WHO'S TO BLAME?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201200016-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: May 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201200016-3
ARTICLE
ON PAGE
WASH1NG1'ON POST
18 May 1985
Richard Cohen
.Who's to Blame?
' On an evening Philadelphia will not
soon forget, a police helicopter
swooped down over a house on Osage
Avenue and, in one of the great bone-
head maneuvers of modern times,
dropped a bomb. In short order, 11
persons were dead, and a swath of
Philadelphia had been burned to the
ground. As is customary in these mat-
ters, the mayor, W. Wilson Goode,
said he would take responsibility, but
said nothing about accepting the
blame. That presumably belonged to
someone else.
As if to underscore the difference
between responsibility and blame,
Goode almost instantly said that if he
had to do the whole thing over, he
would do nothing differently. No one
had done anything wrong. The bomb
idea was a wonderful one. The police
had performed faultlessly and so had
:the fire department. He made it sound
as if the fire had been an act of God.
Allowance should be made for the
pressure on Goode at the time-and,
probably, for fatigue as well. But the
evidence lay smoldering all around him
that something had gone terribly
wrong. The plan was lousy. The proof
of that was its failure. City officials did
not anticipate a fire and its conse-
quences: Could the fire department
fight it? Would firefighters be fired
upon? Would they be scared no matter
what? Some of the best minds in Phila-
delphia were out to lunch that day.
They simply were not thinking at all.
Whatever you may make of Goode,
it ought to be remembered that he is
following a tradition: in the land of
rugged individualism, American public
officials almost never accept blame.
Instead, they assert the obvious-that
they accept responsibility. But that
goes without saying. Goode is the
mayor, and the mayor-it says right
in the city charter-is responsible.
Blame is a different matter. The city
charter is silent on that.
In fact, one way of avoiding blame is
to accept responsibility. If you do this,
everyone is supposed to think you are
a stand-up guy. This is yet another of
John F. Kennedy's legacies. After the
Bay of Pigs fiasco-an invasion
planned and even conceived by others
but authorized by him-Kennedy
stepped forward and accepted respon-
sibility.
For this he was roundly lauded-al-
though it soon became apparent that
Kennedy's willingness to accept re-
sponsibility did not preclude others
from blaming the CIA and the Penta-
gon. To this day, the CIA is widely
thought to be the culprit-especially
culpable for leading the young and
naive president astra . s a resT
Kennedy himself is seen as anot er
victim o the Bay o igs-certam y its
most famous one.
nates. What is presented as an act of
humility is, in reality, one of arrogance
-an assertion of executive preroga-
tive.
In the case of the Beirut bombing,
the president threw a protective blan-
ket over the Marine command by de-
claring that he would take responsibil-
ity. That was supposed to end mat-
ters. To a large extent, it did.
If Goode signs off on an order to
bomb a house, he is more than respon-
sible for what happened. He is to
blame. But so are his subordinates, the
ones who came to him with the clever
idea, the ones he relies on for advice.
For the mayor to cloak them protec-
tively by asserting his responsibility
holds no one accountable and does no-
thing to protect the public from the
consequences of future incompetence.
It leaves us knowing who's responsi-
ble. Now we want to know-who's to
blame?
Ronald Reagan, who admires Ken-
nedy's style if not his politics, per-
fected Kennedy's mea-not-so-culpa
routine when terrorists blew up the
Marine barracks in Beirut. Grandly, he
took responsibility for all the technical
lapses that made the bombing possi-
ble, but not for having the Marines in
Beirut in the first place. Like Goode,
he made an avoidable tragedy seem
unavoidable-as if blame has to do
with intentions and not performance:
If you mean to do the right thing, then,
well, you cannot be blamed.
The trouble with assuming respon-
sibility and not blame is that it shields
the inept from the consequences of
their action. It has the air of a white-
wash-as if once the top guy says he's
responsible, it would be unsporting to
persist in asking how, say, 53 homes
were burned to the ground. The word
functions as a shield that protects
everyone, including culpable subordi-
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201200016-3