WASHINGTON — Knocked off stride by a racial uproar he helped stoke, President Barack Obama hastened Friday to tamp down the controversy.
Obama, who had said Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly” in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., declared the white arresting officer was a good man and invited him and the professor to the White House for a beer.
Obama conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology. He personally telephoned both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley, hoping to end the rancorous back-and-forth over what had transpired and what Obama had said about it.
Trying to lighten the situation, he even commiserated with Crowley about reporters on his lawn. “I informed him that I can’t get the press off my lawn,” Obama joked.
Hours earlier, a multiracial group of police officers had stood with Crowley in Massachusetts and said the president should apologize.
It was a measure of the nation’s sensitivities on matters of race that the fallout from a disorderly conduct charge in Massachusetts — and the remarks of America’s first black president about it — had mushroomed to such an extent that he felt compelled to make a surprise briefing-room appearance to try to put the matter to rest.
“This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” Obama said. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department and Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could’ve calibrated those words differently.”
The president did not back down from his contention that police had overreacted by arresting the Harvard professor for disorderly conduct after coming to his home to investigate a possible break-in. He added, though, that he thought Gates, too, had overreacted to the police who questioned him. The charge has been dropped.
Obama said his conversation with Crowley confirmed his belief that the sergeant is an “outstanding police officer and a good man.”
There were signs both that Obama’s statement had helped to ease tensions and that his critics were not about to let that be the end of it: A trio of Massachusetts police organizations issued a statement thanking the president for his “willingness to reconsider his remarks.” The statement said Crowley was “profoundly grateful” Obama was trying to resolve the situation.
But a Republican congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, said he would introduce a House resolution calling on Obama to apologize to Crowley.
