"In any nonfiction book . . . it is presumed by the reader that the facts have been checked and are accurate, and that the book therefore is to be relied on. In most publishing houses, however, a copy editor simply cannot check everything. . . . A lot of very famous authors are really quite sloppy, and both editor and copy editor simply have to live with it and keep as many obvious errors as possible from slipping through to final copy."

from Who Does What and Why in Book Publishing, by veteran editor-publisher Clarkson N. Potter

"Neither the editor nor the copy editor should be expected to serve as researcher or co-author. You are the authority . . . don't expect your editors to check every fact, as they would in a newsmagazine."

Samuel S. Vaughan of Doubleday, addressing authors in Editors on Editing

"Out there, where folks are reading their papers and cruising their shopping mall book marts, they're scratching their heads. How could the nation's biggest publisher print nearly a million copies of a bare-knuckles attack on a former First Lady without knowing for certain that everything between the covers was true? Isn't Simon and Schuster accountable for the accuracy of the books it publishes?"

-- from an article by Paula Span, part of The Washington Post's coverage of Kitty Kelley's Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography

All the media attention devoted to Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan, published by Simon & Schuster, had some beneficial fallout: a few news organizations examined not only what Kelley wrote, but also how she knew it. It was a rare instance in which journalists examined a book's accuracy on the news pages.

From the first sentence of the biography, Kelley began taking liberties. That sentence reads: "Two entries on Nancy Reagan's birth certificate are accurate -- her sex and her color." Actually, it appears that all the items on the birth certificate are accurate. What Kelley apparently meant is that Nancy Reagan later may have told lies about certain items.

Item after item in Kelley's book has been questioned. A Newsweek team led by Jonathan Alter stated: "Sarah Brady, wife of former Reagan press secretary James Brady, convincingly denies they were excluded from White House social functions to avoid reminding Nancy of the assassination attempt on her husband." Alter and team also noted, "Mike Wallace, an old friend of Nancy's who despises Kelley, says her third-hand story about his encounter with Nancy's foul mouthed mother in Arizona is partially accurate but wrongly dated by about ten years." The article also convincingly questioned a date-rape allegation against Ronald Reagan that Kelley included, uncritically, in her book.

The same week Simon & Schuster shipped Kelley's book it published a Ronald Reagan biography by Washigton Post reporter Lou Cannon. The contrast was stark, Newsweek noted: "No one has to ask whether to believe Cannon when he writes that Reagan preferred watching The Sound of Music to studying his summit briefing books. Kelley's credibility is is much shakier. Good biographies depend on more rigorous standards than quotation marks around the word luncheon to suggest a White House affair with [Frank] Sinatra."

Cannon's biography was praised in part because his book is painstakingly documented and because he has built a reputation for accuracy. That raises the question of where to place Bob Woodward on the spectrum. Woodward is the author or co-author of six important bestsellers -- All the President's Men, The Final Days, The Brethren, Wired, Veil, and The Commanders. Only Wired, a biography of John Belushi, contains end notes. The sourcing on the other book is impossible to determine on most pages unless the reader is an insider at, respectively, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon. Even Kelley's copious but imprecise sourcing on her biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan is better than Woodward's. Woodward, however, has a better reputation for accuracy because (tautology noted) nobody has proved that his books contain inaccuracies. Should his publisher let him play by his own rules? Woodward insists that on-the-record interviews and other specific sourcing would impede his efforts, but other authors -- such as James Bamford writing about the National Security Agency in The Puzzle Palace -- have covered controversial public affairs topics while providing copious end notes.

Controversy over the veracity of Kelley's Nancy Reagan biography should have been no surprise, for two reasons -- Kelley's past performance and the frequent disregard for accuracy in trade book publishing.

