Ghostwriters are a hazard to historians

Ghostwriters can confuse historians. Acquaintance Rick Perlstein quotes from James Reston, Jr.'s The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally:

So comprehensive was the Johnson letter mill that it even included a weekly letter from Johnson to his mother Rebekah. These letters have become of particular interest Johnson biographers, especially those with a psychological bent…. “There have been a lot of ridiculous ideas about Lyndon Johnson’s mother…about her influence, about this need to please her,” [Johnson aide] Gene Latimer has said. "[Historian] Doris Kearns, for example, she must be absolutely out of her mind! Kearns talks a lot about that relationship and his letters to her. Well, what Kearns didn't know was that he never had time to write his mother from Washington. That was my job. I was assigned every week to write a two-page letter to his mamma…you know, a family letter like I’d write to my own mother. It was typewritten. He’d sign it and away it would go."