Misremembering Our Lives

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal looked like a shoo-in to take Chris Dodd’s place in the United States Senate until Ray Hernandez of the New York Times reported this week that the Attorney General had frequently “misrepresented” his military service in campaign speeches. Blumenthal served in the Marine Reserve – after receiving multiple military deferments – and never saw duty in Vietnam. But on a number of occasions, especially when addressing veterans groups, the Attorney General had presented himself as a Vietnam vet.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal told a gathering of veterans and senior citizens in Norwalk in March of 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

It’s not clear that Blumenthal’s fibs about his service record will be fatal to his candidacy – he’s a widely respected Democrat in this Blue state and has an impressive record as Attorney General. But it’s still surprising that a man of Blumenthal’s stature and integrity would lie about his past in order to win some votes.

Or is that what happened?

As Michael Barbaro and David Halbfinger reported in a follow-up story in the Times, Blumenthal’s misrepresentations of his military service grew over time. Former Connecticut Congressman Chris Shays noticed the change during years of listening to Blumenthal’s speeches. “He just kept adding to the story, the more he told it,” Shays told the Times.

Brian McAllister Linn, a professor from Texas A&M who specializes in military history, told the reporters, “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon of exaggerating military service by people who feel nostalgic because they missed their war.”

But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about the way our memories remodel our life histories.

I thought about this recently when I was researching a column about my experiences during the Gulf War (see “Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part III” on February 26). I remembered a great story about General Schwarzkopf that I wanted to tell to illustrate his exceptional skills as a communications strategist. It involved a question I’d asked at a press conference and his clever answer. I’d told the story a hundred times, but I looked up clips of the news conference to confirm the quote. It turned out that I had the quote right, but I had “misremembered” the question that had provoked the General’s reply. It didn’t alter the point of the story at all, but I was stunned by the fact that I had so clearly remembered something that wasn’t in fact, a fact. And I think this happens to all of us a lot more often than we realize.

Terry Gross, the brilliant host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, interviewed the British comedian Russell Brand about a year ago and they talked about how Brand had landed his breakout role as Aldous Snow in the 2008 movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Gross played a clip from a previous interview she’d done with the movie’s writer, Jason Segel, who described how Brand had arrived for his audition completely unprepared.

As Segel described it, Brand walked onstage and said, “You’ll have to forgive me, mate, I’ve only had a chance to take a cursory look at your script. Perhaps you could tell me what you require?”

Brand said that the first time he heard Segel tell that story, he told him, “I would never have said that! That’s really, really rude and I would never say that. I’m an Englishman. I’m a gentleman. It’s unforgivable, and I would never, ever say that.”

But, as Brand told Terry Gross, “Of course, it was all on film – it’s an audition – and I DID say that! I can’t believe it!”

“Makes you wonder about the rest of your life,” Gross commented, “what you think you’re doing... what you’re really doing…”

I liked Brand’s reply. “I’m an unreliable witness of my own existence,” he said, “so perhaps my autobiography should be dramatically re-edited by people who were actually there.”

Dick Blumenthal probably feels the same. We live in the Google/Facebook/You Tube age, and so many of our “misrememberings,” like Brand’s audition, end up on the electronic record, for all to read and see and hear.

I’m not trying to give Blumenthal a pass, just like I wasn’t willing to give Hillary Clinton a pass when she misremembered coming under sniper fire at that Bosnian airport in 1996, or the many professional athletes who have misremembered their use of steroids, or Richard Nixon’s many misrememberings of his role in the Watergate cover-up. Sometimes it is just a matter of telling a lie to win some votes or avoid responsibility for past transgressions. But to some degree, I think we’re all victims of our imperfect memories. We’re all unreliable witnesses to our own lives. And, like Russell Brand, we sometimes need to have our facts checked by people who were actually there.

Arizona

My father was a flight instructor at Luke Field, west of Phoenix, during the Second World War and in 1943, while he was still a cadet, my mother made the journey cross-country on a Greyhound bus to marry him there. That would have been just another romantic war story but for the fact that my father had grown up with terrible allergies that were almost magically relieved by the pollen-free environment of the Arizona desert. So years after they were married, he persuaded my mother to revisit Arizona to explore the idea of relocating there, and we packed ourselves into our un-air-conditioned 1960 Plymouth Valiant to check it out.

I don’t remember a lot about the trip (except the heat in the backseat of the Valiant), but I do remember the thrill of being in cowboy country. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona – it was an All-American landscape any boy could love. Mesa was our target city, and my mom and sister and I spent a few days enjoying the sights around town while my dad researched his professional opportunities there. Mesa was a small town then, probably no more than 50,000 people, and in the end my father had to agree that his prospects were probably better back home in Allentown. So, to my mother’s relief, we packed up and headed back east.

Mesa is a big city now, with an estimated population of about 450,000 people, and more than a quarter of its residents are Mexican or of Mexican descent. It’s also the home of State Senator Russell K. Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s recently enacted – and hugely controversial – immigration bill. A recent New York Times article reported that Pearce told journalists that he had promoted the bill to “give the police a tool to weed out criminals before they act and help foster a climate of toughness that would discourage more immigrants from coming.” And a climate of toughness is exactly what the bill has delivered.

The new legislation has been blasted by critics for its Gestapo-like approach to the problem of illegal immigration. The idea that police in Arizona are now authorized to demand identification from anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant has outraged civil liberties and human rights activists, and provided fodder for late-night comedians.

Here’s Seth Myers on Saturday Night Live:

“Could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers’? There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ‘Show me your papers.’ It’s their catch-phrase! Every time someone says ‘Show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check.”

But the problem of illegal immigration is real, and though Arizona’s approach is cruel, unfair – and probably unconstitutional – there’s no doubt that a comprehensive, national solution to the challenge of illegal immigration is desperately needed.

What’s also needed is some sense of empathy from those of us who already enjoy the privilege of US citizenship. In 2010, it’s easy to forget that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that it’s the grit, determination, energy and imagination of those immigrants that has made America strong and mighty. Way back when, we all (Native Americans, of course, excepted) came here from somewhere. And we need to remember that the circumstances that drove our ancestors to seek a better life in the United States are still priming the immigration pump today.

I don’t know how I would have felt about the immigration issue if my parents had decided to stay on in Mesa and raise our family there. As the city grew and the percentage of Mexicans – legal and illegal – increased, I hope I would have welcomed the new immigrants to the land of freedom and opportunity. I hope I would have understood the desperate circumstances – the crime, the violence and the poverty – that drove so many of them to risk everything for a better life in the US. And I hope I would have been a tireless defender of their human and civil rights.

But who knows? Life in Mesa might have made me intolerant and hard-hearted. I could have turned out like Russell K. Pearce. Worse, I could have found myself wearing a police uniform, walking a beat and enforcing the law… and asking some poor Mexican on the street to show me his papers.