Photo

In the 1990s, Carly Fiorina, third from left, oversaw Lucent Technologies’ I.P.O., then the largest by an American company.Credit New York Stock Exchange

As Carly Fiorina has risen in the polls over the last week, there is renewed focus on her controversial tenure as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Yet her career at Lucent Technologies has been treated as little more than a footnote. It shouldn’t be.

“My story — from secretary to C.E.O. — is only possible in this country,” Mrs. Fiorina likes to say on the hustings.

In between her stint as a receptionist for a real estate company in the late 1970s and her being named Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive in 1999, Mrs. Fiorina worked for nearly 20 years at AT&T and then Lucent, the telephone giant’s spun-off equipment business.

It was at Lucent — Latin for “light-bearing” — that Mrs. Fiorina made her name, running several of its divisions and overseeing its successful initial public offering, which at the time was the largest I.P.O in American history. In 1998, she appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine, ranked No. 1 on its inaugural “Most Powerful Women in Business” list.

Yet her celebrated tenure at Lucent has been clouded by what happened two years after she left in 1999. The once-highflying business worth more than $250 billion at its peak nearly collapsed in the face of an accounting scandal and the telecommunications bust. The company laid off 50,000 employees in 2001 alone. Today the company, after merging with Alcatel of France, is worth only about $10 billion.

Lucent, like some its rivals, artificially burnished its financial performance through vendor financing — lending money to customers so they could buy its products. In 2004, the company settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused it of perpetrating a $1.1 billion accounting fraud.

“It’s unlikely she would have been considered for the HP job once it became clear that Lucent’s success had more to do with loose credit terms and creative accounting than any reinvention of the company as the Second Coming of Cisco,” Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard professor who studied Mrs. Fiorina’s tenure, said in “Backfire: Carly Fiorina’s High-Stakes Battle for the Soul of Hewlett-Packard,” a book by the financial journalist Peter Burrows.

While Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t responsible for the accounting fraud — she was never accused of being involved in any financial shenanigans — she did work with, and helped support, some of the employees who came under legal scrutiny for acts that took place after she left. One of those executives was Nina Aversano, a senior executive at Lucent who played a role in the company’s aggressive sales and accounting tactics. Mrs. Fiorina, somewhat famously inside of Lucent, literally kissed the feet of Ms. Aversano on stage in front of hundreds of employees after a particularly good quarter.

Some former Lucent employees, however, say it is unfair to blame Mrs. Fiorina for Ms. Aversano’s actions or for the financial prestidigitation, which were authorized by Lucent’s chief executive, not by Mrs. Fiorina. At least one former executive, Kathy Fitzgerald, who ran the company’s communications department, recalled that Mrs. Fiorina was hesitant about using vendor financing and while she was there “it was constrained,” suggesting the practice become worse after her departure.

“To place blame on Carly for anything that happened at the company after she left is completely irresponsible and absolutely ridiculous,” Leslie Shedd, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Fiorina, said.

They also note that Lucent’s near-death experience occurred alongside an industrywide collapse that sent companies like WorldCom and Global Crossing into bankruptcy. By comparison, Lucent emerged from the telecom bust in decent shape.

“All of the success the company had was bigger than she was and all the failure was bigger than her, too,” said Lisa Endlich Heffernan, author of “Optical Illusions: Lucent and the Crash of Telecom.”

Still, Scott Woolley of Fortune magazine wrote a deeply reported story in 2010 during Ms. Fiorina’s unsuccessful Senate campaign in California that detailed a questionable deal she championed. Mr. Woolley focused on a vendor-financed transaction with a small company, PathNet, a sale that was valued at as much as $2.1 billion, though PathNet had only $1.6 million in annual revenue. It later filed for bankruptcy.

And Ms. Endlich Heffernan’s book connects Mrs. Fiorina to two other failures while she was at Lucent. In one, Mrs. Fiorina was assigned to run Lucent’s consumer products business. Perhaps that division was always destined for failure — it included Lucent’s handset business just as the world was pivoting to mobile communications. But Mrs. Fiorina orchestrated a joint venture with the Dutch electronics giant Philips Electronics that turned out to be a mess, one that she later told The Wall Street Journal was the biggest mistake of her career.

Then there was Lucent’s 1999 acquisition of Ascend Communications for more than $22 billion. That deal may go down in history as one of the worst. Again, however, Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t in charge at Lucent. Was she consulted on the transaction? Yes. But she didn’t try to object to it.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a critical column of Mrs. Fiorina’s time at Hewlett-Packard. Since she was never the C.E.O. of Lucent, assessing her career there is more difficult. The leadership of Lucent fell to Henry B. Schacht (a former New York Times board member) and later to Richard McGinn, who largely oversaw its ascent and demise. Regardless, her senior role at Lucent deserves continued focus as the country debates her presidential bona fides.

Perhaps it will remain an open question whether Donald Trump was right when he said during the debate last week: “You know, if you look at what happened at Lucent under her tenure, it was not a good picture.”