Tricks of memory, remembrance, and digitization

Yesterday was our national day of mourning for George H.W. Bush, a good man, a gentleman, and a person of wide and significant accomplishments. He was much more of a model of what we want in the leadership of our democracy than virtually anyone who came afterwards, fine as some of them might have been in particular ways.

But it is not Bush the man that is making me think at the moment. It the remembering of Bush. Or, at least, the remembering of one small incident.

It is the oddity of days and memory. December 5th was our national day of mourning for George H.W. Bush. December 7th is Pearl Harbor Day, the start of the war with which Bush was most associated.

The week has been filled with words and recollections of Bush 41. Some sensible, some risible, some notable.

But this juxtaposition of the 5th and 7th triggers a memory about an incident which I have not seen referenced. My recollection is that during his administration at some convention or other public speaking event, Bush strayed from his speech and indicated that the day he was speaking, December 6th, marked the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course, the attack was on the peaceful Sunday morning of December 7th.

Bush did not catch himself in the error and proceeded with the speech to increasing murmuring from the crowd. At some point he realizes he misspoke, apologizes, corrects himself and then proceeds on. The irony of course was that Bush, as the youngest Navy pilot in the Pacific and as a combatant who barely escaped capture when his plane was shot down, had, more than most, especially good cause to have December 7th etched in his memory. That was the irony.

Of course the press, political opponents, empty-headed talking heads tried to milk the error for a day or two or a week in all sorts of ham-fisted and petty ways. It played to a reasonably well-earned reputation for his notoriously awkward and stilted speaking style. My take-away at the time was neutral - people make mistakes, the press are poisonous cretins.

Here we are some thirty years later. Given the irony of the dates, has someone dredged up that old incident? Of course it occurred in the late 1980s, pre-internet, pre-google. But most the big papers are now digitized back to then. I would suspect that suitable searching might turn up something. And certainly if someone had incorporated that incident into their observations over the past couple of days, that should already be indexed and findable.

But no matter what combination of queries, I am not finding any reference to this incident using Google. I switch to Duck Duck Go and it is surfaces an incident, not necessarily the incident. And it is not current, it is from way long ago.

The one instance I have been able to locate is from a UPI report in the Los Angeles Times, Remember Pearl Harbor? Legionnaire Bush Doesn't from September 07, 1988, United Press International.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In an address to the American Legion today, Vice President George Bush astonished the veterans by declaring, "Today is Pearl Harbor Day," jumping the gun by three months.

Bush's error dumbfounded the 6,000 people attending the 70th annual convention of the American Legion and set them to murmuring among themselves during his speech.

"Today, you remember. I wonder how many Americans remember. Today is Pearl Harbor Day," the Republican presidential nominee said to a stunned audience.

"Forty-seven years ago to this very day, we were hit and hit hard at Pearl Harbor and we were not ready," Bush said.

Bush, who had diverted from his prepared text in making the mistake, carried on with his address for several more minutes as the whispers among the Legionnaires in the city's Commonwealth Convention Center grew louder.

"Freedom is on the march," said Bush, who, when realizing his mistake, diverted again from his text.

"Did I say Sept. 7? Sorry about that--Dec. 7, 1941, 47 years," the vice president said to applause.

"I'm glad I corrected that. I saw this guy (in the audience) shaking me off out here," he said as the Legionnaires laughed.

Apparently, earlier in his speech he had referenced the month he was shot down, September 2, 1944, and that likely led to the hiccough.

But I am left with a conundrum. This is a slip of Bush's memory of the month (September rather than December) rather than the date (6th rather than the 7th).

So am I misremembering what Bush misremembered? Could be. Perhaps I am not using the right queries or the right search engine.

Or perhaps I am remembering accurately and there was another incident in which he did indeed misidentify the date (rather than the month.)

Not worth pursuing but it is an interesting example of the twines and confusions between biological memory and digital memory. In their different ways, neither is completely reliable. Humility always required.