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It has been 50 years since my first extended visit to Europe as a university student. Most of you are too young to remember, but a "wonder-drug," Thalidomide, had just come on the market. This drug gave temporary rest and relief to millions, especially prospective mothers with morning sickness and problems sleeping.
Stationed in Germany more than a decade later, I witnessed the human results of the horrible side effects of Thalidomide, which had become available all over Germany, the rest of Europe, and beyond. Over 10,000 babies in 46 countries were born without limbs or otherwise disfigured and disabled. Those still alive would be in their late forties now. Perhaps you have encountered some of them.
Frances Kelsey
How did the United States escape this plague? One whistleblower, a woman named Frances Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration saw through the charade—the magic suit, you might say, of the swindlers from the drug company. Although Doctor Kelsey came under extreme pressure to fall in step and approve the drug, she would not be moved. She exposed this particular magic-suit-type scheme, scorned the testing that had been done by the Thalidomide manufacturer, and blocked introduction of the drug for sale in America.
As the sixties and seventies wore on, the horrible damage caused by the drug made itself known. And what also became clear was the reality that a decade of American babies born whole, with all their limbs, owed a debt of gratitude to Frances Kelsey, whistleblower par excellence. Tom Clark, who did so much to help arrange this evening's event, tells me that he is of that generation, that his mother suffered from morning sickness in bearing him, and that he might well be missing a limb or two today, had his mother been able to purchase Thalidomide in the United States.
Not all were so fortunate. The drug company gave 1.200 American doctors 2.5 million tablets on an "investigational" basis. Oddly, while the stated aim was to confirm the drug's "usefulness," reporting the results was optional. Among the nearly 20,000 patients who were given the Thalidomide tablets in the U.S. were several hundred pregnant women. In the end, 17 American children were born with Thalidomide-related deformities.
This happened to an American friend who took the drug during her second pregnancy. She gave birth to a beautiful son—except that his right arm was missing. All that remained looked like a flipper, a stunted hand with the wrist connected directly to his shoulder.
W. Mark Felt
Just last month, W. Mark Felt, now perhaps the most famous whistleblower in our country's history, died at the age of 95. Felt was the senior FBI official referred to as "Deep Throat," who resisted and exposed the cover-up of the Watergate crimes under President Richard Nixon.
Felt leaked to the press so much damaging information that President Richard Nixon was driven out of office when it became clear that he was trying to be king, rather than president. With help from two young journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, of the Washington Post—a courageous newspaper in those days—a would-be dictator was forced to resign the presidency.
One must make some practical application here in order to explain why Bush and Cheney were permitted to serve out their term. It was the power of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and the cowardice of an invertebrate legislature that were responsible for the fact that these war criminals were not impeached, convicted, and removed from power—a process for which the provident Founders of our country were careful to provide in the Constitution.
Freedom is endangered when there is no truly free and independent Fourth Estate, which the British statesman Edmund Burke called the "most important estate of all." The biggest sea change I have witnessed in the American body politic in the 45 years I have been in Washington is the reality that our country no longer has, in any meaningful sense, a free media. That is, as we say in America, BIG! Perhaps the situation is better here in Denmark?
The morphing of Bob Woodward is perhaps most instructive of all. He kept his explicit promise to Felt to avoid revealing the identity of "Deep Throat" until Felt was dead. Woodward did not, however, keep the implicit promise of an investigative journalist to pursue truth without fear or favor. Rather, like the Neo-craven Washington Post, Woodward made an unconscionable transition from fearless "junkyard dog" to Historian to the Court of George W. Bush and his regent Dick Cheney.
It was the price Woodward would pay for uniquely privileged access to them.
All, including investigative journalists, are vulnerable to the seduction of power—Lord Acton's dictum at work once again.
Sadly, Britain's Lord Goldsmith seems blissfully unaware of Lord Acton's dictum. Or perhaps he set out to prove it. Goldsmith is the U.K Attorney General who conveniently obliged when then-prime minister Tony Blair told him to change his legal opinion on attacking Iraq from illegal to legal.
