The Army Secretary's Duty
The New York Times
Editorial
April 18, 2002
Army Secretary Thomas White has repeatedly pledged that if questions stemming from his ties to Enron became too much of a distraction, he would resign. They now have, and he should.
Mr. White is a West Point graduate who served two tours of duty in Vietnam and eventually rose to be a brigadier general on Colin Powell's staff in the late 1980's. He then worked as an Enron executive for 11 years. Federal investigators are trying to determine whether he violated insider-trading laws when he unloaded $12.1 million worth of Enron stock last year, between June and October. This is only one of several inquiries Mr. White is likely to be facing in coming months. When he was tapped by the Bush administration for the Pentagon post, he was vice chairman of Enron's Energy Services unit. That operation has since been accused by former employees of having engaged in the types of improper accounting that led to the company's downfall, though Mr. White denies any wrongdoing.
After initially underreporting the number in response to Congressional inquiries, Mr. White ultimately acknowledged having had 84 phone calls, attempted calls and meetings with current or former Enron employees in his first 10 months as Army secretary. He insists, however, that he never sold stock based on what anyone at Enron told him, and points out that he did not sell some of his holdings until after the company went into a tailspin.
Whether or not he committed any crimes, Mr. White has shown a troubling disregard for the ethical responsibilities that come with public service. The chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee rebuked him for failing to abide by the ethics agreement that required him to fully divest himself in a timely fashion of his stake in Enron. After being given repeated extensions until the end of last November, Mr. White held onto options to buy 665,000 company shares until the middle of January. On yet another ethical front, the Pentagon's inspector general is looking into allegations that Mr. White has improperly used government planes for personal travel.
Mr. White's most damning liability may be his own résumé. His affiliation with the once-vaunted Enron, the credential that got him hired by the Bush administration, is looking more like a disqualifier a year later. If the president was looking for a canny administrator who could make things work, he was obviously looking at the wrong company.
Either Mr. White was a perpetrator in Enron's sham accounting or he was hoodwinked by the likes of Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow. He pleads the latter, saying he and other executives at Enron's various business units had no way of knowing of the destructive self-dealing with offshore partnerships orchestrated by the company's two top executives, with the board's approval.
That claim is somewhat undermined by his own unit's aggressive accounting, the number of Enron executives who did express concern about the company's ways and Mr. White's ethical lapses since he entered government. But even if it were true, his blissful ignorance about Enron's true state of affairs would hardly commend him for his current office, where he is entrusted by taxpayers to oversee a complex bureaucracy and intricate weapons-procurement programs.
The time has come for Mr. White to acknowledge that he no longer has the credibility to fulfill his mission at the Pentagon. The honorable course would be to resign.
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