What did he know, and when did he know it?

My last blog post reflected on Rick Perry's "brain freeze" at the CNBC GOP presidential hopefuls debate earlier this week and also recollected a previous century when another Texan politician, Barbara Jordan, demonstrated profound oratory skills. Barbara Jordan arrived on the national scene when she served on the congressional panel overseeing the Watergate hearings. Her colleague, then Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr.,  acted as Vice Chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. During the committee's proceedings, Baker asked: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Baker's post on the Watergate Committee was a bit awkward for him, whose 1972 campaign literature proclaimed him to be a "close friend and trusted advisor of our President, Richard M. Nixon." Fast forward to the scandal at Penn State University, and commentary from the university's own Malcom Moran, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State.


Moran's commentary, reported in the November 11, 2011 Los Angeles Times resonated especially for me, as I was about 11, when the Watergate scandal hearings took place.

"When you read grand jury testimony as deeply troubling as what we have seen, your thoughts go back to your roots," said Moran. "Before I entered the business of journalism I was a product of the Watergate era, watching hour after hour of the hearings. Throughout this week, I have thought of the twin quetions we all asked back then: What did he know? When did he know it?

Moran further offers that those two quetions can be asked of Joe Paterno and Grhama Spanier.  'What did they know? When did they know? What was described? How were acts characterized?"

Moran, had been invited to be part of a panel discussion at the Duke Law School in the wake of the scandal surrounding the men's lacrosse program. "One of the most powerful realizations was how little we all knew at an early stage of the process, when key decisions were made and assuptions were treated as fact. Until -- and unless -- this process reaches the point of witnesses testifying under oath, it may be very difficult to know what we really know."