In D.C., The Buck Stops Elsewhere ‘Mistakes’ Admitted, But No One Takes Blame

It wasn’t quite an apology, certainly not an admission of wrongdoing.

President Clinton’s recent concession that “mistakes were made” in raising money for his campaign left unclear exactly who made the blunders and what he thinks they did wrong.

But that’s the norm in a city in which finger-pointing is the preferred method of taking responsibility. Being president, it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry.

If Clinton’s words sounded familiar, it’s because they were uttered by men who beat him to the Oval Office.

“It was a mistake,” Ronald Reagan said in 1987, to trade arms for hostages in the controversy known as Iran-Contra.

“Mistakes were made,” then-Vice President George Bush said about the same scandal. But, Bush insisted, he was “out of the loop.”

Robert Bies, a Georgetown University business-school professor specializing in political leadership, lamented the trend toward sinlessness, noting that House Speaker Newt Gingrich blamed his lawyer and then the media for an ethics violation that brought an unprecedented reprimand and steep financial penalty.

“We’ve taken the morality out of it. It’s now just ‘mistakes,”’ said Bies.

It wasn’t always so. Remember Harry Truman and his famous buck? After the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, John F. Kennedy accepted full blame, saying, “I’m the responsible officer of the government.”

Then came Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to square with the public about the human costs of war.

And, of course, Richard Nixon declared, “I am not a crook,” but never took personal responsibility for Watergate.

Clinton has proved a master at wriggling out of tough situations. By skillfully denying, deferring or deflecting blame, he has survived accusations that he cheated on his wife, evaded the draft, smoked marijuana, participated in shady real-estate ventures, installed his friends in the White House travel office and misused FBI files.

Clinton’s not-quite mea culpa on campaign finance probably wouldn’t satisfy a priest in a confessional, but it might do the trick with the public, analysts said.

“Mild contrition is an appropriate response,” said Allan J. Lichtman, a history professor at American University here. “I think it would have clearly been a mistake for him to dismiss it or to try to counterattack. Anything more than that might have provoked cries of ‘What did you do?”’

While the public cares about the way campaigns are financed - and wants to end abuses - most people are not worked up about an issue so far removed from their day-to-day lives, said Lichtman and others.

In his Tuesday press conference, Clinton chose his words judiciously about the campaign-finance controversy, making scrutiny difficult.

“Anyone who is involved in politics must accept responsibility for this problem and take responsibility to repair it,” Clinton said. “That is true for me and true for others as well.”

Everyone is to blame. And no one is to blame.

Or are they?

“So I think that what we’ve all got to be candid enough to say is no one is blameless here,” Clinton said. “It costs so much money to pay for these campaigns that mistakes were made here by people who either did it deliberately or inadvertently.”

But, Clinton said, it’s not his place to assess that blame.

Clinton did say it was wrong for a top banking regulator to attend a White House coffee with bankers organized by the Democratic National Committee.

But he did not extend the “mistake” assessment to the coffees themselves, and declined to say that big contributors would no longer be given special access to the White House.