Sept. 20, 2004
Memory: Remember it right?

By STEVE FRIESS

It's well documented that President George W. Bush was in a Florida classroom on 9/11 when chief of staff Andrew Card told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. But how did Bush learn about the first crash?

Two of his recollections are similar, but factually impossible. On Dec. 4, 2001, and Jan. 5, 2002, Bush told audiences he saw the first plane hit the tower on TV before he entered the classroom. But he couldn't have seen it; nobody saw it live on TV. Between those recountings, on Dec. 20, Bush told The Washington Post that Karl Rove told him.

This isn't to say the president is a fabulist. He's just exhibiting a prominent example of a common memory glitch, says UCLA psychology fellow Dan Greenberg, who published a paper this summer in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology called "President Bush's False Flashbulb Memory of 9/11/01." Greenberg says this is more evidence that "flashbulb memories"—major events people remember "like it was yesterday"—are not as indelible as experts thought. (This was proved in a four-year study after the 1986 Challenger explosion, when witnesses dramatically altered their memories of the disaster.)

Greenberg thinks Bush saw the first-tower crash footage replayed so often that it seemed as if he had seen it as it happened. Greenberg struggles to explain why Bush, having remembered events differently in his second recounting, went back to the original version.

The White House declined to comment.

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