Confidence Men Part 29

When the threatening e-mails. .h.i.t CFTC in December, Gensler was in full battle mode, negotiating with other members of the commission-two Republicans and, including Gensler, three Democrats-over the controversial issue of how derivatives "bids" could be posted on trading platforms called "swap execution facilities" by a wide array of individuals and firms, and then matched, or answered, by the most attractive offer. Though Wall Street opposed such a change, and their lobbyists had literally been camped in front of CFTC for months, it was a feature that, more than any other, would push the shadowy derivatives market into sunlight. Trading derivatives would start to look more like trading stocks on the NYSE. In fact, creating free, open, and transparent access to the platforms is at the heart of the "trading" function Gensler fought fiercely to get into Dodd-Frank and that he said were nonnegotiable. But, that day, he was forced to negotiate, in order to get the votes he needed to have the specifics of the trading rules firmly delineated. Then a deputy pa.s.sed a printed copy of an e-mail to him: "You can tell that f.u.c.king corrupt piece of Goldman Sachs s.h.i.+t (G.G.) I am coming after him as well," McCrudden had written to a senior attorney at CFTC. Soon, after the FBI was alerted, a security guard appeared at the back door of the CFTC hearing room.

Gensler got up from his chairman's seat, walked to the back of the room, shook the hand of the guard-an African American woman-and thanked her for coming.

A few days before, at the White House Hanukkah party, Gensler-with one of his daughters in tow-shook the president's hand in the receiving line. Though he had one of the most important jobs in government, they'd scarcely met. But Obama was on cue. "How's the rule writing?"

"Great," Gary said, using the three to five seconds one has to say anything as the line pushed forward. He abruptly added, mostly over his shoulder while moving onward, "But don't let them go after our funding!"

Gensler was, indeed, getting it from all sides. Into January, and especially after the Tucson shooting, he thought frequently about the death threats. Regulation, once a sleepy realm of a government that had lost faith in its capacities, had become the stuff of fierce-and even violent-pa.s.sions.

So he was happy to find out on January 14, the day after the arrest warrant was filed in Manhattan, that McCrudden had been apprehended by the FBI at Newark International Airport. With the arrest, news of the incident was now finally made public, creating plenty of arch comments on financial Web sites about how regulators had, in this era, managed to make themselves targets.

But they are largely unprotected ones-at least in terms of the way the intent of legislation can be thoroughly, and often brilliantly, attacked by an army of lobbyists. Was.h.i.+ngton was still a town where public purpose only rarely managed to outrun private gain.

Gensler often joked that "gazelles fare better in sunlight," and CFTC's response to the onslaught of literally thousands of lobbyists over the past six months from both Wall Street and Fortune 500 companies-the latter not wanting to post collateral at clearinghouses for their hedges-had been to post each lobbyist's name, their interest, and whom they met with at CFTC. At the same time, he managed to give speeches virtually nonstop and testify to Congress, where the House's newly charged Republican majority was already planning to cut his funding and that of other regulators.

Back at CFTC, the security guard, who he said, "was always a comfort to see in the back of the room," was gone: with the arrest she was no longer needed. Gensler's mid-January schedule was jammed with meetings and speeches. He knew now that he'd miss a late-January deadline for a crucial provision to set position limits on trading, something that Democratic lawmakers were hoping would prevent the big investment firms from gaming the oil markets. But Gensler, a driven man who'd run fifty-mile marathons, remained sanguine about the messy but basic soundness of democracy. "Look, progress is always slow, and uneven, but if you manage to be moving in the right direction-creating something a little better than what we had before-the pain is worth it. That's the trick: you've got to learn to love the pain, to own it, to make sure it doesn't kill you. Day by day, year by year, you get stronger."

Up at Dartmouth, Jim Weinstein was fine-tuning his latest outrage. Twelve years ago, Dartmouth and two hospitals that Dartmouth's Atlas identified as leaders in "best practices"-the Mayo Clinic and Utah's Intermountain Medical Center-began to pool data to rigorously test the effectiveness of various medical procedures, a union that helped create continuous improvements of better care at lower cost for all three inst.i.tutions. Adding hospitals to the trio, though, had not been easy. Many didn't want to have to live by the revealing data and the changes in practice that it might portend. By 2009, it was up to six, including the Cleveland Clinic and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania. "The concept, of course, is wherever the data leads, we will follow," Weinstein said, "even if it means forgoing some expensive procedures that are, to be blunt, profitable for our hospitals."

But this was not nearly enough. These hospitals were the ones that Obama, Orszag, and others often cite as models for the rest, ones that have managed to lower costs-for themselves and ultimately the government's insurance programs-while improving care.

