Fact-checking is one of my superpowers. I love it. It comes easily to me.

Maybe it’s the sceptic in me. Maybe it’s the sleuth. Maybe it’s the researcher.

Whatever it is, I love a fact.

But I don’t just love facts. I get annoyed by statements that masquerade as facts – whether mistaken, misconstrued, misquoted, or mis-stated.

And, more often than not, I am moved to find the truth.

Even if it takes me down a rabbit hole. Like the following detour I took to find the origin of the saying, 'Trust, but verify.'

доверяй, но проверяй

For those of you who don’t know you’re Russian – sorry, I couldn’t help employing that too-common typo – that heading is ‘doverjáj, no proverjáj,’ written in the Russian alphabet.

For those of you who are Russian but don’t know your proverbs, ‘doverjáj, no proverjáj’ translates to ‘trust, but verify’.

The phrase entered the Western lexicon through Ronald Reagan, who learned the proverb from Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history who met with him regularly between 1984 and 1988 to teach him about the Russian world and its worldview.

In their meeting just before the famous Reykjavik Summit of 1986 – marked as the beginning of the end of the Cold War – Massie told Reagan, “You know the Russians often like to talk in proverbs and there’s one that might be useful. You’re an actor, you can learn it in a minute, ‘Trust, but verify.’”¹

Reagan took that proverb with him to his meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Höfði House – an equal parts quaint, odd, lonely, and haunted house with a fascinating history – on the windswept Reykjavik waterfront. (The place was haunted badly enough for the British Foreign Office to sell it in 1952 back to the Icelandic government, who, apparently, will neither confirm nor deny that the house is haunted.²)

Reagan first quoted the proverb there at his meeting with Gorbachev in Höfði House in 1986. “There is a Russian saying: doveryai no proveryai, trust but verify. How will we know that you'll get rid of your missiles as you say you will?”³

And then he quoted it at subsequent meetings, again and again. To the point that Gorbachev began to get tired of it.

He finally said something. When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed at the White House on 8 December 1987, Reagan said,

‘We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim, doveryai, no proveryai – trust, but verify.'                              'You repeat that at every meeting,’ Gorbachev replied. ‘I like it,’ Reagan said, smiling.⁴

I like it

I like it, too, despite my own ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’ sitting on my shoulder and telling me, ‘You check every fact.’

Here’s an example.

‘A chilly September 1658’

When the writer of work that I am editing makes a statement of fact that raises my eyebrows, no matter how trivial or throwaway the line might be in the context of the writing, I cannot let simply let it go through to the keeper.⁵

I feel a primal need to verify or refute the statement for myself.

Sometimes I will do the research, for free. Even if I don’t have time. For my own satisfaction. 

Not long ago, I was editing an article for Quillette.com when I came across this sentence about malaria: 'It was even endemic in temperate Britain; Oliver Cromwell died of malaria in a chilly September in 1658.'

The word 'chilly' stood out to me for some reason, so I decided to see what I could find about the temperature on the day Cromwell died. It didn’t take me long.

I wrote the following comment:

I suggest that, rather than ‘chilly’, ‘on a wet and windy day in September 1658’ might be more in line with the records that I found. September 3, the date Cromwell died, is right at the end of summer.

This site https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history-1650-to-1699-ad/ suggests that the day on which Oliver Cromwell died was stormy, but it does not characterize it as cold: “A 'wild & stormy night', with chimneys and roofs blown down and many trees uprooted. This was the night that Oliver Cromwell (the 'Lord Protector' of England during the 'Inter-regnum') died.”

Also, p. 393 of the journal article ‘Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659-1973’ https://www.rmets.org/sites/default/files/papers/qj74manley.pdf gives the September monthly mean temperatures from 1659 into the 1660s as 13 degrees C, which is almost at the level of the warmest months of the year, July and August, with means of 15–18 degrees, whereas the truly chilly months (2, 3, 4, 5C) occur in Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb.

It was a rather longer margin comment than my normal three-liners, but I felt it worth the effort to suggest a more accurate description.

A week later, I looked at the published article, and was very happy to see that the author had taken my advice and had even cited the 'Weather in History' webpage in their article.

I cannot remember what the weather was like the day I saw the published article. But I know that he third of September 1658 was a wet and windy day.

And that’s a fact.

1. Nina Porzucki, N. ‘Suzanne Massie taught President Ronald Reagan this important Russian phrase: ‘Trust, but verify’. The World. March 6, 2014. https://theworld.org/stories/2014/03/07/suzanne-massie-taught-president-ronald-reagan-russian-phrase-trust-verify, Accessed 20 June 2024.
2. ‘The Ghost in Höfði House in Reykjavik’. Moon Mausoleum. https://moonmausoleum.com/the-ghost-in-hofdi-house-in-reykjavik/#google_vignette, accessed 20 June 2024.
3. Schultz, G. Chapter 36, ‘What Really Happened at Reykjavik?’ Turmoil & Triumph, quoted by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110620, accessed 20 June 2024.
4. Watson, W.D. (2011). ‘Trust, but Verify: Reagan, Gorbachev, and the INF Treaty’. The Hilltop Review. 5(1); Article available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/hilltopreview/vol5/iss1/5
5. ‘Let it go through to the keeper’ is an idiom from the sport of cricket. When a batter chooses not to strike a ball bowled to them, they will let it pass harmlessly by for the wicketkeeper to catch. The idiom uses that image to describe a person deciding not to pursue a point, to let it slide. To let it go. When it comes to facts that need checking, I can’t let them go.

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