Talk:Michel Thomas/Archive 1
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[edit] Thomas on Learning
Image:MThomasport32004-05-26.jpg Michel Thomas
I personally believe that the way languages are taught in secondary schools here in England needs to be reconsidered, because so many pupils leave after having studied a language for five years unable to put together the simplest sentence. Would this be tolerated in other subject areas?
Language teaching is a special case, as it is really the only subject which is not most effectively learnt in a formal classroom situation (I'm referring to how the true subject experts, native speakers, learn). Do we take enough time to really think about how languages are learnt 'ideally'? When we are learning our native language, we do not rely on glossy flashcards and textbooks. We learn through listening and internalizing the language structure and vocabulary in a natural, relaxed and mostly stress-free way. It is only as we grow up and work our way through the education system that we are conditioned to rely rather heavily on visual aids.
Of course, learning a foreign language is rarely going to be the same as learning our mother tongue - we are not usually surrounded by people who speak the language 24/7, for example. But Michel Thomas' courses come as close as anything I have ever seen to making full use of our brains' innate tendencies to pick up language solely in an auditory way, whilst at the same time making use of our knowledge of English (it would, of course, be silly to ignore the advantage that second language learners have of already having mastered a linguistic system - that's why I am personally against lessons being taught entirely in the foreign language, unless, perhaps, the students are under the age of 8 or so).
Our view of how classes and courses should be taught is still extremely Victorian in nature - as is the whole educational system. It is not inducive to students being able to relax and enjoy the learning process - to get a thrill from it. They sit behind desks and copy from blackboards and are shushed continually; a bell signals when they must get up and move to the next class.... stress, pressure, tension... even most teachers expect that learning their subject will become a chore and should just be pounded away at until at least a little information is retained (for a limited time, anyway). Being able to produce specific sentences for specific questions on specific examination papers is one of the main aims.
Does it really have to be this way? I cannot speak for other subjects, but I have a vision of the ideal language classroom being a relaxing environment in which students are comfortable and happy and willing to learn in a light, natural and enjoyable way. Anyone who saw the BBC documentary about Michel Thomas a few years back, in which he taught a group of students at a high school in Islington, London, will remember that he cleared the classroom of its traditional furniture and brought in easychairs, soft lighting, plants and screens to block the view of computers and other things traditionally associated with learning. A gimmick? Well, it actually seemed to work. In just a week, the students, who had all had bad experiences with language learning in the past, were communicating fluently and naturally in French.
But perhaps more than that, when they were being interviewed about their experience, the enthusiasm in their eyes, their realization that learning French didn't have to be an arduous slog; memorizing lists of vocabulary and irregular verbs, was truly inspirational. The head of French at the school seemed to be extremely taken aback by the progress the students had made and this led her to seriously doubt the way in which languages are traditionally taught.
It really surprises me that there seems to have been very little interest in this system from schools. Certainly businesses and industry have realized that the system has a lot to offer which other methods simply cannot touch.
We owe it to the students to try out this method, to carry out trials, to do a little research, to at least be open-minded about this.
I do not deny that other methods can be successful, but too often they are not, and they fail students every single year. Formal memorization does nothing but produce tension and ultimately, resentment. It's not even the most effective way to learn. Children 'magically' remember all sorts of information, about football, baseball, whole scenes from their favourite films etc etc. It is easy for them, because it is accessible, enjoyable and natural.
The more a student can work out for themselves, the more they will remember. I think understanding is the key. For example, if a student is told that most nouns which end in -tion in English, end in -ción in Spanish and are then asked how to say 'combination', 'implication', 'meditation' and so on... will they ever forget that? They have worked it out for themselves and have, in the space of a minute, also learnt hundreds of other words with next to no effort.
