PATERNO, THE MOVIE

By Charles Snow

AL PACINO AS JOE PATERNO

Recently I watched Paterno, HBO’s made-for-TV movie. I couldn’t tell for certain from the previews what this movie was going to be about. Would it focus on the child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State caused by Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s long-time assistant coach? Would it be about Paterno the fallen hero, a legendary football coach being brought down by the Sandusky scandal and Penn State’s handling of it? Or, perhaps, would it be a standard biopic of Paterno the man – his childhood experiences, five-decade leadership of the Penn State football program, and his many accomplishments as an individual? Remember, also, I was a faculty member at Penn State during much of this period, so I could not approach the movie with any pretense of objectivity.

As movies go, I did not find Paterno to be riveting drama. In fact, I did not think the movie was emotional or moving at all. Al Pacino did a good job of imitating Paterno’s gruff voice and limping gait, but the other performances were as average as one would expect from a TV movie. The Sandusky scandal had all the makings of a very interesting movie – if a screenwriter unleashed his or her imagination and created a fictional movie using the real characters and context.

Paterno was an icon: great football coach, Catholic churchgoer, fundraising chairman of the campaign to expand the Penn State library, possible Republican gubernatorial candidate after retirement, and much more. Sandusky was a great defensive coach who many credited for Penn State’s two national football championships. He also started the Second Mile, a charitable organization that helped more than 10,000 underprivileged kids (and also served as his conduit for finding boys to groom).

The local District Attorney who decided not to press charges against Sandusky in one particular incident mysteriously disappeared and has not been heard from since. Penn State’s Board of Trustees fired Paterno without bothering to follow the norms and practices of due process. Three top Penn State administrators may or may not have covered up portions of this mess (the court decided they did not and convicted them of the lesser charge of child endangerment). And, all of this behavior occurred over a period of many years in a small Pennsylvania town where virtually everybody bleeds Blue and White.

The movie I saw seemed to be Paterno the ‘conflicted man’, apparently unaware of Sandusky’s criminal behavior until he is confronted with it by Sandusky’s indictment and, later, in some stiff and awkward conversations with his family members. If this was the movie’s intent, then it should have been tightly focused on the various conflicts that Paterno wrestled with: his own failings in helping a child in need, his relationship with Sandusky, and his role as an ambassador of Penn State University. Pacino could have portrayed the pained and struggling Paterno with the emotions needed to make this a movie truly worth watching.

PATERNO AND SANDUSKY

MARCH 2018 IGNOMINIOUS ABUSRDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. White House Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It’s about time to list Sanders as an IGGY candidate. Multiple lying certainly constitutes ignominious behavior. Her latest whopper involves confirming the story she told after Trump’s total fabrication of why he fired James Comey.

While Trump forced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write him a cover excuse for dropping Comey on the incredible premise that Trump was upset over Comey being too mean to Hillary Clinton, Sanders attempted to post-justify the firing with another idea: that Comey was simply bad at his job.

MS. SANDERS: The President, over the last several months, lost confidence in Director Comey.  The DOJ lost confidence in Director Comey.  Bipartisan members of Congress made it clear that they had lost confidence in Director Comey.  And most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.

The idea that the FBI “rank and file” was anti-Comey and happy about his dismissal was one that Sanders returned to again and again.

When asked why she was so confident the rank and file within the Bureau lost faith in the FBI director, when an inside special agent previously wrote that “the vast majority of the Bureau is in favor of Director Comey . . .the real losers here are 20,000 front-line people in the organization because they lost the only guy working here in the past 15 years who actually cared about them,” Sanders offered this response:

“Well, I can speak to my own personal experience.  I’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the President’s decision.  And I think that we may have to agree to disagree.  I’m sure that there are some people that are disappointed, but I certainly heard from a large number of individuals — and that’s just myself — and I don’t even know that many people in the FBI.”

But now thousands of FBI memos from that period have been released, and Lawfare has detailed their contents. The truth is that agents at all levels were shocked and upset by Comey’s firing, and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was pushing an enormous lie—which is the one thing about this affair that’s not shocking.

“Countless” is obviously Sarah Sanders’ term for “zero.” Because that’s how many FBI agents seemed to be in agreement with the decision as indicated by the recently released emails.

Since the Comey firing, Trump has been engaged in an ongoing effort to demean and degrade the FBI for the sole purpose of protecting himself from the continuing revelations being uncovered in the Russia investigation. And Sarah Sanders has continued to do what she’s done every day on the job—lie her ass off.