Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan Read Free Book Online Page B

true. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, for example, but at the time I knew only what was reported in the media. Like millions of others, I knew nothing of the intense debates in Washington and Moscow about how to handle the crisis. I had no idea that Kennedy had secret channels of communication with the Soviets or that the Soviets already had nuclear warheads in Cuba. I did not know that FidelCastro was prepared to see his country destroyed if it brought Soviet victory in the Cold War closer. It was only much later, as the classified documents started to appear on both sides, that we got a much more detailed and comprehensive view of what was really happening. The same gap exists between the experiences of the veterans and the history of the bombing campaign. They knew what it was like to risk their lives flying over Germany, but they could not know about the debates in Whitehall or the impact of the bombs they dropped. That could only come with hindsight and much research and analysis.
    Memory, as psychologists tell us, is a tricky business. It is true that we all remember bits of the past, often in vivid detail. We can recall what we wore and said on particular occasions, or sights, smells, tastes, and sounds. But we do not always remember accurately. Dean Acheson, the distinguished American statesman, once told the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that he needed a strong martini after spending a morning on his memoirs. Acheson had been sketching out the run-up to Pearl Harbor and remembered vividly being in President Roosevelt’s office with the president and Cordell Hull, then secretary of state, on that fateful day in 1941 when the United States took a step closer to war with Japan by freezing Japanese assets. “The President was sitting at his desk; Cordell Hull was sitting opposite him; I was in a chair at the Secretary’s side,” he had written. The only trouble was that his secretary had checked the records and found that Hull had not even been in Washington that day.
    We mistakenly think that memories are like carvings in stone; once done, they do not change. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memory is not only selective; it is malleable. In the 1990s, there was much public concern and excitement about recovered memories. Authoritative figures published books and appeared in the media claiming that it was possible to completelyrepress memories of painful and traumatic events. Working with therapists, a number of patients discovered memories of such ghastly things as sexual abuse by their parents, cannibalism, satanic cults, and murder. Many families were destroyed and lives, both of the accusers and of the accused, ruined. Now that the panic has died down, we are ruefully admitting that there is no evidence at all that human beings repress painful memories. If anything, the memories remain particularly vivid.
    Researchers at the Biological Psychiatry Lab at McLean Hospital, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, have recently conducted a research project into the repressed-memory syndrome. Their interest was piqued by its sudden appearance in the late twentieth century. If the syndrome were hardwired into the human brain, then surely there would be evidence of its occurrence down through history. They found examples in nineteenth-century literature, but, although they offered rewards, they turned up no examples either in fiction or in nonfiction before 1800. They concluded that “the phenomenon is not a natural neurological function, but rather a ‘culture-bound’ syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century.” The preoccupation of the Romantics with the supernatural and the imagination, as well as later work, most notably that of Sigmund Freud, into the subconscious, predisposed us to believe that the mind can play extraordinary tricks on us.
    We edit our memories over the years partly out of a natural human instinct to make our own roles more attractive or important. But we also change