Sara Lippincott, who now lives in Pasadena, having retired as an editor at The New Yorker in the early nineteen-nineties, worked in the magazine’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science, and when pieces of writing about science came into the magazine they were generally copied to her desk. In 1973, a long piece of mine called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” From that sixty-thousand-word piece of mine—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might or might not do with it—one paragraph in particular stands out in memory for the degree of difficulty it presented to her and the effort she made to keep it or kill it.
It was a story told to me by John A. Wheeler, who, during the Second World War, had been the leading physicist in residence at the Hanford Engineer Works, on the Columbia River in south-central Washington, where he attended the startup and plutonium production of the first large-scale nuclear reactor in the world. In 1939, with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Wheeler had identified the atomic nuclei most prone to fission and the consequent release of binding energy. In 1943–44, as the first reactor was being designed for Hanford, Wheeler had urged that its fundamental cross-section be expanded from a circle to a square, so that five hundred extra fuel rods could be inserted, if necessary, into the graphite matrix of the reactor—a colossally expensive alteration made because Wheeler had come to suspect that something like xenon poisoning might affect the reaction. It did, and the increased neutron flux from the additional fuel rods took care of the problem. In Professor Wheeler’s office at Princeton University in 1973, I had scribbled notes for about an hour when he said, as a kind of afterthought, that an odd thing happened at Hanford in the winter of 1944–45, or, perhaps, did not happen. He had not observed it himself. He had never seen it mentioned in print. Hanford was a vast, spread-out place in the bunchgrass country, full of rumors, secrecy, and apocryphal stories. If I were to use this story, I would have to authenticate it on my own because he had no idea if it was true. He said he had heard that a Japanese incendiary balloon—one of the weapon balloons that were released in Japan and carried by the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean—had landed on the reactor that was making the plutonium that destroyed Nagasaki, and had shut the reactor down.
The Japanese called the balloons fūsen bakudan. Thirty-three feet in diameter, they were made of paper and were equipped with incendiary devices or high explosives. In less than a year, nine thousand were launched from a beach on Honshu. They killed six people in Oregon, five of them children, and they started forest fires, and they landed from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as Farmington, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Completing the original manuscript of “The Curve of Binding Energy,” which was otherwise not about Hanford, I wrote half a dozen sentences on the balloon that shut down the reactor, and I turned the piece in. If Wheeler’s story was true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. I hoped it was true. The rest was up to Sara.
Her telephone calls ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos, not to mention Hanford and various targets in the District of Columbia. Interspersed with everything else she had to do in order to arrive—one word at a time—at those countless ticks, she went on making calls about the incendiary balloon for days on end. At last came an apparent breakthrough. Someone told her that he could not authenticate the story, but he knew absolutely who could.
“Oh, yes? Who?”
“John Wheeler.”
I told Sara to abandon the anecdote. The tale was almost surely someone’s invention; we should just delete it; she had done enough. She went on making phone calls.
If Sara was looking for information in the dark, the darkness was the long shadow of the wartime secrecy, when forty-five thousand people, from construction workers to theoreticians, lived in Hanford, Pasco, Kennewick, and, especially, Richland, a village of two hundred that the Army bought in 1943 and soon enhanced with more than four thousand houses. The large population notwithstanding, Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not know about it. Harry Truman learned of it only after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, in April, 1945. People at Hanford lived among posters that said “Don’t Be Caught With Your Mouth Open.” They set their urine in bottles on their doorsteps at night so it could be tested for contained plutonium. The people of Richland made babies at a higher rate than any other place in the nation. There was little else to make except plutonium. To put an ear to the ground, so to speak, and listen for spies, a resident F.B.I. agent went to brothels in Pasco and Kennewick, taking with him his beautiful wife. She sat in the car while he did his counterespionage inside. To profile people who might be easy targets for spies, F.B.I. agents went from house to house trying to learn who the heavier drinkers were and who was climbing into what neighbor’s bed. Hanford Engineer Works had its own justices of the peace, its own jail. Taverns were erected for the nighttime bibulation of construction workers, whose tendency to brawl was so intense that Wheeler later recalled “those beer joints with windows close to ground level so that tear gas could be squirted in.”
