Google Books finds instances of the phrase "the smartest guy/person in the room" from long before it became a popular saying in mainstream U.S. society. Here are six from 1983 or earlier. From a 28-page pamphlet titled "Detroit. Twelfth Street in Perspective" (1967) [snippet view]:
If anyone can salvage a political situation, it is [Jerome] Cavanagh. When men of concern gather in his office, Cavanagh is usually the smartest guy in the room. He is blessed with mental toughness, a sense of humor, and an Irish fatalism which holds that life was never supposed to be that good anyway. At this point in his life, he is like the exciting, undefeated boxer who comes out of the ring from his first great beating.
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No person achieves greatness unless he has maturity in these four essential dimensions of life. Each of us, as we seek to grow in understanding, recognizes that there must be balance in life. It is not enough to be the smartest person in the room, nor is it enough to be "in" with the socially elite. Like a sturdy table, a person must have four underpinnings long enough to reach the ground. dimensions.
"You want to know about Bob Nix?" asks an aide to another Pennsylvania congressman. "Let me start with the good stuff. In meetings, he is incisive, sometimes the smartest person in the room. He'll get right to the heart of something after everyone has been running at the mouth and he'll be able to say what has to be done. If he doesn't know anything about the subject, he says nothing rather than say something dumb. That's the good stuff. The bad stuff is that I've never seen him take leadership on anything. You go into his office and it always seems empty. Nobody seems to be doing anything."
I am not the smartest person in the room but I have been studying what I am supposed to be doing so I know what the law says, and she had not, which means that I constitute an irritation to her because I can correct her when it comes down to what the law says.
There were other occasions when he displayed sparks of temper. For example, he heard that an Air Force brigadier general was downgrading the A-10. Brown at that time was trying to work closely with the Army on the Air Force use of the A-10 for ground support. "He knew," said Dick Ellis, "that if the Army thought the Air Force was not serious about the coordination and usefulness of the A-10, he would be in trouble with Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams. I remember his telling me, 'Get that brigadier up here and I'll have a good piece of him.' But this brigadier, when he came in to see the Chief, was the smartest guy in the room. He had done his homework and knew the details of his position. After the explanation was given of what had actually happened, George cooled off. After he left, George said to me, 'That kid makes sense, doesn't he?'"
These examples suggest that by 1983, the expression "smartest guy/person in the room" was fairly well established in political/business/bureaucratic settings. It did not become a trope in popular culture, however, until it appeared in Broadcast News:
Indeed, without truly understanding the supposed 'smartestguys in the room' who ran Enron, it is impossible to understand how andwhy they did what they did. The excesses and egos of Enron's executiveteam, in particular Chief Operating Officer Jeff Skilling, Chief FinancialOfficer Andy Fastow and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay, their pervertedmanipulation of an era of 'deregulation', and the strange'geek turned Rambo' culture of the company, are revealed throughclever interweaving of news footage, internal corporate videotapes, phonetranscripts and original interviews (post-collapse).
In each of these cases, the smartest guys (or gals), have supposedly found a loophole that no one else has seen that paves the way for success of previously unimaginable heights. For Enron, it was so called \u201Cmark to market accounting\u201D which the company used to book future profits on their balance sheets at the moment a deal was signed, no matter than the actual future profits were as yet unknown. This drove up Enron\u2019s valuation, enriching executives and other employees who held stock options.
While publicly, Enron was being feted as the smartest guys in the room, the reality behind the scenes is that they were consistently performing poorly, and the fraudulent bookkeeping ultimately didn\u2019t hold up against he dedicated scrutiny of the investigative reporters. The company winds up in bankruptcy, the executives in jail.
To this day, Kenneth Lay, the son of a Baptist preacher and friend of President George W. Bush (who affectionately calls him "Kenny Boy"), and his hand-picked CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, deny any wrongdoing. In a telling segment, we learn that the latter's favorite book is The Selfish Gene, a Darwinian manifesto that presents a dog-eat-dog version of human nature. Money is the only thing that counts in Skilling's eyes, and his career demonstrates the kind of ruthlessness that comes from such a philosophy. His mark-to-market accounting worked for far too long and gave him the cockiness to believe that anything was possible for Enron since they were "the smartest guys in the room." The documentary alludes to the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter; the magic tricks of CFO Andy Fastow, who made millions for the company through the use of shell companies to cover up Enron's staggering debt; and the escapades of Lou Pai, a right-hand man for Skilling, a mysterious figure with a penchant for strippers.
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