By Merrie Spaeth, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
I didn't know.
That's what we've been hearing for several years. Whatever went wrong - the person in charge saying, "I didn't know about it so it's not my fault."
I, for one, am sick of this excuse. It's always been popular with kids. The broken lamp at the party? I didn't know anything about it. But when you got to college, graduated and became an adult, the idea used to be that you accepted responsibility.
The "I didn't know" excuse became really popular with the rash of celebrity CEO's whose companies went down the tube on their watch. Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling of Enron - they didn't know anything about the hundreds of millions of dollars their CFO and his colleagues stashed off-shore. Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom? He didn't know anything about his CFO's cooking the books.
Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth: he didn't know anything. His CFO was also engaged in duplicity. What's with these CFO's? Are they not only all con men but leading secret lives.
Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the U.N., also never suspected there were any problems with the 'oil for food' program with Iraq. And it never crossed his mind to wonder where his son's funds were coming from.
Here in North Texas, we see the superintendents of Grapevine-Carrollton and who didn't know anything about steroid use by their athletes.
Our police higher-ups didn't suspect anything in the fake drug scandal; that the same set of facts presented themselves over and over didn't seem strange to them. Why bother to check?
The latest claimant who didn't know is former CIA director George Tenet. He told the commission investigating the nation's intelligence capabilities that he had no idea that there were questions about the reliability of the defector from Iraq who supposedly had information that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
This is bunk. One of the responsibilities of the guy at the top is to ask a lot of questions, and we hope he - or she - has enough experience to sense when he's not getting the right story. Law enforcement is inherently both supportive and suspicious of informants or defectors. They have great information but they also have this nasty habit of telling investigators what they think the investigator wants to hear.
Back to what we expect from the person at the top: we expect them to want to know, to ask questions, to sense what's going on. Okay.
Maybe a CEO can't know if a mail clerk is embezzling paper clips, but given the magnitude of these incidents - they should have known.
Interestingly, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, just was deposed as part of the investigation into insurance giant AIG. A Berkshire company did a suspect deal with AIG. Buffett was very refreshing. He said he realized he should have asked more questions and it was a failure on his part.
Thank heavens one guy at the top is willing to admit this. Will others learn?
Merrie Spaeth is a communications consultant based in Dallas. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.