Key personnel were known by false names. Enrico Fermi was Mr. Farmer. Eugene Wigner was Mr. Winger. Arthur Compton was Mr. Comas. People referred to Wheeler as Johnny the Genie. Radiation exposure was called “shine,” and the word for radiation itself was “activity.” One technician who slipped up and used the “R” word was called to an office and chewed. With extremely few exceptions, the personnel had no idea what they were doing, but they did what they were told (“We all washed our hands so many times a day I thought I was Lady Macbeth”). The Manhattan Project, at Hanford as elsewhere, required the “‘immediate high amputation’ of any human limb with a cut contaminated by plutonium.” There could have been a safety billboard: 29 DAYS WITHOUT A HUMERUS LOST. There were black-widow spiders in people’s houses. One woman called the government hospital and asked what she should do if a black widow bit her three-year-old daughter. Hospital: “If she goes into convulsions, bring her in.…” On and off the site, rumors were ceaseless about Hanford’s contribution to the war effort: variously, it was a P.O.W. camp, a processor of solid rocket fuel, a biological kitchen preparing things for germ warfare, a nylon production line (DuPont was the prime industrial contractor). Asked what was really going on, the Army’s knowledgeable liaison, Captain Frank Valente, said, “We are dehydrating the Columbia River for shipment overseas.”
And now, in late 1973 at The New Yorker, the moment was rapidly approaching when “The Curve of Binding Energy” would go to press and alterations would no longer be possible. Once again I thanked Sara and told her to remove the story of the Japanese balloon. O.K., she said, but maybe if she found a free moment that final afternoon she would make another call or two. Or three. And she did, and she turned up someone in Delaware who told her that he could not authenticate the story, but he knew absolutely who could.
Oh? Who would that be? John Wheeler?
The site manager, B Reactor. He would surely have known if an incendiary balloon had lit up his building.
Where is he now?
Retired in Florida.
Sara looked up his telephone number. The checking department in those days was equipped floor-to-ceiling with telephone books. She called. He was not home. He had gone shopping.
Where?
The mall.
Sara called the police. She told them the situation, asked for help, and gave them her telephone number.
Minutes went by but not hours. The piece had not yet gone to press when the site manager called. He was in a telephone booth, the ancestral cell. Sara explained her purpose and read to him a passage that ended as follows:
The fire balloons were so successful, in fact, that papers were asked not to print news of them, because the United States did not want to encourage the Japanese to release more. The balloon that reached Hanford crossed not only the Pacific but also the Olympic Mountains and the alpine glaciers of the Cascade Range. It now landed on the building containing the reactor that was producing the Nagasaki plutonium, and shut the reactor down.
The manager said to Sara, “How did you know that?”
He went on to say that the balloon had not actually landed on the building but on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. Striking the line, the balloon burst into flames.
There was just enough time to make the fix.
* * *
Derek Jeter, Cal Ripken Jr., and Pee Wee Reese made occasional errors, and so does The New Yorker. Rarest of all is a fact that was not erroneous in the original manuscript but became an error in the checking process. When this happens, it can fairly be called an event, like the day the soap sank. This has happened to me only once—and long ago. If blame is to be assigned, heaven forbid, I am not the assignee, and neither is Sara, who checked the piece. Called “Basin and Range,” it was the first in the series of long pieces on geology that appeared from time to time across a dozen years. It had extensive introductory passages on themes like plate tectonics and geologic time. In the original manuscript, one paragraph said:
It is the plates that move. They all move. They move in varying directions and at different speeds. The Adriatic Plate is moving north. The African Plate once came up behind it and drove it into Europe—drove Italy like a nail into Europe—and thus created the Alps.
C Issue, B Issue, A Issue, the schedule drifted, as ever, toward the brink of time, the final and irreversible closing. In one’s head as in the surrounding building, things speed up in the ultimate hours and can become, to say the least, frenetic. Joshua Hersh, a modern fact-checker who was characteristically calmer than marble, referred to this zone of time as “the last-minute heebie-jeebies.” As “Basin and Range” came within fifteen minutes of closing, so many rocks were flying around in my head that I would have believed Sara if she had told me that limestone is the pit of a fruit. At one minute to zero, she came to tell me that I was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest.
Desperately, I said, “Who told you that?”
She said, “Eldridge Moores.”
World-class plate theorist, author of innumerable scientific papers on the ophiolitic sequence as the signature of global tectonics, president-to-be of the Geological Society of America, Eldridge Moores was the generous and quixotic geologist who had undertaken to teach me, on field trip after field trip, the geologic history of, among other places, California, Arizona, Greece, and Cyprus. My head spinning, I said to Sara, “If Eldridge Moores says the Adriatic Plate is moving southwest, it’s moving southwest. Please change the sentence.”
