An Editor’s Note:
An illustration on Sept. 5 with a front-page article about the role the turmoil of the 1960s played in shaping Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political philosophy showed part of a letter of recommendation that a professor at Wellesley College wrote for her when she applied to Yale Law School.
The letter was dated Oct. 13, 1968, and was written on Wellesley letterhead. Readers pointed out that the letterhead contained a nine-digit ZIP code, which was not used until many years later. The professor says that when the media began asking about Mrs. Clinton in 1992 while Bill Clinton was running for president, he had a copy of the 1968 letter retyped on the letterhead and has been using that copy since that time.
Had The Times noticed the discrepancy, it would not have used the letterhead to illustrate the article; this editors’ note was delayed for research. Link
One Comment
To be clear: the *professor who wrote the letter* had it retyped?
Well, that seems perfectly within his purview to me.
Even putting the original date on it as it’s retyped is certainly acceptable; the date of a letter is part of the provenance of the information in the letter, not the ink particles or the paper.
And clearly, no fraud is intended; even in our zero tolerance world, scienter is still a valid component of badness.
(For more on zero tolerance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Baylink/Zero_tolerance )