Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ Speak, Memory

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - November 24, 1997

Speak, Memory

Remember when remembering was something you didn’t need a laptop or a therapist for?

by KURT ANDERSEN

MEMORY, ALL KINDS of memory, is exploding. Since the early eighties, when I switched from merely typing words to processing them, the memory in my desktop computer has got four hundred thousand per cent bigger. Back then, almost all mechanical communication took place by phone, entirely evanescent; now, however, much of the best chatter is by microprocessed fax and E-mail, stored indefinitely in bottomless computer memories. Our telephones remember whom we just called; computers remember the last three hundred Web sites we visited. A whole new fin-de-siècle TV genre—videos: funniest, scariest, deadliest—exists entirely as a function of the proliferation of dirt-cheap electronic memory.

As artificial memory has expanded, we have come to think of our own brains as computers, and of each individual’s memory as infinitely accessible, full of retrievable terabytes of juicy information dating back to childhood. According to this cyber-Freudian idea, human memory is not itself selective but only selectively accessed. Thus, during the last decade many minds have proven vulnerable to hackers—that is, to the psychotherapists who encourage patients to “remember” lurid fictions as actual facts from their own lives. During Patricia Burgus’s treat-ment for depression in the late eighties and early nineties at a hospital in Chicago, for instance, psychiatrists used drugs and hypnosis to help her “recall” that she had sex with John F. Kennedy (an incident nowhere to be found in Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot”), belonged to a satanic cult, and ate human flesh. Burgus eventually realized that she had not been a devil-worshipping cannibal after all, or one of J.F.K.’s floozies, and two weeks ago she got a $10.6-million settlement from her former caregivers.

In this age of fungible memory, many of the most exciting “recovered” episodes turn out to be fabrications—like the sexual-blackmail contracts between President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe that Sy Hersh discovered were spurious and left out of his book, and accounts of White House meetings that Robert Reich embellished for his recent memoir, “Locked in the Cabinet.” It was the recovered-memory vogue that helped turn an obscure 1991 fiction (Kathryn Harrison’s “Thicker Than Water”) into best-selling 1997 fact (Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss”). But a lot of entirely bona-fide memories have been recovered this season as well. The unearthed cache of videotapes that show President Clinton schmoozing campaign donors was damaging not just because of the money-for-influence spectacles the tapes recorded but because the tapes existed at all: indiscriminate electronic recording of Presidential conversations in the White House smells bad—Watergate Lite. Soon after the Clinton videos turned up, in fact, so did a fresh new batch of Watergate transcripts, as if the national hard drive contained a single “Scandal, White House, tapes” file, and clicking on 1996 democrats caused 1971 republicans to pop open as well. The recovered Watergate memories don’t depict Nixon as a satanist—not officially, anyway. “The Jews, you know . . . are stealing everything,” Nixon says to Haldeman on one of the newly transcribed tapes. And, another time, “You see, the I.R.S. is full of Jews.”

That same week, we learned that Clare Boothe Luce, the yin to Nixon’s yang, had kept handwritten notes of her several LSD experiences during the early sixties. While tripping, the former Ambassador and congresswoman noted her intention to “Capture green bug for future reference.” She had the bad-trip epiphanies (“The futility of the search to become one. Do you hear the drum?”) as well as the good-trip epiphanies (“Mountains in distance seem . . . more relaxed. . . . Nature can do nothing awkward, or tasteless.”)

Why did she keep the notes secret? She realized that a person in her position—the wife of the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.!—ought not to be seen endorsing acid. In that sense she was the first among tens of millions of Americans to cope with a peculiar problem of the late twentieth century: Mrs. Luce chose to recover her memories posthumously, several decades after the fact, just as baby-boomer parents who took drugs decades ago dissemble about the subject now, choosing to practice selective memory until their children are older.

Bill Clinton, when asked if he remembered smoking marijuana, made his most celebrated and telling public utterance, his version of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” or Reagan’s “I don’t recall”: “I didn’t inhale” had the requisite hair-splitting, the desire to please everyone, and the convenient slipperiness of memory—especially pre-home-video memory. Recovered memories have consistently caused trouble for Clinton (Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, James McDougal). Now former Presidential counsellor George Stephanopoulos is writing a memoir of his White House service, and although it has been widely reported that he hired a “memory consultant” to help him, Stephanopoulos says no, he’s doing it the old-fashioned way. He told me, “I’m having no problems reconstructing memories.”