by Jack Cashill
Chelsea’s answer, if any, was lost amidst the hisses and boos raining down on the imperturbable Longman’s head. This was a guy I was pretty sure I could count on, and I was right. He gallantly took up the challenge. He did not, however, shy from sharing his handicaps, namely that no one had ever heard of him and to the degree that anyone had it was as the hulking partisan bully who beat up on poor Chelsea. Still, he was capable of doing the science, and he proceeded to do just that. With Longman on board, I now counted Mormons, Catholics, Jews, evangelicals, and agnostics among my ecumenical crew.
At about this same time, I turned to a fascinating character who had recently written to American Thinker to disagree with the conclusions of Duquesne’s Patrick Juola. A friend had forwarded him a copy of an article in which I had reported Juola’s conclusion, namely the belief that “the accuracy simply isn’t there” to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. Wrote Chris Yavelow, “I’m sorry to disagree with Mr. Juola…. I have developed software that can detect if works are written by the same author, or, given samples of two authors’ work, detect within a reasonable doubt, who wrote a third work.”
Yavelow, a composer who had helped pioneer the marriage of music and computers, had turned his attention to what he called “computational corpus linguistics” some years earlier. In 2005, he had started marketing software called Fiction Fixer. He clarified: “Don’t be concerned with the focus on novels at the website. The software is equally effective with biographies and autobiographies.” Yavelow insisted that if he had adequate samples of Obama’s and Ayers’s writing, he could tell who wrote that. “Please pass this information along to Mr. Cashill,” he concluded. “I believe that this would be an important project.” Yes, “important” sounded just about right. I was not sure what to expect from Yavelow, but I sent him some relevant materials and promptly forgot about him. In truth I did not expect much.
On Sunday morning, October 26, E minus 9, I heard back from Longman. He had downloaded Patrick Juola’s JGAAP software and was running the relevant writing samples through it. As he explained, there were fourteen tests, and fourteen analytic methods, for a total of 196 combinations.
“Right now I am running some trial runs,” he wrote, “using the sample writing fragments made available in the program, and firing up other computers to run at the same time.”
In the interim Longman had been examining the work of the two anonymous university-based scientists. “They did a very good job,” he wrote. “Any engineer or scientist familiar with confidence level statistics will be satisfied that the basic method is reasonable.” He phrased his analysis of their work artfully:
The Ayers-Obama matching shows a measurable and substantial effect. It is easily and objectively distinguishable from comparison to a third document. These results achieved through good methodology should readily stimulate scientists skilled in the particular relevant fields to construct their own tests, place objective metrics on the correlation between the Ayers-Obama documents, and publish results. We strongly think this bears immediate investigation by the academic community at large as the initial data presented is highly suggestive that these two documents share large portions of authorship.
That much said, Longman understood that for such a test to be conclusive, or close to it, he would have to run twenty or so comparable memoirs through the software and establish that the Obama-Ayers correlation was stronger than that for Obama–anyone else. He had little doubt that it would be, but “little doubt” did not equal confirmation.
Still, Longman’s analysis was enough for Bob Fox to persuade Chris Cannon to hold a press conference in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, E minus 7. Mark Hyman of Sinclair Broadcasting, a Washington insider who had been following our work and supporting it, agreed to come, as did Bruce Heiden of Ohio State. The classics professor, blithely indifferent to his colleagues’ Obamamania, was having fun with the project.
Longman chose not to come to D.C. “I have no fear,” he said, but he did not have the credentials, either. “Me trying to be a credible spokesman, cross-discipline, and on such short notice, stretches not only my ability to perform, but my public credibility,” he explained. “For your success, I don’t evaluate it as a good calculus.” At first, I tried to change Longman’s mind. “The future of the Republic is at stake,” I wrote Longman, “and the weird thing is I am not kidding.” The more I thought about it, though, the more sense his decision made.
On Monday, October 27, E minus 8, I got a pleasant surprise. Yavelow weighed in. “Upon cursory examination,” he wrote, “it’s relatively certain that Dreams From my Father and Audacity of Hope were not written by the same person.” He added, “Many aspects of Fugitive Days are too close to Dreams to be a coincidence (I’m talking about structural things here). I am preparing a report about this which I should be able to email you tomorrow.”
At 11 P.M. that same night I received another email from Yavelow. “I’m getting close to finishing the report and it’s quite amazing. I am convinced Ayers had a hand in Dreams From My Father, and probably wrote the entire thing (excluding dialog which he probably received as cassettes or notes from BHO).” At five the next morning, October 28, E minus 7, Yavelow sent the finished report. “I’ve put a note on it not to distribute without permission,” he wrote. “That’s because, with such little sleep I’m starting to imagine repercussions about me having done this—for example, if someone were to feel that I contributed to BHO not winning the election. Perhaps if we talk about this a bit, you can reassure me that such things don’t happen in America.”
