Just weeks after graduating from high school and being voted "The Girl Most Likely to Get Her Picture on a Wheaties Box" by the members of her class, my daughter Debbie found out she was pregnant.
Things got hard right away. Plans for college vaporized. There were long discussions of options. Worst, the boy she'd loved and dated since her sophomore year was overwhelmed by events. He started dating one of Debbie's good friends. A soap opera of events followed. There was lots of crying and worrying.
But miracles come in all kinds of situations. Teddy, the first miracle was born in February 1996. Debbie brought him home. Soon Martin started coming around to see his son. He and Debbie talked. Things developed through lots of talking, arguing, crying and hugging.
Now Teddy was almost two and walking down the aisle of St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Martin, his father, and the man Debbie loved, stood at the head of aisle, looking handsome and charming.
Debbie and I started down the aisle toward him. Debbie was nervous. I tried to set her at ease. This was easy because I kept getting out of step with her and the music. She started laughing.
I wasn't just nervous because it was Debbie's wedding. I still wasn't sure about Martin. I wasn't sure I could trust him even though I'd seen how much he loved Debbie and Teddy. I didn't quite trust him yet.
As we came to the front of the church, I leaned over to Debbie. Partly to break the tension and partly because it was an honest sentiment, I whispered in her ear, "If he hurts you, I'll kill him." She laughed out loud.
Trust is a funny thing. We trust when we need others to do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. It may be because we don't have the knowledge, or the opportunity, or the information or the time, but we cannot do for ourselves, and so we trust others.
When I was about ten or eleven, my best friend Ray and I did something we knew wasn't right. I don't even remember now what it was that we did. I do remember that we wanted to set things right and we didn't know how. We were scared to ask our parents.
Ray suggested we talk to the priest at the local Catholic parish. I wasn't sure. "Come on, Wally," Ray said, "He's a priest. You can trust him."
It turned out that we could. The priest helped us sort things out, like countless priests have helped countless other people over the centuries. But I wonder if we'd have gone to that priest today, after all the headlines about the pedophile priests and church cover-ups. Trust, you see, is a fragile thing.
Despite the nature of the headlines, the big issue is not that there are priests who are pedophiles. There will always be pedophiles. They will always gravitate to places where adults have privileged relationships with young people. There is no persuasive evidence that there are more of them in the Roman Catholic Church than in any other church.
The acts of the pedophile priests were indeed breeches of trust, but they were not the worst. The real sin is the Church's breech of trust. Instead of finding help for many priests with problems, keeping them away from temptation, and helping their victims, Bishops moved the pedophiles quietly from one parish to another. It was almost like instead of saying, "Go and sin no more," the Church was saying, "Just keep quiet. Here's another opportunity."
Why? Surely there wasn't someone down at the Chancery Office thinking, "We'll move him over to such-and-such parish. Then he can abuse different children." The answer, I think lies in the human desire to avoid embarrassment coupled with some warped idea of "higher good."
Most of the time when folks do bad things, they do them for what they think are good reasons. I'm sure the officials who acted to move pedophiles from one parish to another thought they were protecting the church and idea of the priesthood. For them, at least at that moment, the victim was less important than the institution. The future victims were less real than the threat of embarrassment.
The greater the trust, the easier it is to abuse. Executives at Enron had a track record of success. They were held up as models of excellence. They led the company to phenomenal growth in share price. That share price, in turn, put money in their pockets and in the retirement plans of their employees.
At some point though, they started to fudge results. Nobody intended it to last. It was just for this quarter. After all it was important to maintain the confidence of investors. The investors had to keep trusting Enron or the share price would drop.
There were other incentives to cheat just a little, just for now. There were contractual obligations tied to results and share price. And let's not forget bonuses for key executives. It was never intended to be permanent.
But then there was another quarter, and another. The top folks at Enron began propping up their Potemkin Village results. The façade mattered. That's what people saw.
This is called "managing earnings." Former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt defined earnings management as the practice of having "earnings reports reflect the desires of management rather than the underlying financial performance of the company."
Enron wasn't alone. In 1998 Business Week reported that 12% of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) had managed earnings at the request of their superiors. Another 55% were asked to do this, but said they refused. In 1999 CFO Magazine reported that more than half of CFOs felt pressure to manage earnings.
Once you have lied and gotten away with it, it gets easier and easier to do it again. Every time you get away with it, you've added another stick to the pile of belief that you'll always get away with it. Every time you have to do a little bit more to make the lie work and every time it's more dangerous to get caught.
After a while you're lying as a matter of habit and you're lying to everyone. Even as they were scurrying for the anchor ropes and liquidating their own shares of Enron stock, top executives were assuring the market and their employees that everything was just fine. As they socked away cash, employees who trusted them watched their jobs and retirement savings turn to junk.
My friend, George, owns stocks. He doesn't have a gigantic portfolio that makes him the favorite of his local broker. He's not a day trader, buying and selling at the click of a mouse. Instead, he's got a comfortable portfolio where he's put most of his retirement savings.
We were talking the other day about the Enron situation. "I don't know who to trust," George said. "The companies lie to you and the auditors and brokerage firms let them get away with it."
Today, more Americans own stock than ever before. Like George, they don't know who to trust either.
When I was in the Marines and two guys made a bet on something, they often got someone to hold the money until the winner could be determined. They didn't really trust each other, but they did trust a neutral third party. We used to be able to do that in business. We used to be able to trust outside audit firms and analysts.
We can't do that any more, though. In the last decade or so, accounting firms have moved more and more into consulting work. At Enron, audit fees and consulting fees were about equal. What resulted was a conflict of interest.
There's another kind of conflict of interest over at the investment and brokerage houses. There, supposedly independent analysts are rewarded based on how they help the investment banking business of the firm. Good reports on investment banking client firms help boost stock price. So there's pressure on the analysts to produce good reports on client firms.
The SEC has issued new rules for analysts. They really don't do much. Most do little more than encourage analysts not to do bad things. Others call for more kinds of disclosure. But there are few clear rules that would be easy to enforce.
There's lots of talk now about reforming things, but unless the conflicts of interest are barred and unless it's crystal clear what constitutes a conflict of interest, things aren't likely to change much. Which leaves investors like George with no one to trust for good information.
Trust is a magical thing. Trust enables us to have productive relationships. It takes away worry and let's us concentrate on what we need to do. Betrayal changes that in a heartbeat. That betrayal has happened and now we have to begin the long road back to trust.
Once people have had their trust betrayed, it takes a long time for them to trust again. That's true whether they've quit trusting the Church or corporate management or auditors and analysts. When they're convinced to trust, it's actions that convince them, not regulations or high-sounding statements.
Martin didn't say much to me when he started coming by to visit Debbie and Teddy. He didn't have to. I could see how he acted. I could see how Debbie and Teddy felt when he was around. Watching him, I started to trust, but only a little bit at first.
Over the years since he and Debbie have been married I've watched more. He and Debbie have worked at their relationship. I've watched Martin work hard at being a good husband and father. Over time, I've trusted him more. But back at the church in 1997 that was all in the future.
"If he hurts you, I'll kill him." Debbie laughed out loud, then squeezed my arm and gently pushed me toward my place in the pew.
"It'll be OK, Daddy," she said, flashing that Wheaties-box smile. "Trust me."
This feature appeared on 20 May 2002
