Before President Clinton went to Africa in March of this year, his press secretary, Mike McCurry, made a double announcement. The President would discuss American slavery while visiting the continent from which America’s slaves had come. But he would not apologize for it. “He certainly is going to talk about the legacy of slavery and the scar that it represents on America,” McCurry said. But an apology would be “extraneous and off the point.”

The President fulfilled both promises in Uganda, in a talk to students in a rural village. “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that.” Clinton walked the line McCurry had drawn with the care of a motorist taking a sobriety test. He said “we were wrong,” but he put that wrong deep in the past (slavery lasted almost ninety years after the United States became a nation). He also put the wrong in the passive voice: That we “received the fruits of the slave trade” made the slaves sound like a hospitality basket left on the nation’s doorstep.

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