The report ran twenty-seven pages and impressed me immediately with its logic and lucidity. What the report did was compare Dreams with Fugitive Days on any number of variables. The first one, for instance, Yavelow describes as “attributions,” meaning the verb used to introduce a quote or a sentiment, such as he “said” or she “responded.” As he observed, some authors get by with as few as three such attributions and many with fewer than twenty.
His Fiction Fixer program tracks 106 possible attributions. Of these, 36 appear in Dreams and 34 in Fugitive Days. “The remarkable thing,” writes Yavelow, “is that these subsets differ by only 4 words, and of these 4, three are relegated to the ‘only to be used once’ category.” His program diagnosed any number of other variables: characters per word, syllables per word, sentence length, structure, flow, paragraph length, readability, verb use, modifiers, contractions, redundancies, and more.
The similarity between the two books on nondialogue sentences was striking. The average number of words per sentence in one book was 17.62 and in the other 17.61. The average number of syllables per sentence was 26.48 in one and 26.27 in the other. Dreams averaged 1.44 syllables per word, Fugitive Days 1.47. The sentences using dialogue, however, showed no particular correlation, which suggests that these were largely left unedited in Dreams.
Yavelow also tracked the use of clichés. “Striking to observe,” he writes, “is that out of 3,072 clichés, one of these books uses 5% of the available list while the other uses 7% of the list. Nonetheless, they have 62% of the clichés they use in common! And, not only in common, but often in a nearly corresponding position on the distribution list.” For instance, at the top of each list was the phrase “first time.” In second place in one and third in the other was “of course.” Fifth in one, sixth in the other was “handful,” and so on.
Another categorization that struck me as interesting was “sensory triggers,” words that relate to the use of the five senses. For sight sensory triggers, the six most frequently used such words in Dreams—black, see, looked, seemed, look, saw—are also the six most frequently used such words in Fugitive Days. The other senses tracked comparably.
Indeed, in no category was there a variation that caused Yavelow to doubt the validity of my thesis. He summed up his findings:
There is a strong possibility that the author of Fugitive Days ghost wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either t
ape recordings or notes). Alternatively, another scenario might be possible: Ayers might have served as a “book doctor” for Obama and given extreme license to edit and rewrite.
In September 2009, remember, Christopher Andersen would note that Obama had indeed given Ayers recordings of dialogue as well as “a partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes.” Obama also seems to have given Ayers license to rewrite as he saw fit. Yavelow had beaten Andersen to this conclusion by a year.
Just a few hours after I received Yavelow’s report I boarded a plane for Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. As we taxied to the gate at BWI, we were greeted by a cold, nasty rain. The weather proved rather an omen. When I checked my phone messages, the first one was from Bob Fox. It said something to the effect of “Don’t bother to come today. The press conference has been called off.” Heiden had gotten the message before he left and stayed home. For better or worse, I was here.
I called Fox, and he danced around the reason for the cancellation. I think Cannon had chosen not to squander his legacy on some whack job from Kansas City, and Fox was too loyal to say so. In any case, he arranged for Cannon to meet me at 5 P.M. in the office building that bears the name of an earlier Cannon, Joseph Gurney Cannon, the Republican House speaker who opened the building exactly a century earlier.
On the good-news side, as Fox saw it, he had contacted a professor at Oxford University, as in England, who was prepared to do an authorship study. All Fox had to do was raise ten thousand dollars in the next day or two. This demand came not from the professor but from the university. Fox figured that at this late stage, E minus 7, nothing that Longman or Yavelow could say would make a difference. Only an Oxford endorsement could generate an October surprise capable of surprising anyone who mattered.
Having rented a car, I looked for someplace suburban to hole up and ended up, entirely by accident, at the Bowie Town Center, on the road to Annapolis. As I was pulling in, I heard on the radio the audio of an Obama interview from 2001 so ominous that I remember exactly where I was when I heard it.
In this interview, Obama lamented the fact that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.” He went on to say that the Warren Court failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.” Scarier still, he expressed confidence that he “could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.”
The Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, protects the citizen from the government, and here was our would-be president wanting to tear down that wall. Yikes! If I had any doubts about what I was doing in D.C., or why I had invested so much time in what seemed to so many a fool’s errand, I doubted no more. The image that Obama had been crafting as a congenial centrist first with Dreams, and even more so with Audacity, seemed something of a trick on America. Especially vulnerable were our civic baby seals, those well-meaning citizens so anxious to atone for the nation’s racial sins that they would vote away the Constitution.
I knew then what Remnick would later affirm, namely that my theory, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of [Obama’s] candidacy.” I knew too that we had all but run out of time, a fact that just about everyone had come to accept other than the relentless Bob Fox.
I met with Cannon later that afternoon. Although pleasant enough, he took the meeting as a courtesy. His heart was no longer quite in it. Staffers were packing up and taking plaques off the wall as we spoke. He suggested a few people I might meet with in the next few days but beyond that he had little to offer. He had already resigned himself to defeat.