In the new New Yorker on the following Monday, the Adriatic Plate was on its way to Morocco. Leafing through the magazine in an idle moment that week, I called Eldridge and found him in his office at the University of California, Davis. I said, “Eldridge, if the Adriatic Plate is moving southwest, what are the Alps doing there?”
He said, “The Adriatic Plate?”
I said, “The Adriatic Plate.”
I believe I actually heard him slap his forehead. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not the Adriatic Plate! The Aegean Plate. The Aegean Plate is moving southwest.”
* * *
The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.
Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it “will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed … silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.” With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is, in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara’s words, a publication will believe in “turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs.” Newspapers do not have discrete fact-checking departments, but many magazines do. When I first worked at Time—in the year 1957, during the reign of Eadwig the All-Fair—Time’s writers were men and the researcher/fact-checkers were women. They were expert. When I freelanced a piece to The Atlantic, I asked who would do the fact-checking and was told, “That’s up to you.” The Atlantic had a nil budget for fact-checking. A little later, when I sold a piece to National Geographic it seemed to have more fact-checkers than there are Indians in the Amazon. Holiday and The Saturday Evening Post were only a little less assiduous. While The New Yorker’s fact-checking department had achieved early fame in its field, many other magazines have been just as committed and careful. Twenty-eight years after that first Atlantic piece, I sold The Atlantic a second one, and this time experienced a checking process equivalent to The New Yorker’s.
Book publishers prefer to regard fact-checking as the responsibility of authors, which, contractually, comes down to a simple matter of who doesn’t pay for what. If material that has appeared in a fact-checked magazine reappears in a book, the author is not the only beneficiary of the checker’s work. The book publisher has won a free ticket to factual respectability. Publishers who, for early-marketing purposes, set a text in stone before a magazine’s checking department has been through it get what they deserve. An almost foolproof backup screen to the magazine-to-book progression is the magazine’s vigilant readership. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, the editor, and even the shade of the founder. As the checking department summarizes it, “no mistakes go unnoticed by readers.” In the waning days of 2005, Rebecca Curtis’s fine short story “Twenty Grand” appeared in The New Yorker. Its characters, in 1979, go into a McDonald’s for Chicken McNuggets. McNuggets appeared in The New Yorker’s Christmas mail. McDonald’s had introduced them nationwide in 1983.
On the scattered occasions when such a message has come to me, I have written to the reader a note of thanks (unless the letter is somewhere on the continuum between mean-spirited and nasty, which is rarely the case). “You’re right!” I say. “And I am very grateful to you, because that mistake will not be present when the piece appears in book form.” If, in the reader’s letter, there has been just a tonal hint of a smirk, I cannot help adding, “If a lynx-eyed reader like you has gone through those thousands of words and has found only one mistake, I am quite relieved.”
* * *
If there is one collection of people even more likely than New Yorker readers to notice mistakes of any ilk or origin, it is the Swiss. Around the first of October, 1983, Richard Sacks, a fact-checking veteran with oak-leaf clusters, put on his headphones and dialed Zurich. In weeks that followed, he also called Bern, Brig, Lausanne, Geneva, Salgesch, Sion, Sierre, and other communities, many of them in the Canton de Vaud, principal home of the Swiss Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, which had given me a woolly hat and allowed me to walk around in the Bernese Oberland and the Pennine Alps with the Section de Renseignements of the Eighth Battalion, Fifth Regiment. Eventually, I wrote:
With notebooks and pencils, the patrols of the Section de Renseignements go from place to place exploring, asking questions, collecting particulars, scribbling information, characterizing and describing people and scenes, doing reconnaissance of various terrains, doing surveillance of present activity, and tracking events of the recent past. Afterward, they trudge back and, under pressure of time, compress, arrange, and present what they have heard and seen. All of that is incorporated into the substance of the word “renseignements.” I have limitless empathy for the Section de Renseignements.
No problem there. All Richard had to do was ask, phrase by phrase, if the patrols did those things. If he had to ask in French, he also asked for someone who could speak English, the better to tick the phrases. There were, however, extended dimensions of the situation.
Generally speaking, it can be said that discipline is nearly perfect in the Swiss Army, and that discipline is perhaps a little less than perfect if the soldiers are thinking in French, and, finally, that within any French-speaking battalion perfection tends to dilapidate in the Section de Renseignements.
How would you put that in a call to an official in the Département Militaire? I had made very formal application to attend a so-called refresher course (a cours de répétition) with units of the national militia, and had included only one stipulation: that I spend at least fifty per cent of my time not in the company of officers. Evidently, the Département Militaire had no difficulty deciding where to place me.
