Self-Excusers Can Expect No Laurels

President Reagan has begrudgingly admitted that he erred in selling arms to Iran, and has asked that since he is trying to forget the shame and cost of the deal, won’t everybody do the same?

He counts on the fact that the nation’s memory is short and that people will prefer to dwell on the glory days of his first four years. Meanwhile, he talks optimistically about the future as if his lease on power was as sure as ever. This is the best that he can do at the moment--an old hoofer counting on a new fall show to bring the reviewers back into camp.

Politically wounded Presidents of the United States cannot hide. They suffer their trauma in public. Reagan’s case is particularly tragic because it takes place in the second term--the time when Chief Executives are tidying up and vying for a shining place in history and eventual reincarnation on stamps and coins.

As one who followed the career of Franklin D. Roosevelt with avid interest and admiration, Reagan knows that after F.D.R.’s great blunder--the failed effort to pack the U.S. Supreme Court in 1937--Roosevelt had lost forever the domestic clout that he exhibited only a few months earlier in winning the most overwhelming election victory in modern history. So seriously had Roosevelt been damaged that he could never restart the New Deal engine. While Roosevelt’s blunder was not of the same order as Reagan’s, and Congress did not seek to investigate it, many contemporaries believed that “that man in the White House” was aiming to destroy the Constitution and to establish a dictatorship of the executive. Roosevelt, however, never apologized for his aborted initiative.

Indeed, admitting error--a rare act among Presidents--is risky business. While a segment of the public may take it as proof of the “bigness” of the man, it also makes of him a self-excuser--generally a sign of weakness.

Even so, errors of commission are comparatively easy to deal with. When Thomas Jefferson believed that he was violating the Constitution in acquiring Louisiana, he wrote: “It is the case of a guardian investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; and saying to him when he came of age, ‘I did this for your good; I pretend to no right to bind you; you may disavow me, and I must get out of the scrape as I can; I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.’ ”

Errors of omission, as in Reagan’s case, are much harder to explain away because they can suggest incompetence or, as the Tower Commission concluded, that the ship of state had been run too loosely.

Reagan has tried now to get out of his scrape as best he can, heavily handicapped by its circumstances. His fundamental problem has been not only the deception of Congress and his own dissembling statements to the American people but also that the debacle revolved around foreign affairs. There, always, decision involves life and death, which requires that the advance calculation of benefits and drawbacks be precise.

The Reagan Administration’s imprecision, not to speak of its demonstrated casualness and immaturity, in dealing with the Iranians is hardly explained away by the President’s latest words or by his assertion that the episode “at times” made him “mad as a hornet.” The public is no doubt tired of the subject and ready to move on. Still, while business-as-usual resumes, most of the basic questions remain unanswered. Reagan’s pledge to have a lot to say on the subject after the hearings were over has not been met.

Sadly, Reagan will now be excused from further explaining--an old man running out his string. The precedents for a such a broken presidency are few. Jefferson left office in 1809 with his “peace policy” a shambles, unshakeably convinced that with a little more time it would have succeeded. Like Reagan, he kept his personal popularity despite the vicissitudes of his stewardship of the nation. He also had the satisfaction of controlling the presidential succession, passing the office along to his friend James Madison.

But if the public did not believe that Jefferson’s politics would work, it believed in the great Virginian himself, and it saluted with affection his inspiring idealism. Reagan, it now appears certain, will not wear back to California a comparable wreath of laurel.

DR, HANEL, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurt