It happens. Or rather it didn't happen. How many of us can remember an
event, often full of emotional overtones, that didn't happen? It's a common
enough experience to have a name: false memory.
Just how that false memory forms and is reinforced over the years can be
left to the psychologists to explain in detail. Maybe first we exaggerate
what happened, then elaborate the imagined memory with each retelling,
especially to ourselves. And before we know it, we've fully incorporated the
event into our dramatic life story. Our ever-absorbent psyches could put any
ordinary screenplay to shame.
Maybe that's what happened with Hillary Clinton and her exciting tale about
landing under sniper fire at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia back in '96, and how
she and her brave platoon "ran with our heads down" to take cover. Exciting
stuff. She told the story, not for the first time, in a speech at George
Washington University to back up her credentials as the kind of leader you'd
want answering that red telephone at 3 a.m. (Every time the Clinton campaign
ran that commercial, John McCain must have jumped another 10 points in the
polls.)
It turns out that others on that now famous trip to Tuzla didn't remember it
that way. Not at all. And the news footage shows Mrs. Clinton walking in
stately fashion down the rear ramp of an Air Force C-17 with 16-year-old
Chelsea at her side, their heads held high, to meet the reception committee
on the tarmac. First Lady and First Daughter would be accompanied by
comedian Sinbad and singer Sheryl Crowe. It all had the look of the usual
ceremonial visit, including a photo of Mrs. Clinton kissing the cutest
little girl, and the usual unidentified suits in the background. Not exactly
heavy combat.
Or as Barack Obama would say in his understated way, it was just Hillary
Clinton exaggerating her foreign policy experience. To lift a phrase from
the immortal Gilbert of Gilbert-and-Sullivan comic-opera fame, Sen. Clinton
was adding "merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic
verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
Hillary Clinton finally admitted, in a meeting with the editorial writers at
the Philadelphia Daily News, that she'd "misspoke." Who says the lady has no
sense of understatement?