Word: confessionally
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The first case involved an Arizona man named Robert Edwards, who was charged with robbery, burglary and murder. At his first interrogation, Edwards requested a lawyer. Next day, though Ed wards had still seen no attorney, he talked to two detectives and implicated himself in the crimes. That admittedly voluntary...
The Fifth Amendment allows citizens to remain silent. But it looks bad. Emanations of a man's guilt, as Freud once put it, "ooze from all his pores." Even the hard, grim stonewall of the Nixon White House eventually crumbled. Richard Nixon, in fact, is a fascinating case study...
After Chappaquiddick, in 1969, Edward Kennedy practiced what might be called the pre-emptive deflective confession. The idea was to assume the guilt in one large abstract gulp in order to silence any further specific inquiries. It did not work well for Kennedy. He spent a full week in a...
In some peculiar way, alcohol has become a convenient way to mitigate public embarrassments. Betty Ford, Joan Kennedy, Billy Carter and others have reported that their unsteady, occasionally weird behavior resulted from drinking. That sort of confession can be exemplary and thus publicly useful. But in others it can also...
Some people, of course, go to the other extreme and pro duce detailed confessions even when nobody asked them. The nation surely had no "need to know," as the White House says, but Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy in 1976 that he had felt lust in his heart for women...