Mom’s Memory

Memory is a funny thing.  Everyone’s brain works in a slightly different way, I’m sure, but I think it’s safe to say that most people tend to remember things differently than they really were.  We all gloss over the ugly stuff and inflate the happy stuff from our earlier days, and create a distorted backward look at the world that’s unique to each of us.

Personally, I think I have a very good memory (which probably makes me no different than anyone else in the world), and yet I recall things from my childhood differently than my siblings or parents do.  I’m sure part of the time I’m remembering correctly and part of the time I’m dead wrong.  My guess is that we all remember things more accurately if we didn’t have an emotional stake in it when it happened.  My personal recollections of the times my brother stole money from my piggy bank are almost certainly skewed by the fact that it pissed me off at the time, while his memory of those moments is probably much more accurate since he didn’t really have any emotional baggage over the whole thing.

A good example of this happened yesterday.  We went to my mother’s house to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day and bring her a gift, and then we sat around and chatted for a while.  If you chat with my mother long enough, she will raise some uncomfortable issue.  She just likes to discuss all sorts of things going on in the world and doesn’t really care much if some of those things are a touch sensitive or inappropriate.  That’s just the way she is.  So, not content to just chat about grandchildren or her upcoming trip to California for a wedding, my mom asked, with no warning at all, if the Minnesota Senate race had finally been decided.

Now, to be clear, talking politics with my mother is always hard, because while she claims to be an independent, she also proudly declares that she’s never voted for a Democrat for president and never will.  She’s about as Republican as any Boston Catholic can be, and while she arrives at those views honestly and intelligently, she’s also somewhat strident about them, which makes things a bit touchy since she’s not prone to making any allowances at all that sometimes a Democrat is actually right or better or whatever.  Since I’m someone who voted Democrat recently, which she knows, a lot of her comments border on the “I’m right, you’re wrong” variety.

I answered her Minnesota question as best I could, telling her that a Minnesota court has decided the election in favor of Al Franken, but Norm Coleman is still protesting that ruling to the Minnesota Supreme Court.  Having known my mother for over 40 years, I knew what was coming next, and she didn’t disappoint.

“You know who’s never received enough credit for accepting questionable election results?  Richard Nixon.  He was robbed in 1960 when the Democrats rigged the results from Chicago, but he accepted them because it was the best thing for the country.”

This is one of my mother’s favorite pet peeves.  She not only despised John Kennedy (and every other Kennedy, for that matter), but she basically idolizes Richard Nixon and takes every opportunity to defend him.  Like I said, she’s not your normal Boston Catholic.

Sadly, her facts in this particular case aren’t right.  I knew that immediately because I was a U.S. History and Political Science double major, and I basically couldn’t graduate from college without learning all about the 1960 presidential election.  In reality:

• While there almost certainly was widespread voter fraud in Chicago that favored Kennedy, there was also widespread voter fraud in the other districts in Illinois, only in Nixon’s favor, not Kennedy’s.
• Nixon’s campaign DID dispute the election results, not only in Illinois but in ten other states, too, and the only outcome was to move Hawaii from Nixon’s column to Kennedy’s after a recount.
• Even if Illinois had been declared for Nixon after a finding of fraud in the voting, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election at all.  Kennedy won the electoral college by a count of 303 to 219, so shifting the 27 votes from Illinois to Nixon’s column would have only made the margin 276 to 246, and Kennedy still would have surpassed the 269 electoral college votes needed to win the overall election.
• The election was so close and “stealable” for Kennedy largely because of a string of campaign blunders by Nixon.  He insisted on campaigning in every state, no matter how small and no matter how locked up they already were, and consequently didn’t spend nearly as much time in the large, up-for-grabs population centers as Kennedy.  He failed to understand the impact of television and completely botched his first debate appearance.  He pandered to African-Americans by vowing to appoint a black person to his cabinet, but then couldn’t say who he would appoint or what post he’d put them in, and also failed to take any action or make any statement when Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested during a protest, while Kennedy actively tried to get him released, resulting in massive support for Kennedy from African-American voters.  On top of all that, Nixon’s boss, President Eisenhower, torpedoed Nixon’s reputation when he answered a question about important contributions Nixon had made by saying “If you give me a week, I might think of one“, a comment so damning that the Democrats made a campaign commercial out of it.

Needless to say, mom’s recollection of the events of 1960 aren’t all that close to reality.  She was disappointed that Nixon lost and Kennedy won, she’s been disappointed with the historical treatment Nixon has received, and now she’s looking back at that time and those events and selectively remembering only the parts of the story that she wants.  It’s perfectly understandable.  For me, having not lived through that time, and having been forced to regurgitate the actual facts during my coursework, my views on that particular topic aren’t skewed.

So, with all of this knowledge at my fingertips, did I point out to my mother that her fond remembrance of Richard Nixon’s valiant, selfless act of patriotism is, shall we say, misplaced?  No, I didn’t .

All I did was smile and say, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom”.