No Apology, but a Lot of Sorry Excuses

Oh, it’s a sorry tale, all right. A man sits in prison for almost a quarter of a century, doing time for a murder he didn’t do.

I read the Times story about Thomas Goldstein twice, maybe three times, looking for the truly sorry part -- the apology.

I might as well have been looking for WMDs in Santa Monica.

A man goes into the slammer as a sometime college student and full-time drinking man. By the time a Superior Court judge in Long Beach set him free last week, he’s old enough to join the AARP.

Does the D.A. apologize to Goldstein? Not on your docket.

Look, fellas: You’re going to get sued anyway. Why not just do the big thing, the gentlemanly thing, and say you’re sorry?

(Excuse me a moment -- there’s an e-mail coming in from my lawyer.)

Ahem. I regret any remark that may have led to an erroneous interpretation of my meaning.

What was I thinking? Public figures, apologize?

This is America, not some wussy country with more salad forks than stealth bombers. (I regret that France may choose to interpret my remarks to refer to itself.)

Rod Paige, the secretary of Education, calls the National Education Assn. “a terrorist organization.”

After someone slips him the word that this was probably not politic, he would only admit that “in today’s context, it was a poor choice of words.” Meaning, we’re left to assume, that before Sept. 11, it might’ve been OK for the secretary of Education to equate the NEA with a band of terrorists.

Bill Gates found it easier to shell out more than one billion dollars to compensate for Microsoft’s strong-arm marketing tactics than to utter the S-word -- sorry. The best he could manage was that he agreed to the deal “because the government felt there were some concerns.”

Things are hunky-dory now with Libya -- Tony Blair made a house call on Moammar Kadafi and the U.S. lifted its travel ban about five weeks ago -- but it was a near thing.

Libya’s prime minister threw a wrench in the works when he refused to apologize for the Lockerbie bombing because that wasn’t part of the deal. His own government muzzled him and said, yep, they did it, all right.

In the generation since Watergate, anyone who gets backed into a corner can deliver the no-fault apology, the passive voice, like President Ronald Reagan, making amends in 1987 for the Iran-Contra scandal: “Serious mistakes were made.” Implication: but not by me.

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Saying “sorry” might come more easily if it weren’t followed almost inevitably by a lawsuit; we’ve got to be able to separate the sentiment from the settlement. Perhaps that’s why it’s been easier to apologize for someone else’s transgressions. Bill Clinton apologized for the reprehensible Tuskegee Experiment that let black men suffer untreated with syphilis for 40 years, and a month later, Tony Blair apologized for Britain’s role in the Irish Potato Famine, which happened on Queen Victoria’s watch.

Why stop there? The Chinese could apologize for inventing gunpowder, the Spanish could apologize for the Spanish flu, even though it wasn’t, pigs could apologize to humans for swine flu, and humans could apologize to pigs for ham.

In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush was overheard telling Dick Cheney that a certain newspaper reporter was the human equivalent of a certain body cavity. When he was called on it, Bush said he regretted that people heard him -- but not that he’d said it.

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It’s a funny old world when saying “sorry” actually gets some people riled up.

That’s what happened after the Bush administration’s former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, appeared before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and told the families of the victims he was sorry.

You’d think he’d confessed to the attacks himself, the way that the Senate’s majority leader Bill Frist carried on, savaging Clarke for his “theatrical apology,” the issuing of which was not “his right, his privilege or his responsibility.”

I wonder what our day and age would have made of this apology, never delivered:

In June 1944, a man sat down and wrote out what he planned to say in case the D-Day landing failed.

” ... The troops, the air and navy did all their bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

He carried it in his wallet for years thereafter. That theatrical apology was the handiwork of the supreme commander of the Allied forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower. You may remember him; he became president.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. Her earlier columns are at www.latimes.com/morrison.