PRESENT TENSE:LAST WEEK, the phenomenon of the damage-control media event, that well-established tradition in US public life usually reserved for philandering politicians, was given a singular makeover by, who else, Sarah Palin. While adulterous South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was going the more conventional route, with tearily contrite press conferences and the like, the Alaskan governor took what her fans might call a maverick approach.
Palin, pictured below, had hurriedly resigned from her gubernatorial post before the Independence Day holiday weekend, and the resignation speech, all folksy inarticulacy, was positively unhinged – she struggled for air, gulping between sentences; she struggled for coherence, blaming everything and anything for her decision; and she struggled for her political life, as she wilfully destroyed it. Controlling the damage wrought by this speech was going to take one hell of a media charm offensive.
The hastily arranged publicity stunt we saw last week, however, had that deranged, improvisational quality that is quickly becoming her trademark. The first clue that things were more than a little unusual came when the reporter from Fox News enthusiastically began his piece with the phrase, “You have not lived until you’ve gone commercial fishing with Sarah Palin,” which would be welcome publicity if Palin was setting up a fishing company, but, as far as most people can tell, she probably still has designs on the White House. The reason for this unlikely vote of confidence in her ability to kill lots of fish? Palin and her family brought representatives from US broadcast news networks to a remote part of western Alaska to go commercial fishing.
Given Palin’s patchy track record when it comes to interviews with the national media in an attempt to control her image, you’d think she might have been more cautious – that notorious interview with Katie Couric last September left her credibility in tatters, after all. But the sight of her in fishing waders, making a patently desperate bid to control the story and limit the damage to her image, confirmed that the fine art of the rehabilitative media event, a rare species, seems to be beyond her.
An altogether more ambitious, and artful, attempt at image control was widely remembered this week as another controversial figure in US political life, this time from an earlier, even more volatile era, passed away. Robert Strange McNamara, the secretary of defence under presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, was the chief architect of the Vietnam war, and so closely associated with it that it widely became known as McNamara's War. McNamara would most likely have faded from public view many years ago were it not for the fascinating 2003 documentary by Errol Morris, The Fog of War. Consisting of little more than McNamara explaining himself and his actions, largely unchallenged and unfiltered, the film was undoubtedly self-serving, a final attempt by an old man to gain absolution for the sins that clearly haunted him.
As an example of the rehabilitative confessional, The Fog of Warwas certainly compelling, though its effectiveness was, like everything associated with McNamara, open to debate. That McNamara has been as vilified in death as he was in life, widely labelled a war criminal and murderer, suggests that he failed to achieve that public redemption he so obviously craved.
In light of both Palin’s commercial fishing expedition and McNamara’s arthouse documentary, it becomes clear that the reputation-saving PR exercise rarely works for politicians. It is hard to think of any such project that actually restored a damaged reputation to its previous condition (a prominent exception, as is so often the case, being Bill Clinton in 1992, who did contrition as well as he did everything else). The series on Bertie Ahern, for instance, with which he co-operated enthusiastically, did nothing for his post-taoiseach prospects. And as for Richard Nixon, well, if he thought Woodward and Bernstein had damaged his good name, wait ’till he met David Frost.
In attempting to control their image, these politicians and public figures are up against not only the well-established narratives that circumscribe them, but the powerful force of confirmation bias, that natural inclination to seek and accept information that reinforces our world view while ignoring or dismissing information that contradicts it. So if you subscribe to the notion that Sarah Palin is a flaky narcissist who is out of her depth in politics, then the sight of her entertaining all those TV reporters on a fishing boat does nothing to dispel that image. And if you feel that Robert McNamara had the blood of millions on his hands and that his expressions of regret were too little too late, The Fog of Waroffers all the evidence you need. Repeatedly, public figures who attempt to rewrite their own stories usually discover that our stories are written for us.
Shane Hegarty is on leave