Merely Mortal? : America Seems Preoccupied With Finding the Flaws of the Famous : Many American Heroes Are the Subjects of Intense Examination

When Rudolph Ekstein learned last month that his late friend Bruno Bettelheim had been accused of plagiarism, Ekstein was heartsick but not surprised.

Not that he ever doubted the integrity of the legendary child psychologist. What struck the 78-year-old Viennese-born psychoanalyst was the seemingly inexorable need of Americans to diminish the great thinkers and leaders of their society.

“For some reason in this country, we have the need to tear down idols and heroes,” Ekstein said in an interview from his West Los Angeles office. “In Europe, we build monuments to great men when they die. Here, we try so very hard to find out what they did wrong while they were alive.”

Countless Americans who approached hero status in life have fallen prey to excruciating examination after their deaths: Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Elvis Presley, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Fueled by incessant probing from scholars, an almost prurient curiosity within the media and a growing public cynicism, the nation seems preoccupied with the flaws of the famous.

Has hero bashing become a national pastime?

“It does seem to be (on the rise),” said Studs Terkel, author of “American Dreams: Lost and Found,” “Hard Times” and other books on the American character.

“The problem is we (Americans) don’t know who our heroes are,” Terkel said. With some exceptions--King being the most notable--”look at who we name our streets after: politicians, heads of corporations and big-shot industrialists. Look at the streets of Paris. They are named for Victor Hugo, artists, sculptors, creative spirits.”

Moreover, those who are anointed as America’s heroes have often been given far more credit than they probably deserve, which is precisely what gets them--and those who criticize them--into so much trouble, said writer and editor Philip Terzian.

“I don’t think we have any national pathology for vilifying heroes,” said Terzian, editorial page editor of the Providence Journal. “What we do tend to do is be naive about heroes. We invest them with far too much greatness. We make them into superhuman figures. Then when we find out they were after all only human--when we discover they had flaws--we are devastated.”

Witness revelations that two of America’s great Presidents, Kennedy and Roosevelt, were philanderers; that another, Jefferson, had illegitimate children.

Consider the effect that biographies have had on the reputations of some of America’s literary and cultural heroes: Mencken has come to be thought of as a racist and anti-Semite for his journal writings, despite his actions in support of blacks and Jews. Lewis, the author of “Main Street” and the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has come to be remembered as an obnoxious, belligerent alcoholic who mistreated his family and abused his colleagues rather than as a great chronicler of the American character. Presley has come to be remembered more for his drug addiction and his decadent lifestyle than for his music.

Perhaps the most troubling discovery came just four months ago, when a Stanford University history professor announced that King, the nation’s most revered civil rights leader, had plagiarized another student’s work in his doctoral thesis and other graduate writings at Boston University in the 1950s.

And this winter, a UC Berkeley professor has made a similar accusation against Bettelheim, an American leader in the field of child psychology.

In his 1976 book, “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,” Bettelheim had made unattributed use of “A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness,” a 1963 book by Stanford University psychiatrist Julius E. Heuscher, according to Alan Dundes, a Berkeley folklore expert.

Like the King discovery, which followed disclosures of the civil rights leader’s alleged extramarital affairs, the charge against Bettelheim followed allegations by former patients that he was physically abusive to young patients at the University of Chicago’s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, where he was director for nearly 30 years.

Such revelations have caused some Americans to wonder whether their society has become obsessed with human flaws and deficiencies. Experts are pondering whether Americans have lost pride in their intellectual, artistic and political leaders. And they are attempting to define whether it is the function of scholars and critics to keep the citizens of a democracy skeptical of their leaders.

In one sense, many observers say, Americans have always been uneasy about their cultural and political leaders, simply because they have never been ruled by a monarchy. In a democracy founded on the notion that all men are created equal, there is little room for hero worship.

Even less room has existed since JFK’s assassination, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Many scholars pointed out that Kennedy’s death was a turning point for many Americans, a graphic end to an era of innocence.

The tendency to be “critical and skeptical” is part of not only “our distant past but our more recent past as well,” said historian Arthur Schlesinger.

The power and immediacy of the modern media have fueled the latest shift to a less romanticized view of heroes, observers say. Although few in the 1930s knew that FDR’s legs were paralyzed, for example, most Americans in the 1980s knew not only that Ronald Reagan had colon cancer and skin cancer but also knew graphic details of his treatment.

In many cases, the things said about public figures today would have been unthinkable a generation ago--or even a decade ago. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s alleged drinking problems, for instance, were hushed up during her lifetime, while Betty Ford’s alcoholism became a national cause celebre shortly after her husband left the White House.

Another reason for the country’s seeming preoccupation with debunking its heroes may have to do with the American judicial system: Under U.S. law, you cannot libel the dead.

In his 1986 book, “Suing the Press,” Rodney A. Smolla wrote that a biographer or scholar who reveals unflattering facts or allegations cannot be held financially responsible if they besmirch reputation after a person’s death, which is not the case before a person’s death.

A less cynical explanation may have to do with the release of information to biographers, graduate students and others who analyze important writings and chronicle great lives. It often takes years for families, friends and foes to relinquish letters and other documents and for those papers to be collected and catalogued in libraries.

In the case of King, for example, it was not until 1984, 16 years after his death, that his widow, Coretta Scott King, founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project to collect his writings and speeches.

Three years into the project, Stanford researchers found ideas, sentences and whole passages taken from other sources, without attribution, throughout King’s writings as a theology student. The findings, however, were kept secret for three more years, until details of the research were published in the Wall Street Journal last Nov. 9.

