“One man with courage,” said frontier general Andrew Jackson, “makes a majority.”
Yet it’s amazing how many “heroes” come out of the woodwork once the danger is safely past.
Joseph Stalin dominated the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953. He held absolute power twice as long as Adolf Hitler–whose Third Reich lasted only 12 years.
Joseph Stalin
Above all, he was responsible for the deaths of at least 20,000,000 men, women and children:
- At the hands of the executioners of the NKVD (later named the KGB).
- In exile–usually in Siberia–in Soviet penal camps.
- Of man-made starvation brought on by Stalin’s forced “collective-farm” policies.
Then, the unthinkable happened–Stalin finally died on March 5, 1953.
Almost three years later–on February 25, 1956–Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, shocked the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union with a bombshell announcement: Stalin–the “Wise Leader and Teacher”–had been a murderous despot.
Among his crimes:
- He had created a regime based on “suspicion, fear and terror.”
- His massive purges of the officer corps had almost destroyed the Red Army–thus inviting Hitler’s 1941 invasion, which killed at least 20 million Soviet citizens.
- He had allied himself with Hitler in 1939 and ignored repeated warnings of the coming Nazi invasion.
Naturally, Khrushchev didn’t advertise the role he had played as one of Stalin’s most trusted and brutal henchmen.
Over the ensuing years, many of the statues and portraits of Stalin that had dotted the Soviet Union like smallpox scars were quietly taken down. The city of Stalingrad–which Stalin had renamed from its original name of Tsaritsyn–became Volgograd.
Then, in 1961, Stalin’s corpse was removed from its prominent spot in the Lenin mausoleum and reburied in a place for lesser heroes of the Russian Revolution.
The young poet, Yevgeney Yevtushenko, noted the occasion in his famous poem, “The Heirs of Stalin.” Its gist: Stalin the tyrant was dead, but his followers still walked the earth–and lusted for a return to power.
Something similar happened in the United States around the same time.
From 1950 to 1954, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy terrorized the nation, hurling unfounded accusations and leaving ruined careers in his wake.
Joseph McCarthy
Among those civilians and government officials he slandered as Communists were:
- President Harry S. Truman
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow
- Secretary of State George C. Marshall
- Columnist Drew Pearson
Finally, in 1954, McCarthy overreached himself and accused the U.S. Army of being a hotbed of Communist traitors. Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army, destroyed McCarthy’s credability in a now-famous exchange.
Later that year, the Senate censured McCarthy, and he rapidly declined in power and health.
Senatorial colleagues who had once courted his support now avoided him; they left the Senate when he rose to speak. Reporters who had once fawned on him for his latest sensational slander now ignored him.
Eisenhower–who had sought McCarthy’s support during his 1952 race for President–joked that “McCarthyism” was now “McCarthywasm.”
Fast-forward to July 12, 2012–and the release of former FBI Director Louie Freeh’s report on serial pedophile Jerry Sandusky. As the assistant football coach at Penn State University (PSU), he had used the football facilities to sexually attack numerous young boys.
Jerry Sandusky
But Sandusky was regarded as more than a second-banana. He received Assistant Coach of the Year awards in 1986 and 1999, and authored several books about his coaching experiences.
In 1977, Sandusky founded The Second Mile, a non-profit charity serving underprivileged, at-risk youth.
“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State,” Freeh stated.
College football is a $2.6 billion-a-year business. And Penn State is one of its premiere brands, with revenue of $70 million in 2010.
PSU’s seven-month internal investigation, headed by Freeh, revealed:
- Joe Paterno, head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions, was aware of a 1998 criminal investigation of Sandusky.
- So was president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz.
- In 2001, then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary reported to Paterno that he’d seen Sandusky attacking a boy in the shower.
- Paterno, Spanier, Curley and Schultz then conspired to cover up for Sandusky.
- The rapes of these boys occurred in the Lasch Building–where Paterno had his office.