According to majors and manuals, Renseignements is an activity that calls for a special style of mind, constantly seeking intelligence and finding it even if it is not there, for in peacetime exercises what is required above all else is imagination. The effect of the Section de Renseignements is, in one major’s words, “to make it live.”
That is to say, people in Renseignements need a fact-checker.
The patrols of Renseignements walk in the unoccupied territory between the battalion and the enemy. They circle high behind enemy lines. Since the mountains are real and the enemy is not, there tends to be a certain diminution of energy during a refresher course—particularly on the part of those who go out on patrol, in contrast to those who stay in the command post and think up things for the patrols to do. Essentially, the people in the command posts are editors, trying to make sense of the information presented by the patrols, and by and large the patrols are collections of miscellaneous freelancing loners, who lack enthusiasm for the military enterprise, have various levels of antipathy to figures of authority, and, in a phrase employed by themselves and their officers alike, are “the black sheep of the army.”
I would admire the Swiss forever for having the wit to assign me to Renseignements—a legerdemain of public relations unheard of in my country. Our patrol was led by a young viticulteur named Luc Massy, whose love of Switzerland was in inverse proportion to his love for the army. He carried on patrol his assault rifle, his tire-bouchon, and his six-centilitre verre de cave. The several wines concealed in his pack bulged like a cord of mortar shells. In an alpine meadow, the patrol sits down in a circle.
Massy fills the glass, holds it up to his eye.
“Santé,” he says, with a nod to the rest of us, and—thoughtfully, unhurriedly—drinks it himself. Because I happen to be sitting beside him on his left, he says, “John, you are not very well placed. In my town, we drink counterclockwise.” After finishing the glass, he fills it again and hands it to his right—to Jean Reidenbach. The background music is a dissonance of cattle bells. We count nineteen Brown Swiss in the meadow just below us, and they sound like the Salvation Army. A narrow red train appears far below. Coming out of a tunnel it crosses a bridge, whistling—three cars in all, the Furka-Oberalp.
In his weeks on the telephone with Switzerland, Richard Sacks had a great deal more to do than retrace the steps of one patrol from alp to alp, or call an off-limits restaurant in Birgisch where Corporal Massy stirred fondue with the antenna of a walkie-talkie. There remained that other half of the equation, the officers: the major who managed the Hotel zum Storchen, in Zurich; the colonel who was also president of Credit Suisse; the major who was general manager of the Bankverein; the colonel who was president of the Bankgesellschaft; the colonel who was chairman of Hoffmann–La Roche; the major who was chairman of Ciba-Geigy; the major who imported lobsters from Maine and had been caught entering Sweden with bundles of cash taped to his legs. Richard could not get a hard check on that last one, and we left it out of the piece. Captain François Rumpf was my official shepherd and initial contact. A letter from the Département Militaire instructed me after arriving in Switzerland to meet him on a precise day and hour in the Second Class Buffet in the railway station of Lausanne. I was there, on the Swiss dot. Rumpf was adjutant to Adrien Tschumy, the tall, contemplative Divisionnaire—two stars and a full-time professional. He reported to Enrico Franchini, of Canton Ticino, Commandant de Corps.
He had a kindly face that was somewhat wrinkled and drawn. There were three stars on his cap, and down the sides of his legs ran the broad black stripes of the general staff, disappearing into low black boots. Sometimes described as “mysterious” and “not well known outside Ticino,” he was one of the seven supreme commanders of the Swiss Army.
I had worked through the final draft of the manuscript during a month at an academic retreat in northern Italy, where I had little else to do but show up for cocktails at five in the evening. I have never turned in to The New Yorker a more combed-over piece than that one. Its length was around forty thousand words. As Richard went through them a tick at a time—starting on the telephone in the early morning and staying on the telephone until the end of the Swiss day—he found, as he always did, errors resulting from words misheard, errors of assumption and supposition, errors of misinformation from flawed books or living sources, items misinterpreted or misunderstood. To turn up that many errors in so long a piece was routine in his work, and scarcely a surprise to me. I both expected it and depended on it in the way that I have relied on the colleagueship of professional fact-checking across the years. In the making of a long piece of factual writing, errors will occur, and in ways invisible to the writer. Was the Morgenstern really an eight-foot cudgel with a sixteen-spike pineapple head? Is the Schwarzbergalp above the Mattmarksee? Would you get to the Nussbaum bridge via Gouchheit, Krizacher, and Vogelture? Would the villages be in that order? Are there two “h”s in Gouchheit? How many “n”s in Othmar Hermann Ammann? How long would it take an entire company to go up the Bettmeralp téléphérique? How many soldiers could sleep in the Schwarzenbach barn? Was that all right with Schwarzenbach? What is the correct spelling of Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft? Of Schweizerische Kreditanstalt? Of Schweizerischer Bankverein? Who wrote the cuckoo-clock speech in Graham Greene’s The Third Man? Did Louis Chevrolet, of Canton de Neuchâtel, really put the map of Switzerland on the grilles of his American cars? Richard called Warren, Michigan.
