In this golden age of corruption, it takes much courage to be a whistleblower

Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to cry out for help: first in saving the country from the profound and corrosive corruption that is so well chronicled in this volume, and then finding a seasoned editor to cut the book down to readable size and scope. Mueller’s reporting and insight about the unusual breed of civic-minded citizen willing to risk his or her career by exposing government fraud and corporate malfeasance are extraordinarily detailed and vivid. But he does himself and his readers a disservice by overloading this work with lengthy disquisitions about behavioural theory and inflated quotations from the interested parties.

That said, Crisis of Conscience should be assigned reading for every elected official and civil servant, from the lowest municipality to the highest level in Congress, the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy — if only to show them what motivates whistleblowers. These mavericks of morality who, in Mueller’s words, assume the ‘duty of virtuous dissent’, share a distinguished lineage dating back to the American Revolution and a Marine captain named John Grannis. He complained to the Continental Congress about the ‘inhuman and barbarous’ treatment of British prisoners under the watch of Esek Hopkins, commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. Hopkins was dismissed from his post and forced to retire, while Grannis and nine others were subsequently acquitted and reinstated. In 1778, Congress enshrined this principled insubordination into law, requiring ‘all persons in the service of the United States’ to denounce their fellow public employees if they caught them breaking the law or abusing their power.

Like so many other well-meaning gestures from that era, however, this founding legislation, and its successor laws, never really took hold in the American political consciousness.