The Boston Globe

PROFESSOR'S PAST IN DOUBT DISCREPANCIES SURFACE IN CLAIM OF VIETNAM DUTY

Author(s): Walter V. Robinson, GLOBE STAFF Date: June 18, 2001 Page: A1 Section: Metro/Region

SOUTH HADLEY - At Mount Holyoke College, Joseph J. Ellis has never been more revered. He is a beloved mentor to many students, and perhaps the college's most popular and engaging professor. Now he has become a national literary icon for his 1997 Jefferson biography and the Pulitzer Prize in History he just received for his latest best seller, "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation."

Yet Ellis's historical focus extends beyond the country's early days. For years now, his course on Vietnam and American Culture has been one of the school's most popular - enriched, say his students, by his sometimes detailed recollections of his own Army service in Vietnam. But Ellis did not serve in Vietnam at all, according to military records obtained by the Globe and interviews with his friends from the 1960s. He spent his three years in the Army teaching history at the US Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Ellis also appears to have exaggerated the extent of the involvement he claims to have had in both the antiwar and civil rights movements.

Last Thursday, Ellis agreed to an interview about the discrepancies. But Mount Holyoke spokesman Kevin McCaffrey quickly canceled the interview. Ellis, he said, would not discuss any of the issues.

Friday evening, from the front stoop of his Amherst home, Ellis shook his head "no" when asked by a Globe reporter whether he would address the contradictions. "I'll have to suffer the consequences of this," Ellis said.

Before cutting short the brief discussion, Ellis added: "I believe I am an honorable man."

Holyoke president Joanne V. Creighton released a brief statement to the Globe praising Ellis, but not addressing any of the newspaper's questions. During nearly 30 years at Mount Holyoke, she said, Ellis "has earned a reputation for great integrity, honesty and honor . . . The College is proud to have him on our faculty."

McCaffrey, asked whether any of Ellis's Mount Holyoke colleagues had been suspicious of his Vietnam claims, said he had never heard anyone question Ellis's resume in McCaffrey's seven years at the school.

A review of records and Ellis's statements reveals that in interviews, lectures to students and statements to friends, he has embellished his accomplishments during the 1960s - even recounting for a Globe reporter last year how he scored a winning touchdown for his high school football team. But the school yearbook does not indicate that he was on the team.

Perhaps inevitably with his increasing fame, the two biographies of the 57-year-old Ellis have collided. Now, the small college here is left to grapple with the fact that it has long been misled into believing Ellis was an airborne soldier in Vietnam when, it turns out, he was actually safely ensconced in graduate school at Yale.

The biographer's official Mount Holyoke resume omits any mention of Vietnam, though Ellis's own choice of words at times would not raise eyebrows among those he led to believe he served in the war. For example, in a 1999 article he wrote for the Washington Post, Ellis cited "my military experience during the Vietnam War."

For years, Ellis's tales of war appear to have been confined mostly to classrooms on the campus of this prestigious women's college, and to nearby Amherst College, where he has also taught about Vietnam. And students who have heard those tales - and believed them - said he seldom offered more than scant detail about his purported tour in Vietnam.

But his growing national prominence over the last decade has also widened his audience. And despite the obvious risks, Ellis has recently publicly reiterated his claims about Vietnam.

Last year, he told Globe reporter Mark Feeney that he went to Vietnam in 1965 as a platoon leader and paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. That year, the division's first brigade was one of the first Army units sent to the war zone by President Johnson.

In that interview, Ellis also drew attention to his civil rights work, and said that after returning from Vietnam, he joined the peace movement while at Yale - motivated to do so by what he had seen in Vietnam.

Those assertions were included in the subsequent Globe article. But other claims were not. For example, Ellis told Feeney that his Vietnam service also included duty in Saigon on the staff of General William C. Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam. And he said he later shared his observations about Westmoreland with David Halberstam, the author of the 1972 best-selling book, "The Best and the Brightest."

