The big story that has come both their ways through different avenues, is about a government program called 'Resonance,' a highly secret, approved by the Prime Minister, eavesdropping technology designed to identify terrorist activity, the "chatter" we always hear about.
The Herald can do a story on it. A whistleblower from MI5 has come forward and is willing to go on record and blow the whole thing wide open. The Post, while not having the benefit of the whistleblower talking to them, wants to keep a lid on the program because George Emmerson, the media titan who controls vast media holdings in the U.K. wants to oblige the PM, who he is on speed dial with.
There is of course a meeting of the senior people at The Herald, where "go", "no-go" opinions are expressed. The story goes to print. This of course is television, but it could be about any newspaper's decision to print The Pentagon Papers, The Panama Papers, WikiLeaks, anything. Decision are made.
Every day decisions are made what to put on the front page; where to put certain stories; run, don't run.
And so, this is what Mr. Grimes is known for, as an editor at The Sunday Times of London who in 1983 became convinced that the Hitler Diaries they had in front of them were genuine—some 60 volumes— and they were going to print them for the world to examine.
Mr. Grimes had help in coming to that decision to print. Hugh Trevor-Roper, a former member of British Intelligence during the war, and someone who in 1947 wrote a highly regarded book on Hitler's last days in his bunker, "The Last Days of Hitler," examined the diaries and came to the opinion they were genuine.
Along the way, however, Mr. Roper started to have second thoughts that perhaps these handwritten diary entries were not genuine. What gave Mr. Roper that idea is not disclosed in Mr. Grimes's obit, but Mr. Roper told someone at a sister paper of The Sunday Times of London that he now felt the diary was a hoax.
You wouldn't know these guys were in the communication business, because Chicken Little talked to Henny Penny, but Henny Penny didn't talk to Ducky Lucky and Mr. Grimes went ahead and published. Rupert Murdoch, who owned the papers agreed. Uh-oh.
Turns out the diaries were a forgery perpetrated by a prolific German forger Konrad Kujau. He sold the diaries onto Der Stern, a German magazine, and Der Stern offered the rights to The Sunday Times of London The media had been had. It was Howard Hughes's autobiography all over again, a 1976 hoax that nearly fooled McGraw-Hill Publishing that Clifford Irving had found Mr. Hughes's autobiography.
When Mr. Roper learned more about the chain of custody he apparently got a funny felling. As Mr. Giles and his senior staff were patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves, no doubt with very good Scotch, Mr. Giles took a phone call from Mr. Roper.
The phone call is re-creted by Katherine Q. Seelye in the NYT obit. You can only think of an early Bob Newhart telephone bit. To those who were there in the room, it went like this.
"Well naturally Hugh, one has doubts. There are no certainties in this life But those doubts aren't strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that?
"Oh, I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn."
Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling, and fall it did. Since they had closed The Tower of London to all but tourists, the British were no longer lopping off heads. But they were lopping off employment, and Mr. Giles was out after a long and distinguished career, now known for one disaster that would provide the lede to his obituary, even if he did live to be 100.
I remember a quote from David O. Selznick who claimed that when he died the credit he earned for being the producer of the movie 'Gone With the Wind' would accompany his name. It did. Do something big, and it follows you.
When the forgery was acknowledged, things in the diary became suspicious. Hitler's arm had been injured in the attempted assassination bombing, thus his handwriting from that point on should have shown a deterioration. It didn't.
There were references to his inner circle that didn't jibe with what was known about what Hitler would say. I would love to know if the German forger wrote that Hitler called someone a dummkopf.
But most telling about the diaries was that the paper, ink and bindings being more contemporary than something that was supposedly written in the 1940s.
Chalk that last investigative oversight up to the lack of C,S.I. shows on television in the 1980s. No one was thinking of forensic testing.
There is always a great contrast between American and British obituary writing. When Mr. Roper passed away in 2003 The Guardian gave him an effusive obituary that mentioned the Hitler diary hoax in the heading, but didn't really get around to writing about it until well into the text. And then they put a fell-sorry-for-him spin on it.
For Mr. Giles's obit, The Guardian concentrates heavily from the get-go on the hoax and Mr. Giles's gullibility, along with Rupert Murdoch's. Rupert, who is still very much with us at 88 (his mother lived to be over 103) and now married to Mick Jagger's ex, Jerry Hall, only admitted in 2012 his mistake in publishing the diaries. Apparently, he never liked Mr. Giles, despite appointing him the editor, so he had no problem in letting him carry the blame for decades. What a guy.
The obits for the forger, Konrad Kujau are very direct. He passed away on 2000 at 63. The NYT obit gets it right out there; The Guardian gets it right out there but provides oodles of more information as to how the diaries came to be in existence, and the role a Gerd Heidemann played in duping Der Stern. It is rich reading, and even, in an Elvis-like speculation, allows for the possibility that Konrad is not really dead.
The newscaster Dan Rather became convinced several years ago he had the smoking document that the then current president, George W. Bush had avoided the draft. There were people who doubted the authenticity of the document, and it was pointed out that such a document couldn't have been typed when it was claimed because there was no way to make a subscripted ordinal designation, e.g. 26th, with the "th" raised like an exponent. There was no word processing software then that could do it at the time it was purported to have created. However Dan Rather and his producer kept at it, and were eventually fired.
The urge to believe something is true is a powerful emotion. It drives our daily news. And sometimes it is true. The only question is when?
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