What surprised and now agitated Weinstein was that in the past ten months, since the pa.s.sage of health care reform, fifteen more hospitals, a diverse array of inst.i.tutions urban and rural, plush and threadbare, had volunteered to join, with another fifteen lined up behind them.

To organize and integrate the measurement and data collection procedures for this many hospitals, especially some with subpar capacities, would take money. "We didn't go after these guys. They knocked on our door, even when they know that some of the conclusions drawn from this much data might mean they'd have to make major changes in the way they practice medicine."

So for weeks he'd been on the phone to Was.h.i.+ngton. The cost of funding a cooperative with this many hospitals, Weinstein estimated, would cost $300 million across five years, or $60 million per year. "It sounds like a lot," he said, but then he broke down the numbers and the offsetting cost reductions in just a single area, back surgery, where he's one of the country's leading experts. The frequency of back surgery at Dartmouth Hitchc.o.c.k is 2.2 surgeries annually per thousand people; nationally, the frequency is 4.5 per thousand. At Johns Hopkins it's 4.8, and at the Medical Center in Casper, Wyoming, it is 10.5-more than four times Dartmouth's level. Annual funding of $60 million, to include major hospitals that cover 30 million people, would be paid for with savings-roughly about $50 million-on this one procedure. Nationally, bringing spine surgeries in line with Dartmouth's level would save $500 million, annually. "And that's just one procedure," Weinstein exhorts. "But I can't get a call back from Was.h.i.+ngton."

But then he smiled, thinking of Oregon. This was something that always gave him a lift, something he discovered a few years ago that surprised him. Oregon was the first state to pa.s.s a "Death with Dignity Act," in 1994, allowing for physician-a.s.sisted suicides in certain limited cases. Since then, the law had been repealed and reinstated, challenged and, ultimately, affirmed in a 2006 Supreme Court ruling.

Nearly 30 percent of Medicare costs are spent on end-of-life care, a stunning figure considering that most beneficiaries arrive into Medicare at sixty-five and the average life expectancy is seventy-nine. In the last year of life, covered medical costs average nearly $30,000.

But here's what made Weinstein smile, thinking about the ferocious debate in Was.h.i.+ngton. "The Oregon debates, over all these years, helped people see and understand all sides of the issue." Even if they would never consider physician-a.s.sisted suicide, "they began to think more clearly and exercise 'shared-decision making' " in their end-of-life care. "When people learn what they need to know, they often surprise you taking charge of their life. They learn, then they act." The result: Medicare costs in Oregon are some of the lowest in the country. And it's largely because of reduced end-of-life costs. "They learned what the doctors didn't want to tell them," Jim Weinstein said with a chuckle. "That in medicine, less is often more. And you-patient-are in charge, right until the end."

By late January, Alan Krueger had settled back into his office at Princeton. He was sleeping better, seeing more of his wife and two college-age kids-one at Princeton-and getting back full-time to the research.

The exhaustive study of 6,025 unemployed New Jersey residents was completed. The findings, of which he presented a preliminary glimpse in mid-November at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, were surprising and, of course, ever more pertinent to a growing national crisis of chronic unemployment.

For the 13.9 million unemployed as of January, the length of their joblessness, on average, was 36.9 weeks, the highest duration since the government began this measurement in 1948 and nearly twice as high as the most recent, comparably serious recession, in 1983, when it was 21.2 weeks. Understanding this group, and why it was so difficult to reduce their number, was on everyone's mind, in both parties. Among Krueger's findings was that the amount of time devoted to job search declined sharply over the spell of unemployment; the exit rate from unemployment was low at all durations of joblessness, and declined gradually as time pa.s.sed; and also, quite importantly, there was no rise in job search or job finding around the time unemployment insurance benefits expired. This refuted a long-standing study-the centerpiece of public policy actions in handling the jobless and their benefits, for two decades-that recently won its coauthor the n.o.bel Prize.

But what struck Krueger, poring over the data in his office in late January, was how sad the unemployed were-sadder than data indicated the jobless had been in previous eras-and how they were particularly depressed during episodes of job search.

Economists have long been better at measuring misery than they are at measuring happiness, and the issues that push the unemployed into depression tend to be a complex brew, including a sense of whether society is fair, the length of a person's joblessness, and how they see employment as ident.i.ty. "Those without a job for an extended period of time seem to lose their ident.i.ty," Krueger said, "their sense of who they are, and the path they've chosen in life."

