What did the President know and when did he know it? Former Senator Fred Thompson wrote those lines, when he was a staffer on the Senate Watergate Committee. His boss, Senator Howard Baker, then uttered them during the Watergate Hearings. Since that time, these two lines have been a mainstay of any scandal or corruption investigation because the cover-up is almost always perceived to be worse for the participants than the underlying crime.
I thought about those questions when I read about the recent remarks of Volkswagen Chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch and Chief Executive Matthias Müeller in a Press Conference given in Wolfsburg Germany last week. Pötsch explained “There was not one single mistake, but rather a chain of errors that was never broken.” However, he stressed that it was “the misconduct and shortcomings of individual employees” coupled with a “mind-set in some areas of the company that tolerated breach of rules.”
