Being president of the United States provides immense power and almost limitless opportunities to screw up.
And
commanders in chief do screw up in ways large and small, and the
results can be devastating or merely annoying, historic or just the
focus of an awkward news cycle.
Asking
presidents to reflect on their biggest mistake can shed light on how
they view the power, and the limits, of their office, or how they might
approach a future problem that resembles the one they think they handled
inadequately.
The
question can also provide someone at the apex of American politics with
the opportunity to deliver an insincere, self-serving answer, like the
job seeker who makes a show of confessing in an interview that his or
her biggest shortcoming is that, ‘Gosh, I’m a perfectionist.’ It’s also
important not to confuse “biggest mistake” with “biggest regret” — a
mistake is something that should have been done differently, a regret
might be something beyond even a president’s control.
George
W. Bush infamously bungled John Dickerson’s question on the matter.
Among the Bush press corps, it became known as “the Dickerson Question.”
“In
the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake
you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was
trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes
might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be,
would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?”
A
Bush communications aide, asked to remember the experience, told Yahoo
News “it didn’t feel like a tough question in the asking, even though
there were obviously lots of bad ways to answer it,” especially with
Bush’s reelection fight that year. “We just didn’t think he’d have, you
know, this level of bad,” the aide said ruefully of Bush’s response.
Bush’s
answer could be boiled down to this: I know I’ve made some mistakes,
but can’t think of any, and certainly not the Iraq War. But he drew it
out in a painful way.
“I
wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I
could plan for it,” he said, to laughter from the press corps. He went
on, “John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, Gosh, he could
have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure
something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press
conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer,
but it hasn’t yet.”
Bush
defended his handling of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and
even seemed to hold out hope that he’d be vindicated on the question of
whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
And
then Bush wrapped up his answer. “I hope I — I don’t want to sound like
I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t — you just
put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I
should be in coming up with one,” he said.
“God,
it fed into all of [the media’s] portrayals of him as stubborn, out of
touch, unable to admit mistakes,” the communications aide recalled.
Even
though Obama will soon leave the office, studying his self-diagnosed
“biggest mistake” and what lessons, if any, he has learned carries
greater weight now, with U.S. forces entangled in the president’s
undeclared but escalating war against the so-called Islamic State, also
known as ISIS.
“Biggest
mistake?” host Chris Wallace asked. “Probably failing to plan for the
day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in
Libya,” Obama replied in an all-too-brief exchange.
Obama’s
answer to the Dickerson Question has evolved over time, and while it
doesn’t have the same cringe-factor as Bush’s response, it’s worth some
scrutiny.
Libyans
celebrate at Saha Kish Square in Benghazi in October 2011, following
the death of longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi. (Photo: Francois Mori.AP)
In July 2012, with his reelection campaign in full swing,
Obama was asked in a CBS interview to assess his first-term failures.
“The
mistake of my first term, couple of years, was thinking that this job
was just about getting the policy right,” Obama said. He continued, “And
that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story
to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and
optimism, especially during tough times.”
Obama
reflected that the doubts about him during the 2008 campaign — when
“everybody said, ‘Well he can give a good speech but can he actually,
you know, manage the job?’” — had by 2012 morphed into: “‘Well, he’s
been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but, you know, where’s the
story that tells us where he’s going?’” And, the president admitted, “I
think that was a legitimate criticism.”
Obama
concluded, “Getting out of this town, spending more time with the
American people, listening to them, and also then being in a
conversation with them about where do we go together as a country, I
need to do a better job of that in my second term.”
It’s
hard to imagine an easier crowd pleaser than Obama’s
Washington-is-bad-the-American-people-are-good offering. But it’s not
that his answer was insincere, necessarily. Obama aides today broadly
defend the idea that he got the policy substance right and the sales
pitch wrong. (Obama did, however, promote his White House communications
director at the start of his second term.) But they acknowledge a
certain political convenience, in that the answer amounted to what one
top adviser recently described to Yahoo News as a “most uninteresting”
response — one unlikely to dominate a news cycle with talk of
presidential weakness or failure.
By
December 2013, the disastrous Obamacare rollout trumped the
communications lapses. Obama called the busted HealthCare.gov website
his biggest mistake and took responsibility.
“Since
I’m in charge, obviously we screwed it up,” he said. “And it’s not that
I don’t engage in a lot of self-reflection here. I promise you, I
probably beat myself up even worse than you [ABC’s Jonathan Karl] or
[Fox News correspondent] Ed Henry does on any given day.”
Over
the past two years, Obama’s answer has shifted again, from Obamacare’s
rollout to the failure to rebuild Libyan institutions after helping the
rebels who toppled and killed dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Upon learning of
Gadhafi’s killing in October 2011, Hillary Clinton responded: “
We came. We saw. He died.”
In an August 2014 interview with the New York Times, Obama defended the decision to be part of “
the coalition that overthrew Gadhafi” as “the right thing to do,” and argued, “Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria.”
At
the same time, he told the Times, “I think we [and] our European
partners underestimated the need to come in full force” to rebuild
post-Gadhafi Libyan society. “That’s a lesson that I now apply every
time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an
answer [for] the day after?’” Obama said.
Without using the “biggest mistake” language, Obama again delivered a public mea culpa of sorts about Libya in
his September 2015 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
As
he did on Fox News and in the Times, Obama cast the military
intervention as the right thing to do “to prevent a slaughter” since
Gadhafi was vowing to massacre residents of the city of Benghazi.
