The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (59 page)

One letter from CIC historian Conrad McCormick seemed to support the article. Except, McCormick did not write the letter. It was cobbled together from emails, without McCormick’s knowledge and printed without his permission - despite a strict
Los Angeles Times
policy requiring a check on the authenticity of all letters considered for publication.

In a sworn statement McCormick declared, ‘I did not write any letter to the editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. I recognise some of the contents of the letter published with my name as text from email correspondence that I exchanged with Mr Rivenburg in the course of our contact regarding his inquiries for the article. However, whatever words of mine appeared in the alleged Letter to the Editor were not written to Mr Rivenburg or the
Los Angeles Times
with the intent that they would be published.”
[269]
The paper has refused to comment or answer questions regarding this.

My initial reaction after the publication of the article was to seek the right of reply. I wanted the
Los Angeles Times
to agree to publish an answer to the questions raised, but the paper would give no such undertaking. There seemed no alternative for Michel but litigation, although most of his friends - myself included - strongly advised against such a course. It would involve him in an unequal struggle against a powerful newspaper with unlimited resources intent on placing every legal obstacle in his path. The battle would be long, uncertain, expensive and emotionally draining. Characteristically, Michel chose to fight. ‘I have no choice. It is a battle for my name and everything I have stood for. It is a fight for my reputation. For my whole life.’

Michel retained the services of a Los Angeles libel lawyer, Anthony Glassman. The considerable legal obstacles facing any litigant in a libel suit were carefully explained, although Glassman was convinced that if the case could be heard before a jury it would be won. However, an apology and right of reply was first sought from the
Los Angeles Times
. A lawyer representing the paper was dismissive of the request for a correction, claiming that the article was merely a book review, written within the accepted journalistic practices of a reviewer, and that Michel either could not or would not provide verification for his version of events.
[270]

The article, of course, was not a book review. Reviews at the
Los Angeles Times
are controlled and commissioned by the editor of the Book Review, Steve Wasserman. And indeed
Test of Courage
had been favourably reviewed by the paper - ‘A story that highlights the power of the human mind and will’ - four months before the publication of Rivenburg’s article.
[271]

After the
Los Angeles Times
made it clear there would be neither a printed apology nor any possibility of reply, Michel was left with no alternative but to sue, although he declared from the outset that whatever damages he might win would be donated to a charitable educational trust.
[272]
The case was not about a man seeking to avenge his hurt feelings, Tony Glassman stated in the filing, but the right to redress the damage to his reputation against defamatory lies. Michel wrote: ‘I found the article deeply humiliating and damaging to my reputation. To me the overall impression given was that I am a charlatan, a liar and a fraud and that I have exaggerated or fabricated the story of my life.’
[273]

Expert witnesses from the fields of journalism and linguistics were contacted to evaluate the extent of defamation contained in the article. These needed to be of exceptionally high calibre, whose expertise was officially accepted by Federal Courts in California. The verdict of Robin Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley for the past thirty years, was damning, m a sworn declaration, she wrote that she found the article one-sided, biased, and highly defamatory.
[274]
Sherrie Mazingo, journalism professor at the University of Minnesota, was equally harsh in her judgement citing inaccuracy, factual errors, undocumented facts, bias, and lack of balance. The professor was most critical of the exclusion of vital information.

‘The problem is all the more acute because the story appears in a newspaper of excellent repute such as the
Los Angeles Times
, a reader is likely, and fully entitled, to believe that the reporter acted in a way consonant with the ethical and professional standards of the field, consulted sources on all sides and gave expression to all sides in the final article... Michel Thomas comes off as someone who has a wild imagination, engages in Walter Mitty-like fantasies and is basically a liar...

‘The reporter Rivenburg, chose to disregard documentation that could have verified information that he presented in his story as lacking credibility. But what is perhaps most grievously unethical about the article Larger Than Life is the overwhelming presence of editorialising, bias, superfluous information, and cheap shots. The standards of fairness and balance require that news reporting remains free from exaggeration, distortion, and personal opinion; and that it deals respectfully and honestly with the subjects of stories... the reporter woefully fails to meet the ethical standards of fairness and balance.’
[275]

Although a mass of documentation had been unearthed for the book, and might be expected to satisfy most readers, a potential court case demanded that evidence should meet a legal standard of proof. To head the research team, the lawyers employed Alex Kline, a San Francisco private investigator specialising in pre-trial research and corporate investigation. Kline employs high-powered computers, teaming up with researchers all over the United States and the world, to sift through data banks. He and his teams spent thousands of hours on the case.

‘I had never heard of Michel Thomas, and my first exposure to him was from reading the article,’ Kline said. ‘Investigators take professional pride in a stubborn sense of scepticism, and my first reaction was that the reporter had done a skilful job dissecting the dubious claims of a man whose past was simply too extraordinary to be believed. There was precious little hard evidence mentioned in the article to bolster the claims of such an extraordinary life, and plenty of indication of the kind of bombast of a con man, who had worked the gullible celebrity circuit successfully for decades, with hard-to-verify claims of wartime derring-do, and a too-good-to-be-true method of language teaching. The reporter’s snide attitude about his subject was off-putting, but his research appeared detailed and thorough. Roy Rivenburg had succeeded in implanting in me a great scepticism about Michel Thomas.’