Reviewing Kelley's biography of Jackie Onassis twelve years ago in The Nation, Richard Gilman wrote that "almost nothing she claims to be quoting has the slightest ring of authenticity," then went on to provide examples. Published in 1978 by Lyle Stuart, Jackie Oh! contains no footnotes or end notes; the bibliography is superficial. In the acknowledgments, Kelley thanks forty-five sources, but it is usually difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine who told her what.

Kelley's 1986 biography of Frank Sinatra, while more thoroughly documented -- it contained chapter notes, a fuller bibliography, and 857 interviews as tabulated by the author -- prompted questions about accuracy nonetheless. Some of the research was brilliant; she demonstrated more fully than previous authors the crooner's influence at the White House during various administrations, his violent streak, and his links to organized crime figures, for example. Some of her findings, however, were unsubstantiated gossip or came from others' work previously published in newspapers, magazines, or books -- work that may have contained inaccuracies to begin with and that was used by Kelley without question. Because of the imprecise way Kelley constructed her chapter end notes, much of her information cannot be verified by the average reader.

After the Sinatra biography was published, by Bantam, journalist Gerri Hirshey produced a three-part unauthorized profile of Kelley for The Washington Post. Kelley failed to cooperate in any way. The series revealed Kelley's fabrications about her own life and convincingly cast doubt on parts of her Sinatra research.

The sometimes shaky factual foundation of the Sinatra book did not prevent it from becoming one of the biggest-selling biographies in publishing history. So Kelley, despite her less-than-sterling reputation among sundry reviewers, journalists, and publishers, commanded a multimillion dollar contract for the Nancy Reagan book.

PUBLISHING'S DIRTY SECRET

Kelley's most recent bestseller is symptomatic of publishing's dirty secret -- few nonfiction books are checked for accuracy. As a result, inaccuracies abound.

It could be worse, of course. Because many authors posses not only pride, but also research skills and high standards, numerous books that purport to be serious nonfiction are indeed mostly accurate, serving as imperfect but nonetheless indispensable research material.

That said, far too much inaccuracy makes it into print. Almost every edition of The New York Review of Books and the book sections of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times contain reviews that expose factual errors.

Meanwhile, book publishers have little incentive to change their ways. Trade publishing is a for-profit endeavor; spending money for fact-checking would cut into profits. Moreover, few readers pay attention to which publishers are responsible and which are not; for whatever reasons, there is little brand-recognition among consumers of books. Many consumers are aware that the National Enquirer is an unreliable newspaper, but they have no idea which book publishers are the industry's National Enquirer equivalents.

Publishers have plenty of "good" excuses for their failure to check for accuracy besides bottom-line considerations. It is hard to find outside experts to vet manuscripts and, even when the right expert is available, the process is time-consuming. The proper comparison, some publishers contend, is not with newspaper or magazine articles but with columnists, who blend fact and opinion to disseminate a point of view. If publishers brought out only those books they knew beyond question to be completely accurate, the argument goes, many would never reach readers, thus inhibiting the free flow of ideas. Finally, publishers say, truth established beyond a reasonable doubt, truth with a capital T, is unachievable; readers will believe what they want anyway -- if they are skeptical, let them prove error.

CHAPTER AND VERSE: GETTING DOWN TO CASES

There are instances of publishing house editors knowing about inaccuracies but pushing ahead anyway. Brad Miner made a rare public confession to such a sin in National Review six years after the deed:

In 1984, I spent a week locked in an office with David Yallop, editing In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I; this so my then employer, Bantam Books, could publish it as an "instant hardcover". . . . Yallop knew I thought his book proved none of its fantastic claims. . . . He never actually named the murderer, you see, and nervously feigned opacity whenever I pointed it out. The book was published, sold well, and received a lot of attention, most of it (as I'd predicted) negative.

In God's Name lacks source notes and a bibliography. Despite Miner's misgivings, it also lacks any warning to readers. As for Yallop, he explained away his heavy reliance on anonymous sources by raising the specter of murder should their names be revealed. But, Yallop asserted, there was no need to worry about accuracy: "I can assure the reader that all the information, all the details, all the facts have been checked and double-checked to the extent that multiple sources were available. I take the responsiblity for putting the evidence together and for the conclusions reached."

