Enron: An Interview with The Journalist Who Broke The Story

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
What was it like to hear about the JFK assassination?
Or America's triumph over Hitler? We're seeing Queen at Live Aid. Our past is a collection of stories that bring us to now. Welcome to the Eyewitness History Podcast, where we view history through the eyes of the people that watch the events that shaped our world. Here's your host, Josh Cohen, and these are their stories.

**Josh Cohen** (0:32)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Eyewitness History Podcast. This episode we have the privilege of speaking with renowned journalist Bethany McLean, whose investigative prowess brought to light one of the most significant financial scandals in history, the Enron scandal. Enron, once a titan in the energy industry, collapsed in 2001 due to corporate fraud and accounting manipulation shaking the business world to its core. It was Bethany McLean's incisive reporting that played a pivotal role in uncovering the complexities behind Enron's downfall. Her seminal article is Enron Overpriced, written for Fortune, raised early questions about the company's practices, sending shockwaves through the financial community.
Her subsequent book, The Smartest Guys in the Room, which she coauthored with Peter Elkind, offered an in-depth expose of the scandal's intricacies, revealing how Enron's house of cards crumbled under the weight of deception. Join us as we delve into Bethany McLean's perspective on the Enron saga, her investigative journey and the enduring lessons from this cautionary tale of corporate greed and ethical breaches. And now I give you Bethany McLean.
Okay, I'm here with Bethany McLean. Bethany, thanks for coming on the podcast.

**Bethany McLean** (1:45)
Thanks for having me on.

**Josh Cohen** (1:46)
Yeah, it's a pleasure. I'm really excited to speak with you. I want to discuss, obviously, your career, Enron, the book, Smartest Guys in the Room.
Before we do, please tell us briefly who you are and what you do.

**Bethany McLean** (1:58)
So my name is Bethany McLean. I'm a long-time journalist, good heavens. I guess I've been a journalist for almost 30 years now.
I write mainly for Vanity Fair, at least in the past, and I've written a bunch of books.

**Josh Cohen** (2:11)
Excellent.
Thank you. I'd love to wind the clock back then, Bethany. I'd love to talk about how you got into journalism and reporting on business specifically. I understand that you were previously a banking analyst with Goldman Sachs.

**Bethany McLean** (2:23)
I was. So as you and I were just talking about, my group at Hibbing, which some of your listeners may actually know where that is.
Most people don't, unless they're fans of Bob Dylan. So I didn't have grand plans of being a young investment banker because I didn't know what investment banking was growing up in Hibbing. The only banks that were around were, I think Merchants and Miner State Bank.
Anyway, then I was a math major in college and I guess I thought I would go on to get my math PhD, except I figured out sometime during the course of getting my undergraduate degree in math that I was actually not very good at math. You can fake it for a while in math and then it's almost more like art than it is like anything else. Either you could do it or you can't and you can't continue to persevere through it or fake it. You just can't. And I couldn't. So I ended up in banking after college, not out of a desire to be a banker, rather because my parents were pretty clear, you're never moving home. You're not coming back to him. No, that was it. They offered me a job and I moved to New York. And I guess I probably did always harbor a dream of being a writer, but I grew up in a pretty practical family. Both my parents were scientists and so the idea of pursuing a writing career wouldn't really have been acceptable. But after three years of banking, I was about to go to business school and I thought, well, if I go to business school, I'm gonna graduate with all this debt and then I'm definitely going on to a career in business because I'll have to. And so if I ever wanted to try something else, I guess now is the time. And it was not unheard of back then. You can get an entry level job in journalism without having any experience as a journalist because the big glossy magazines which existed at the time, like Fortune magazine, where I ended up getting a job, had fact checkers. And so you could get in the door as someone who checked facts without any writing experience. And because I had these three years of banking, they figured I don't care if she can write or not, she can check facts. And so that was how I got my job.