Play the Enron Blame Game!
Who destroyed America's seventh-largest company? Point the finger at your favorite culprit.
Who destroyed Enron? It depends who you ask.
Enron's board of directors faults Arthur Andersen's sketchy bookkeeping. Andersen passes the bucks (billions of them) to rogue auditor David Duncan. Duncan fingers Enron's management for hiding losses in dubious off-the-books subsidiaries. Enron management whacks former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow for setting up the sleazy subsidiaries. Fastow shrugs the responsibility up the hierarchy to former CEO Kenneth Lay. Lay complains that business journalists are persecuting Enron. Those journalists, in turn, push some guilt for the Enron debacle onto giddy stock analysts who didn't understand the company they were touting. The stock analysts hide behind the excuse of the dot-com boom, which befuddled everyone. … And that's not to mention President Bush, Congress, the bankers, the lawyers, and so many other potential culprits.
The blame-passing is enough to whiplash the most seasoned scandal-monger. No one can keep track of who's been accused of what—which is why Slate brings you the Enron Blame Game.
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(The game requires Macromedia Flash, which you can download free here.)
David Plotz is the Editor of Slate. He's the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank and Good Book. He appears on Slate's Political Gabfest.
Photographs of (starting at top, left to right): Lawrence Kudlow by Tom Reed/AP World Wide Photos; Kenneth Lay by Kamal Kishore/Reuters; David Duncan by Larry Downing/Reuters; Arthur Levitt by Brian Snyder/Reuters; Sherron Watkins by Ho/Reuters; President Bush by Win McNamee/Reuters; Enron logo by Richard Carson/Reuters; terminated Enron employees by Richard Carson/Reuters; Dick Cheney by Win McNamee/Reuters; Vanna White by DouglasKirkland/Corbis; Bill Clinton by Thierry Roge/Reuters; Jeffrey Skilling by Robert Visser/Corbis Sygma; Andrew Fastow by Mike Segar/Reuters; Kmart sign by Joe Skipper/Reuters; John McCain by Win McNamee/Reuters; Golden Gate Bridge by Andy Kuno/Reuters; Bill Murray by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis.