Martin Cosgrove (2003)
couldn't agree more, i am a french gsce student and after 5 years of twice weekly lessons and homework i learnt more in his 8 hour course than i ever had done before
[edit] i want to learn
can anyone help i want to learn french the M T way i live in the north of ireland. frankiemckeown@hotmail.com
Yes, There are audio CD sets of French, German, Italian and Spanish. In eight hours of audio, you can supposedly learn the basics of one of the languages. I'm doing French right now and it is VERY good.
Also check your local library as they're expensive to buy :P
[edit] Roy Rivenburg and Michel Thomas
(extensive response, not directly related to article moved to archive 1) Antonrojo 16:59, 2 December 2006 (UTC) Mr. Rivenburg and his employer the L.A. Times were sued by Michel Thomas for defamation in 2001, after Mr. Rivenburg's profile of Thomas, headlined "Larger Than Life" was published in April of that year. Mr. Thomas was then 87 years old. His biography, Test of Courage, had been published the year before, and had been favorably reviewed by the L.A. Times.
Mr. Rivenburg's profile portrayed Thomas as a fraud who had lied about or exaggerated his WWII service. In May 2001, a few weeks after the article ran, the Times published half a dozen letters in response to the article, the gist of them was that the article was the essence of "cheap shot journalism" as one letter-writer characterized it.
One of the published letters was from Dr. Theodore Kraus, a former U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps Agent who had served with Mr. Thomas in the CIC in Germany in 1946-47. He had been interviewed by Mr. Rivenburg, and fully supported Mr. Thomas' accounts of his work for the CIC, yet for some reason Dr. Kraus and his statements backing up Mr. Thomas were never mentioned in the article. He strongly disagreed with the article's take on Mr. Thomas's life, and asked in his letter why his own statements backing up Mr. Thomas's wartime CIC service were never mentioned in the article.
In June 2001, Mr. Thomas and his attorney hired me to do research that would establish the truth of Mr. Thomas's WWII service, to be used in the defamation case. I had never heard of the man and knew nothing about his past.
From my first meeting with him, it was clear to me that something was wrong. Among other things, the article had portrayed Mr. Thomas as a phony Dachau liberator. But Mr. Thomas showed me a briefcase full of original documents, including photos he took at the liberation of Dachau, for which he had the negatives. He also had signed original statements, in German, of the crematorium workers whom he had interrogated. Had the reporter simply ignored all this documentation? Had he researched its authenticity? Had he tried to locate persons who had served with Mr. Thomas during WWII?
Unlike any real fraud, who would have avoided delving into details, Mr. Thomas gave me his full cooperation. He was never evasive, and during the course of the lawsuit he paid me to research his past. (Later on I donated my time pro bono.)
Over the course of the next couple of years, working with others, we found documentation in the U.S. National Archives and in Europe that completely corroborated Mr. Thomas's accounts of his wartime service. I met with noted French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld in his office in Paris and obtained from him the original files establishing Mr. Thomas's bona fides as a recognized "ancien combattant" who had been imprisoned repeatedly in Vichy French concentration camps, tortured by the French version of the Gestapo -- the Milice -- and had been officially cited for his bravery fighting with the French Resistance.
We contacted Ms. Barbara Distel, who for decades has been the curator of the Dachau Memorial Museum, and sent her prints of twenty-three of the photos Mr. Thomas took at Dachau. She replied by letter that she and her staff had verified the authenticity of the photos, stating that “20 of the photos are unknown until now and seem to have been taken by Mr. Thomas," who still had the negatives for many of the photos.
At the National Archives, we found a list of the members of the 45th Division CIC unit in which Mr. Thomas had served. I tracked down every member of that unit and found a lone survivor, Mr. Walter Wimer, who lives today in Michigan. He had had no contact with Mr. Thomas since the war but was outraged at the Times' portrayal of Mr. Thomas, whom he remembered well for his extraordinary bravery and language skills. Mr. Wimer, himself an emigre of Hitler's Germany, happily provided a Declaration in the lawsuit in which, among other things, he stated that "Mr. Thomas was sent out on missions by our commanding officers, in the same capacity and with the same duties and powers as the other Agents of our unit."
