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" Published in the December 2012 issue We shouldn&amp;#039;t have needed Louis Freeh. We shouldn&amp;#039;t have needed him, for example, to unearth all those e-mails, the devastating ones, the ones that finally put meat on the bones of our suspicions. Like the e-mails that proved that Joe Paterno actively followed a 1998 child-abuse investigation of Jerry Sandusky, an investigation he had always denied knowing anything about: &amp;quot;Anything new in this department?&amp;quot; Penn State&amp;#039;s athletic director wrote to the VP who oversaw Penn State&amp;#039;s police department during that investigation. &amp;quot;Coach is anxious to know where it stands....&amp;quot; We should have been able to find those e-mails ourselves. But we couldn&amp;#039;t. We couldn&amp;#039;t, because Pennsylvania State University is bizarrely exempt from the sorts of open-records laws that govern almost all other publicly funded institutions. We couldn&amp;#039;t, because a journalist trying to shake records loose from the Penn State fortress is as helpless as a child. So we needed Louis Freeh, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to find the truths that had been hidden away. Freeh and his team were given the keys to the fortress, and they spent more than seven months exploring it. He could have dug a little less deep, or failed to make the connections that he made, or overlooked some of the hidden stashes of notes that he and his investigators unearthed. He could have been less harsh in his conclusions, could have decided that the sanctity of some icons, the magnificence of some legacies, somehow outweighed the importance of raw and painful revelation. Instead he distilled millions of documents and hundreds of interviews into a 267-page report that can be further distilled into a single, awful sentence: The men in charge of Penn State cared more about the public image of their institution and its football program than they did about the heinous crimes being committed there. We shouldn&amp;#039;t have needed Louis Freeh. But we did. SEE ALL OF THE 2012 AMERICANS OF THE YEAR "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16722/louis-freeh-american-of-the-year-1212/>