Several of you have written me to suggest that maybe the review of Al Gore's book was written from an early, uncorrected proof that didn't include the endnotes. That's possible, though if that were the case and I were the Washington Post, I think my correction would have noted that. It's a more reasonable — though not wholly forgiveable — explanation of why the reviewer got things so wrong. There's a big difference between the reviewer's assertion as to why there were no footnotes (because Gore couldn't back up his claimed facts with sourcing) and there being no footnotes because the publisher left them out of a review copy. If indeed, that's what happened.
In fairness to the reviewer, there are many Lincoln scholars who believe that the purported Lincoln quote that Gore cited is spurious, and it may well be. I guess my real problem here is something that I think I've alluded to in the past. It's the old "gotcha" game where we don't like what someone is saying so we seize upon one factual error and do the old "Well, if we can't believe him about this…" routine to try and invalidate all the other things he says.
It's a favored trick of crooked lawyers when they know a witness is burying their client. During his Watergate testimony, John W. Dean got hundreds of dates, names, places, etc. so provably correct that the Republicans on the committee were frantic to find some way to impeach his testimony. Then he confused the name of one Washington hotel where he'd had a breakfast meeting with another Washington hotel…and it was suddenly proof (to his detractors, at least) that his word could not be trusted on anything. In that case, it didn't work. Dean even had a logical explanation for why he'd confused the names. But they sure tried.
Everyone gets the occasional fact wrong. There are some folks and publications who get them wrong so often — or so inexplicably — that it's right and proper to write them off as generally unreliable. But it's dishonest to use one or two errors to impugn someone that way, especially when you're making your own mistakes.