A handful of book industry observers took that assurance with a shovelful of salt. Edwin McDowell, the book beat reporter at The New York Times, commented that Yallop "does not always say which fact came from which source, and therefore some people consider such 'documentation' pointless. Worse yet, it suggests that his shocking conclusions may have come from some perfectly reputable library included in his list, without giving the reader a way to check this information. The Vatican press office last week denounced the book's conclusions as 'absurd fantasies,' adding, 'It is shocking and deplorable that anyone could so much as think let alone publish theories of this kind.'" In the post-Watergate age, however, during which official denials have come to be regarded as automatically suspect, the Vatican's statement may well have added to Yallop's credibility among many readers.

In the same 1984 article, McDowell questioned the credibility of Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, published by Simon & Schuster. After reviewing the evidence against the credibility of the two books, McDowell wondered, "What are the responsibilities of book publishers in a democratic society of maintaining standards of evidence, proof, and disclosure in the books they publish?"

Publishers have occasionally withdrawn books from the market, at least temporarily, when they get caught out. That happened to Poor Little Rich Girl, a biography of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton written by C. David Heymann and published by Random House in 1983.

Like Kitty Kelley, Heymann had written previous biographies that were suspect in some of their specifics. Like Kelley in her Reagan book, Heymann trumpeted his extensive research on Hutton. Like Simon & Schuster, Random House thought it had a bestseller on its list.

Then Random House received a call from a lawyer representing a Beverly Hills physician mentioned in the book as having overmedicated Hutton in 1943. The lawyer presented proof that his client had been only fourteen years old in 1943. Random House executives began to do the kind of checking nobody had insisted upon before publication. That checking led to the book's recall.

Publisher Lyle Stuart bought the discredited manuscript, reworked it, and got it back into stores. Heymann's only quasi-admission of inaccuracy appeared in a disingenous footnote on page 193.

Instead of shunning Heymann, the book world embraced him. Lyle Stuart signed him up for a new biography of Jackie Onassis, just as Stuart had signed Kitty Kelley to write about the same subject the previous decade. In 1989, Heymann's A Woman Named Jackie shot to the top of the bestseller list, despite questions about accuracy.

Probably the most searing indictment came from Miami Herald reporter Mike Wilson, who wrote, in part:

The two-pound, twelve-ounce book bulges with steamy new stories about the Kennedy's. . . . But much in the book is not new. And much, Heymann's sources are saying, is not true. Heymann, whose last book was recalled by Random House because of a serious error, defended A Woman Named Jackie in a 45-minute phone interview with The Miami Herald, saying he had most of the interviews on tape. Then, refusing to answer any more questions, he hung up. Heymann's publicist, Sandra Bodner, said later that the Herald is 'attacking the author's credibility on really peripheral issues.' She said that, unless someone sues him, Heymann will not play his tapes for the Herald or anyone else.

Wilson's investigation of Heymann's book yielded convincing evidence that the author had wrenched a key direct quotation out of context, thereby altering its meaning. Furthermore, Wilson demonstrated that Heymann had borrowed heavily from previous books without adequately crediting their authors.

Several of Wilson's sources questioned whether Heymann had even interviewed some of the people he said he had, including people who died before publication. Heymann insisted the had conducted the interviews, but, he said, he had not taped some of the particular ones at issue. His chapter notes were of little help -- like Kelley's, they looked extensive at first glance, but some turned out to be vague and unverifiable upon closer study.

Neither Heymann nor his publicist nor his publisher produced new evidence to validate the book's accuracy. Yet the book stayed in stores and on library shelves. Signet, an imprint of New American Library which in turn is part of Penguin Books USA, published the book in mass market paperback without disclaimers.

The annals of contemporary trade publishing are filled with similar cases. Among the more notable are:

* Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post by Deborah Davis, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1979. Davis alleged that Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee had collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency ad that Richard Ober, a CIA official, had acted as Deep Throat.