In August 2002, I accompanied Mr. Thomas and Dr. Kraus to the reunion of the 45th Infantry Division in Oklahoma City. I witnessed first-hand Mr. Thomas' reunion with Henry Teichmann, who had written the orders releasing Mr. Thomas from the 180th Regiment of the 45th, in 1944. The two had not seen each other in nearly 60 years, but had a warm and emotional reunion that I videotaped.
Dr. Kraus spoke to the membership of the 180th that weekend, and they responded in force: more than 130 members sent signed cards to the L.A. Times, respectfully asking the paper to re-report the true facts of Mr. Thomas' life. I kept copies of these cards before shipping them to the L.A. Times via special delivery from Paris, after my meeting with Serge Klarsfeld.
No one at the Times ever responded to any of these, or more than 380 additional letters the paper received about their article.
After the reunion, another wartime comrade surfaced. Bedford Groves had served not only in the CIC with Mr. Thomas, but also knew him when Mr. Thomas served in the combat intelligence unit of the 180th Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division. He sent a card recalling Mr. Thomas and when I contacted him he told me that Mr. Thomas "did the work of three Agents" in the CIC.
Witness testimony is the gold-standard of evidence for evaluating inflated claims of wartime heroism. Of the four surviving persons we located who had served with Mr. Thomas, every one of them fully supported his 'stories' of extraordinary wartime service.
In the meantime, the documentation from our research was piling ever higher. Mr. Thomas had been nominated for a Silver Star in 1944 for his bravery fighting with the 180th in France. He never knew what became of the nomination, and never pursued it, because he was honored enough to have served with the U.S. Army in the fight against the Nazis.
I found the widow of the man who wrote the original nomination letter, Capt. Martin Schroeder, and she verified his signature on the letter, and further stated that her husband would never have nominated someone for such a high decoration "unless he really deserved it."
At the National Archives, we found documentation of the Battle of Autrey France, which was described in Captain Schroeder's letter.
What the Sources Said
I also interviewed people whom Mr. Rivenburg quoted in the article to discredit Mr. Thomas. Felix Sparks, who led the first troops into Dachau, was quoted in the article thus: "[Sparks] says he would certainly recall if Thomas had accompanied the 200-member force: 'He's got the right battalion, that's correct, but there were no CIC [Counter Intelligence Corps] with us.'"
But when I interviewed Sparks, he told me, "this reporter called me and said, 'this guy Thomas says he went into Dachau with you as a CIC Agent.' I told him I never heard of the guy and I had no idea what any of those CIC guys did, and never knew any of them." I informed Sparks that, with all due respect, Mr. Thomas had never heard his name until he read the L.A. Times article, and had certainly never told the reporter he had 'gone in' with Lt. Col. Felix Sparks. Mr. Thomas did say, as his biographer made clear to Mr. Rivenburg in emails prior to the publication of his profile, that he had gone into Dachau on the day of liberation as a CIC Agent, who did not need to be "attached" to any infantry unit such as Mr. Sparks'.
Mr. Sparks signed a letter in May 2002 stating that, had he known this had been Mr. Thomas's claim, "I would have told Mr. Rivenburg that it was perfectly possible that Thomas was at the camp that day, and I would not necessarily have been aware of this."
Mr. Rivenburg's profile also quoted retired Lt. Col. Hugh F. Foster III, an expert on the liberation of Dachau: "Regarding Thomas' mention of tanks, Foster says there were no tanks because the bridges between the town of Dachau and the military camp across the river had been blown up. Thomas doesn't recall a river. Thomas says he entered the camp through the front gate, after the Germans waved white flags and opened fire on his group. But Foster and Sparks say the battalion deliberately avoided the front gate and circled around to another side of the sprawling camp."
