Kurt Eichenwald (Courtesy
Broadway Books)

Kurt Eichenwald is the author of Conspiracy of Fools, a detailed chronicle of the Enron scandal. Eichenwald is a 17-year veteran of the New York Times, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism and a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. His last book, The Informant, is currently being adapted into a major motion picture.


Thomas Lang: Your book’s press release hypes your last book, The Informant, as “a gripping corporate thriller with more plot twists than a John Grisham novel.” And, like a John Grisham novel, this new book contains detailed blow-by-blow accounts of high-level meetings populated by panicky executives, up to and including the specific sink a certain executive chose to throw up in as the debacle unfolded. How did you go about reconstructing those conversations? And why should the reader trust that your reconstructions are accurate, when you don’t identify your sources?


Kurt Eichenwald: What I find so interesting in that [question] is that the most difficult reporting that I ever do is in these kinds of reconstructions. The other day I was at an event where a person who I interviewed [for the book] attended. It was a government official. He was commenting to people there that he’d never been through an interview like the one he’d experienced for this book. He started off telling me he was only involved in these events for ten minutes, that he shows up in the book for the equivalent of ten minutes, but that the interview lasted over two hours. The way it happens is simply asking questions, circling back, checking documents, finding out [what] things line up with each other, and, ultimately, getting the most detailed reconstruction you possibly can.


… [W]hat I’m doing, I’m checking people’s memories against the documents. I’m checking people’s memories against other people’s memories. I’m checking people’s memories against all of their records, and also against whatever they told me two-and-a-half hours ago when we spoke about the same thing. Ultimately, what I end up with is ten times more accurate than paraphrase, which is what most journalism relies on. The reason that it’s more accurate is because I’ve had to delve into it to this degree.


It’s funny, what I’ve found in having these kind of interviews is that there is some recess in people’s brain that stores information because as you keep bearing down and bearing down, probably in about an hour-and-a-half you start tapping into memories that people seem to not have been able to access earlier on. You could always say, “Well, they are being manufactured out of the torture of going through the interview.” But, in truth, it’s those memories that always seem to be confirmed in other interviews with other people. And the consistency of what people talk about is why I have a great deal of confidence that this is what happened. That, plus the fact that every time I’ve done this, I’ve had people who are participants in the events say to me “that’s what happened,” or “that’s the way it went.”


Why should people trust it?


Unlike a lot of reconstructions, and unlike a lot of journalism where we just say “sources said,” you can flip to the back of this book and you will see things like the FBI 302’s from the ongoing investigation, grand jury testimony, people’s personal diaries, schedule books, people’s personal emails, documents that you couldn’t get through a [Freedom of Information Act] request, documents that haven’t appeared in a news article. Virtually every scene has documentation like that backing it up. And so when people are wondering, “how can I trust it,” you can turn around and go “This kind of documentation is not easy to get. Not only that but this kind of documentation doesn’t stand behind anything else I’ve read [on Enron], so even though this is an exceedingly detailed rendition it is the most heavily-documented rendition, involving documents that other people do not have …”


I find it so unbelievably frustrating … people who’ve never done this … think that I’m just making things up. Have any of them ever sat down with someone for 72 hours? When you have a 72-hour interview you’re obviously talking about a lot of material [to get through] to get people to sit through these [interviews.]


TL: Was there any one standard or any one thing that would tip you off that someone wasn’t telling the truth? How did you test their [statements]?