One of those officials, Gary Schultz, articulated in dire terms what the incidents might suggest:
“Is this opening of Pandora’s box?” Mr. Schultz wrote in notes that he would keep secret for years. “Other children?”
The officials did nothing. No one so much as spoke to Mr. Sandusky.
Last month, Mr. Sandusky, for three decades one of Joe Paterno’s top coaching lieutenants, was convicted of sexually attacking 10 young boys, nine of them after the 1998 investigation, and several of them in the same football building showers.
Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who spent the last seven months examining the Sandusky scandal at Penn State, issued a damning conclusion Thursday:
The most senior officials at Penn State had shown a “total and consistent disregard” for the welfare of children, had worked together to actively conceal Mr. Sandusky’s assaults, and had done so for one central reason: fear of bad publicity. That publicity, Mr. Freeh said Thursday, would have hurt the nationally ranked football program, Mr. Paterno’s reputation as a coach of high principles, the Penn State “brand” and the university’s ability to raise money as one of the most respected public institutions in the country.
The fallout from Mr. Freeh’s conclusions was swift, blunt and often emotional. Phil Knight, the chief executive officer of Nike and an ardent Paterno loyalist, had Mr. Paterno’s name removed from a child care center Knight had founded in Oregon; Bobby Bowden, the former football coach at Florida State who is second behind Mr. Paterno in career victories, called on Penn State to take down the statue of Mr. Paterno that stands on its campus in State College, Pa.; and students, faculty and former Penn State players suggested no one could hide from the ugly truth of what they said was a devastating but fair investigation.
Mr. Freeh, in a formal report to the university’s board of trustees that ran more than 250 pages, offered graphic evidence of the implications of what he termed “a pervasive fear” of bad publicity:
In 2000, a janitor at the football building saw Mr. Sandusky assaulting a boy in the showers. Horrified, he consulted with his colleagues, but decided not to do anything. They were all, Mr. Freeh said, afraid to “take on the football program.”
“They said the university would circle around it,” Mr. Freeh said of the employees. “It was like going against the president of the United States. If that’s the culture on the bottom, then God help the culture at the top.”
Indeed, Mr. Freeh’s investigation makes clear it was Mr. Paterno, long regarded as the single most powerful official at the university, who persuaded the university president and others not to report Mr. Sandusky to the authorities in 2001 after he had violently assaulted another boy in the football showers.
“We have a great deal of respect for Mr. Paterno,” Mr. Freeh said of his investigators. “And condolences to his family for his loss.” But of Mr. Paterno, Mr. Freeh added: “He, as someone once said, made perhaps the worst mistake of his life.”
“The facts are the facts,” Mr. Freeh said. “There’s a whole bunch of evidence here. And we’re saying that the reasonable conclusion from that evidence is he was an integral part of this active decision to conceal. I regret that based on the damage that it does, obviously, to his legacy.”
The investigation’s findings doubtless will have significant ramifications — for Mr. Paterno’s legacy, for the university’s legal liability as it seeks to compensate Mr. Sandusky’s victims and perhaps for the wider world of major college athletics.
Already, the reverberations of the scandal have been extraordinary, its effects felt in everything from the shake-up in the most senior ranks of the university to the football program’s ability to recruit the country’s most talented high school prospects to a growing wariness among parents about the relationships their children have with their sports coaches.