I believe the implication of this is clear: Mr. Thomas was lying, was not at the liberation, and cannot recall things that a genuine liberator would recall.
When I interviewed Foster, I showed him the independent documentation we had found, along with some of the documents and photos Rivenburg had been shown, but did not mention or show to Foster when he interviewed him. Foster wrote a detailed statement, outlining the evidence he had seen, and concluded, "Based on my review of these documents and photos, I believe that Michel Thomas most likely was present at Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945." He added, "I do not know to what extent Mr. Roy Rivenburg was aware of the above information during his contacts with me. I do know that the essence of his correspondence with me was that Mr. Thomas had made the fraudulent claim that he accompanied the first troops to enter the concentration camp at Dachau. I am now aware that Mr. Thomas made no such claim; rather he claimed only to have been at the camp on liberation day, and I believe the evidence I have seen supports that claim."
I also interviewed Conrad McCormick, a CIC veteran and archivist at the U.S. Army Intelligence Museum in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, who was quoted in the article about Mr. Thomas's CIC ID card. During the interview, Mr. McCormick mentioned that he had been working for years on an index of the thirty-volume unpublished history of the CIC, compiled between 1950 and 1959 at the Army Intelligence School in Fort Holabird, Maryland. I asked him if he had looked up the name Michel Thomas in his index in response to Mr. Rivenburg's query. He said he had not, but did so while I looked on.
McCormick found an entry at p. 2862, of Vol. XX, concerning the small CIC unit in which Michel Thomas had been an Agent:
"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. They collected tactical information about the situation ahead and forwarded it to Target Force Headquarters, along with a report of initial security measures they had instigated in Hersbruck. In addition to the normal arms collection, curfew, travel restrictions, and communications disconnection, the two Agents arrested an official of the Organization Todt and indicated the existence of a war crimes' situation in the town. Agent Schiff was performing all interrogations as the day ended. Most of this work had been performed in suburban areas."
(Later, I interviewed Ian Sayer, co-author of a book about the CIC, at his spacious home outside London. Sayer too, was quoted in the profile of Mr. Thomas, indicating his skepticism. Sayer maintains an extensive library of WWII documentation and memorabilia at his home. To my astonishment, Sayer produced the same page from the CIC history, and showed me the fax of it he had sent to Rivenburg in March 2001 after Rivenburg contacted him to research his story. However, no mention was made in the article of this entry documenting "Agent Thomas's" work in the official CIC history. )
I informed Mr. McCormick that Mr. Thomas had photos of himself with Agent Frederick White, in their CIC Agent uniforms. I later contacted Frederick White’s widow and she supplied additional photos of her husband and Michel in their CIC uniforms in a car together, along with photos taken at the liberation of Dachau that matched those taken by Michel Thomas, for which he kept the negatives.
After the publication of Rivenburg’s article, the Los Angeles Times published a Letter-to-the-Editor indicating approval of his article by Mr. McCormick. It was the only letter of any substance published in support of the article. I showed Mr. McCormick that letter, published on 7th May 2001. He reacted with some indignance, and stated he had never written any such Letter-to-the Editor, and that it was not his practice ever to write such letters. He said he recognized some of the words in the letter from email correspondence and telephone calls between himself and Rivenburg.
In a sworn statement filed with the Court, 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 enquiries 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.”
So, where are we now? Four out of four of Mr. Thomas's surviving comrades are outraged at Mr. Rivenburg's portrayal and happily sign letters or sworn statements backing up Mr. Thomas. Two sources quoted in his article effectively recant their statements quoted in the article, and a third finds evidence that his quoted statement suggesting Thomas was not a bona fide CIC Agent was misleading or incorrect. And, finally, there is evidence of a planted Letter-to-the-Editor, amidst the many letters of outrage received.
The Defamation Suit
Mr. Thomas did not prevail in his defamation suit, because the trial judge ruled that the article was not defamatory on its face. This was a curious ruling, insofar as she did agree that the article implied Thomas had lied about his past. So, apparently, one can be portrayed as a liar and a judge will nevertheless find that this is not prima facie evidence one has been defamed.