Obama
admitted at the U.N. that “even as we helped the Libyan people bring an
end to the reign of a tyrant, our coalition could have and should have
done more to fill a vacuum left behind.” And, he said, America and its
partners “have to recognize that we must work more effectively in the
future, as an international community, to build capacity for states that
are in distress, before they collapse.”
This
would seem to be an especially wrenching admission for a president who
regularly excoriated Bush for the wretched handling of post-Saddam Iraq.
But in an April 2016 piece in the Atlantic, based on multiple interviews,
Obama basically shifted the blame for his “biggest mistake” onto allies Britain and France.
“When
I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room
for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s
proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said. He pointed out
that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following
year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron quickly
became “distracted by a range of other things.”
Everyone
has a friend who’s been in a relationship like this, in which one
person ducks blame by saying, “My real mistake was thinking too highly
of you.” But aides deny that Obama was trying to absolve himself for
what he privately calls a “s*** show,” according to the Atlantic.
Whether
or not Obama was shifting the burden elsewhere, he has had to draw his
own lessons from Libya. That country has been locked into what one top
White House aide called a “one step forward, one or two steps back”
dynamic that includes the presence of ISIS terrorists (and American
airstrikes on those forces).
Libya
is hardly the only problematic country from Obama’s tenure in office,
and White House aides cite a number of other examples on the “lessons
learned” front.
The
president’s critics often say one of his greatest mistakes was his 2013
decision not to enforce his “red line” against Syria’s use of chemical
weapons. But according to Obama’s aides, military strikes on forces
loyal to strongman Bashar Assad could have led to worse chaos in Syria,
beyond even the bloodshed that has left as many as 470,000 people dead,
by some estimates. Toppling Assad without a plan for filling the vacuum
he would have left, they say, would have risked putting all of Syria
ultimately under ISIS control, dramatically expanding the threat to key
U.S. allies like Turkey or Jordan as well as Iraq, and threatening to
pull America into a much wider conflict.
Administration
officials also point to Obama’s ongoing resistance to providing Ukraine
with lethal defensive weapons to fend off pro-Moscow forces in the
country’s east. In their telling, the risk of escalation if Ukrainian
forces killed Russian troops with American weapons is unacceptable.
Finally,
they cite the current U.S. deployment in Iraq and, to a lesser extent,
Syria. In their version of events, Obama held off on all but the most
urgent military action — sending a small force to protect the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, launching airstrikes in Syria and intervening to
save civilians of the Yazidi religious minority who were besieged on
Mount Sinjar by ISIS forces — until Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
was pushed from office in 2014. Once Haider al-Abadi, seen in
Washington as a much more reliable partner, took over, Obama
dramatically ramped up U.S. operations. In this argument, Obama again
connected a de facto political vacuum to prospects for American-led
military success and future stability.
Whether
these were the right or wrong lessons to draw from Libya — or the right
decisions at all — is a matter of heated debate that won’t be settled
here.
Obama
himself may at least partly settle the argument before he leaves
office, or in a few years, if the experience of his two immediate
predecessors is any guide.
At his final press conference,
on Jan. 12, 2009, Bush faced a variant of the Dickerson Question, and
this time it seemed to catch him in a more thoughtful mood.
“I
have often said that history will look back and determine that which
could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made,” Bush began.
But
he noted that his May 2003 appearance on an aircraft carrier in front
of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner “sent the wrong message.” He
allowed that “some of my rhetoric has been a mistake” — a reference to
cowboy talk like wanting Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” His only
reference to Hurricane Katrina was to criticism of his Air Force One
flyover on his way back to Washington from vacation in Texas — a
decision he defended — not to the botched government response to the
devastating storm. He said it was a mistake to push the partial
privatization of Social Security after his 2004 reelection — a failed
legislative drive that badly damaged his political standing.
Bush
also pointed to the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison and the
absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “I don’t know if you
want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go
according to plan, let’s put it that way,” he said.
“There
is no such thing as short-term history,” he concluded. “I don’t think
you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time
has passed: Did a president’s decisions have the impact that he thought
they would, or he thought they would, over time? Or how did this
president compare to future presidents, given a set of circumstances
that may be similar or not similar? I mean, it’s just impossible to do.
And I’m comfortable with that.”
Bill Clinton provided a different model for presidential soul-baring in a June 2004 CNN interview.
What was your biggest mistake in the office, asked host Larry King.
“We
know what my biggest personal mistake was,” Clinton replied, in an
obvious reference to his affair with former White House intern Monica
Lewinsky.
But
as president, he suggested, one of his biggest mistakes was spending
his first two years trying to pass a sweeping health care reform bill,
having underestimated the resolve of Republicans to block it.
And
“one of my great regrets in foreign policy is not sending troops to try
to stop the Rwandan genocide when I realized how severe it was,”
Clinton said of the 1994 mass murder of minority Tutsis by majority
Hutus. “It happened very fast, 90 days, 10 percent of the country,
700,000 people killed with machetes. I feel terrible that we didn’t do
it.”
Clinton
explained that, at the time, his administration was “still reeling”
from the 1992-1993 Somalia intervention, immortalized in the movie
“Black Hawk Down.” He was also trying to mobilize support to help Haiti
and intervene in Bosnia.
Acting in Rwanda, Clinton said, “was never seriously considered.”
“And when I finally came to grips with the magnitude of it,” the former president said, “I will always regret it.”
SOURCE: YAHOO
