Six weeks ago, The Nation called for Army Secretary Tom White’s resignation. White, former vice chairman of an Enron Ponzi scheme called Enron Energy Services (EES) was self-evidently not fit to bring sound business practices to the Pentagon. Since then, new revelations have created a bill of particulars against White serious enough to warrant probes by a federal grand jury and the Defense Department’s Inspector General. White has stated that “if I ever get to the point…where the Enron business represents a major and material distraction…I wouldn’t stay.” That point has come. If White does not resign, he must be fired. The recent revelations show that White continues to practice the same squirrelly ethics that made Enron infamous. Since becoming Army Secretary, he has:
§ infuriated Republican Senator John Warner and Democrat Carl Levin of the Armed Services Committee by masking the full range of his Enron holdings;
§ violated his pledge to divest himself of those holdings, in accordance with ethics guidelines. After requesting an extension to sell his 405,710 shares, he finished dumping them in October, after a flurry of calls to executives at Enron and just before the SEC’s public announcement of a formal investigation of the company, which caused the stock to tank. This has made White a target of a grand jury probe on insider trading. White says he was just commiserating with his former friends about Enron’s troubles;
§ concealed those supposedly innocent contacts with Enron executives, failing to include them in response to a request by Representative Henry Waxman. White claims that he forgot to include the calls from his home phone;
§ misused a military plane to fly his wife and himself to Aspen, Colorado, where he completed the sale of his $6.5 million vacation house. This earned him an Inspector General’s review of his past travel. Military transport is available only for official duty. White claims he had official business in Dallas and Seattle and that Aspen was directly between the two. He also states that he was required to fly a military plane as part of the Bush Administration’s secretive continuity-in-government plan, which apparently requires top officials to fly military aircraft to resorts where they maintain mansions.
The more we learn of White’s past at Enron, the worse it gets. EES cooked the books to register immediate earnings and profits, when in fact it was suffering hundreds of millions in losses–most of which were then secreted in Enron’s notorious accounting scams. White has claimed that he knew nothing about improprieties at EES. But former EES employees interviewed by Dow Jones Newswires affirm that White was part of the scam. He signed off on the EES contracts that produced immediate paper profits and long-term real losses. He urged the sales force to make the company look like it was making money. He even participated in the notorious Potemkin Village trading floor, a fake trading room that EES threw together to impress visiting stock analysts. And then White walked off with millions, while investors were fleeced and the workers discarded. For conservative military analyst Eliot Cohen this alone is grounds for White’s resignation, because he cannot profess the core military ethic of “mission” and “men” before self since “he was an integral part of an organization that violated those principles.”
These days George W. Bush scarcely remembers his leading political patron, Enron CEO Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay. The President now poses as a champion of corporate accountability, calling for executives to be held personally responsible for their companies’ financial statements. Yet he hasn’t held his own Army Secretary personally responsible for his fraudulent actions at Enron and his misdeeds as Army Secretary. If White doesn’t have the grace to go, he should be dismissed. The Army and the country would be better served if he defended himself from scandals past and present on his own time and with his own dime.