A few weeks later, he was standing before seventy or so students, mostly uppercla.s.smen, inside one of Princeton's Gothic stone halls teaching "The Great Recession: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies." His guest that day was Wendy Edelberg, an economist with the Federal Reserve who'd spent much of the past two years on loan to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Krueger told the students that the cla.s.s "was an attempt to teach history in real time" and that they'd have to think clearly about distinguis.h.i.+ng "contributing factors from root causes."

Candidates for the latter, he said, might be the housing bubble, "poor choices by consumers in taking on mortgages they couldn't afford," or "money flowing into the financial system and whether the financial system did a bad job of directing that capital." Edelberg talked about the crisis inquiry's views of the matter, focusing mostly on the financial industry's incentives and ultimately destructive activities, while she noted there was general agreement that lack of regulation was a "contributing factor, more than a root cause."

However, after the lecture, with twenty students from one of the cla.s.s's sections, or precepts, the two teachers themselves were taught a lesson.

After an hour of discussion, Krueger asked the undergraduates to introduce themselves and say something about their plans or their goals. About half were economics majors, but the other half were spread across many disciplines-history, philosophy, biology. One after another, they said they planned on going to Wall Street. All of them. Finally, one student-the last of them-said he wasn't sure what he was going to do.

"You might consider becoming a financial regulator," Krueger said, anxiously. "We're going to need a lot of them going forward."

"Yes," Edelberg implored him. "It's an opportunity to speak truth to power!"

The student seemed unconvinced. The rest of the cla.s.s looked on, unmoved, as silence filled the seminar room.

A few minutes later, Krueger and Edelberg walked in silence to a nearby cafeteria and sat picking at a pair of salads. A clean sweep for Wall Street. They were stunned. "Can we get any more proof that we're back to the same att.i.tudes of 2007?" Krueger said. Edelberg nodded glumly. Usually a phrase like "speaking truth to power" gets a rise from young adults; at least it once did. "They looked at us like were walking anachronisms," Krueger said later. "Like we were hippies from the sixties."

On the evening of January 30, Tim Geithner walked down the hall from his office on the third floor of the Treasury Department to the stately Diplomatic Reception Room, restored recently to its nineteenth-century grandeur.

Waiting for him there were six men who understood, better than virtually anyone else on the planet, what it felt like to preside over the U.S. economy.

They were all former Treasury secretaries.

There was a practice in the early years of the American government for the outgoing Treasury secretary to host his successor for dinner-a bit of courtliness, amid the often vicious political dialogue, to ensure continuity in the managing of the financial accounts of the United States. Some things were viewed as too important for partisan bickering. By the twentieth century the dinner had grown into more of an official, ceremonial welcome. About a year into each new Treasury secretary's term, his predecessor buys dinner for all the former Treasury secretaries to celebrate the arrival of a new member into this exclusive club.

So, on this night, Hank Paulson was the host. He warmly toasted Geithner and treated Bob Rubin, Paul O'Neill, James Baker, Nick Brady, and John Snow to dinner. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and deputy Treasury secretary Neil Wolin were asked to attend as well.

Of course, the only schedule that really mattered in the mix was that of the guest of honor. And Tim Geithner was so thoroughly engaged in the crus.h.i.+ng weight of successive crises that the dinner had already been delayed a year beyond custom. It floated on his "to do" list month after month. The decision to go forward, oddly enough, was political. Geithner had been hopeful that the president would include recommendations of Alan Simpson's and Erskine Bowles' National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility-which in early December had recommended approximately $3 billion in cuts and $1 billion in added revenues over the coming decade-as part of his grand bargain on the Bush tax cuts and stimulus spending with Republicans. The president, cutting that deal himself, dismissed it as too much to attempt.

By early January, Geithner was feeling the clock tick: the U.S. government was a few months away from hitting its borrowing capacity. The debt limit would have to be raised in April to avoid a government shutdown-a prospect that was sure to be a matter of pitched combat with the new Republican-controlled House.

And then he remembered the dinner.

Most of the Treasury secretaries who would attend were Republicans. On balance, these were men he could talk to-hailing from a Republican Party that, compared to Congress's many new Tea Party warriors, would be considered pragmatic, even progressive. They'd all been stewards of American's finances and understood what it would mean for the United States to slip into default.

He got in touch with Hank. How about that dinner? Then, several of the prospective attendees were contacted by Treasury to engage in the new debt-limit debate, to be spokesmen for probity, writing letters and making calls, especially to congressional Republicans-Treasury secretaries . . . united!