Richard to me, as he remembers it: “Chevy says no. Chevy denies it.”
Me: “Not everything that Chevy says is right.” The Musée des Suisses à l’Étranger, near Geneva, says that a map is what Chevrolet had in mind, that his emblem “n’est pas sans rappeler, de façon stylisée, le pays d’origine du constructeur.”
In The Third Man, in the immortal Ferris-wheel scene high above postwar Vienna, Orson Welles as Harry Lime implies that he has been selling diluted penicillin to Viennese hospitals but asks his lifelong friend Joseph Cotten if one of those little moving dots down there (one of those human beings) could really matter in the long scheme of things. On the ground, he adds:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
I learned, or Richard learned—we’ve forgotten who learned—that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of The Third Man, only later published the preliminary treatment as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or in the original screenplay. Greene did not write it. Orson Welles thought it up and said it.
After the Swiss Army piece appeared in The New Yorker, I expected a swarm of letters containing nits that only a Swiss could pick. Those New Yorker issues (October 31 and November 7, 1983) were read in Switzerland more widely than I ever would have guessed. Some months later, the book that reprinted them sold well there, too, actually reaching very high on the national list, the fact notwithstanding that the book was in English. Yet as a result of Richard’s fact-checking no word has ever come to me from Switzerland (or, for that matter, from anywhere else) of an error in the English version. The French version was done by two translators for a publisher in Paris. A hundred and forty errors were found in it by the adjutant François Rumpf, who fixed them himself for a second printing.
Richard Sacks moved on from The New Yorker to Reader’s Digest and has retired from the Digest to the lone preoccupations of a novelist. I told him recently how impressed I continue to be that in more than a third of a century no Swiss has sent a corrective letter about that story.
This fact did not check out with Richard. “Oh, but there was one letter,” he said. “Something about a German word, but the reader was wrong.”
* * *
In a 1993 essay on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and the three decades of biographies that had described them, Janet Malcolm mentioned a plaque on the house in London where Plath was living with her two children when she died. The galley proof said:
Olwyn and I finally reached the house on Fitzroy Road where Plath killed herself. I recognized it immediately—it is an obligatory photographic subject of the Plath biographies, and its oval blue ceramic plaque reading “William Butler Yeats, 1865–1939, Irish poet and dramatist, lived here” is a compulsively mentioned (and yet oddly irrelevant) detail.
“Irrelevant” is not a word that travels far in the checking department. The checker called The New Yorker’s London office, a species of exaggeration where three and sometimes four people worked on an upper floor in an old building in Hay Hill, Mayfair. One was a young English cyclist named Matt Seaton, whose title was London Bureau Manager. Now a columnist for The Guardian, Seaton vividly remembers the call about the plaque: “The checker was very specific in requesting that I actually go see it to ascertain that it was indeed blue and ceramic (as opposed to, say, black enamel tin).… I found the errand slightly absurd/amusing, because if you live in London you know there are plaques like this all over, and they’re all basically the same.” Seaton, nevertheless, descended the stairs, got on his bicycle, and went via Portland Place to the outer circle road around Regent’s Park and then up Primrose Hill to 23 Fitzroy to check the Yeats plaque.
In the nineteen-eighties, Michelle Preston checked a piece on the iconography of New York City street signs. She went out and looked at the signs and “just about all of them were wrong.” The signs weren’t wrong; the writer was; and the piece was O.K. because the facts could be professionally corrected. Less easily realigned was a checking proof in which the writer bushwhacked uphill through wild terrain to a certain summit in the Appalachians. The checker went to the mountain and found that she could drive to the top. If a writer writes that Santa Claus went down a chimney wearing a green suit, the color will be challenged, and the checker will try to learn Santa’s waist measurement and the chimney’s interior dimensions. Not only is fiction checked but also cartoon captions and the drawings themselves. When two cars passing an American gas station were each driving on the left side of the road, a checker noticed. The image had been flipped in reproduction.
