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The Republican White House, which received the vast majority of the Enron money, struck an unbothered pose, relieved that neither Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill nor Commerce Secretary Don Evans had lifted a finger when Enron came calling for help last fall. Still, the Bush team made one tiny bow to the explosive potential of the Enron scandal, hinting for the first time that it might fork over the details of Vice President Cheney's closed-door meetings with energy-industry officials last spring if a congressional committee requested them. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett predicted that those papers, if released, would provide no evidence of a smoking quid pro quo between the Administration and Enron. "News flash," dry-quipped Bartlett. "We want to increase domestic natural-gas production. Tell me what Democrat doesn't."
If anyone was having trouble making Enron go away, it was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who represented the Big Five accounting firms before Bush named him to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission last year. Until the Enron scandal broke, Pitt had waved away demands for stronger regulation of corporate accounting and auditing. There were calls from lawmakers for Pitt to recuse himself from the SEC probe of Enron, but Pitt refused--after a fashion, anyway--saying that such a step would hurt the agency's standing. He added, however, that director of enforcement Stephen Cutler would run the probe anyway. Bush last month named two other accounting executives to empty seats on the SEC: Paul Atkins, a partner with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Cynthia Glassman of Ernst & Young.
These rookies, like Pitt, face a rough season. "There could be other Enron-like situations out there," says Arthur Levitt, the activist former SEC chairman. "Financial legerdemain from seduced audit committees, compromised accountants and inadequate standards could certainly crop up again at other U.S. companies." At the moment, the public's best protection against that sort of surprise is other brave whistle-blowers like Sherron Watkins.
--Reported by Cathy Booth Thomas/Houston, Bernard Baumohl and Deirdre van Dyk/New York, James Carney, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington, and Sally Duros and David Thigpen/Chicago