I wrote to the National Press Club in an effort to obtain a copy of Meir’s 1957 speech. The response I received was that Meir, who at the time was Israel’s foreign minister, did not speak there in 1957. She had, however, addressed a club luncheon on December 11, 1956. Well, authors do make mistakes, and maybe Syrkin got the year wrong. Besides, December 1956 is pretty close to 1957.

The National Press Club did not have a copy of Meir’s 1956 speech, so I searched far and wide for one. None of the repositories in the U.S. that I contacted had a copy, nor did they have any record of Meir’s ever having made the statement I was looking for. These archives included the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library (where many of Meir’s papers are located); the Jewish Women’s Archive in Brookline, Mass.; the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library; and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, which houses Syrkin’s papers.

It turned out the Recorded Sound Research Center of the Library of Congress had a recording of Meir’s National Press Club speech, but before I could get to Washington to listen to it, I obtained a transcript of the speech from the Israel State Archives.

Breathlessly I read it—but, alas, Meir’s quote was not there.

With no primary source found, a previously unfathomable question came to mind: Did Golda Meir really say it?

As the author of numerous books, I’ve learned in my research that it is not unusual for myths, false statements, half-truths, quasi-truths, exaggerations, distortions, and all sorts of other apocrypha to creep into the public mind. They enter it through the main arteries of communication and its back alleyways, and all too often are accepted without question by the public at large.

For example, schoolchildren of past generations were taught that when George Washington’s father asked if he’d chopped down a cherry tree, young George responded, “I cannot tell a lie.” The story was actually a fabrication that had its roots in Mason Locke Weems’s 1800 book “The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington.”