COMMENTARY

Paterno deluded by self-absorption

— Joe Paterno was a liar, there’s no doubt about that now. He was also a coverup artist. If the Freeh Report is correct in its summary of the Penn State child molestation scandal, the public Paterno of the last few years was a work of fiction.

In the last interview before his death, Paterno insisted as strenuously as a dying man could that he had absolutely no knowledge of a 1998 police inquiry into child molestation accusations against his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. This has always been the critical point in assessing whether Paterno and other Penn State leaders enabled Sandusky’s crimes.

If Paterno knew about 1998, then he wasn’t some aging granddad who was deceived, but a canny and unfeeling power broker who put protecting his reputation ahead of protecting children. If he knew about 1998, then he understood the importance of graduate assistant Mike McQueary’s distraught account in 2001 that he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in the Penn State showers.

If he knew about 1998, then he also perjured himself before a grand jury.

Paterno didn’t always give lucid answers in his final interview conducted with The Washington Post three days before his death, but on this point he was categorical and clear as a bell. He pled total, lying ignorance of the 1998 investigation into a local mother’s claim Sandusky had groped her son in the shower at the football building. How could Paterno have no knowledge of this, I asked him?

“Nobody knew,” he said.

Everybody knew.

Never heard a rumor?

“I never heard a thing,” he said.

He heard everything.

Not a whisper? How is that possible?

“If Jerry’s guilty, nobody found out ’til after several incidents.”

Paterno’s account of himself is flatly contradicted in damning detail by former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report. In a news conference Thursday, Freeh charged that Paterno, along with Athletic Director Tim Curley, university President Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz, engaged in a coverup, “an active agreement of concealment.”

Paterno was not only aware of the 1998 investigation but followed it “closely” according to Freeh. As did the entire leadership of Penn State. A May 5, 1998, e-mail from Curley to Schultz and Spanier was titled “Joe Paterno” and it says, “I have touched base with the coach. Keep us posted. Thanks.”

A second e-mail dated May 13, 1998, from Curley to Schultz is titled “Jerry” and it says, “Anything new is this department? Coach is anxious to know where it stands.”

There is only one aspect in which the Freeh Report does not totally destroy Paterno’s pretension of honesty. It finds no connection between the 1998 investigation and Sandusky’s resignation from Paterno’s staff in 1999. The report also suggests that Paterno genuinely believed the police had found no evidence of a crime.

Paterno can be forgiven for his initial denial, for refusing to believe his colleague was a child molester in 1998. What’s not forgivable is his sustained determination to lie from 2001 onward.

This is how Paterno testified in January 2011 before the grand jury. He was asked: “Other than the incident that Mike McQueary reported to you, do you know in any way, through rumor, direct knowledge or any other fashion, of any other inappropriate sexual conduct by Jerry Sandusky with young boys?”

Paterno replied: “I do not know of anything else that Jerry would be involved in of that nature, no. I do not know of it.”

Paterno’s family continued to insist Wednesday in a statement that Paterno’s account was not inconsistent with the facts, and he “always believed, as we do, that the full truth should be uncovered.”

In fact, in 2001 Paterno had every reason to suspect Sandusky was a serial defiler of children. In fact, Paterno was not reluctant to interfere in university procedure; he helped dictate it. In fact, this was a football scandal. The crimes were committed by a former assistant football coach in the football building. Ten boys, and 45 criminal counts, at least five of them molested on the Penn State campus after 1998 when Paterno committed the awful misjudgment of continuing to allow Sandusky to bring boys to his locker room, so sure was he that Sandusky was “a good guy.”

We can’t unrape and unmolest those boys. We can’t remove them from the showers and seize them back from the hands of Sandusky. That should have been an unrelenting source of rage and grief to Paterno. Yet in perhaps the most damaging observation of all, the Freeh Report accuses Paterno and his colleagues of “a striking lack of empathy” for the victims.

Undeniably, for many years Paterno did virtuous work at Penn State. His combined winning records and graduation rates were indeed much higher than his peers. It’s a relevant part of the Penn State affair and worth stating, because it contributed to the institutional response.

He was the self-appointed arbiter of character and justice in State College. He had decided Sandusky was “a good man” in 1998, and he simply found it too hard to admit he made a fatal misjudgment and gave a child molester the office nearest to his. He was more interested in protecting a cardboard cutout legacy than the flesh and blood of young men.

The only explanation I can find for this “striking lack of empathy” is self-absorption. In asking how a paragon of virtue could have behaved like such a thoroughly bad guy, the only available answer is that Paterno fell prey to the single most corrosive sin in sports: the belief that winning on the field makes you better and more important than other people.

Sports, Pages 20 on 07/13/2012

Upcoming Events