Enron Spoils The Party

We're not going to have to tear up the speech, are we?" George W. Bush asked late last week, as his aides labored over the text of Tuesday night's State of the Union address. Bush was gently mocking the endless process--and perhaps acknowledging how many reasons there are for last-minute rewrites: a war and a recession, an anxious public, an aggressive opposition party, and above all the fast-moving story of the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history--a scandal that has so far defied White House attempts to isolate it or explain it away. In the space of five days last week, the story of Enron's collapse went from the merely unusual to the truly baroque, with plot elements lifted from the pages of Robert Penn Warren and John Grisham. On Tuesday FBI agents moved in when document shredding was discovered inside Enron's Houston headquarters. On Wednesday Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, until recently the national cheerleader for a frictionless new economy and a man the President nicknamed "Kenny Boy," resigned in disgrace, forced out by a board of directors who had apparently been napping for months. One of 11 congressional investigations opened its hearings on Thursday with a tableau we might as well get used to: Enron's former outside auditor taking the Fifth Amendment. On Friday J. Clifford Baxter, 43, an executive who left Enron last May, was found dead in his Mercedes-Benz in the median of a divided highway in the fancy Houston suburb of Sugar Land--an apparent suicide. That same day, as if on cue, the White House acknowledged that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, had recommended that Enron hire a key G.O.P. consultant during the early days of Bush's presidential campaign five years ago.