But time spent with Michel, together with a close inspection of the documents in his possession, quickly convinced Kline that the man was the genuine article. Moreover, he reasoned that a competent investigative reporter with the resources of the
Los Angeles Times
, especially someone allowed months to prepare a major article, could quickly run down the details of the story. ‘It should have been easy to expose a fraud definitively. If the details did not fit together, if the documents and the witnesses did not exist, it would be very hard to maintain the face. Yet Thomas was inviting me to dig as deeply as I wanted, and he shied away from nothing when I asked him for details. This was precisely the opposite of what I would expect from a con man, whose greatest expertise is at changing the subject and dodging the explanation of details. It cost Michel many thousands of dollars to research these questions over the following year. Again, this was hardly the action of a con man intent on concealing his fraudulent past.’

Documents were sent to photo and handwriting experts for verification, while a team of top researchers hunted down fresh supporting evidence. Wartime colleagues were tracked down, and the curators of relevant museums were asked for expert opinion. Those people interviewed by Rivenburg for the article were contacted, re-questioned, shown documents, and asked to share email correspondence exchanged with the reporter. As each question raised by the
Los Angeles Times
was researched, an abundance of new evidence, confirmed by the most exacting experts in the field, supported Michel’s original account without exception.

‘As I spent months methodically researching dozens of aspects of Michel’s story,’ Kline said, ‘I found a wealth of evidence in every instance to support his “claims” for his wartime experiences.’ He became, and remains, a passionate defender of Michel’s reputation. ‘Everything has checked out one hundred per cent!’

Perhaps the most damaging attack on Michel’s credibility was the suggestion that he had not been at the liberation of Dachau. The article ignored hard evidence, and relied instead on quotes from people who did not know Michel, or that he possessed photos and documents linking him to the liberation. For this Rivenburg did not seek out his own contacts, but relied on those outraged veterans who had most vociferously questioned the authenticity of Paul Parks in articles in the
Boston Globe
. Parks was a prominent black Boston civil rights leader and former state education secretary, who claimed to have been at the liberation of Dachau. For years he told stories of breaking through the gate of the camp on top of a large bulldozer, described a mountain of gold teeth extracted from corpses, and said he shot a Nazi colonel in a rage after being spat upon. According to Parks, black GIs were hugged by emaciated, ghostlike survivors. He also claimed to have landed at Omaha beach on D-day, where his unit suffered sixty per cent casualties, and a buddy beside him was shot dead by machine-gun fire.

Parks’s status as a concentration camp liberator made him a sought-after speaker by Jewish groups, including Holocaust survivors, and he was appointed co-chairman of the Cornerstone Project for the New England Holocaust Memorial. B’nai B’rith in Berlin selected him to receive the prestigious Raoul Wallenberg award, named after the Swedish diplomat who gave his life to save Jews.

But the
Boston Globe
declared Parks a phoney.
[276]
Veterans of the liberation claimed that his military record was riddled with contradictions, asserting there were no black troops at Dachau, and that Parks’s 365th Engineer Regiment was hundreds of miles away on the day of liberation. His claim to have been at the Normandy landing was also said to be false. The 365th Engineer Regiment was still in England when the Allies landed at Normandy, and the man said to have been shot dead beside Parks on D-Day had actually died three months before.

In recent years Parks has responded by saying that he was part of a special unit that had volunteered for mine detection duty both on D-Day and at Dachau. Veterans who dismiss the claim as ‘ludicrous’ include retired Brigadier General Felix L. Sparks, who was a twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Colonel in the Thunderbirds when he led the first troops into the camp on the day of liberation. ‘The Germans never put out any mines in the last days of the war, because we were deep inside Germany at that time. They weren’t laying any mines, and, if they did, I had my own people to take care of them.’
[277]

Brigadier General Sparks had been quoted in the article in the
Los Angeles Times
about Michel, saying that he did not recall anyone named Thomas. Interviewed afterwards, Sparks said he had been told by Rivenburg that Michel Thomas claimed to have accompanied him and his troops into Dachau on the day of liberation, and only later learned that Michel never made any such claim. He could hardly be expected to remember the names of the hundreds of US military personnel who had been at the camp of the day of liberation, he said, he would not have recognised a CIC agent if he saw one. ‘I never knew what those guys did - I don’t even know if I was aware of their existence during the war!’
[278]

Ian Sayer, author of a history of the CIC, was quoted in the
Los Angeles Times
article as saying that although the records do not specify when the first CIC agents arrived at the camp, the first unit was not the 45th Detachment. But Michel specifically told Rivenburg - and I confirmed in emails - that he went to Dachau on his own initiative, for which he had both the motivation and the authority. (General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, had ordered: ‘CIC personnel will be permitted to operate with minimal restrictions of movement, CIC personnel will not be delayed in the execution of their assigned duties by the observance of standard military customs or prohibitions, nor by the military police or other military agencies. CIC badges and credentials will be honoured at all times.’)
[279]
The records show that Michel’s unit was at Schrobenhausen, less than twenty miles from Dachau, on the morning of liberation.

No mention is made of author Sayer’s earlier statements when first emailed by Rivenburg. The reporter had outlined Michel’s claims, and written that he was trying to establish if any of the stories checked out. Sayer had initially replied that Michel sounded plausible, and later wrote with the ‘good news’ that he had found a reference to Special Agent Thomas from 45th CIC. He then faxed a photocopy from a page of the unpublished, thirty-volume history of CIC: ‘Agents Thomas and White, on their way to pick up an automatic arrestee, were informed at Hersbruck that the town for which they were heading was in German hands.’
[280]
This referred to an incident in mid-April 1945, just before the liberation of Dachau and the battle for Nuremberg, when Michel found himself in a city still held by the enemy. Confronted by Americans in a jeep, the Germans promptly surrendered. Although aware of the event myself, I had not included it in the book because at the time I had been unable to find documentary verification. But not a word of Sayer’s discoveries, made as a direct result of Rivenburg’s enquiries, appeared in the article.