For a man who spent the past 12 days issuing a carefully worded "impromptu" near-apology for slavery, sweating a little detail about what might have happened one afternoon at the Excelsior Hotel seems the smallest of potatoes compared to 225 years of institutionalized bondage in the U.S. But grand, vague apologies for something you personally had nothing to do with are almost commonplace right now, while personal apologies are still hard to do.

This much we know: A lot of bad things were done to people in the past. And in recent years, we've felt the need to say we're sorry for most of them. It's not just Clinton (who has also officially apologized to the survivors of the Tuskegee experiment); the whole world is on board. In the past 15 years, the Catholic Church has apologized for those Catholics involved in the slave trade, for the Holocaust and for the Church's treatment of women. Japan has a lot that people want it to fess up to -- the Korean "comfort women," the appalling things done to Manchuria's civilian population, the rough treatment of British POWs -- but has eschewed complete and unambiguous apologies. Tony Blair is looking for more from the Japanese, especially after his apology for England's treatment of the Irish during the potato famine. Next on the British PM's list: an official "We're sorry" for Bloody Sunday.