Will Tony Hayward Please Be Quiet?

The "whole truth" of the oil spill may show more than one culprit. It's also true that Congressional inquiries have shown that all the oil majors lacked an appropriate oil spill response plan. Yet none of this means that the CEO whose company had the oil spill should be off the hook.

CEOs aren't villains. They are just the most highly paid people in the world, and as such, deserve to be rewarded equally for success and failure. Hayward got his due reward then, and his leaving BP with a big severance package shows the double-edged sword of the CEO stature.

Hayward got his life back, too -- but still he can't keep quiet. The "measure of the man" isn't just his willingness to resign, as incoming BP CEO Dudley said of Hayward. The real measure of a man is his willingness to let go. If BP can rebuild faster in America with Tony Hayward, as the "villified" man said himself, maybe he can rebuild himself faster when his failure at BP and his victimization isn't the subject.

Or, in oil spill parlance, put a cap on it Tony.

-- Written by Eric Rosenbaum from New York.

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