The Army Secretary's Duty
Editorial
The New York Times
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 theBush 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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