Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [33]
Chapter 3
Memory, the Self-justifying Historian
What we … refer to confidently as memory … is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.
—memoirist and editor William Maxwell
MANY YEARS AGO, DURING the Jimmy Carter administration, Gore Vidal was on the Today show being interviewed by Tom Brokaw, the host. According to Vidal, Brokaw started by saying, “You’ve written a lot about bisexuality…” but Vidal cut him off, saying, “Tom, let me tell you about these morning shows. It’s too early to talk about sex. Nobody wants to hear about it at this hour, or if they do, they are doing it. Don’t bring it up.” “Yeah, uh, but Gore, uh, you have written a lot about bisex…” Vidal interrupted, saying that his new book had nothing to do with bisexuality and he’d rather talk about politics. Brokaw tried once more, and Vidal again declined, saying, “Now let’s talk about Carter…. What is he doing with these Brazilian dictators pretending they are freedom-loving, democratic leaders?” And so the conversation turned to Carter for the rest of the interview. Several years later, when Brokaw had become anchor of the Nightly News, Time did a feature on him, asking him about any especially difficult interviews he had conducted. Brokaw singled out the conversation with Gore Vidal: “I wanted to talk politics,” Brokaw recalled, “and he wanted to talk about bisexuality.”
It was a “total reversal,” Vidal said, “to make me the villain of the story.”1
Was it Tom Brokaw’s intention to turn Gore Vidal into the villain of the story? Was Brokaw lying, as Vidal implied? That is unlikely. After all, Brokaw chose the story to tell the Time reporter; he could have selected any difficult interview in his long career to talk about, rather than one that required him to embellish or lie; indeed, for all he knew, the reporter would check the original transcript. Brokaw made the reversal of who-said-what unconsciously, not to make Vidal look bad, but to make himself look good. As the new anchor of the Nightly News, it would have been unseemly for him to have been asking questions about bisexuality; better to believe (and remember) that he had always chosen the intellectual high road of politics.
When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event, observers usually assume that one of them is lying. Of course, some people do invent or embellish stories to manipulate or deceive their audiences, as James Frey notably did with his bestseller A Million Little Pieces. But most of us, most of the time, are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving. We aren’t lying; we are self-justifying. All of us, as we tell our stories, add details and omit inconvenient facts; we give the tale a small, self-enhancing spin; that spin goes over so well that the next time we add a slightly more dramatic embellishment; we justify that little white lie as making the story better and clearer—until what we remember may not have happened that way, or even may not have happened at all.
In this way, memory becomes our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian. Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald once described the self as being ruled by a “totalitarian ego” that ruthlessly destroys information it doesn’t want to hear and, like all fascist leaders, rewrites history from the standpoint of the victor.2 But whereas a totalitarian ruler rewrites history to put one over on future generations, the totalitarian ego rewrites history to put one over on itself. History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or what we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders.
At the simplest level, memory smoothes