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.
