Marching on Washington

By David K. Shipler

            We were the only whites on the bus, my mother and I. And when a matronly woman came down the aisle taking names and addresses to be sure she had a complete roster, we gave her ours and received a surprised, joyous reaction.

            We came from the next town over, Chatham, N.J., known as an all-white community whose real estate agents and homeowners were only just beginning to come under pressure to allow blacks to buy and rent property. There was no covenant, but anti-discrimination housing laws had not yet been passed, and excluding minorities was a legal practice in towns and neighborhoods across the land. My middle-class commuter town had a reputation as a white spot alongside its racially diverse neighbor, Madison, where we had boarded the bus for the March on Washington.

            So when we said, “Chatham,” the astonished attendance-taker beamed and chirped, “Well, welcome, Chatham!” Other passengers turned and gave us the biggest smiles I’ve ever gotten on a bus to anywhere.

Frozen Scandals and the Myth of Self-Correction

By David K. Shipler

            Perhaps it’s premature to say, but it seems likely that Edward Snowden’s enormous sacrifice will be in vain. In the pattern of recent leakers and whistle-blowers before him, his damaged life will have no compensation in the form of revised policy. Nothing will change. So it has been with the likes of Thomas Tamm, Thomas Drake, and others who didn’t go to jail as Army private Bradley Manning will, but suffered the destruction of their careers for the sake of informing an American public that basically didn’t care about the wrongdoing they exposed.

This is the phenomenon of the “frozen scandal,” as Mark Danner described it brilliantly in 2008, in The New York Review of Books:

“We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.