Reply #9: Yeah ...

[RoyGBiv]

Things like that should cause a person to pause.

This seems to be an extension of an old-school license that many historians once used where they would reconstruct a private conversation based on what others said they were told was said or what was later reported in memoirs, sometimes written decades after the fact. (Hell, I'd have trouble quoting myself from yesterday.) This has caused massive problems with interpreting various historical events, especially controversial ones.

Off the main topic, but you see this a lot with Civil War histories and books about the Old West. An entire conversation, and by extension many times value judgments, are derived from a single sentence one person later said another said at a given moment. I've had legendary arguments with a certain subset of Civil War "fans" regarding the planning for a certain battle. We have a dozen or so quotes, all of them either from published memoirs, other post-war remembrances, and third-hand accounts from people we know weren't even present for the discussion. And this concerned a planning session that took place over several hours. Out of these some will argue they know with precision what was intended when the truth is we can barely even guess.