Humor is checked in all forms, sometimes causing fact-checkers to be cast as obtuse. Joshua Hersh was not fond of this hair shirt. “We understand humor; we are real people,” he asserts. “But we have to ask: ‘Do you mean this humorously? Is that a joke or a mistake?’”
It could be both. In a piece called “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century”—which described the Kennebec River now, then, and earlier—I mentioned that the schooner Hesperus was built in Hallowell, Maine, downstream of Augusta. I said that the Hesperus had been “wrecked multiguously by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” The fact-checker looked into it. Then—in a tone that was a wee bit stern and adversarial, not to mention critical—she said to me: “Longfellow did not wreck the Hesperus!”
I was surprised to be told by Richard Sacks that The New Yorker once checked people’s claims and anecdotes and so forth only with the source, and not—or not as a rule, anyway—with third parties. If someone said he was Jerome Kern’s cousin, he was Jerome Kern’s cousin, tick, tick, tick. The fact-checkers certainly triangulate now. If three sources tell the same story, there is a reasonable probability that under enough additional inquiry it may be thought correct. Today’s fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and then ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond—a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. In the nineteen-sixties, acting within some legislated legalese known as “the mining exception,” Kennecott Copper planned an open pit in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. The Sierra Club said the mine would be visible from the moon. With the additional counsel of planetary scientists, the checking department decided that it would not be.
When the novelist Susan Diamond was a fact-checker at The New Yorker, she called a number in San Francisco one day, and said, “Is this the city water department?”
Voice on phone: “No. This is Acme Air Conditioning.”
Susan: [pause] “Well, perhaps you can help me.”
Overhearing bits of conversation was not a feat. The departmental space at 25 West Forty-third Street, where The New Yorker spent the fifty-six years ending in 1991, was basically one room in which seven desks were tightly packed among piled books and tumbling paper. Easily traversable in five steps, it closely resembled the communications center in George Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge, where twenty officers in a twelve-by-twelve-foot room sat all day long writing letters. Sara remembers a German fact-checker named Helga, who was “spiffy-looking, with long hair.” When Kennedy Fraser wrote a piece on a furniture store, calling its furniture “ersatz,” Helga called the store. “Tell me,” she said. “Do you have any ersatz furniture?” Dusty Mortimer-Maddox, a great checker who held the job for almost as many years as Martin Baron, at one point had a fur-covered telephone. In the room on Forty-third Street, a cruciform emblem said “God Bless Our Home.” After Jewish checkers objected, the cross was put on the department’s reference Bible. When the magazine crossed the street, in 1991, the cross crossed with it. When the magazine moved to Times Square, in 1999, the cross went to the Crossroads of the World. Twice as many checkers now work in three times as much space as the department had at 25 West Forty-third Street. Martin Baron has been through every scene described. He is a fact-checker so learned in the procedures of scholarship that an editor once said to me, “Always remember this about Martin: he is never wrong.” This was not a character judgment. It was just a checkable fact. Martin was checking a story by Ken Auletta on the day that Auletta married the literary agent Amanda “Binky” Urban. Shortly before the ceremony, Martin was in Ken and Binky’s apartment, with galley proofs, checking facts with the groom. And more facts. The bride was on the roof, sunbathing. When she came down, she said, “Martin, I love you, but you have to go now because we have to get married.”
Robert Bingham, gone since 1982, was an author’s editor of the highest rank and the executive editor of the magazine. With Sara Lippincott, he devised a checker test. Sara described it, in part, when she spoke to the aspiring journalists: “What we want are people who … already know that there are nine men in a batting order, what a Republican is, and that the Earth is the third planet from the sun. That being got past, it helps if you speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, read classical Greek, have low blood pressure, love your fellow man, and don’t have to leave town on weekends.” The checker test was a great deal more challenging than the examples Sara gives. It was the sort of thing Republican presidents routinely flunk. Who is the Sultan of Oman? Who is the Emir of Qatar? Who is the King of Bhutan? Who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services? What is acetylsalicylic acid? Last night, where was the Dow? (That last one was Bingham’s way of assessing poets.) Over time, as new candidates came along, the test was updated and modified. When Michelle Preston came along, in the nineteen-eighties, she achieved the checker test’s highest all-time score. Like her husband, Richard Preston, she is now a New Yorker contributor.