But an extensive public record review by the Globe, as well as the accounts of Ellis's friends from those years, contradict his assertions that he served in Vietnam. For his part, Halberstam said he has no recollection of ever meeting Ellis, and that Ellis was not a source for his book.

To be sure, Ellis was in the ROTC at The College of William & Mary, and was commissioned an Army second lieutenant when he graduated in 1965. But his active duty was deferred for four years, until August 1969, according to his military records. The reason: Ellis spent those four years at Yale, according to the university and his friends, earning two master's degrees and a doctorate in history.

In the 1965-66 academic year - the period Ellis claimed in a 1997 Globe interview to have been in Vietnam - his first year of graduate study was being funded by a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, according to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Ellis's military records, obtained from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, show that he did not begin his active service until August 1969, with a two-month assignment to an officer's basic course at Fort Gordon, Ga. In October 1969, he joined the history faculty at West Point. In June 1972, he was discharged from the Army as a captain.

Egon R. Tausch, a San Antonio lawyer who joined the West Point history faculty in 1969 after serving as an infantry company commander in Vietnam, recalled in an interview that Ellis once told him that he was in the military because he had no other choice.

Paraphrasing Ellis, Tausch said his fellow officer said to him, "Why should I go be a ground-pounder in Vietnam when I can polish my academic credentials here at West Point?"

Tausch, who said Ellis was an outstanding teacher, added: "There were some others there who chose that route. There was no shame in it. They didn't burn their draft cards or flee to Canada."

Also perplexing to Ellis's friends from the 1960s, are his claims of participation in the antiwar and civil rights movements.

In his remarks to the Globe last year, and to students, Ellis says he was motivated to oppose the war because of his experiences in Vietnam.

Katherine Clouse, who graduated from Mount Holyoke last month, and who audited his Vietnam course last year, recalled Ellis's view of the war from what he said in class. "He was the veteran who came back and participated in the antiwar movement. So his perspective is very liberal," she said.

Although Ellis said in a 1975 interview that he thought the war was wrong, the Globe could find no evidence that he was in any visible way part of the antiwar movement. At Yale, two faculty members who knew him well - the administrator of the graduate program and Ellis's thesis adviser - said they cannot recall Ellis being involved in any antiwar activity.

"Joe was a superb student. But an antiwar activist? I don't recall anything like that," said Gaddis Smith, a Yale history professor who oversaw graduate programs and who has written about the antiwar movement at Yale.

Edmond Morgan, an emeritus professor of history who was Ellis's thesis adviser, also expressed surprise at the notion that his friend was involved in antiwar activities. "I don't recall him being active at all," said Morgan.

Ellis's statements about his civil rights work are also puzzling. On the Ellis resume posted on Mount Holyoke's Web site, it states, "Coordinator, Yale Intensive Studies Program for Minority Students (1969)." And in a 1975 interview with a William & Mary alumni publication, Ellis said he recruited black students in the South in 1967 and 1968 for a Yale summer program. Indeed, the Globe has learned that he did visit the South to enlist students for the Yale program.

Yet in his remarks to the Globe, and to some of his students, Ellis has used bolder brush strokes to describe his role.

In last year's Globe interview, Ellis was quoted as saying he spent a summer doing civil rights work in Mississippi. "An interesting time," he called it, citing instances in which local police pounded on his door at night and State Police followed his car.

The Globe article last year also noted that Ellis had played football. That was based on his detailed representation to reporter Feeney, which was not published, that he was a running back at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. Ellis told Feeney that he scored the winning touchdown in the last game of his senior year.

That fall, however, according to Gonzaga's yearbook, the team lost its final two games. And Ellis is not included in the team picture, which even lists those who were not there for the photograph. His yearbook listing contains no mention that he played any sports.

The autobiographical revisionism appears to have occurred at Mount Holyoke, where Ellis has been for 29 years. Here, he has forged a career as scholar, teacher, and author that has been without public blemish.

