I find it interesting that no matter how many embellished memoirs, hoaxes, etc. are exposed and no matter how many times they get taken in, the media still buy into the most absurd nonsense.
Here, William F. Buckley has written a memoir in which he seems to have conflated Ronald Reagan with the noted Marvel comics chaacter Spiderman. SuperRon saves the day by crashing through windows without scratching his skin or his clothes.
This incident went unremarked upon for more than 40 years before suddenly being recollected resurrected by Buckley on his deathbed.
A Senior Editor from the Atlantic and various editors from the NYT Book Review publish a "review" of Buckley's memoir without making any note that--or evincing even the slightest awareness that--the work is, aapparently, largely fictional.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Sunday Book Review
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: January 16, 2009
On the night that William F. Buckley met Ronald Reagan, the future president of the United States put his elbow through a plate-glass window. The year was 1961, and the two men were in Beverly Hills, where Buckley, perhaps the most famous conservative in America at the tender age of 35, was giving an address at a school auditorium. Reagan, a former Hollywood leading man dabbling in political activism - the Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin of his day - had been asked to do the introductions.
But the microphone was dead, the technician was nowhere to be found and the control room was locked. As the crowd began to grumble, Reagan coolly opened one of the auditorium windows, stepped onto a ledge two stories above the street and inched his way around to the control room. He smashed his elbow through the glass and clambered in through the broken window. "In a minute there was light in the upstairs room," Buckley later wrote, "and then we could hear the crackling of the newly animated microphone."
This anecdote kicks off The Reagan I Knew (Basic Books, $25), a slight and padded reminiscence published posthumously this past autumn, nine months after Buckley's death. As a personal portrait of the 40th president, the narrative is sketchy at best: the Reagan whom Buckley knew turns out to be the Reagan most of his friends and allies knew - amiable, smooth and ultimately opaque.
What the book does offer, though, is an expansion on the theme lurking in that opening vignette, in which the man of ideas came face to face with the man of action, and the intellectual famous for describing the world met the future president eager to change it. At its most interesting, "The Reagan I Knew" provides a case study on the relationship between intellectuals and power, and specifically on the marriage between right-wing thinkers and populist politicians that has defined the modern right from the Goldwater era to our own.