GATEKEEPING FUNCTIONS ANDnPUBLISHING TRUTHS by Irving Louis HorowitznWhen a forgery is uncovered or a plagiarized volumenappears or a fake letter is adduced to support anmediocre manuscript, cries are sent forth that there is anneed for tighter security by publishers. This is often couplednwith a complaint that authors should scrutinize themselvesnmore carefully. The burden of my remarks is quite thenreverse: that the review process works surprisingly well andnthat authors have enough mechanisms of censorship atnwork to inhibit all but the most brazen few from “crossingnthe lines” of sound judgment and good taste alike. On rarenoccasions, serious transgressions may not be captured untilnafter publication, but one of the chief functions of making anwork public is exactly to separate sense from nonsense.nMaintaining standards of truth in scholarly communicationnis an important goal, but it is necessarily a sharednobligation. In the main, the amount of intentional deceptionnthat goes undiscovered is small. For example, fournrelatively famous, popular books have received carefulnscholarly attention: Alex Haley’s Roots, H.R. Haldeman’snThe Ends of Power, David Rorvik’s In His Image: ThenCloning of a Man, and Timothy J. Cooney’s Telling RightnFrom Wrong. Each has received different sorts of criticismnregarding standards of truth. Apart from the introductorynessay. Roofs was not billed as nonfietion but as a piece ofnimaginative reconstruction which provided a collectivenvision of the slave roots of American blacks. It was criticizednas inaccurate by those who took it as a literal tracing of ansingle family tree, but the transgression was quite properlynseen as minor and modest. H.R. Haldeman’s The Ends ofnPower may be a more revealing statement than many of thenfiction and nonfietion potboilers that followed Watergate.nIn part, the book aroused curiosity since Haldeman, althoughnformer President Nixon’s closest aide, had previouslynrefused to “cash in” by discussing Watergate in public.nOne can accuse Haldeman of a stubborn inability, evennnow, to grasp the magnitude of the Watergate affair, but notneven his most severe critics have labeled him a liar on thenpresentation of larger issues. Certainly his version is asncredible as a host of others which came before and after.nThe Rorvik volume is more problematic and moreninteresting, not so much because the author claimed tonhave evidence that a man has been cloned, but because thenpromotional copy asserts that the publisher is an adequatenjudge of the veracity of these scientific claims. ‘ SincenLippineott is a major publisher of medical texts, its tradendivision is clearly suggesting that they consulted in-housenexperts on the scholarly side. This may account for thendisturbance felt by the scientific community, which wasnnot, apparentiy, consulted at all. Even the Clifford Irvingnbiography on the late Howard Hughes might have passednmuster as imaginative biography—the problem here wasnfraud in labeling. The author sought a large advance, andnthe publisher sought big profits by claiming in its advancenpublicity that the book was autobiographical rather thannbiographical. But as the Rorvik case indicates, this seems tonhave been more an example of advertising exaggerationnthan publisher negligence.nThe case of Cooney’s Telling Right From Wrong providesnanother sort of wrinkle in the truth-telling paradox. Thenauthor believed, incorrectiy as it turned out, that his booknhad no chance of being published by a major publishernwithout a supporting letter from a major academic figure.nWhen the faked letter was discovered, the original publisherndeclined publication; but another enterprising press pickednup the option and, in this case, the plates. Since the qualitynof the book is not under consideration, but only thenauthenticity of a supporting document, the issue camendown to whether an author-as-faker is any worse than annauthor-as-murderer. According to Random House, thenbook would have been materially affected by the author’snprepublication actions. According to the author and hisnIrving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Professor ofnSociology and Political Science at Rutgers University andneditor in chief of Transaction/Society. This essay is anchapter from his hook Communicating Ideas (OxfordnUniversity Press).nnnAPRIL 1987119n