* * *
In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to follow up behind me, I like to guess at certain names and numbers early on, while I change and re-change and listen to sentences, preferring to hear some ballpark figure or approximate date than the dissonant clink of journalistic terms: WHAT CITY, $000,000, name TK, number TK, Koming. These are forms of promissory note and a checker is expected to pay it. Koming means what koming sounds like and is sort of kute; TK means “to come.” At least for me, they don’t serve the sound of a drafted sentence as well as flat-out substitutes, pro-tem inventions. In a freight train a mile and a half long, there is a vital tube of air that runs the full length and controls the brakes. In “Coal Train” (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one:
The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.
Before long the checking department was up to its chin in ichthyologists, and I was informed by Josh Hersh that the air sac of an American eel is proportionally a good deal shorter than the air sac in most ordinary fish.
“Who says so?”
“Willy Bemis.”
“Oh.”
Willy Bemis is to the anatomy of fishes what Eldridge Moores is to tectonics. Willy was the central figure in a book of mine that had been published three years before, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker. He had since left the University of Massachusetts to become the director of Shoals Marine Laboratory, the offshore classrooms of Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. I called him in Ithaca to ask what could be done. Ever accommodating, Willy at first tried to rationalize the eel. Maybe its air sac was up to the job after all. Maybe the analogy would work. I said the eel would never make it through the checking department, or, for that matter, past me. We were close to closing, and right offhand Willy was unable to think of a species with a long enough sac. What to do? What else? He called Harvard. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sac of a rope fish.
* * *
On the Merrimack River in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a Budweiser brewery that brewed its first Bud in 1970. In 1839, John and Henry Thoreau passed the site in their homemade skiff on the journey that resulted in Henry’s first book. A run of white water there had been known as Cromwell’s Falls since the seventeenth century, but, Thoreau wrote, “these falls are the Nesenkeag of the Indians,” and he went on to say, “Great Nesenkeag Stream comes in on the right just above.” New Hampshire has a number of place names that end in the letters “k e a g.” The “keag” is pronounced as if the “a” were missing; i.e., “keg.” In 2003, my son-in-law Mark Svenvold and I went through Nesenkeag Falls and Namaskeag Falls and Amoskeag Falls, in an Old Town canoe, tracing the Thoreaus’ upstream journey, and while dragging the canoe up the rapids I found myself wondering how many kegs that Budweiser plant could produce in a day. Back home and writing, I made up a number out of thin air, and it is what Anne Stringfield, checking the facts, saw on her proof:
Just above Cromwell’s Falls on Route 3, very close to but not visible from the river, is a Budweiser brewery that has a production average of thirteen thousand kegs a day.
Never underestimate Anheuser-Busch. The average production turned out to be eighteen thousand kegs a day.
* * *
Another fluvial piece—“Tight-Assed River”—was checked by Josh Hersh in 2004. He found this on his proof:
People say, “The Illinois River? What’s that? Never heard of it. Where does it go?” Actually, there are two Illinois Rivers in America, each, evidently, as well known as the other.
One is in Illinois, another is in Arkansas and Oklahoma; and those two are all you will find in Merriam-Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, which is among the checking department’s more revered references. Josh dove into the Web, and came up with a third—an Illinois River in Oregon, which is not well known even in Oregon.
Actually, there are three Illinois Rivers in America, each, evidently, as well known as the others.
(More recently, before this chapter appeared in The New Yorker, the fact-checking department found yet another Illinois River—in Colorado. If I were to republish this bit of fluvial information forty-six more times, evidently we would find an Illinois River in every state in the Union.)
That feat, on Josh’s part, was just a stretching exercise before he took on, among other things, a cabin boat that was drifting idly on the eponymous Illinois while a vessel longer than an aircraft carrier bore down upon it sounding five short blasts, the universal statement of immediate danger. The vessel, more than eleven hundred feet long and wired rigid, was made up of fifteen barges pushed by a “towboat.” I was in the pilothouse scribbling notes.
At just about the point where the cabin boat would go into our blind spot—the thousand feet of water that we in the pilothouse can’t see—people appear on the cabin boat’s deck, the boat starts up, and in a manner that seems both haughty and defiant moves slowly and slightly aside. We grind on downriver as the boat moves up to pass us port to port, making its way up the thousand feet of barges to draw even with the pilothouse. Two men and two women are in the cabin boat. The nearest woman—seated left rear in the open part of the cockpit—is wearing a black-and-gold two-piece bathing suit. She has the sort of body you go to see in marble. She has golden hair. Quickly, deftly, she reaches with both hands behind her back and unclasps her top. Setting it on her lap, she swivels ninety degrees to face the towboat square. Shoulders back, cheeks high, she holds her pose without retreat. In her ample presentation there is defiance of gravity. There is no angle of repose. She is a siren and these are her songs.
