Who's responsible for the seemingly endless chain of White House fund- raising scandals now coming to light? Listening to Bill Clinton's recent press conference, it was hard to tell. "No one is blameless here," said the president, since "at the edges, errors are made, and when they're made, they need to be confessed." Fair enough. The only problem is, nobody ever has confessed. The closest the president came to an admission of guilt was summed up in a page-one Washington Post headline the next day: "'Mistakes Were Made,' Clinton Says of Gifts." Longtime Post readers couldn't help but feel a sense of deja vu. It was only ten years ago, almost to the month, that another set of headlines said much the same thing. "Bush Says 'Mistakes Were Made,'" announced a front-page story on December 4, 1986. Less than a week later, a followup piece informed readers that "President Reagan acknowledged yesterday for the first time that 'mistakes were made.'" Both stories referred to the Iran-Contra affair then consuming Washington. And in both cases it was unclear, from the official semi-apologies at least, who, exactly, had made the mistakes in question. They seemed to have made themselves.
According to Landon Parvin, a Reagan speechwriter who worked in the White House during Iran-Contra, the passive, pronoun-free phrasing was not accidental -- no mistakes were made in the choice of words. At the time, says Parvin, "there was a horrendous internal battle [at the White House], with some people wanting to go further. But 'mistakes were made' was sort of the lowest common denominator you could get away with. It was the most the political people and the lawyers and the other apologists would allow. It was always very hard to get the first-person pronoun in there."
It still is. Except in the Clinton administration, the "political people and the lawyers and the other apologists" don't have to argue their case at White House strategy meetings -- they're the only ones present. The result: Clinton didn't stop with trying to avoid responsibility for misdeeds; he went for the extra point and tried to take responsibility for a good deed. And so the first-person pronoun finally made an appearance at the press conference: " It's up to me to do what I can to clean up the system," said the president. With a straight face.