Testifying Before Congress Isn’t What It Used to Be
Legislators who don’t legislate but do profit from grandstanding are destroying a Washington ritual.
Rather be doing … anything else.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
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If you’re a kingpin of business or finance, getting called to testify before a congressional committee has never really been good news. Banker J.P. Morgan’s family and friends believed that relentless questioning by House Banking Committee counsel Samuel Untermyer at the so-called Pujo Committee hearings in December 1912 drove Morgan to his death a few months later. When it was J.P. Morgan Jr.’s turn in 1933 to testify before the Senate Banking Committee and its special counsel Ferdinand Pecora, the experience doesn’t seem to have killed him (he lasted until 1943), but it did leave him humiliated. Same with the seven tobacco company CEOs who testified in 1994, under questioning from then-US Representative Ron Wyden, that they didn’t think nicotine was addictive, and former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who showed up before the Senate Commerce Committee in 2002 only to plead the Fifth. And so on.