Overlooked financial anecdotes from an early Bush-era tell-all.

Like most tell-alls, The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's eminently readable chronicle of the brief but contentious tenure of Paul O'Neill, George W. Bush's first treasury secretary, is a product of its timing. Published barely a year after O'Neill's resignation in December 2002, it was marketed very much as a book about the war. It came packaged with the requisite newsmaking revelation—that Dick Cheney had been determined to make overthrowing Saddam Hussein a top priority on Day 1—and used O'Neill's position of power as a window into the policymaking process (or stunning lack thereof) in the Bush White House.

Yet something else was going on during those years: a wave of outrageous multibillion-dollar accounting scandals, beginning with the rapid implosion of Enron in 2002, that threw the entire practice of financial reporting—and the ethics practiced by management of big firms throughout a huge array of industries—into doubt. (It also sent the Dow plunging below 7,600 and money managers piling into "safer" fixed-income investments, like mortgage-backed securities.) Maybe you remember it, but you'd be forgiven for being preoccupied by the war on terrorism—it certainly sold a lot more books than the accounting scandals. The stock market quickly recovered.

Which is why O'Neill bristled at the Bush administration's initial stance on the scandals, what then-adviser Larry Lindsey called the "do nothing" policy, whereby companies would be punished for their negligence on Wall Street. O'Neill didn't think Wall Street had enough institutional memory for that and wanted to criminalize gross negligence, a position that made him a lot of enemies in executive suites.

And little wonder, according to a mind-blowing passage in the book in which O'Neill tries to reason with 19 financial-services CEOs composing the Financial Services Forum at the elite trade organization's annual luncheon at the Ritz-Carlton. "Simply knowing what's going on in your company, and being responsible for it," he told the audience, which included the current occupant of O'Neill's post, Hank Paulson, "is a standard no one in this room would have any trouble meeting."

The room wasn't so sure.

"I would resign rather than be expected to know everything that's going on in my company. It's just not tenable," said an unnamed financial-services CEO. "That's what I have a board for, that 's what I have a chief financial officer for. I simply can't be held responsible for what all of those people do."