Seeking spiritual solace: Jimmy Swaggart faces up to his indiscretions © Bettmann / Corbis

Political leaders may suddenly accelerate into the apology mode when their political fortunes are at stake. But that is not their instinct, says Michael Munger, chair of the political-science department at Duke. "People who have that sort of sensibility in terms of fairness are not likely to become politicians. Such people are turned off by the process itself--it's ugly. And even if you wanted to apologize, your advisers would tell you not to. If you put yourself out to be president, and if you are to have any kind of serious chance, you have to be an essentially different kind of person. That involves personal qualities that we wouldn't necessarily think are admirable in other contexts--a kind of resilience, and also an ability to shut out other people's feelings. And for an apology to be real, what you're trying to do is reach out to others and say, 'I care about your feelings.' "

Reportedly, Vermont Governor Howard Dean, in his run for the Democratic nomination, sought advice from Gary Hart, whose own presidential ambitions were derailed by what was widely perceived as reckless personal behavior. Hart's basic message was: Wimps don't become president. Dean took Hart's message a little too much to heart and later was compelled to apologize after remarking that Democrats should reach out to the population of truck-driving Southerners who display Confederate flags. He had touched on a hypersensitive theme, Munger says, though he certainly was correct in recognizing the need to broaden the Democratic appeal.

Seeking spiritual solace: Cardinal Law acknowledges his oversights © Reuters / Corbis

Wimps seemingly won't become governor of California either. So Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeded with a rather strained apology to California voters: "Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right.... Those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that." In Munger's view, anyone who was already opposed to the movie actor wasn't won over. Those who supported him but were wavering could take solace in his stated contrition. But it was less an apology than a "framing of the issue," or an explanation that hinged on perceptions of Hollywood behavior.

That kind of pseudo-apology also seems to shift the blame to overly sensitive victims--those who were somehow "offended." There are two ways to understand such a statement, Munger says. "One is that it's a strategic ploy to try to diminish blame. The other is that it's an honest psychological reaction on the part of someone who is just not capable of thinking of himself as doing wrong. I wonder if some capacity for self-delusion is a requirement for being a politician."

In electing our politicians, we favor "an absence of self-doubt," Munger says. The greatest characteristic of Ulysses S. Grant, as a Union general, was that "he never second-guessed himself," says Munger. After he took over, "finally, the Union started to win the Civil War. And if he lost troops, well, that's the price we pay. There were at times unbelievable numbers of casualties, and he was quite cavalier about it. But it probably could not have been otherwise." People either give up their positions of public leadership or they become so thick-skinned as to be incapable of apologizing, he says.

Self-doubt wasn't evident in mid-March, when Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, found himself entangled with an unexpectedly "live" microphone. Kerry was overheard calling his opposition "the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen." He later told a news conference that "I have no intention whatsoever of apologizing for my remarks." Conservative columnist William Safire speculated that Kerry had bought into the view that "apologies are for wimps.... John Edwards just proved that nice guys get great press clips but don't win elections."

And nice guys can't recast their place in history. The current documentary The Fog of War centers on the endlessly enigmatic Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War. Filmmaker Errol Morris ponders the consequences of McNamara's finally explaining--or apologizing for--his longtime silence about his doubts on the war. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't," Morris muses. McNamara responds firmly that he'd prefer to remain in "the damned if you don't" camp.

Not only is it out of character for a politician to apologize, it's also rare, Munger says, for a political apology to reverse political fortunes. Trent Lott profusely and repeatedly apologized for his comment that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won the presidential race in 1948. Lott's remarks were seemingly off-the-cuff and clearly meant to hearten the aging senator, and onetime ardent segregationist, as he marked his milestone 100th birthday. Still, his detractors observed that Lott had a track record--supporting discrimination at Bob Jones University, speaking up for the segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, standing against the Voting Rights Act, rejecting several minority judicial candidates. It was that personal history, says Munger, that made the apologies ring hollow and led to his giving up a Senate leadership role.

"If Bill Clinton had been caught telling a racist joke, he would have been forgiven. That's because people had a lot of experience with him that made them think he's not really a racist. For Trent Lott, it seemed with this episode that he was acting in character. And that is much harder to apologize for."

It's hard, then, to see a scenario for an apology developing in the White House--though the rationale may be there. In late January, David Kay, chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, reported that no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been found or were likely ever to be found. Kay said that he had "innumerable analysts come to me in apology" as they realized that "the world they anticipated" didn't match the facts on the ground. The New York Times' Paul Krugman titled a column on Kay's findings "Where's the Apology?" But Munger's speculation about the ultimate presidential position is that President Bush "will never apologize, because, if he does, he owes an apology to Saddam Hussein, the U.N., and the French.... I would guess that the Bush line is going to be that Saddam would have developed WMD. It was just a matter of time."

After all, says Munger, an American business icon, Henry Ford, is said to have lived by the doctrine "Never apologize, never explain." It was an American literary icon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "No sensible person ever made an apology."

But a public apology can resound in big ways, even in small places. Last November, villagers of the tiny Fiji Islands settlement of Nubutautau wept as they apologized to descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by their ancestors 136 years ago. The villagers and relatives of the missionary were taking part in a ritual intended to lift a curse that, the locals believe, had caused an extended run of bad luck. According to The New York Times, a cow was slaughtered and a hundred sperm-whale teeth were given to eleven of the relatives who made the trip. A fourth-generation descendant of the missionary got a kiss from the village chief, himself a descendant of the chief who cooked the missionary. It seemed that the circle of misdeeds, repentance, and forgiveness was complete.