Davis had undeniably turned up some valuable new information about her subject. But some reviewers found the book poorly documented, and the absence of end notes certainly did not help Davis's credibility. After publication, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich received a letter from Bradlee pointing out thirty-nine alleged inaccuracies. Davis conceded some mistakes, while downplaying their significance to the overall theme. Subjects of books complain about inaccuracies all the time, of course such complaints must be treated skeptically -- because of the subjects' self-interest -- and yet seriously. This time, the publisher decided that Bradlee's list contained enough validity to call the whole project into question.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich disavowed the book and shredded the remaining copies. It rose from the ashes eight years later, when National Press Inc. published what was billed as a "second edition." Nowhere did Davis or the publisher reveal what had happened to the first edition.

* The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace by James Mills, published by Doubleday in 1986. This 1,165-page blockbuster received lots of attention, mostly favorable, upon publication. Mills, touted by Doubleday as having "won a reputation as one of America's most respected journalists," had written for Life magazine. His books included fiction and nonfiction.

To a discerning reader, there were immediate warning signs that The Underground Empire might contain elements of fiction. The book lacked footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. Such omissions make factchecking nearly impossible, and thus can be used by authors and publishers to evade responsibility. Those signs, among others, made Jack Miles and David Johnston suspicious. Miles was the book editor at the Los Angeles Times; Johnston was one of the paper's investigative reporters.

Johnston's eventual page-one story said that "forty-three people involved with events described in the book have told the Times that what Mills wrote about those events is untrue. Four people named or identified in the book say that Mills twisted their innocent and normal actions to make it appear that they are criminals or knowingly do business with major drug traffickers. All four said they would have explained their side if Mills had given them a chance."

After listening to those sources and checking the book page by page as thoroughly as he could, Johnston concluded that "government records, court papers, newspaper clippings, and other documents directly contradict numerous . . . facts covering scores of pages throughout the book that are crucial to Mills' stated premise."

Mills and Doubleday defended the book's accuracy, without providing any proof. But, as Johnston wrote, Mills acknowledged "that he made no attempt to interview many people he writes about negatively. He said that because government agents were the sources of most of the allegations of criminal activity, he was under no journalistic obligation to let the suspects and others tell their side of the story."

Johnstone was not the only critic. Law professor Alan Dershowitz, writing in The New York Review of Books, cited example after example showing why he found Mill's work nearly worthless as a guide to reality. The Federal Bureau of Investigation wrote to Doubleday, detailing errors. Doubleday did not respond.

This seemingly indifference by a major publisher to well-documented charges of inaccuracy infuriated Times book editor Miles. In a column, he asked rhetorically, "Aren't there errors in any book? Couldn't a smart and determined reporter find flaws almost anywhere? Does it matter that the credibility of a given book is not total? Yes, there are errors of detail in every book. But no, there are not errors of this magnitude. And no, the smartest, most determined reporter would not get far against a carefully researched book. . . . The Underground Empire . . . has debased the intellectual currency of its publisher. As with disinformation in the political arena, so with this example of public discourse -- Mill's distortions and errors make it harder to take future Doubleday books at face value."

The Los Angeles Times expose had little impact. Dell published The Underground Empire in paperback; reviewers of the paperback edition praised it, perhaps unaware of the Johnston-Miles debunking.

