Human Memory and History

[RobertLC]

Human memory is certainly a complex and fascinating topic. Respected studies have shown that our memory is not a linear recording and can quickly become tarnished.

Historian Thomas F. Schwartz, in his article, “Not Even Wrong”: Herndon and His Informants, (Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 35, Issue 2, 2014), dedicates almost three pages to examine issues related to human memory. He writes, “In short, memory as expressed in individual recollections is much more complicated than historians have heretofore imagined. It is not, by itself, sufficient as a reliable source for documenting the past.” Tim Good also raises concern about human memory on page vii in the preface of his book, We Saw Lincoln Shot, One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts.

An account that is worth noting has nothing to do with Lincoln, but is one for those of us more seasoned citizens who lived through and were old enough to pay attention to the Watergate scandal. John Dean, the White House counsel for Richard Nixon, provided lengthy testimony in congressional hearings that proved to be very damaging for Nixon. People marveled at his remarkable memory. Studies have been done that compared Dean’s recollection to the actual facts that were gleaned from the original White House tapes. Psychologist and author Alan Kennedy wrote this about portions of Dean’s testimony, “More often than not he distorted the gist of a conversation, exaggerating his own role and sometimes even inventing a role for himself where none had existed. In a nutshell, you could not use Dean’s memory of events to recover anything like the truth of what went on. At pretty well all levels, what he remembered was quite manifestly false. People didn’t say what he recalled them saying; people didn’t do what he said they did; and so on.” So, did Dean lie or was his memory so tainted that he honestly testified to what he thought actually happened?

I raise this issue not necessarily for a discussion of the limitations of human memory, although that would be fascinating, but instead, I’m curious as to what members of this forum think about human memory and how we apply it to our study of the past.

Bob