Thanks largely to Bob Woodward and his trusty Deep
Throat, whistleblowing is a vastly overromanticized endeavor.
Government professionals who wish to publicize, and thereby alter,
official behavior that they find unethical or illegal actually have
few attractive options. Speaking openly about the problems of the
agency that employs you is apt to be extremely unhealthy —
even fatal — to the average public service career. Blowing
the whistle through “proper” channels is often a good way to gain
assignment to your agency’s Fargo, N.D., branch office,
whistleblower-protection laws notwithstanding.
And
because I’ve spent about half my working life as a reporter,
and about half of that time listening to the complaints of
government employees, I can tell you that government whistleblowers
who decide to provide the press with information on a confidential
basis often consign themselves to months or years of hellish
stress. No matter how careful an unnamed whistleblower and his
reporter are, if the information made public is embarrassing
enough, the agency involved will go to amazing ends to find and
punish the leaker. And as recent federal leak investigations show,
today’s unnamed and public-spirited whistleblower can be
tomorrow’s unemployed malcontent (or, in some cases,
tomorrow’s criminal defendant).
So it is nice to
read, in Stephen J. Lyons’ “Old but Faithful,” about the
Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, a group that has, in
its short 3-year life, served whistleblowers, reporters and the
public interest, all at once. The group, which includes a
remarkable array of former national park supervisors, acts as an
intermediary, funneling inside information and documents about
threats to the national parks from the Park Service rank-and-file
to the general public.
Already, Lyons notes, the retiree
group has achieved a signal success, revealing a set of proposed
revisions to national park management policies authored by Paul
Hoffman, a former executive director of the Cody Chamber of
Commerce now serving in the Interior Department’s upper
reaches. Working through major newspapers, the group made a
national issue of Hoffman’s absurd revisions — which
seemed to value motorized recreation in the parks over their
long-term preservation, among other things — and stopped them
cold.
The retiree coalition joins other groups —
among them Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or
PEER, a group of local, state and federal workers — that help
protect government professionals who want to bring their
environmental policy concerns to the press, and thereby the public.
The Park Service retirees will never be as sexy as Deep Throat, and
it’s unlikely a movie will ever be made about them. No,
they’ll just have to settle for saving Yosemite, Yellowstone
and a few dozen other natural cathedrals, for all Americans and all
time.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Whistling in the park.
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