So had just about all of Republican Washington. It felt like Paris, May 1940. “I remember it clearly: You wore blue, the Germans wore gray.” Some were planning to flee, others to collaborate. Few were prepared to fight. Back in Missouri, a battleground state, la résistance was still slugging it out in the hills and dales as though victory were possible. Partisans in flyover country took their inspiration from one particular person, Sarah Palin. It was she who gave them reason to believe that the McCain campaign was worth the fight. McCain would never have carried Missouri—and any number of other states—without her.
They didn’t get this in Washington. They didn’t get Sarah Palin. Truth be told, they didn’t get America. The bluing of conservative bloodlines could be traced through the Buckley family. Whereas William would surely have resisted, son Christopher chose to collaborate. “I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate,” he wrote in endorsing Obama weeks before the election. “He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine.” Yes, Christopher, but even a rare bird can poop on your head.
David Brooks, who had graduated from the Weekly Standard to the New York Times in 2003, proved no more red-blooded. “I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks wrote, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the immediate wake of the release of The Audacity of Hope, Brooks published an unmanly Times column headlined “Run, Barack, Run.”
Despite Mark Hyman’s best efforts, I could not get on the agenda of Grover Norquist’s highly influential Wednesday morning meeting. (When I did get on some months later and explained my project, I heard at least a few boos from the Vichyites in the cheap seats.) Nor was I able to get any D.C. media attention save from the tireless G. Gordon Liddy, who, at eighty-something, could still sense a con when he saw one. A twenty-something reporter from the Washington Times called because someone told her to, but she had no idea what the story was about. I referred her to my website and asked her to call me back. She never did.
LONDON FOG
No later than Thursday morning, E minus 5, I got a surprising and welcome call from the London Times. The reporter, Sarah Baxter, sounded sympathetic and interested, and for a moment at least, she gave me cause to believe that Bob Fox’s improbable British strategy might just pay off.
What attracted her to the story was the failure of Fox to raise the ten thousand dollars needed to pay for a study by Oxford professor Peter Millican. As I understood it, the intellectual property guardians at Oxford would not take Fox’s down payment and an IOU. I sent a story on the Oxford angle to WND, which ran it on Saturday, November 1, E minus 3.
That same morning, I received a long and amiable email from Millican. He humbly corrected my designation of him as “arguably the world’s leading authority.” (His modesty would prove well justified.) As he related, contractual arrangements had stalled “for no very clear reason.” He attributed the breakdown not to Oxford but to “the relevant Republican authorities.” In other words, and this Millican may not have known, Bob Fox simply couldn’t come up with the dough.
Millican clarified another issue. There was no study to “liberate,” as I had suggested in my posting. True, he spent some time “preparing for a detailed study,” but he had been unable to commit the time necessary for “a full study.” The breakdown in contract negotiations, a heavy teaching load, and his need to prepare a conference paper had kept him from completing the task.
After his initial investigations—“such as they were”—Millican had cautioned Fox on the likely outcome: “I told him that if he was to go ahead he should see it as a gamble: not likely to succeed, but potentially with a huge payoff if it did.” I responded promptly to Millican in equally amiable terms:
Peter
Yes, sorry for the journalistic shorthand. I know that the difficulty has been on our side of the drink. Bob Fox discovered what I was doing a couple of weeks ago and has done his best to advance it, and he may have gotten ahead of himself. After talking to [Patrick] Juola a month ago, I was skeptical of the value stylometrics bring, but I seemed almost alone in my skepticism. Media people
especially kept demanding to see “studies.”
What worried me from the beginning was exactly what Juola warned against—the power of one study to undo the literary detective work that preceded it, especially given the political leanings of our professoriate…. I do not know what heat we can generate in the next few days, but you would probably be better off staying out of it altogether. This is an unusual election, and I fear it could make 2000 seem like a stroll in the park.
When Millican sent his pleasant email on Saturday he knew what was coming the following day. I had no idea. On Sunday, under Sarah Baxter’s byline, the London Times ran a blistering front-page story headlined “Republicans try to use Oxford don to smear Barack Obama.” The only Republicans that Baxter identified were Cannon and Fox. Baxter did not quote me at all, and I suspect her headline had been more or less written before she even called me.
In that same day’s paper, both in print and online, Millican fleshed out the libel in a lengthy op-ed perversely titled “How they tried to tarnish Barack Obama: Peter Millican reveals how he was drawn into a plot to link the Democrat to a former radical.” Good gosh! And I was worried about our professoriate. Millican’s breathless opening paragraph needs to be read in full:
Last Sunday I received an urgent call from Bob, a man close to a Republican congressman in the American west. He wanted to enlist my services to prove a scandalous allegation against Barack Obama, which would surely affect his prospects in the forthcoming election. Namely, that his famous 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, on which so much of his reputation was built, was in fact written largely by Bill Ayers, a Vietnam-era domestic terrorist.