'Mistakes have been made': the way to avoid self-incrimination

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This is the age of "mistakes were made." I don’t know which politician first uttered the phrase, but the one that sticks in my mind is Ronald Reagan, explicating (or rather not explicating) the route to the Iran-Contra scandal. The phrase avoids blame, responsibility and the active voice. It says that the fault lies not with the speaker but with an unidentified (and only implied) "they." Just recently, Sen. McCain said, in regard to waterboarding torture and the CIA, "mistakes were made."

Can you imagine yourself or a member of your family coming home after doing something obviously wrong, and saying, "mistakes were made"? The phrase is a far cry from New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s classic and frank admission of error and responsibility, "When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut."

Modern politicians have all got it into their heads that an admission of error is an admission of fallibility, and that an admission of fallibility is tantamount to declaring your own incompetence.

I don’t know where this one started, either, but the cautionary tale comes from George Romney saying during the Vietnam War, when he was running for president, that in regard to having supported the war before lots of people had turned against it, he had been "brainwashed." At the time I admired Romney’s frankness; many people had started out being for the war in Vietnam and then had their minds changed by events. But Romney’s admission was perceived as evidence that he was too easily led, and therefore not qualified to be president.

Presidential infallibility is now a given, so candidates for president must also be infallible, and no one in high political office can ever admit publicly that he or she has made a "beaut."

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And beauts are made regularly in politics. If the Constitution had been a perfect document — an infallible one — what need could there possibly have been to amend it? We as a people have even repealed one amendment after it had been put in place.

Apologies in the political sphere should be made, by individuals, for their mistaken policies and decisions that have been proven by events to have been wrong-headed and disastrous for the city, state or country.

Had an apologies-are-in-order ethos been in place in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon could have stepped to the podium, and said, "I take full responsibility for the asininities of my subordinates in breaking into the Watergate Hotel headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and then attempting to cover up their involvement. I am firing those responsible for this fiasco, including my top aides, and will not stand in the way of their prosecution. I hope you will allow my administration to start anew, pledged to open government and accountability."

Such an apology would have staunched the wound to his presidency before it became too infected to ever be healed, and would have given him four more years in the White House.

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"Sometimes I do dumb things," President Jimmy Carter might have said, after the aborted mission to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980. "I told the Shah to go easy on Ayatollah Khomeini because I thought the Ayatollah was a religious man, as I am, and wanted to spur religious tolerance. That was a good goal but a naïve formulation, and the result was the embassy takeover. Then I let the military mount a too-timid rescue mission, and the result was a disaster. The United States will need to regroup, and I ask for your help and prayers and ideas on what to do next in regard to Iran." Such an apologia might not have gotten Carter a second term, but it would have kept him in contention.

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In this space, you can write President Bill Clinton’s post-Monica-affair apology.

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Let’s assume that the occupation of Iraq has not proved as easy or as salutary as President George W. Bush and his advisors believed it would be. How different things would be now if, say, back in the fall of ’03 or even the summer of ’04, the president had said to us: "We did a good job of knocking over Iraq, but we underestimated the difficulty of establishing democracy and good oil flow there, and that was a mistake. I apologize for that. But whether y’all like it or not, the United States will be stuck in Iraq for a while. Precipitous withdrawal would get us in even hotter water. The congressional leaders and I will work out a timetable for withdrawal, and submit it to you for your approval. Once it’s approved by the voters in a referendum, I’ll expect y’all to give it your support."

As most religions and 12-step programs teach, apologies are only one strand of making up for bad behavior. Acknowledgment of having hurt people is another. Changing your life so that you do not repeat the bad behavior (or the hurts) is a third.

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These are easy concepts to articulate, but not much fun to do or even to read about. The least performed and most misunderstood play in the canon of Greek tragedies is Sophocles’ "Oedipus at Colonnus," which tells the story of Oedipus many years after his discoveries and self-blinding. How does he cope with his burden? How atone?

How transform himself? It is not as simple as accepting responsibility for bad deeds; more has to be done, the play implies, by people who have been kings or high priests or generals.

And that need to do something more, to truly atone, is the sense that is lacking in modern political life. Just once, I’d like to see one of these disgraced pols give up the pursuit of money and perks and do the right thing; that is, devote the rest of their lives to in some way bettering the lot of the less fortunate.

That would be a real apology.