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Indifference is an impressive but somewhat risky ploy. Rarely do public figures command the easy Gallic disdain of French President Valéry Discard d'Estaing. When Le Canard Enchaîné reported that Giscard had accepted $250,000 worth of diamonds as gifts from the Central African Republic's butcherous Emperor Bokassa, Giscard's reaction was roughly, "So what?" Of course, the French have a tradition of Non, je ne regrette rien. Across the channel, the Duke of Wellington once displayed something of that spirit when an old mistress (a Frenchwoman) threatened to publish all kinds of lurid details about his grace. "Publish and be damned!" the Iron Duke responded, or words to that effect. Grover Cleveland ("Ma, Ma, where's my pa?/ Gone to the White House—ha ha ha!") also managed a show of imperturbability about an illegitimate child who turned up.
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 in the psychology of confession. The "Papyrus of Nu" from the 18th dynasty of Egypt records what scholars have come to call the negative confessions. Therein the Egyptian advises the gods of all the crimes he has not committed during his life ("I have not polluted myself... I have not carried away milk from the mouths of children" and so on) and concludes in an ecstasy of self-exoneration: "I am pure. I am pure." During the 1952 campaign, when he was running for Vice President, Nixon was accused of having an improper $18,000 slush fund set up for him by California businessmen. Eisenhower thought seriously of throwing Nixon off the ticket. Nixon responded with the masterfully corny Checkers speech, in which he pharaonically denied wrongdoing and told the nation about his wife's "respectable Republican cloth coat" and his daughters' pet dog. It worked; the country loved it; Ike kept him. Years later, his painful writhings during Watergate were ultimately unavailing, but there was some echo of the Papyrus of Nu in Nixon's "I am not a crook!"
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 fortress of silence while the reassembled talents of Camelot labored over a text for him. Then he went on national television to take the responsibility of a young woman's death unto himself but also, simultaneously, to leave himself in a state of dazed blamelessness. His biggest mistake—all penitents beware—was to soak the speech in a disagreeable self-pity.