The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind Read Free Book Online

crisis. The president capped the year by announcing that because of the crisis, he wouldn’t light the national Christmas tree.
    But the Interior Department’s new deputy undersecretary of energy wasn’t around long enough to effect policy. Concluding that the energy crisis was bound to mean big changes for the staid old pipeline industry, Lay decided the time was ripe to exit the government and head into the world of business. In September 1973, less than a year after he arrived at the Interior Department, Lay put out a feeler to W. J. (Jack) Bowen, CEO of a midsize pipeline company called Florida Gas, whom he’d met at a public hearing in his capacity as deputy undersecretary. “As you know, I have been involved in energy policy making in Washington for the past two and one-half years,” Lay wrote, using Interior Department stationery. “I feel it is now time I begin thinking about returning to the private sector and resuming my career in business. I would be most interested in being considered for possible job opportunities with Florida Gas Company. The natural-
gas industry, obviously, faces some very difficult challenges in the months and years ahead, and I would like to be in a position in industry to help meet these challenges.”
    Bowen, a West Point graduate, met with Lay in Washington then brought him and Judie down for a visit to the company’s headquarters in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park. Bowen also personally called his references: Lay’s old boss at Exxon, a rear admiral in the Pentagon, and, of course, Pinkney Walker. Bowen took notes on their comments. “Never had a better man technically. Would like to have—tops!” declared the admiral. “Head’s screwed on straight,” said Walker. “Think a great deal of him. . . . Good worker. Very smart,” added the Exxon man, who went on to offer the only cautionary note: “Maybe too ambitious.” By year’s end, Lay was in Winter Park as vice president for corporate planning, with a starting salary of $38,000 a year plus 2,500 stock options.
    Bowen left the next year for Transco Energy, a much bigger pipeline company in Houston. That only accelerated Lay’s rapid ascent. By 1976 he was president of the pipeline division at Florida Gas; by 1979, president of the entire company. For the first time in his life, Ken Lay was flush. He owned a $300,000 house, joined the Winter Park Racquet Club, and bought a beach condo on the Florida coast and a ski condo in Utah. In 1980 Lay made $268,000.
    His marriage, however, was falling apart. The preacher’s son was carrying on an affair with his secretary, a divorced mother of three named Linda Phillips Herrold, who would become his second wife. Newspaper profiles later described Lay’s divorce as “amicable.” And indeed, in the years after his split, Lay established a remarkably cordial relationship with his first wife. Over the years, Lay even paid for Judie and their two kids to accompany him, Linda, and Linda’s children on family ski trips and cruises. When friends showed up for the Lays’ Christmas parties in Aspen, they were startled to discover
both
of his wives there, mixing amiably. Says one friend: “I was expecting to see Judie in Ken’s Christmas card.”
    But if the aftermath was friendly—a testament to Lay’s ability to smooth over any conflict—the split itself was anything but. Lay began talking to Judie about separating in late 1980. About that time he called up his old boss, Transco chairman Jack Bowen, told him he had “domestic problems,” and asked if Bowen had a job for him in Houston. Once again, a key relationship Lay had forged paid off. Bowen, then 57, hired the 39-year-old Lay as Transco’s president—and his heir apparent. In late April 1981 Lay filed for divorce, requesting custody of his two children, just days before officially beginning his new job in Houston. About this time, Linda Herrold was also transferred to Florida Gas’s Houston office.
    Judie