Tilting at windmills: outed farmers plane too far careless cooks Philby of the FBI NBC's shame bribes for admission - brief notes

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by Charles Peters

THE PRIVATE AVIATION LOBBY argues that the small plane used in the Florida crash was incapable of doing much damage. Not by itself, but what if it had been loaded with explosives, or with chemical or biological weapons? There are 200,000 of these planes, and some 25,000 of them are definitely not small. Just take a look at the planes that are lined up outside the general aviation terminal at your airport.

THE CDC MADE A SERIOUS mistake when it said that anthrax spores could not escape a sealed envelope. What the CDC failed to do was consider what happens when mail goes through those sorting machines, not to mention the tossing around that sacks of mail get in a major postal facility like Brentwood. This is a lesson that I would love to teach to government officials and reporters. If you want to know what you're really talking about, go where the rubber meets the road.

That's true of the Enron story as well. Just as CDC officials and reporters didn't go to Brentwood and uncover the truth about mailing anthrax, most reporters found it easier to pontificate about energy deregulation than to go down to Houston and find but what was really going on at Enron.

Another approach to getting stories like Enron comes from that Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, who teaches another lesson that I've tried to impart to young reporters--the value of some experience in the institution you plan to cover. McLean, before she went to Fortune, had learned the ropes of high finance at Goldman Sachs, acquiring the nose for how and where the bodies are buried that can only be acquired from the inside.

WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE ON Enron's board blow the whistle as the company was marching toward disaster? A possible explanation comes from the case of Dr. John Mendelsohn, the president of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who also is a member of Enron's board. Dr. Mendelsohn was on the board's auditing committee and thus had, in the words of Jo Thomas and Reed Abelson of The New York Times, a "pivotal role in overseeing the company's relationship with its auditor Arthur Andersen and the integrity of the company's financial statements." His zeal for embarrassing questions may have been muted by the fact that his cancer center received $332,758.00 from Enron and the Linda and Ken Lay family foundation, not to mention $10.3 million from a gala benefit at Enron Field attended by George H.W. Bush.

BURIED IN AN ARTICLE IN The New York Times under a headline that seemed to be about another subject was a chilling observation from a Grupa Taca flight attendant based in Guatemala: "We're not even close to the security" that now exists at U.S. airports, "but we fly to New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco." It's not hard to imagine that what's true of Guatemala is true of much of the rest of the Third World.

IT WAS A SAD DAY FOR EVERY student of bureaucracy when Nigel Hawthorne died in December. He was the marvelous actor who played Sir Humphrey Appleby in the British television series "Yes, Minister." Sir Humphrey was the civil servant who tells his boss, either an elected official or a political appointee, what to do without the boss quite realizing it. When Appleby's boss James Hacker suspected that he might be being conned and asked Humphrey a question, the answer to which might have confirmed his suspicions, Appleby would reply in elegant but totally incomprehensible bureaucratese, guaranteed to leave Hacker in the dark. Appleby reminded every civil servant of what subtlety could accomplish, and Hacker's gullibility educated every elected official and political appointee in the ways of wily subordinates. The show depicted realities of government rarely perceived by political scientists or journalists.