The former statesman, who in addition to crafting the Reagan
administration’s foreign policy also served as secretary of labor and
secretary of the treasury under President Nixon, had joined the
Theranos board of directors in July 2011 and become one of
Elizabeth’s biggest champions. A distinguished fellow at the Hoover
Institution, the think tank housed on the Stanford campus, Shultz
remained a revered and influential figure in Republican circles despite
his advancing age (he was ninety-two). That made him a friend of the
Journal’s famously conservative editorial page, to which he
occasionally contributed op-eds.
During a visit to the paper’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters to
discuss climate change with its editorial board in 2012, Shultz had
dropped mention of a secretive and reclusive Silicon Valley startup
founder who he felt certain was going to revolutionize medicine with
her technology. Intrigued, the Journal’s long-serving editorial page
editor, Paul Gigot, had offered to send one of his writers to interview
the mysterious wunderkind when she felt ready to break her silence
and introduce her invention to the world. A year later, Shultz had
called back with word that Elizabeth was ready and Gigot had handed
the assignment to Joseph Rago, a member of the Journal’s editorial
board who had written extensively about health care. The resulting
piece ran in the Weekend Interview column, a fixture of the Saturday
Journal’s opinion pages.
Elizabeth had picked a safe place for her coming-out party. The
Weekend Interview, which rotated among the members of Gigot’s
staff, wasn’t meant to be hard-hitting investigative journalism. Rather,
it was what its name implied: an interview whose tone was usually
friendly and nonconfrontational. Moreover, her message of bringing
disruption to an old and inefficient industry was bound to play well
with the Journal editorial page’s pro-business, anti-regulation ethos.
Nor did Rago, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for tough editorials
dissecting Obamacare, have any reason to suspect that what Elizabeth
was telling him wasn’t true. During his visit to Palo Alto, she had
shown him the miniLab and the six-blade side by side and he had
volunteered for a demonstration, receiving what appeared to be