Acknowledging the findings at a news conference the day after the article appeared, Clayborne Carson, a former civil rights activist and Stanford history professor who had been asked by Coretta King to oversee the project, said he had been slow to discuss the matter publicly because of his own divided loyalties: allegiance to a subject he greatly admired and service to his discipline.

“There is very little elation about this kind of discovery,” Carson told reporters at the time. “But I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think it’s better to know than not to.”

Many Americans are unmoved by charges that the nation’s greatest thinkers and creators may have behaved less than honorably, either in private or public life.

“So what?” said Henry Steele Commager, professor emeritus at Amherst College and author of “The American Mind” and numerous other books on U.S. history and culture. “What difference does it make? Their accomplishments still stand. Their minds worked just the same.”

Neither the psychiatrist from whom Bettelheim allegedly stole material nor the former graduate student whose writings King plagiarized ever expressed concern publicly about the disclosures.

Heuscher, now a professor at Stanford University Medical School, said he had not noticed the plagiarism and was honored to have contributed to Bettelheim’s work, even though he did not always agree with it.

King’s fellow student, Jack Boozer, who also went on to become a college professor, learned of the findings shortly before his death in 1989, his wife recently told reporters. She said he was also honored to have helped King.

But other Americans are less sanguine about the revelations.

Every time a lurid new detail emerges, a host of “perplexing questions” arises, editor and biographer James Atlas said in a 1988 essay on what he describes as a proliferation of “pitiless case histories” of famous people.

In the case of Bettelheim’s “borrowings,” it might be argued that the failure to attribute ideas and words is simply a matter of “conventional academic etiquette,” said Dundes, who disclosed Bettelheim’s alleged plagiarism in the winter issue of the Journal of American Folklore. But the Bettelheim case also raises the issue of whether words and ideas should be valued and protected as any other form of property would be.

Perhaps the most important question is why so many critical details about famous individuals’ lives emerge after their deaths, when they can no longer answer the charges, said Theron Raines, a New York literary agent who for years was Bettelheim’s representative in the book world.

“We have a German proverb,” said Ekstein, “ ‘Man soll Toten nichts boeses nachsagen. . . . You shouldn’t say anything bad about the dead.’ ”

Whether Europeans take such maxims to heart is a matter of debate.

“There is a word for this phenomenon, you know: iconoclasm,” Schlesinger said. “Americans are not, by any means, the only iconoclasts, the only people in the world who break apart their idols.”

Yet many observers believe that at least some subtle differences exist between Americans and citizens of other countries.

The French, for example, are “far more cynical than we are,” Terzian said. “They are terminally argumentative, consummately critical. . . . The British, on the other hand, are simply more realistic.”

Take Winston Churchill. “He was revered in the United States as a great historical figure,” Terzian said in an interview from his office in Providence, R.I.

“The British had a much more evenhanded view of him,” he added. “He was considered great in some ways and not so great in others. When he lost the election right after the end of World War II, it greatly shocked Americans. . . . And when his son Randolph started writing the biography revealing details about his father’s upbringing--that his parents, for example, didn’t much like him, thought him something of a moron--Americans were even more shocked.”

What concerns scholars most are the motives of those who make allegations, especially when their targets are no longer around to defend themselves.

By most anyone’s reckoning, two of the greatest minds in the 20th Century were Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, and John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose theories, when put into practice, helped pull the United States out of the Depression. After their deaths, however, both men’s works were subjected to endless scrutiny, in some cases by American scholars who seemed intent on using the criticism to bolster their own reputations.

That is precisely what Bettelheim’s defenders believe may be happening to him. For most people, however, the Bettelheim case will likely pass into obscurity and become “an academic issue to be resolved by the scholars,” said Louis Jolyon West, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

For others, however, allegations against Bettelheim and others raise larger political, sociological and even psychological issues.

Hero bashing, said Nathan M. Szajnberg, a Connecticut psychiatrist and a former student of Bettelheim, is “deeply embedded in the American psyche” and is related to the relative youth of the nation.

Like Terzian, Szajnberg believes Americans tend to make “too much of the people we admire.”

He wrote in a recent editorial in the Hartford Courant: “Did John F. Kennedy sleep with Marilyn Monroe? Did Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarize another’s doctoral thesis? Did Simone de Beauvoir serve as Jean-Paul Sartre’s handmaiden? By dwelling on alleged human weaknesses, we absolve ourselves from feeling that we need to live up to their greatness.”

“In letting ourselves off the hook,” he explained in an interview, “it means we don’t have to live up to JFK’s ideas for a better world or Martin Luther King’s dreams of a more just society or Bruno Bettelheim’s wish that children be treated better.”

The mature response, he added, is not to ignore the failings, as young children often do when idealizing their parents. Nor should Americans disown and disavow their leaders, as adolescents do as they try to reject their parents.

“To live better lives, we need heroes, but we need human heroes. We need to accept not only their greatness but their shortcomings as well,” Szajnberg said.

One man who seems to have learned this lesson, he observed, is Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf.

His heroes, Schwarzkopf recently told reporters in Saudi Arabia, are not the dashing young commanders who loved war, looked handsome in their uniforms and took credit for everything accomplished militarily. The military leaders he admires--and presumably has tried to emulate--are the “muddy-boot soldiers”--ones who don’t worry about credit and only concern themselves with “getting the job done.”

What Schwarzkopf clearly seems to be doing, consciously or not, according to Szajnberg, is “to guard against America’s tendency to make him a hero (or a villain).”

Look at what happens to Schwarzkopf in the post-Gulf War era, Szajnberg suggests. If he is neither deified nor vilified, it may suggest that the United States has finally and fully matured as a nation.