Two weeks ago in this space I documented the good company in which Harvard President Claudine Gay finds herself as an aspiring plagiarist. Harvard worthies Doris Kearns Goodwin, Laurence Tribe, Charles Ogletree and Fareed Zakaria have all been forced to wear the Scarlet P just in the last 20 or so years. One Harvard plagiarist,…
, was released with minimal fanfare. Although he sanitizes his experience as the publisher of Barack Obama’s
Dreams from My Father, Osnos lets slip a detail that could transform Obama’s reputation from “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln” to the best plagiarist to occupy the White House before Biden. First, the sanitation. In a 2006 article, Osnos publicly scolded then-Sen. Obama for his “ruthlessness.” As Osnos recounted, hustling young agent Jane Dystel stuck by an unknown Obama even after he failed to honor a book contract with Simon & Schuster. Undaunted, Dystel landed Obama a new contract with Osnos, then the publisher of Times Books. The punch line of the 2006 article is that, after