THUS FOOTNOTES:

Earlier societies were characteristically more tolerant of plagiarism, and I say with some nostalgia that they may have been more sensible about it than we are. Few may have known, much less cared, when Shakespeare recycled Plutarch -- the word "plagiarize" does not appear in English until 1621 -- but it is obvious that centuries of copyright laws and college honor councils have done little to deter writers from grazing on the literary commons. In April 2006, The Harvard Crimson drew attention to the numerous plagiarisms in Kaavya Viswanathan's popular novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life; in 2008; Michael O'Neill, a Bush nominee for the Federal District Court in Washington, was discovered to have "appropriated without attribution" substantial portions of an article he published in 2004 from a book review written in 2000 by another law professor; in 2002, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin reached a private settlement with Lynne McTaggart, who had claimed that numerous phrases and sentences from her own biography of the Kennedys had been plagiarized by Goodwin; and in 1990, The New York Times reported that "the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged that . . . substantial parts of Dr. King's doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized." King's public standing seems not to have been harmed in the slightest by these revelations. Indeed, numerous scholars rose to King's defense by arguing that in this case, plagiarism wasn't plagiarism because King wrote from within a literary tradition where "intertextualizations," "resonances," and "voice mergings" were common practice. Not so lucky was Monica Crowley, who had to step down from her appointment as an advisor in the Trump White House when CNN's Kfile published numerous passages she had plagiarized in writing both her dissertation at Columbia University as well as her book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened?  

Contemporary politicians embrace recycling as a rhetorical strategy; members of the Senate seem especially guilty. Former Montana Senator John Walsh lost his master's degree from the Army War College after it was determined he had plagiarized a paper he had submitted in 2007 as part of his graduation requirements. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been accused multiple times of lifting words both in his speeches and in his book; Barack Obama was said to have done the same during his 2008 presidential campaign, apparently borrowing language from then Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, and Joe Biden abandoned his presidential campaign in 1988 in part as a result of claims he had plagiarized not only somebody else's words but much of his life story. More recently, Melania Trump, in her speech before the Republican National Convention in 2016, told much the same story of childhood as had another future First Lady, eight years earlier, when Michelle Obama had told her audience at the Democratic National Convention in Denver that she had been raised by people who believed "that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them." Melania, who had grown up in Slovenia, reported that she, too, had been taught "that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect."  

My personal favorite of political plagiarists has to be Ronald Reagan, who on January 28, 1986, quietly slipped two lines from an old wartime sonnet, "High Flight," into his televised speech mourning the astronauts who had that day lost their lives when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Reagan was never more effective as a politician than when he was in front of a television camera, speaking to an audience whom he could not see but whose needs and moods he nevertheless sensed with an almost mystical capability. "We will never forget them," Reagan said, speaking directly into the camera, "nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." When Reagan spoke those words, I remember with an almost preternatural vividness turning to my wife and saying in amazement: "My God, the man is speaking in iambic pentameter."   

At the time I did not know that the President was merely channeling a poem by John Magee, an American aviator who had been killed in 1941 while flying a Royal Canadian Air Force Spitfire near Lincolnshire. So, the best part of one of the great presidential speeches of history was plagiarized. But wait -- there's more. It's not as if poet John Magee could have taken a stainless-steel-clad case to literary court. As it turns out, the author of "High Flight" was himself not responsible for the words and sentiments in his poem -- or at least not responsible for all of them. In penning his famous celebration of flight, it seems, aviator Magee had scooped up a handful of somebody else's words to add to his poem. In particular, that memorable, closing image of the sublimity of flight -- that instant when, high above earth and clouds, the flier reaches out "to touch the face of God" -- was lifted from another poem Magee had read in an aviation magazine some months earlier.

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