Alter-ing the Truth (updated with response)

"But there's a difference between telling your Aunt Mitzi that you caught a fish that was two feet long when it was actually 15 inches, and falsely claiming you wrote the Haitian Constitution (vice presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920), or had helped liberate Nazi death camps (President Ronald Reagan to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and separately to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1983)."

"In 1983, he told prominent Jews, notably Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel, Simon Wiesenthal, and Rabbi Marvin Hier of Los Angeles, of his personal experience vis-a -vis the Holocaust, saying ‘I was there,' and that he had assisted at the liberation of Nazi death camps. In reality, he was in a film unit in Hollywood that processed raw footage it received from Europe for newsreels, but was not in Europe during the war.[110]"

"Morris, Edmund (1999). Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Random House.  (includes fictional material)"

"After spending 14 years as President Reagan's authorized biographer, he published the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999 (edited by Robert Loomis, executive editor at Random House, Morris' publisher).[1]  This book generated controversy because, although Morris had access to Reagan's papers and correspondence, including his private diary, and he had been chosen as Reagan's official biographer, Morris wrote the book in a fiction-like fashion with a fictional version of himself as the narrator. Morris chose this course because, he admitted, he was never able to bring the president into focus. 'He was truly one of the strangest men who's ever lived,' Morris said. ‘Nobody around him understood him. I, every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, 'You know, I could never really figure him out.'[2]"

"Professional historians began lambasting Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan even before its September 30 release. Most have insisted that the book, which is populated by made-up characters and bolstered by fabricated documents, should have been marketed as fiction, not biography. According to John Demos (Yale Univ.) who has written on history and narrative form one of the cardinal rules of unconventional history writing is to ‘be as clear as possible to your reader about what you're doing.' Morris and his publisher, Random House, clearly flouted this rule.

"Morris played fast and loose with footnotes. The notes in Dutch refer readers willy-nilly to real archival materials as well as nonexistent documents. For historians, footnotes represent scholarly rigor, hours dedicated to dusty documents, creative links among archives, thoroughness, and depth. False footnotes cheapen the real work of writing history. As Kathryn Kish Sklar (SUNY-Binghamton) pointed out, ‘Historians work hard to recover evidence about the past. . . . If the rules governing their craft permitted them to invent evidence, then all their labor would be in vain.'"

"The Dowd story started out high-mindedly, then jumped to innuendo. Kelly's book described Nancy Reagan's and Sinatra's long, closed-door "lunches" in the White House private quarters, with quote marks around the word to imply what Kelly - and the publishers' lawyers - weren't willing to say directly: that Nancy Reagan and Sinatra were having an affair in the White House. Down's article brushed by Kelly's previous publishing history, as well as her habit of conflating rumor and fact. Mike Wallace, the CBS newsman (and Nancy Reagan friend), complained to the Boston Globe about Dowd's complaisant treatment of the Kelly methodology. "If you're going to be used the way the Times was, then you check your facts...or you take the five most scandalous stories and check them out.