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So Widme kept all her 401(k) retirement funds in Enron stock, even though a Paine Webber accounts manager had warned her to diversify. “But there was Ken Lay with his shitty-ass grin.”

Widme doesn’t blame Lay for her lost 401(k). Like many Enron employees, she blames herself. “What a fool I was,” she said. “What fools we all were.”

Widme has an unusual habit of stopping as she talks. Not pausing, as if she’s weighing her words, but stopping, gathering the strength to say them. She stopped a lot while talking about what happened after Enron acquired the company she worked for. “Ken Lay and Skilling inflated the value of the stock. Ken Lay told us what a great company this was. The papers were full of stories about this great company. And we believed them. They walked away with millions of our money, and we believed them.

“Portland General Electric. Who would think that while you were working at this company that is one hundred years old this would happen to you?”

Kate Widme is a single parent. She patched together jobs and the child support she got from her ex-husband to raise a son who is now a pilot on the Columbia. In 1987 she landed a good-pay temporary position at the Trojan nuclear-power plant. When Trojan was shut down by Oregon’s voters, she moved on to another temporary gig. Then she got lucky. In 1997 she got a permanent job with PGE. She began working “four tens” for Portland General Electric, followed by night shifts and weekends at the Riverview.

The work at PGE’s recycling warehouse in Portland was dirty and physically demanding: lifting rolls of cable, porcelain insulators, and wooden cross-arms. It was also fifty miles from home. “We had to get up at three-thirty to make it to Portland by six,” she said. But permanent employees got 401(k) accounts with matching company contributions. Widme moonlighted as a waitress so she could make the maximum monthly contribution to her retirement account and still have enough money to live on. “It was a real drain. Working a ten-hour day and driving to your night job. . . . But for me, it was a great deal. I would be set for life. That 401(k) was my retirement. My future.” When two slots on the Trojan plant’s decommissioning team opened up, Widme and her friend Diane Tillotson ended their daily grind commuting to Portland and signed on as rad-waste handlers. The work was still dirty and physically demanding, but it was close to home.

At Trojan it was all Enron all the time. “One guy always had the stock ticker running on a computer screen,” Widme said. “He would shout out stock quotes two, three, four, five times a day, and everyone would cheer. A guy named Ollie had eight hundred thousand dollars in his 401(k). He would push people. He was telling everyone, ‘This stock is going crazy!’ ”

Then shares valued at almost $100 fell to $80, then $60, then $40. Enron management locked employees out of their accounts. Those who held only Enron stock were wiped out. “I was destroyed,” Widme said. “I had migraines. I had ulcers. I was a mess.” No one she knows went to a single session with the grief counselors PGE provided. “No one wanted anything to do with the company,” she said. “I found my own shrink.”

Kathryn Widme admits she doesn’t have the greatest Enron horror story: “I didn’t lose the house on the hill.” She lost only $75,000. But it was all the retirement she had. It was $5,000 annual bonuses, $1,000 special bonuses, and tips earned during night shifts at the Riverview—all deposited in her 401(k). It was doing the numbers and calculating when her account would hit $500,000.

Until the bottom fell out.

It was so silly. Why didn’t he just say Ken Lay was a strong supporter and gave him a half-million dollars and is a good friend, and he’s really sorry Ken’s in these terrible circumstances?

—ANN RICHARDS ON GEORGE BUSH AND KEN LAY

There were dinners for Lay at the White House during the first few weeks after Dubya Bush took the oath of office. And lunch at the White House the day after the inauguration.

There had to be. Governor