Re: 9/12/00 - John Gaddis: clarifying the YDN Schwartzberg article
John Gaddis: clarifying the YDN Schwartzberg article
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Published 9/12/00
To The Editor:
Tim R. A. Cooper's account of the Steven Schwartzberg affair ("The Saga of Steven Schwartzberg," YDN, 9/9/00) is in most respects accurate. There are, however, a few points of clarification that I'd like to make.
First, my only substantial previous contact with Mr. Schwartzberg came in the summer of 1998, just prior to his arriving at Yale, when he asked me to consider his dissertation for possible publication in a book series on Cold War history that I edit at the University of North Carolina Press. I rejected the manuscript in its existing form, made suggestions for revision, and encouraged Mr. Schwartzberg to resubmit when these revisions had been made. He did not choose to do so.
Second, the seminar held at my house several nights after the Jovin murder had been scheduled well before that event, with the assigned reading selected by a History Department colleague who led the discussion. The subject was the new narrative history, and book in question, Simon Schama's Dead Certainties, does deal with a murder that took place at Harvard -- in the 1850s, however, and of a professor, not an undergraduate.
Third, although my April, 1999, Atlantic Monthly article discusses the human propensity for violence, the context is the history of the past five thousand years, and the possibility of finding ways now to curb that tendency.
Fourth, I have on file two communications from Mr. Schwartzberg in which he explicitly disavows his charges. One is to the editors of H-DIPLO, dated May 10, 1999, explaining that he had intended his accusations as "a parody of postmodernism." The other is addressed to me, dated June 21, 1999, and in it he states: "I know of no evidence that you ever met Suzanne Jovin, much less that you were involved in her murder."
Finally, my greatest regret in all of this is the additional pain it must have caused the Jovin family. The police having taken no action on a set of charges Mr. Schwartzberg has himself twice withdrawn, I can only hope that he will now turn his energies to some fairer line of inquiry.
This is not a matter over which Mr. Schwartzberg, or anyone else, should be chuckling.
John Gaddis
September 10, 1999 [sic]
The writer is a history professor at Yale.
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