Often when books on the same topic appear more or less simultaneously, they are reviewed together. Inevitably, the conscientious reviewer, feeling compelled to compare and contrast, discovers passages in one book that contradict passages in the other. It happens even when both authors are respected researchers. A recent example involves two generally well-researched accounts of Manuel Noriega's rise and fall in Panama: Our Man in Panama by John Dinges, published by Random House, and Divorcing the Dictator by Frederick Kempe, published by Putnam. Reviewing the books together in The Washington Post, Miami Herald reporter Jeff Leen (whose expertise is based partly on research conducted for Kings of Cocaine, of which he was a co-author) commented:

Although Kempe out-reports Dinges, he's also given to making snap judgments in the face of scant facts. His most vivid scenes are often the products of unnamed sources. Time after time, he makes small errors. He estimates the cost of a cartel cocaine lab in Panama at $ 1 billion -- Dinges' $ 500,000 is much closer to reality. He convicts a cartel boss in Tampa -- it was Jacksonville. He has cartel drug flights overflying Cuba very soon after 1982 - the evidence shows it was five years later. He has DEA agents unaware that the cartel bosses were in Panama in 1984 -- in fact, the DEA was running an informant who was meeting with those bosses personally. . . . In many unintended ways, these books illustrate how fragile our knowledge is of these events. The authors conflict on an amazing number of details, small and large. The disagreements range from the trivial (Noriega's favorite liquor -- Old Crow or John Walker Black Label?) to the significant (Dinges says Noriega's father acknowledged paternity, Kempe says he did not) to the crucial ([source Jose] Blandon's credibility, the cartels' connections to Noriega).

Other cases in point: the multiple books on how Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Picasso, and John Lennon lived and died contradict each other wildly.

CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS

Book publishing is a strange business indeed. Most editors are educated people who presumably depend on books for much of their own knowledge. Yet they do virtually nothing meaningful to promote accurate knowledge for their house's customers.

Why is that? Publishers do not expect authors to be perfect spellers or grammarians; copy editors make hundreds, even thousands of alterations in a typical manuscript. Publishers do not expect authors to be omniscient about libel and privacy; in-house publishing lawyers or outside counsel fire off multiple queries at the manuscript stage. But most publsihers seem willing to assume that authors are somehow pillars of diligence and wisdom when it comes to finding facts, evaluating information, and drawing conclusions. The contractual burden for accuracy is by tradition primarily the author's. Yet authors are frequently unequipped to get everything right -- because of poorly developed research skills, because of time and money pressures, because of laziness.

Some authors would welcome fact-checking assistance from their publishers; a few beg for it. The absence of a safety net is especially scary for authors who also write for magazines at which fact-checking is a tradition. The New Yorker's fact-checking operation is perhaps bestknown to non-journalists, but fact-checkers at numerous other magazines are in the same league. They regularly catch errors. Everybody benefits -- author, magazine publisher, and readers.

Kitty Kelley knows this. Seven years ago, during the controversy over the accuracy of a different biography by a different author, Publishers Weekly quoted Kelley as saying, "I take full responsibility for what I write, but when publishers have vast investments in writers, they should do all they can to help the book. They have an obligation to at least make an effort to fact-check."

Trade publishers do have alternatives to the current situation. They could pay in-house or outside researchers to request documentation from the author, then judge its worthiness. At the very least, they could pay for a spot check, then decide whether a full-scale review is necessary. (Models already exist in university presses, which traditionally send manuscripts to two or more outside readers knowledgeable in the subject area, paying those readers a stipend for their documented opinion.)

Reviewers, for their part, can be doing something, too. If a book lacks end notes, a bibliography, or an index, the reviewer should take the publisher to task. Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets that use book reviews ought to increase their compensation so that reviewers can afford to take the time required to check accuracy.

Theodore Draper is living proof that it can be done. An independent journalist/historian, Draper is an assiduous checker of other authors' facts, convincingly exposing their transgressions in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and Dissent. Draper understand the special status books hold in the minds of readers, in the institutional memory of the nation: "A newspaper can report one thing one day and revise or revoke the report the next day; a book makes a promise of much longer duration and far greater authority. The scale and presentation make a vital difference."

In book publishing houses, accuracy is supposedly everybody's responsibility, but we all know what usually happens when a task is "everybody's responsibility" -- ultimately, it becomes nobody's responsibility. As a result, the saying "You could look it up" doesn't always hold true, since the book you look it up in is not necessarily the final word.

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