- A janitor who had witnessed a rape in 2000 said he had feared losing his job if he told anyone about it. “It would be like going against the President of the United States,” Freeh said at a press conference.
In 2011, Sandusky was arrested and charged with sexually abusing young boys over a 15-year period. On June 22, 2012, he was convicted on 45 of the 48 charges. He will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
On the day the Freeh report was released, Nike–a longtime sponsor for Penn State–announced that it would remove Paterno’s name from the child care center at its world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.
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THE FIRST RULE OF BUREAUCRACIES
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on April 10, 2015 at 1:18 amAfter spending years of his life sexually abusing boys entrusted into his care, Jerry Sandusky will likely spend the rest of his life as a prison inmate.
On October 9, 2012, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced the 68-year-old former Penn State assistant football coach to at least 30 years in prison. And he may spend as many as 60 years behind bars.
Following his conviction on June 22, 2012, he had faced a maximum of 400 years’ imprisonment for his sexual abuse of 10 boys over a 15-year period.
Jerry Sandusky (middle) in police custody
After the sentencing decision was announced, Penn State University President Rodney Erickson released a statement:
“Our thoughts today, as they have been for the last year, go out to the victims of Jerry Sandusky’s abuse.
“While today’s sentence cannot erase what has happened, hopefully it will provide comfort to those affected by these horrible events and help them continue down the road to recovery.”
No doubt Erickson–and the rest of Penn State–wants to move on from this shameful page in the university’s history. And the university has desperately tried to sweep the sordid scandal out of sight of the ticket-paying public–and of history:
So what remains to be learned from this sordid affair?
A great deal, it turns out.
To begin at the beginning:
In 2002, assistant coach Mike McQueary, then a Penn State graduate assistant, walked in on Sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy. The next day, McQueary reported the incident to head coach Paterno.
“You did what you had to do,” said Paterno. “It is my job now to figure out what we want to do.”
Paterno’s idea of “what we want to do” consisted of reporting the incident to three other top Penn State officials:
Their idea of “what we want to do” was to close ranks around Sandusky and engage in a diabolical “code of silence.”
As former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh summed up in an internal investigative report compiled at the request of Penn State and released on July 12:
“Four of the most powerful people at the Pennsylvania State University–President Graham B. Spanier, Senior Vice President-Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno–failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.
“These men concealed Sandusky’s activities from the board of trustees, the university community and authorities.
Louis J. Freeh
“They exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky’s victims by failing to inquire as to their safety and well-being, especially by not attempting to determine the identity of the child who Sandusky assaulted in the Lasch Building in 2001.
“… In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the University….repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the University’s Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.
“The avoidance of the consequences of bad publicity is the most significant, but not the only, cause for this failure to protect child victims and report to authorities.”
If there is a fundamental truth to be learned from this sordid affair, it is this: The first rule of any and every bureaucracy is: Above all else, the institution must be protected.
And this holds true:
During the 48-year reign of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, agents had their own version of this: Do not embarrass the Bureau.
So Hoover could order agents to bug Mafia hangouts–with the understanding that if they were caught, they would be disavowed as rogue agents, fired from the Bureau, and almost certainly prosecuted for criminal trespass.
J. Edgar Hoover
Thus we have seen countless Catholic priests abusing young boys entrusted to their protection–only to be repeatedly protected by high-ranking authorities within the Catholic Church.
We have seen whistleblowers who report rampant safety violations in nuclear power plants ignored by the very regulatory agencies the public counts on to prevent catastrophic accidents.
Imperfect institutions staffed by imperfect men obsessed with power, money and fame–and fearful of losing one or all of these–can never be expected to act otherwise.
And those who do expect ordinary mortals to behave like extraordinary saints will be forever disappointed.
So how can we at least minimize such outrages in the future?
“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom,” warned Thomas Jefferson. And it remains as true today as it did more than 200 years ago.
Add to this the more recent adage: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
The more we know about how our institutions actually work–as opposed to how they want us to believe they work–the more chance we have to control their behavior. And to check their abuses when they occur.
Which they will.
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