Will Tony Hayward Please Be Quiet?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- As Tony Hayward exits BP(BP) with a severance package of $1.6 million in salary plus millions more in pension benefits, he let the world know on Friday morning that he deserves every penny of it.

>>Should Tony Hayward Forfiet his Severance?

In his first interview since announcing he would leave the BP CEO post -- given to the Wall Street Journal -- Hayward played the CEO victim card and insisted that he had done all the right things during the oil spill crisis.

Hayward is clearly a man in love with his job and his company, and reluctant to leave the post. In fact, in his own words, Hayward is leaving BP expressly due to his love for the oil giant. In a verbal tautology worthy of an undergraduate class in logic, Hayward told the WSJ, "I didn't want to leave BP, because I love the company.... Because I love the company, I must leave BP."

Yet many would contend that it's not just the A of Hayward loving BP that merits the B of his giving up the CEO post.

Indeed, there was a sense of Hayward's anxiety about the end of his tenure at BP during Tuesday's earnings conference call. Hayward was almost too "on top" of the Q&A session with analysts, delegating at a commanding pace the portions of analyst questions to be answered by himself, versus those to be answered by CFO Byron Grote and incoming CEO Bob Dudley. Some of Hayward's answers during the Q&A were fired off so quickly and directly that it seemed as if Hayward imagined himself in a High Noon duel and had to show that he still had the steadiness and gunslinger speed to prevail against the real villains. It all went by so fast, we can imagine Hayward lamenting.

>>BP Burning Questions: Inside the Conference Call

Apparently, Hayward has been in a fragile emotional state. The WSJ noted that when Hayward was greeted with a standing ovation as he began his BP farewell tour on Wednesday with one in a planned series of employee town hall meetings, the outgoing CEO told the crowd, "If you keep clapping, I will cry."