its investigation by handing down indictments against seven men. They included the five Watergate burglars but only two of the people involved in planning the crime, and they were the “small fish”—Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. The Justice Department said it had no evidence on which to indict anyone higher up. That seemed to be a victory for Nixon. In his testimony, Dean had this to say about the president’s reaction:
Late that afternoon I received a call requesting me to come to the President’s Oval Office. When I arrived at the Oval Office I found Haldeman [Nixon’s chief of staff] and the President. The President asked me to sit down. Both men appeared to be in very good spirits and my reception was very warm and cordial. The President then told me that Bob—referring to Haldeman—had kept him posted on my handling of the Watergate case. The President told me I had done a good job and he appreciated how difficult a task it had been and the President was pleased that the case had stopped with Liddy. I responded that I could not take credit because others had done much more difficult things than I had done. As the President discussed the present status of the situation I told him that all I had been able to do was to contain the case and assist in keeping it out of the White House. I also told him there was a long way to go before this matter would end and that I certainly could make no assurances that the day would not come when this matter would start to unravel.
On comparing this meticulous account of the meeting to the transcript, Neisser found that hardly a word of it was true. Nixon didn’t make any of the statements Dean attributed to him. He didn’t ask Dean to sit down; he didn’t say that Haldeman had kept him posted; he didn’t say that Dean had done a good job; and he didn’t say anything about Liddy or the indictments. Nor did Dean say any of the things he attributed to himself. In fact, not only did Dean not say that he “could make no assurances” that the matter wouldn’t start to unravel, he actually said pretty much the opposite, reassuring Nixon that “nothing is going to come crashing down.” Of course, Dean’s testimony sounds self-serving, and he might have been intentionally lying about his role. But if he was lying, he did a poor job of it, because, on the whole, his Senate testimony is just as self-incriminating as the actual, though very different, conversations revealed by the transcripts. And in any case, what is most interesting are the little details, neither incriminating nor exonerating, about which Dean seemed so certain, and was so wrong.
Perhaps you are thinking that the distortions so frequent in the memories of those who were the victims of serious crimes (or those who, like Dean, were trying to cover up such crimes) don’t have much to do with your everyday life, with how well you remember the details of your personal interactions. But memory distortions occur in everyone’s life. Think, for example, about a business negotiation. The various parties to the negotiation go back and forth, over the course of some days, and you are sure that you remember both what you and what the others said. In constructing your memory, however, there is what you said, but there is also what you communicated, what the other participants in the process interpreted as your message, and, finally, what they recalled about those interpretations. It’s quite a chain, and so people often strongly disagree in their recollections of events. That’s why when they are having important conversations, lawyers take notes. Though this doesn’t eliminate the potential for memory lapses, it does minimize it. Unfortunately, if you go through life taking notes on all your interpersonal interactions, chances are you won’t have many.
Cases like those of John Dean and Jennifer Thompson raise the same questions that have been raised, over the years, in thousands of other court cases: What is it about the way human memory works that produces such distortions? And how much can we trust our own memories of day-to-day life?
THE TRADITIONAL VIEW of memory, and the one that persists among most of us, is that it is something like a storehouse of movies on a computer’s hard drive. This is a concept of memory analogous to the simple video camera model of vision I described in the last chapter, and it is just as misguided. In the traditional view, your brain records an accurate and complete record of events, and if you have trouble remembering, it is because you can’t find the right movie file (or don’t really want to) or because the hard drive has been corrupted in some way. As late as 1991, in a survey conducted by the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, most people, including the great majority of psychologists, still held this traditional view of memory: that whether accessible or repressed, clear or faded, our memory is a literal recorder of events.8 Yet if memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten or they could fade so that they were no longer clear and vivid, but it would be difficult to explain how people—like Thompson and Dean—could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong.
One of the first scientists to realize that the traditional view does not accurately describe the way human memory operates had his epiphany after a case of false testimony—his own. Hugo Munsterberg was a German psychologist.9 He hadn’t started out intending to study the human mind, but when he was a student at the University of Leipzig he attended a series of lectures by Wilhelm Wundt. That was in 1883, just a few years after Wundt had started his famous psychology lab. Wundt’s lectures not only moved Munsterberg, they changed his life. Two years later Munsterberg completed a PhD under Wundt in physiological psychology, and in 1891 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Freiburg. That same year, while attending the First International Congress in Paris, Munsterberg met William James, who had been impressed by his work. James was then officially the director of the new Harvard Psychological Laboratory, but he wanted to resign from the post to focus on his interests in philosophy. He lured Munsterberg across the Atlantic as his replacement, despite the fact that although Munsterberg could read English he could not speak it.
The incident that inspired Munsterberg’s particular interest in memory occurred a decade and a half later, in 1907.10 While he was vacationing with his family at the seashore, his home in the city was burglarized. Informed of this by the police, Munsterberg rushed back and took stock of the condition of his house. Later, he was called to testify under oath about what he had found. He gave the court a detailed account of his survey, which included the trail of candle wax he had seen on the second floor, a large mantel clock the burglar had wrapped in paper for transport but then left on the dining room table, and evidence that the burglar had entered through a cellar window. Munsterberg testified with great certainty, for as a scientist and a psychologist, he was trained in careful observation, and he was known to have a good memory, at least for dry intellectual facts. “During the last eighteen years,” Munsterberg once wrote, “I have delivered about three thousand university lectures. For those three thousand coherent addresses I had not once a single written or printed line or any notes whatever on the platform…. My memory serves me therefore rather generously.” But this was no university lecture. In this case, each of the above statements proved to be false. His confident testimony, like Dean’s, was riddled with errors.
Those errors alarmed Munsterberg. If
After the event, von Liszt divided the audience into groups. One group was asked to immediately write an account of what they had seen, another was cross-examined in person, and others were asked to write reports a little later. In order to quantify the accuracy of the reports, von Liszt divided the performance into fourteen bite- sized components, some referring to people’s actions, others to what they said. He counted as errors omissions, alterations, and additions. The students’ error rates varied from 26 to 80 percent. Actions that never occurred were attributed to the actors. Other important actions were missed. Words were put into the arguing students’ mouths, and even into the mouths of students who had said nothing.
As you might imagine, the incident received a fair amount of publicity. Soon staged conflicts became the vogue among psychologists all over Germany. They often involved, as the original had, a revolver. In one copycat experiment, a clown rushed into a crowded scientific meeting, followed by a man wielding a gun. The man and the clown argued, then fought and, after the gun went off, ran out of the room—all in less than twenty seconds. Clowns are not unheard of in scientific meetings, but they rarely wear clown costumes, so it is probably safe to assume that the audience knew the incident was staged, and why. But although the observers were aware that a quiz would follow, their reports were grossly inaccurate. Among the inventions that appeared in the reports were a wide variety of different costumes attributed to the clown and many details describing the fine hat on the head of the
