A Web of Truth

Bunny Greenhouse, who questioned an "emergency" Army Corps of Engineers contract to a Halliburton subsidiary, discusses her subsequent demotion before a Senate panel. (Dennis Cook -- AP)

Bunny's older sister grew up to be one of the first black professors at Louisiana State University, holding a doctorate in linguistics and literature of Chaucer. An older brother got his doctorate and taught at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Her kid brother, Elvin -- Elvin Hayes -- grew up to score 27,000 points in the National Basketball Association, lead the Washington Bullets to their 1978 title and be named, at the end of the century, as one of the best 50 athletes to ever play the game.

"My father always taught me to be strong and have dignity, to not have to bow down or have anyone run over you," he once told a Dallas newspaper, summing up the family creed.

So it stands to reason that Bunny was not only valedictorian of her high school class, not only a magna cum laude graduate of Southern in three years (with a degree in math), but she also went on to get three master's degrees over the years -- in business management from the University of Central Texas, in engineering management from George Washington University and in national resources strategy from the National Defense University at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

She married an Army man, Al Greenhouse. She taught math and, during the lightning-rod year of local integration, came back to teach at her hometown high school. She was the first black teacher the white students had ever seen.

"At the time, I didn't quite know what to make of a black person who didn't have a hoe in their hand," remembers Miriam Lane Davey, a white student of Greenhouse's that year, 1968. "She had been somewhere else, she was cosmopolitan, she was sophisticated. It really changed my viewpoint. . . . Later on, when I saw Claire Huxtable [the wife on "The Cosby Show"], I thought she was just like Mrs. Greenhouse."

Greenhouse, like her famous kid brother, didn't have problems with self-confidence as an adult and, like her kid brother, didn't have a problem with letting others know that. When a reporter asks for her rsum, she hands over a 32-page document.

"The Hayeses were different ," she says now, proud. "They were raised different."

It's not clear who she means different from , but it is clear that she means they were exceptional, and Greenhouse would hew to little touches of refinement over the years. She is broad-shouldered, elegant, devoutly Christian. She often refers to herself in the third person. She enunciates "math" as mathematics ; "again" as agayn .

She followed Al in his career as an Army procurement official, and after 16 years as a teacher, entered government service. She started as a mere GS-5, near the bottom of the scale, specialized in the minutiae of contracting. She worked insane hours, attended endless job-improvement seminars, raised three children and climbed the government ladder, working at the Pentagon and for the Army.

In 1997, it all came together -- Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard hired her as one of the top civilians in the Corps of Engineers. Her position was the principal assistant responsible for contracting, or the PARC. She oversaw the management of billions of dollars. The job elevated her into the Senior Executive Service, the very top level of the federal government's 1.8-million-employee pyramid.

Ballard hired her, he has said, because she was "one of the most professional people I've ever met." As the first black director of the Corps, he also wanted her to break up the "good old boys' " network of informal contracting arrangements at the Corps, he said, to professionalize the agency.

Greenhouse was an instant success. She handled the budgets, conducted workshops, gave speeches, produced a newsletter, developed proposals for ways to save tens of millions of dollars, work records show.