As a result of the ruling, Mr. Thomas was never allowed to put before a judge or jury any of the mountain of evidence supporting his 'claims.' Because of the peculiar provisions of California's anti-SLAPP legislation, which makes it nearly impossible for plaintiffs to prevail in defamation cases in California, Mr. Thomas was then forced to pay all of the L.A. Times' legal fees, amounting to nearly $100,000, but not before the judge reprimanded the Times' lawyers for 'rampant over-billing' and ordered them to cut their bill nearly in half.
With the L.A. Times stonewalling all of the letters of protest they'd received, and ignoring all of the evidence they'd been shown after the article was published, indicating they got the story wrong, the loss of the defamation case was devastating to Mr. Thomas. His biographer and several friends decided to put together all the evidence that we could not present in court, and post it on a web site. http://www.michelthomas.org was posted in July 2002. There you will find downloadable copies of scores of historical documents, along with a detailed rebuttal of Mr. Rivenburg's profile.
Silver Star Awarded
The final coda to this story came in May 2004. In 2003, I had petitioned Senator John McCain and Mr. Thomas's member of Congress in New York, Carolyn Maloney, to submit to the U.S. Army the letters and documentation I had gathered concerning the Silver Star nomination. They did so, and the Army reviewed the documentation, conducted their own research, and awarded Mr. Thomas the Silver Star, sixty years after he'd been nominated for it.
Former Senator Bob Dole, a decorated and wounded WWII vet who had spearheaded the building of the new WWII Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC, learned of the award and readily agreed to present the medal to Mr. Thomas. He invited his colleague Senator John Warner, also a wounded WWII vet, and on May 25th, the two pinned the medal on Mr. Thomas in a moving ceremony in the shadow of the Atlantic Wall of the Memorial. This ceremony took place just days before the official dedication of the Memorial, as over a million aging WWII vets gathered in Washington. In addition to Mr. Thomas's family and friends, two of his former WWII comrades made the trip to be at the ceremony: Dr. Kraus and Bedford Groves, the latter in a wheelchair because of his war wounds. The Ambassador of France also attended, and saluted Mr. Thomas for his heroism in the French Resistance. Press coverage of the event included these articles in the Army News Service and on CNN's Wolf Blitzer program: http://www.defendamerica.mil/profiles/may2004/pr052804b.html
The Los Angeles Times, which three years before had deemed Mr. Thomas sufficiently newsworthy to devote the front page of its Southern California Living section to a 3800-word profile of him, declined to cover this new development in his life, though they were informed in advance of it, and it directly touched upon areas of 'controversy' generated by their own reporter.
Letters of congratulation streamed in. Former Senator Max Cleland wrote to Mr. Thomas, "you are a genuine hero."
Two days later, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum paid a special tribute to Mr. Thomas, honoring him before a large crowd as a Dachau liberator, at the Museum's "Salute to Liberators" event.
Posthumous Conduct
After all of this, rather than give any nod of credit to Mr. Thomas, Rivenburg, an ostensibly disinterested reporter, pounced when Thomas died in January 2005, publishing, "The Myth of Michel Thomas" on his personal web site at http://www.offkilter.org/thomas.html. He has repeated a good deal of that in the discussion above. The article includes links to other blogs, such as one by a Les Jones, http://www.lesjones.com/posts/001778.shtml, with the subhead "that lying old fraud Michel Thomas has died."
Mr. Rivenburg has engaged in an 'edit war' here on Wikipedia, with those, including myself, who have tried to correct the misleading impressions he gives in his allegedly objective account of Mr. Thomas's life. He continues to gin up fresh issues to give credence to the phony 'controversies' he has so tenaciously tried to generate.
