2) The Monroe Documents

JFK theories may not always end with somebody getting shot from a window, but they usually involve somebody getting egg on his face. Three weeks ago the victim was Seymour Hersh, a distinguished reporter who has in the past investigated the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007, documented the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons program, and most famously, exposed the 1968 My Lai massacre - a story for which he received the Pulitzer prize. But Hersh fell for a set of nicely scuffed and letterheaded documents that appeared to show Marilyn Monroe had blackmailed John F Kennedy to the tune of $600,000.

Neutral parties are trying to figure out why such a decorated journalist would get fooled by one more hokey Kennedy prank. Washington insider-types, on the other hand, have been merciless in their attacks on the very abrasive and not-well-liked Hersh. Meanwhile, Alexander Cockburn and many other journalists have come to Hersh's defense (actually, gadfly Cockburn used the case as a lauching point for a long overdue attack on "forensics experts").

The best defense of Hersh may be that there's nothing wrong with a reporter's willing suspension of disbelief (he was in the process of verifying the papers' authenticity when the hoax story broke). The instinct that led him briefly to accept the Marilyn Papers was the same one that led him to follow up on a seemingly improbable piece of Army scuttlebutt about a covered-up massacre. Too many reporters already make a point of disbelieving everything - and produce mountains of look-at-this-bogus-press-release reportage to back it up. Bully for Hersh and his open mind.

Conclusion:
1) Even great reporters like official-looking documents.
2) People will get you if you're not nice to them.

3) The Hitler Diaries

Everybody ended up looking silly over the infamous Hitler Diaries hoax. German wag and handwriting mimic Konrad Kujau's fake journals in 1983 made saps of Newsweek, the Times of London, and the venerable German magazine Stern. Newsweek took some serious lumps for its statement that the diaries' authenticity "almost doesn't matter."

I'm on Newsweek's side on this one. Even before the diaries came out, every possible grain of Hitlerism sand had already been sifted. Kujau's other forgeries included World War I-era Hitler poetry, some very convincing samples of hand-drawn Fuhrerkunst, and even Weiland and the Blacksmith, Hitler's maiden effort as a librettist. And that's just the fake stuff! In the past few years we've seen the following versions of the Reich's twelve year history:

The Allies didn't do enough to save the Jews; the Allies did all they could, but saving the Jews was impossible.

The Germans were hoodwinked by Hitler's brilliantly crafted propaganda machine; the Germans are genocidal by nature and Hitler was just a catalyst.

Switzerland made many compromises to protect its neutrality amid the hardships of war; Switzerland tacitly supported Germany and gorged itself on the spoils of war.

Anything from either a real diary or a fake one would easily have been settled into some pre-existing version of events.

The defining act in the Hitler Diaries story was David Irving's decision to change his mind about the diaries' authenticity. As the first person to declare them a fraud, the British journalist and sometime historian fought long and hard against the diaries, only to change his mind and declare them genuine just days before they were definitively shown to be fake. Hard cheese on him! Interestingly, Irving last year surfaced again, claiming to have located Adolf Eichmann's diary - which purports to prove that Hitler knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. But if Eichmann's diary had shown that the whole thing was the Austrian Paperhanger's idea, that would be fine too. In the Borgesian logic of Hitlerland, everything is true, and so is its negation.

Conclusion:
Hitler really gets people going.

5) The Ossian Poems, and others

James Macpherson's Ossian poems appeared in the 1760s, ostensibly as a translation of the poetry of a medieval Celtic bard. Though the poems were immediately suspected of being forgeries, Macpherson refused to budge, protesting their authenticity for decades, and at one point threatening to beat up Samuel Johnson, who said the poems were no good, in addition to not being medieval.

These sorts of forgeries were very much a done thing in the pre-Romantic era. Thomas Chatterton, the marvelous boy, invented a fanciful family history for himself, then went on to forge his great poems in the name of the medieval monk Thomas Rowley. But instead of continuing Macpherson's Salingeresque rambunctiousness, Chatterton killed himself at the age of 17.

In both cases, time has embalmed the questions about authenticity. Just as the Book of Mormon sounds less like a cheap imitation of the King James Bible as we get further away from both, the distinction between a medieval work and an Enlightenment forgery of a medieval work have become indistinct in our fading eyesight. More important, both Chatterton's pranks and the Ossian poems became cornerstones of the Romantic movement in literature. The Ossian poems were set to music by Schubert, Linley and others, and Chatterton became the pre-Rimbaud symbol of youthful poetic genius.

Conclusion:
Nobody cares whether a poem's true or not.

Overall conclusion:
1) People who believe hoaxes are more interesting than people who pull them.
2) Don't believe everything.
3) Believe everything.