Make No Mistake: Presidents Wouldn't Admit It

Being president apparently means never being able to say you're sorry. Or wrong.

President Bush said that the Central Intelligence Agency did secretly detain certain people suspected of working for al-Qaeda, and that CIA interrogators have used "an alternative set of procedures" designed to pry information from prisoners. Given the opportunity to say he was wrong or that he was sorry, he did what presidents do: neither.

It is a presidential maneuver that satisfies some Americans for whom the ends of the Bush administration's approach to combating terrorism justify the means, and that angers others who believe civil liberties have been casualties of that war. It is a tack that the president may take again in light of reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee that Saddam Hussein was not linked to Osama bin Laden at the time Bush was mounting a war against Iraq. In any case, it is an unapologetic apologia consistent with 230 years of U.S. history.

"Thomas Jefferson was wrong about a lot of stuff," says Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia. But when it came to admitting he was wrong or sorry, Jefferson "could be evasive."

For example, when it was suggested that Jefferson had a liaison with the slave Sally Hemings, "he never addressed the issue," Onuf says. "The charges were widely bruited about in the Federalist press and his response was not to confront it directly. It probably was prudent of him."

Partly "it was the code of an honorable gentleman that provided coverage," Onuf says. Jefferson wouldn't stoop to "answering claims by social inferiors. He didn't respond to things he didn't have to. He was a pretty smooth guy. He certainly believed he was already on the side of the angels."

Other presidents have sidestepped culpability. When the British sacked the city of Washington in 1814, says Gerard W. Gawalt, specialist in American history at the Library of Congress, "James Madison managed to blame everybody but himself for that fiasco."

The presidential posture: Take responsibility, not blame.

Self-certainty is built into the presidential software. Steve Rubenzer, a Houston psychologist and co-author of "Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents," says: "People who become president tend to be dominant individuals. They tend to like to be one up on other people. Apologizing is being one down."

Being wrong or sorry "is seen as a disadvantage. That's a position they try to avoid."

Presidents present themselves as competent and moral. "To admit otherwise is to essentially impeach yourself," Rubenzer says, "and once you have admitted it, it's not contested anymore."

Allan J. Lichtman, a history professor at American University and a Democratic candidate in Maryland for the U.S. Senate says that presidents have always had a sense of their own righteousness.

When it was discovered that members of Ulysses S. Grant's Cabinet were selling favors to the highest bidders, "Grant never took responsibility," Lichtman says. "He tried to defend his Cabinet and staff." Other presidents backed into corners -- Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, for instance -- have used parsed and parsimonious language to justify their actions. Franklin Roosevelt never apologized for interning Japanese Americans, Lichtman says.

It wasn't until years after Jimmy Carter had left office, says Richard Norton Smith, a scholar in residence at George Mason University, "that he was able to reply what he would have done differently during the Iranian hostage crisis."

During a presidential debate in 1976, Gerald Ford said, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration." Ford was given opportunities at the time to admit that he was wrong, but "Ford is a stubborn Dutchman. He dug in his heels. He could have backed off in the program. But that's not in the nature of these guys," Smith says.

Years later, as the Soviet Union crumbled, Ford wrote a piece in this newspaper saying "I told you so."

Making the best of a bad situation is part of the job description. Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, a group that has been highly critical of Bush, says that the president's announcement about secret prisons reminds her of the man who was being run out of town and got out in front of the crowd to make it look like he was leading the parade. "That," she says, "is what the president is doing."