In his entry above, for example, he makes much of the issue of what time of day Mr. Thomas arrived at Dachau, and which troops he accompanied. This is entirely typical of Mr. Rivenburg's M.O. from the time he first interviewed Mr. Thomas: nitpick myopically at small, alleged 'discrepancies,' refuse to accept anything Mr. Thomas said as true, overlook the preponderance of corroborating evidence, and then imply Mr. Thomas is a liar because he did not meet Mr. Rivenburg's insistently skeptical standard of proof.
Mr. Rivenburg's article strongly implied Mr. Thomas was a phony Dachau liberator. He has since been presented with so much evidence that he got that wrong that he now has moved the goalpost and insists the issue is that Mr. Thomas could not prove -- to Mr. Rivenburg's satisfaction -- what time of day, and with what troops, he entered the camp.
Mr. Thomas insisted to his dying breath that he was with the first troops to arrive at the camp, and I have no doubt that he did. But our purpose as researchers was to find corroborating evidence that he was a Dachau liberator, not to nail down what time of day he arrived -- as if that were of any importance.
Now, with Mr. Thomas dead and gone, Mr. Rivenburg writes that Mr. Thomas "tried to backtrack by claiming he never said he was with the first battalion, only that he arrived at Dachau sometime later that day." But this is not true. Mr. Thomas's statements were always consistent: as a CIC Agent, he had freedom of movement, and need not have been attached to any infantry regiment to enter the camp.
The historical record shows that it was troops of the 157th that entered the camp first. When Mr. Thomas learned at the time his biography was being written that this was the first regiment to enter the camp, he had no reason to think this was untrue, but the identity of the regiment was not important to him, and so this statement of fact made its way into his biography. Mr. Thomas's biographer Christopher Robbins informed Mr. Rivenburg in emails prior to publication of his profile that he had erred in assuming Mr. Thomas was attached to the 157th.
But Mr. Thomas never said he was a member of the 157th regiment, and he took pains to make it clear he was not, and had no need to be, 'attached' to this or any other infantry battalion or regiment, in order to enter the camp as a CIC Agent.
In addition to the photos and other documentation Mr. Thomas showed to Mr. Rivenburg, we found additional evidence at the National Archives establishing that Mr. Thomas arrested Emil Mahl, the 'hangman of Dachau' two days after the camp was liberated. Mr. Thomas showed Mr. Rivenburg a letter Mahl had written to him from Landsberg prison in 1949 -- after his execution sentence was reduced to a ten-year term -- complaining about details of his May 1945 arrest by Mr. Thomas. If Mr. Rivenburg assumed the letter was a fake, how does he argue away the correspondence log we found deep in the bowels of the National Archives, proving that Mahl sent a letter to Thomas on the very date shown on Mahl's letter? And what of the additional documentation we found in which Mahl attested, with witnesses, that the date of his arrest by Mr. Thomas was May 1st, 1945?
As Hugh Foster told me, even if you assume all of the documents and photos in Thomas's possession were fakes, or genuine items he obtained from others, this evidence of Mr. Thomas's arrest of Mahl is, alone, nearly conclusive evidence Mr. Thomas was a Dachau liberator, for how would Thomas have known who Mahl was, much less where to find him in the vicinity of Dachau two days after liberation, had Mr. Thomas not been there himself?
I could go on, but I doubt if even the most diligent and interested reader has the patience for details at this level. For the full story, go to http://www.michelthomas.org, and you will see the overwhelming evidence put forth there attesting to the truth of Mr. Thomas's 'claims' regarding his wartime service. He was a CIC Agent, he was a Dachau liberator, and he did rescue from destruction the Nazi Party's worldwide membership card file in the first week of May 1945.
Mr. Rivenburg has written a large body of articles for the L.A. Times in the many years he has been a staff reporter there. Some of them show a talent for humor-writing. On this story, about a serious subject, he did real harm to someone who spent the last years of his life, and much of his savings, fighting to correct the damage to his reputation.
