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Hillary Clinton and embroidered memories

— Photo: AP

In this Monday March 25, 1996 file picture, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton kisses Emina Bicakcic, 8, from Sarajevo who dedicated a poem to her shortly after her arrival at the Tuzla Air Base.

The most psychologically intriguing possibility regarding Hillary Clinton’s recollection of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia is that, for her, the memory is entirely accurate. Regardless of what the conditions on the ground objectively were, she was frightened about going there and felt apprehensive throughout a tour which she hoped/feared might have to be abandoned because of a violent incursion. Perhaps she feared being taken out by a sniper so intently that she visualised ducking and running if shots were heard.

Such mental projections can become inseparable from memories. For example, survivors of plane and train crashes in which others died will often tend to put themselves closer to death than any committee of inquiry would acknowledge. This is an entirely logical and honourable response to the adrenaline-shock of a near-miss.

An acquaintance of the disgraced British politician and best selling author Jeffrey Archer once argued that he was not a liar in the conventional sense: when he claimed to have been at one school called Wellington rather than another, or switched restaurant dates to create an alibi, the adjusted anecdote became a flashback in his mind. This phenomenon is common in novelists, even those who are never jailed for perjury. If Ms Clinton had embroidered the experience in a novel, she might have been shortlisted for the Orange prize. Memory enhancement only becomes problematic if you publish an autobiography or run for public office.

Ms Clinton’s difficulty is that she cannot give the sensible and human explanation — it really felt to me, at the time, that there were snipers on every roof-top — because the whole point of the story was to present her as someone who would be cool under fire.

But her misspeaking is as revealing as any speech she has made. History suggests politicians are most likely to say silly things in an area of sensitivity. Nervous of being considered a toff, north London lawyer Tony Blair was forced to reach for more stories of boyhood support for Newcastle United soccer club than he strictly had in the cupboard, and so ended up fantasising about peaks in Newcastle United history he could not have seen.

Ronald Reagan, who presented himself as a latter-day Eisenhower with more showbiz charisma, was embarrassed at lacking the war-hero backstory that the character demanded, and so his mind (possibly already slipping towards Alzheimer’s) conveniently confused his movies with his memories.

Reagan’s successor, the first President Bush, was then ridiculed for claiming that, while waiting to be rescued after ditching his plane during the second World War, he had reflected on the separation of church and state and the importance of prayer in schools. It seems improbable that a 20-year-old flier really boiled with such issues at this time, but the emergency needlework resulted from the desperate search for a life-experience that might endear him to the religious right of his party. It shows the pathetic accommodations required of political candidates that, in this case, a genuine memory of military heroism had become electorally useless and so had to be turned into a false recollection of Christian zeal. Hillary Clinton’s misspeaking was also caused by defensive invention.

Her dilemma is that the only acceptable attack on Barack Obama is the allegation of lacking experience in foreign policy, and so she must draw a contrast. But her background in international affairs consists only of having been married to a man who ran America for eight years. Note that the anecdote that exploded in her face came not from her period as Senator Clinton but from her spell as Ms Clinton.

So, in misspeaking, she inadvertently spoke the truth: she is someone pretending to have far more governmental experience than she has. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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