"Joe Ellis has been a star, our star, from the time he came to Mount Holyoke in 1972," says an article the college posted on its Web site after he won the Pulitzer in April. And a meteoric rise it has been: Within six years of his arrival, he was chairman of the history department. From 1980 to 1990, he was also Dean of Faculty. He even served as the college's interim president for eight months in 1984.

If the resume embroidery causes collateral damage, it is likely to fall most heavily on his students. Unaware of the deception, several of them described Ellis in interviews this month as an unusually charismatic teacher. His dynamism in the classroom, said Brooke Thomson, a May graduate, "envelops" students "in a conversation about the topic that makes them want to learn more."

It appears that Ellis did not begin referring to himself as a Vietnam veteran until the 1980s. In the 1975 interview for the William & Mary Alumni Gazette, Ellis recounted, accurately, how he postponed his military obligation after his 1965 college graduation so he could do graduate work at Yale.

While he was at Yale, Ellis said in 1975, "I knew I didn't want to go to Vietnam because it was all wrong." Instead, he said he arranged the West Point teaching assignment.

With the 1993 publication of his John Adams biography, Ellis became a nationally prominent historian, raising the prospect of awkward moments on a national stage before two separate audiences of people who know him, but who have different understandings of his resume.

Something of that sort occurred during a 1993 appearance on the popular C-SPAN program "Booknotes." His description of his military service was rhetorically on the fence; thus it would not alarm those who know he spent his Army service at West Point or those he had led to believe he fought in Vietnam.

Asked about his background, Ellis said on the program: "Undergraduate, College of William & Mary, entered the Army after that, eventually went to graduate school at Yale. Then, after that, still owed the Army and spent three years teaching on the faculty at West Point." In fact, he had no Army service between William & Mary and Yale.

Yet to seven Mount Holyoke and Amherst students interviewed by the Globe - and likely to countless others over the years - Ellis's accounts of his experiences in Vietnam have animated class discussions, and provided a realistic backdrop to historical discussions.

"The course was something so central to him because he did serve there, while his experience with Jefferson and Adams is otherworldly, so distant in comparison," said Erich C. Carey, an Amherst senior who said he was impressed by Ellis's Amherst course, the Literature on Vietnam.

"When he is teaching," said Mount Holyoke's Thomson, "he uses different anecdotes from his own personal experience in Vietnam . . . to help us understand it better. But he doesn't want to force feed the class his personal views. He does have a very objective view of the war. He is able to step back from his own war experience in Vietnam."

Amherst student Carey said Ellis's citing of his own service in Vietnam "changed the dimension of the course. His having that personal experience gave the course more gravity.

"He was honest about his experience in the war and its effect on him as a person," Carey said. "The course allowed me to imagine myself in the circumstances he faced. Having the course taught by someone who was there helped."

Carey described a moving moment during one class, when, he said, Ellis "told us about a fellow, a strong jock, a college football player, who was drafted and came to Vietnam. They were out in the field, and this guy was reading Emily Dickinson poems that brought him to tears. That was the kind of stress these men were placed under."

"The course was very meaningful for me," Carey added. "I'm staring down the barrel of graduation, and I think back to that course and how the war was a test of his manhood . . . It almost made me a tad jealous of people who had that choice to make - whether to go or not. He had gone, taken the test of manhood, and passed it."

In a subsequent interview yesterday, Carey said he was offended and shocked to learn that Ellis did not serve in Vietnam. But regardless of what Ellis said, "We did read genuine testimonies from people who were there. We still touched on something that was real."

Peter Juran, an Amherst senior who took the same class and recalled Ellis talking about how he had served honorably in Vietnam out of a sense of duty, said he too was shocked and perplexed at the deception. "It never would have occurred to me that he was being disingenuous," said Juran, adding, "It seems incongruous that he would be living a lie like this."

"He has all the right credentials. There was no need for him to fabricate any of this," Juran said.

Walter Robinson's e-mail address is wrobinson@globe.com. Globe Spotlight Team Reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Matthew Carroll contributed to this report.