Taking responsibility:

People have recently suggested that various officials (the Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, and others) should resign as a sign that they take responsibility for their policy errors, or for their failure to properly monitor their misbehaving underlings. I think that in general there’s a good deal to be said for such acceptance of responsibility, though of course much will depend on the particular circumstances of each case.

     But I’m wondering: How often has this sort of behavior happened in the recent past? Since, say, 1960, which Cabinet-level officials (or the Director of Central Intelligence, who’s pretty high up there) resigned because (1) they admit that they have failed in some task, or (2) their subordinates (direct or indirect) have failed and the officials want to take responsibility for the subordinates’ failure (and perhaps their own failure to monitor the subordinates)? I’m excluding (A) firings of such officials, and (B) resignations prompted by personal scandal, unpopular comments, or general unpopularity. I’m looking for resignations of the “My policies have proven to be wrong, and I’m resigning to take responsibility for them” variety.

     Naturally, even if such resignations have been scarce in the past, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t happen now — but their presence or absence may indicate whether the problem is unusual shamelessness on the part of these particular officials, or a broadly shared (even if harmful) aspect of our political culture. Also, if there are such prominent past cases, perhaps they can be used as examples that we should prod officials to emulate.

     If you have such examples, please e-mail me (at volokh at law.ucla.edu),

1. the person’s name, office, and rough tenure of service,
2. the circumstances under which they resigned, and
3. most important, a pointer to some online source that documents this, or at least a quote from and a citation to some print source that documents this.

I hate to be so demanding and so lazy, but I’m afraid that I won’t have much time to invest in research and corroboration; I’m hoping you folks will be kind enough to do it for me.