Somehow an event that the French didn’t even announce until Friday had quickly gathered momentum, drawing about three dozen foreign leaders to Paris to express their outrage at the killings of French citizens at a satire magazine and a Jewish supermarket last week. America’s representative, Ambassador Jane Hartley, looked a little out of place.

White House aides were so caught off guard by the march’s massive size and attention that they hadn’t even asked President Barack Obama if he wanted to go.

So by Monday morning, the intensity of criticism was so fierce that the aides knew they had to apologize. The media, they felt, had constructed a problem. This time, though, they thought the media might have a point. But they were also counting on the low-attention-span White House press corps to move on as soon as they gave in.

It was so obvious, they didn’t even go to Obama for sign-off.

No White House likes to admit being wrong. This White House especially has a tendency to respond to political and media criticism by digging in. There’s an impatience with optics — the ceremony and staging of the presidency — that flows right from the president, and any staffer hoping to do well in the West Wing dismisses concerns about appearances raised by reporters, Republicans or uncooperative Democrats.

This time, White House aides had to admit to themselves, they didn’t have a choice except to apologize. Even if that meant leaving Secretary of State John Kerry, who had been traveling in India and Pakistan and earlier in the day dismissed the criticism as “sort of quibbling,” looking out of step.

Optics matter, White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged at Monday’s daily briefing, even as he avoided saying the word “mistake,” or giving almost any detail about how the decision-making went wrong.

“We want to send a clear message, even in a symbolic context like this one, that the American people stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies in France. Sending a high-level, higher-profile official to that march would have done that,” Earnest said. The concession was so rare that just minutes before on CNN, Earnest’s predecessor, Jay Carney, predicted: “I don’t think you’ll hear that from my successor, Josh Earnest, today.”

“I think it’s fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” Earnest said.

It is an odd political moment when Republicans are beating up a Democratic president for being insufficiently close to the French, which they have been known to denounce as “surrender monkeys.” “The absence is symbolic of the lack of American leadership on the world stage, and it is dangerous,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote in an op-ed for Time, joining Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee and others who went took the opportunity to take a swing at the president, just in case anyone forgot that they might be running for president themselves in 2016.

“Had the circumstances been a little bit different, I think the president himself would have liked to be there,” Earnest added.

Obama wasn’t the only world leader to get socked by the politics around the rally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially announced that he wouldn’t attend, then changed course when several of his rivals in the upcoming Israeli elections said they’d go — and ended up getting rebuffed by French Jews for urging them to move to Israel and mocked by the Israeli press for angling his way to the front row of leaders in the photos.

“As soon as the security problem was resolved, allowing me to come, it was natural that I come here, it was important that I come here, and, therefore, I came,” Netanyahu said in France.

Just who at the White House decided to skip the marches in Paris and a companion event in Washington remains a mystery. What the president was doing instead on Sunday, Earnest wouldn’t say. And he insisted that security concerns were a factor.

“There’s no doubt that had the president or vice president, on this very short time frame, gone to participate in this event that took place outdoors with more than a million people in attendance, that it would have significantly impacted the ability of those who attended the march to participate in the way they did yesterday,” Earnest said.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service stepped up to give partial support to the White House, describing the advance security work as “challenging” and repeating that arrangements for the march would have had to be altered to protect the president.

“Our logistic and security requirements had the potential to affect the planning and/or event,” said Secret Service public affairs spokesperson Nicole Mainor.

Would have been, Mainor said, not was. The prospect of the president going was never seriously considered to the point of the Secret Service beginning its security review process.

The French staunchly refused to criticize Obama’s absence from the march — on the contrary, an embassy spokesperson said the French government has been “overwhelmed and very moved” by the American reaction since the beginning of the crisis.

“To be very frank, for us the first impression that we have had is the support expressed by President Obama,” French Ambassador Gérard Araud said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Monday afternoon, ahead of a meeting the White House announced that he had with top Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco (but not with the president).

“Monaco reiterated that the United States will continue to support France in its investigation as they work to identify, apprehend, and bring to justice those who helped plan or enable these attacks,” the White House said Monday evening.

Obama’s visit to the embassy last week to sign a condolence book was important, Araud said, as was the speech Kerry made — in French.

“From the French side, there is absolutely no hard feelings,” Araud said.

Michael Crowley and Kendall Breitman contributed reporting.