Appropriating the experiences of others is reckless folly. In 1946 Calgarian George DuPre was speaking to church and Boy Scout audiences about his Second World War experiences. He told breathtaking stories of his adventures as a secret agent after being parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe like assisting downed Allied airmen to escape, being interrogated and resisting hideous torture by the Gestapo, blowing up trains and bridges, working as a saboteur in a German submarine yard and finally helping detect Nazi agents posing as Canadians in a prisoner of war camp.
Eventually his tales were brought to the attention of prominent American journalist Quentin Reynolds, himself a former war correspondent. Reynolds met with DuPre and did what he could to check out the man and his account, including getting a glowing endorsement from the provincial cabinet minister DuPre worked for. Reynolds took DuPre for genuine and in 1953 produced a successful book called The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk.
Then a former Royal Canadian Air Force intelligence officer approached the editor of the Calgary Herald. In 1943 the airman and DuPre had worked together in England interviewing shot-down flyers that had escaped back to Britain with assistance from the European underground. DuPre had fabricated his saga of heroism from their accounts. Questioned, DuPre broke down and confessed his deception. DuPre’s apology to Reynolds explained that he had wanted to make his own mundane wartime experiences more gripping when giving talks on the role of religion in opposing oppression.
“His motives had been lofty,” Reynolds concluded in recounting being deceived and noted that he had been startled when DuPre had requested his payment for co-operating in telling the story be sent to the Boy Scout movement. The fake agent was not after financial gain.
Nor was then-University of Alberta dean of medicine and dentistry Dr. Philip Baker after money in delivering his recent catastrophic graduation speech. Indeed, something of the DuPre flavouring of wanting to come across well in giving a talk might help explain rolling out a yarn of medical woes that was notoriously lifted from a graduation address last year by Dr. Atul Gawande at Stanford University. Gawande had outlined very specific medical tragedies in his family — his wife suffering two miscarriages, a son born with part of a major artery missing, a daughter dislocating an elbow. I have not been able to locate the exact text of Baker’s address so I can’t say for certain whether he quoted those words directly. If so, he was suggesting to his listeners his own family suffered exactly the same maladies Gawande had recounted, something that would beggar the laws of probability. Some newspaper reports allude to a graduate following along word-for-word from a website posting of a transcript of Gawande’s remarks as Baker spoke.
In his letter of apology, Baker said vaguely that Gawande’s words “resonated with my experiences. The personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine ...” Indeed they were, but to Gawande. Unless Baker’s family had been identically afflicted, he became something beyond a plagiarist and took on that DuPre odour of a man appropriating someone else’s drama.
St. Albert resident David Haas is a writer, and retired from military and legal careers.
