Paul Slansky, author of "My Bad: The Apology Anthology," chatted on Boston.com this week, and much of the conversation turned to Eliot Spitzer after the New York governor apologized publicly when he was accused of paying for sex with a prostitute. Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Q. It seems like a lot of these guys, like Larry Craig and Eliot Spitzer, drag their wives out with them during apologies. Have you seen husbands or boyfriends used as a prop during women's apologies?
A. I can't think of any examples where the male spouse gets dragged out like that, but then it's really hard to think of many apologies from women that would require it. In general, far more men than women seem to do the kind of things that require public apologies.
Q. Where do you think Spitzer's apology ranks?
A. I thought it was quite good, as these things go. He had a couple of good lines, and of course the key thing is he delivered it in person, as opposed to sending a spokesperson out to read a statement.
Q. What do you think was the biggest reason in your book, a real whopper, for someone to apologize?
A. It's hard to pick just one, or even just a few dozen. Of course, Bill Clinton - having wagged that finger at us - ranks high on the list, but my favorites are when people say racist, sexist, or homophobic things and then have to say they didn't mean them, when it's obvious that if they didn't mean them they wouldn't have said them. Hi, Mel Gibson!
Q. What's been the weakest apology you'd seen someone publicly issue?
A. Again, impossible to pick one. I was particularly amused when Trent Lott went on his apology tour for saying Strom Thurmond would have been a great president, and he wound up on Black Entertainment Television claiming to be for affirmative action and for the Martin Luther King holiday (which had already been approved decades earlier over his objection). I wouldn't have been surprised to hear him talk about how much he'd like to hang out with Mike Tyson.
Q.I heard Geraldine Ferraro on TV this morning about her slight of Obama, which seemed like the exact same line she used on Jesse Jackson in 1988. Anyway, it seemed like she offered the worst kind of apology, the "I'm-not-a-racist-really" apology: "You just took it the wrong way." How much do you actually have to fess up to gain believability?
A. Yes, that is an almost verbatim repeat of her Jesse Jackson line. Those "I'm not a racist" apologies are particularly choice. And believability is really subjective. I guess the apology deemed to have been most successful over the years was Hugh Grant's on Leno. But then, an apology for an offense that affected just your girlfriend is less of a big deal than attacking an entire religion or race.
Q. Are there people who apologized who shouldn't have? Some people think that [former Harvard president] Larry Summers got a bad rap, that he only said there were wide variances among men, which made some smarter and some stupider than women in science. But by apologizing, you put a fork in him, he's done.
A. My favorite was the aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C., who apologized for using the word "niggardly" (which means miserly) correctly.
Q. When it comes to public apologies by politicians when it comes to infidelity, is there any underlying significance in having your significant other accompany you at the podium? It seems odd in cases like Jim McGreevey and Eliot Spitzer that a wife would want to stand by their cheating spouse so soon after such news broke.
A. This indignity seems to come with the territory for the political wife. I think the message is, she's the biggest victim here and she's not so upset because here she is, so why should anyone else care so much? One can only imagine what the car rides to and from the event must be like.
