NEW YORK TIMES: On the day the police arrived at the home of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach, to arrest him on multiple counts of child sexual abuse, Graham Spanier was beginning his 17th year as Penn State’s president. It was an extraordinary tenure, and one that had seemed most likely to continue for many more years. A man of ceaseless energy and considerable ego, Spanier led the university as it grew from a remote outpost of American higher education into a top-tier public university…
The case against Spanier is at best problematic, at worst fatally flawed. More than 20 months after the state branded him a criminal, he still awaits a trial. He continues to live in State College but in limbo. Where once he strode confidently along campus pathways, saying hello to everyone in sight, he now stays within a narrow band of comfort, mixing mostly with close friends and a few trusted former colleagues. “At first I was just so stunned by it all, I couldn’t do anything,” he told me in one of our conversations this spring. “I was depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I lost 25 pounds. When I got up the courage, one of the first things I did was go back out on the racquetball courts. I found that everybody was so supportive. I was still one of the guys.” …
Freeh, who did not respond to my interview requests, did talk to Spanier, but less than a week before he issued his report. “By then, I’m sure that the report was already written,” [Former U. S. Attorney Genera Dick] Thornburgh said. “Anyone who has ever participated in one of these investigations would know that to be the case.” While expressing respect for Freeh, Thornburgh considers the report so flawed as to call into question all of its findings relating to the individuals it names as well as the supposed guilt of the Penn State community. “The language that I find most objectionable is the charge that Paterno and others, in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, repeatedly concealed facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse,” Thornburgh said when I interviewed him at his Washington office in May. “There is no factual basis in the record for that whatsoever. I challenge anybody to find it. It’s outrageous.”
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EDITOR: As we were likely the very first to ascertain and report, the firing of Joe Paterno and the prosecution of Penn State officials was all part of an effort by Gov. Tom Corbett to distract public attention from his association with the Sandusky investigation. We look forward to disclosure from this trial and also the suit against Penn State by the Paterno family. The reputations of the best of people have been blackened for political gain.
We urge the reading of the entire article.