That's not funny at all.
I think the above facts speak for themselves and hope that some day Mr. Rivenburg will find the wisdom to abandon his campaign to discredit a man whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis, who fought against them with great courage and effectiveness, and who was recognized for his wartime heroism in the final year of a long and extraordinary life. Surely there are more worthy subjects for a crusading journalist intent on debunking the real frauds among us.
[edit] Response from Friends of Michel Thomas
Mr. Rivenburg's responses to the bulletin board at http://www.michelthomas.org remained posted there, unedited, for many months. Recently, the bulletin board was hacked. If Mr. Rivenburg would like to contribute to the organization, to pay the cost of restoring the bulletin board, we would be happy to re-post his responses.
As to the business about our hiding Mr. Rivenburg's email correspondence with Christopher Robbins, it is simply untrue. Relevant sections of that correspondence are quoted in Mr. Robbins' Declaration, which is posted on the web site and can be downloaded by anyone.
As to other issues Mr. Rivenburg raises, we have not seen any of the evidence he alleges, e.g. a transcript from the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial of Pierre Truche's alleged statements -- or any contemporary commentary from M. Truche about Mr. Thomas; nor have we seen any of the articles in which Mr. Thomas allegedly stated he was "born in France," nor any document signed by Mr. Thomas as a civilian assistant in the CIC, nor the transcript of any statement by any Justice Department Nazi-hunter.
If Mr. Rivenburg would like to provide these materials to us, we would be happy to respond. Privately. We believe that the public's interest in this sort of minutiae -- including readers of this Wikipedia commentary -- is very limited.
For the average reader, this story is fairly simple: an 87 year-old victim of Nazi and Vichy French persecution, with a distinguished WWII military record fighting with the French Resistance and U.S. military, was the subject of a well-researched biography written by a British author. The author had done extensive reading and research on WWII and had published two previous books about war-related subjects. A Los Angeles Times reporter, known primarily for his discontinued humor column "Off-Kilter" and with no published expertise in WWII history or military matters, undertook to discredit the man in a long profile questioning several areas of his WWII record, quoting persons who had little or no knowledge of the man being profiled. The lone WWII comrade who was interviewed was never mentioned in the article and immediately wrote a letter-to-the-editor objecting to the article and asking why his comments were ignored. Not a single person who had known the man during WWII was quoted in the article. The article sparked outrage and prompted a vigorous defense from his surviving WWII comrades, who -- to a man -- rallied around him and unequivocally stated that he had served with distinction and had not lied or exaggerated anything about his WWII record. The reporter has yet to locate anyone who actually knew the man during WWII who will say anything negative about him. The U.S. Army reviewed evidence of the man's WWII heroism submitted by Senator John McCain and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, conducted their own research, and awarded the man the Silver Star, sixty years after he was nominated for it -- a rare event indeed. Two of the U.S. Senate's WWII veterans then volunteered to present the medal at the WWII Memorial on the eve of its dedication, and the Ambassador of France also paid his respects at the same ceremony.
The following year, after the man died, the reporter resumed his efforts to discredit him. His efforts continue to this day, more than a year and a half after the man's death.
All the available evidence indicates the audience for these efforts is quite limited.
For reasons we still can only speculate on, Mr. Rivenburg took his best shot at destroying Mr. Thomas's reputation in his published profile of April 2001. An extensive investigation of the assertions and implications of the article was made in the following years, primarily in preparation for the defamation case against Mr. Rivenburg and the Los Angeles Times. The results of that investigation are posted at http://www.michelthomas.org, and are briefly summarized above.
Any reader who is interested in further information can contact us at facts@michelthomas.org.
If Mr. Rivenburg would like to debate these issues further, the lead researcher for Mr. Thomas's legal team has politely offered many times to meet with him at a place and time convenient to Mr. Rivenburg, including his office at the L.A. Times, but has always been rebuffed.
The offer stands.