So far so checkable. Something like that can be put—in newyorkerspeak—“on author.” It was my experience, my description, my construction, my erection. No one seemed worried about the color of the bathing suit. I went on, though, to say something close to this:
She is Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” Moore said, “Rounded forms convey an idea of fruitfulness, maturity, probably because the earth, women’s breasts, and most fruits are rounded, and these shapes are important because they have this background in our habits of perception. I think the humanist organic element will always be for me of fundamental importance in sculpture.”
And now we were into deep checking. In 1975, I had telephoned Lynn Fraker, who was a docent for the art museum at Princeton, where Moore’s “Oval with Points” is one of a couple of dozen very large and primarily abstract sculptures that stand outdoors around the campus. I wanted to use them as description exercises in my writing class, which I was about to teach for the first time. The Henry Moore, eleven feet tall, is shaped like a donut, and from each of its interior sides a conical and breastlike bulge extends toward another conical and breastlike bulge, their business ends nearly touching, as if they were on the ceiling of a chapel. It was my opinion that students should be able to do a better description than that. “Donut,” for example, was not a word that should be allowed to rise into the company of Henry Moore; and in every class I have taught since then I have used the notes from that talk with Lynn Fraker. They include the words of Henry Moore, which she recited from memory. And now in 2004 I had no idea where she read them. She had left Princeton decades before, had remarried, and was at that time unreachable.
The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore’s commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library’s main building. After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC’s The Listener. In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fraker had rattled off to me. They needed very little adjustment to be rendered verbatim, as they are above. After which, we were back to “on author”:
She has not moved—this half-naked Maja outnakeding the whole one. Her nipples are a pair of eyes staring the towboat down. For my part, I want to leap off the tow, swim to her, and ask if there is anything I can do to help.
* * *
Perhaps I am giving the fact-checkers too much credit. After all, I do what they do before they do. I don’t leave a mountain of work to them, and this is especially true if The New Yorker has rejected the piece and I am forging ahead to include it in a book, as happened in 2002, when the magazine turned a cold eye—for some inexplicable reason—on twelve thousand words about the American history of a fish. So I checked the virginal parts of the book myself, risking analogy with the lawyer who defends himself and has a fool for a client. The task took me three months—trying to retrace the facts in the manuscript by as many alternate routes as I could think of, as fact-checkers routinely do. There were a couple of passages that slowed things down almost to a halt, when, for one reason or another, it took eons on the Internet and more time in libraries to determine what to do or not to do.
Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to “buy for me a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines.…”
The problem was not with the rod or the real but with William Penn’s offspring. Should there be commas around Margaret or no commas around Margaret? The presence or absence of commas would, in effect, say whether Penn had one daughter or more than one. The commas—there or missing there—were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the color of Santa’s suit. Margaret, one of Penn’s several daughters, went into the book without commas. Moving on, I tried to check this one:
On Wednesday, August 15, 1716, near Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cotton Mather fell out of a canoe while fishing on Spy Pond. After emerging soaked, perplexed, fishless, he said, “My God, help me to understand the meaning of it!” Before long, he was chastising his fellow clerics for wasting God’s time in recreational fishing. Not a lot of warmth there. Better to turn to the clergyman Fluviatulis Piscator, known to his family as Joseph Seccombe, who was twenty-one years old when Cotton Mather died. Beside the Merrimack River, in 1739, Piscator delivered a sermon that was later published as “A Discourse utter’d in Part at Ammauskeeg-Falls, in the Fishing Season.” There are nine copies in existence. One was sold at auction in 1986 for fourteen thousand dollars. The one I saw was at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Inserted in it was a book dealer’s description that said, “First American book on angling; first American publication on sports of field and stream. Seccombe’s defense of fishing is remarkable for coming so early, in a time when fishing for fun needed defending.”
There was, in all of that, one part of one sentence that proved, in 2002, exceptionally hard to check. It could easily have been rewritten in a different way, but I stubbornly wished to check it. To wit:
Joseph Seccombe, who was twenty-one years old when Cotton Mather died.
In order to tick those exact and unmodified words, you would need to know not only the year in which Mather died and the year in which Seccombe was born but also the month and day for each. When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccombe was either twenty-one or twenty-two. Which? The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston, New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe’s birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert “in his early twenties” when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, “June 14, 1706.”