After Hank's toast, Geithner spoke casually and a.s.suredly to his kindred about the state of affairs and especially the debt limit. They all needed to speak as one. This is was not something to be left to politics. Anyone who'd have the temerity to "play chicken" with the prospect of the United States defaulting on its obligations was simply irresponsible. Nods all around.

Anyone in the room who could still conjure images of Geithner from two years back, with his darting eyes of a shoplifter at that disastrous first press conference downstairs in the Cash Room, might have wondered where this man came from. Geithner, the last man standing from Obama's original team, was now thoroughly in charge and, it seemed, reconstructed around a set of ideas that had prevailed . . . for better or for worse. Among this constellation of ideas, his North Star was continuity: to keep matters moving forward with as little disruption as possible. It was always an "up ahead" focus: who knew, maybe in the near future they'd encounter improved prospects, new opportunities to seize, surprising twists. When dramatic reform or restructuring was proffered-for Wall Street, for jobs programs, for reregulation of all kinds-he'd often say, Let's a.s.sess the "Hippocratic risk." The risk, in short, of doing harm. For a new president, with a powerful intellect but little experience, this stance was always available as a sensible course. As Obama learned the limits of pure intellect, in hour after hour of frustrating relitigations, Geithner's posture increasingly felt like a prudential path, rather than a backing away from history's call to arms.

For America's other great center of power-New York and its financial machine-continuity was the path to victory. Wall Street, as it has been constructed in this age of financial miracles, mocks Hippocrates. Doing harm is its business; destruction itself can be quite profitable, properly wrought, especially when the many overwrought parts of the American economy are on the receiving end. Tim Geithner managed, across two years, to win over two const.i.tuencies, as both Wall Street's man and Obama's. He figured it out: Was.h.i.+ngton could be fearfully prudent so New York wouldn't have to be.

As for his old mentor, Larry Summers, Geithner was coy, sizing up matters from the start, searching out s.h.i.+fts in the key relations.h.i.+ps atop the administration. Summers's pride in leading the most academically accomplished, big-brained team since Kennedy's "best and brightest" always carried the scent of peril. That was true for Obama, just like JFK. Geithner, the clever pragmatist, could see this from the start. As the months pa.s.sed, he mostly observed Larry's debate society, partic.i.p.ated only when necessary, and kept his own counsel. Obama arrived with too much faith in intellect's power-with the idea that a collection of smartest people kept in one room could solve almost any problem. While the president learned otherwise, and while his frustration with Summers grew, Geithner held firm, offering the sensible path, feet solidly planted. And when the time came, he said the sensible path would be to reappoint Bernanke. Why make a change? Continuity is a virtue. Deep down, Summers never forgave him.

After Paulson's toast, as the Treasury secretaries drank wine and stood talking before they took their seats, several of the honored guests noticed that a member of their exclusive club was not present. Several of them crowded around Tim. Where's Larry? Geithner had just returned that day from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the first time he'd attended in years. Summers must have been at Davos, too? Geithner nodded, yes, of course.

Then he smiled that coy Geithner smile and offered his trademark shrug, which in no way bespeaks uncertainty. "Larry would rather be in Davos than at dinner with me."

Two weeks later, on February 14, the president meditated on the most important things he'd learned as president, the hard lessons he felt would be most valuable in the days ahead.

"The area in my presidency where I think my management and understanding of the presidency evolved most, and where I think we made the most mistakes, was less on the policy front and more on the communications front. I think one of the criticisms that is absolutely legitimate about my first two years was that I was very comfortable with a technocratic approach to government . . . a series of problems to be solved."

This riff about too much policy, too little politics-a point he'd recently made in another interview-he then broadened, searching for a fundamental redefinition of his presidency.

"The irony is, the reason I was in this office is because I told a story to the American people," he said, his voice dropping into that distinctive cadence that takes hold when he's. .h.i.t a rich vein-slow, steady, but rising to meet the words that matter most. "It wasn't the specifics of my health care plan or Afghanistan. The reason people put me in this office is people felt that I had connected our current predicaments with the broader arc of American history and where we might go as a diverse and forward-looking nation. And that narrative thread we just lost, in the day-to-day problem solving that was going on, and that wasn't because of bad execution on any particular issue. I think I was so consumed with the problems in front of me that I didn't step back and remember, 'What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?' And what the president can do, that n.o.body else can do, is tell a story to the American people about where we are and where we are going."

While his brilliance in understanding a story and its power-so forcefully expressed in that last aria-was what had lifted him to the White House, his difficulty in finding a story to tell, and tell convincingly, as president was surely tied to the burdens of governance. A candidate can tell a story of what will be. A president, after the first few months in office, must tell a story of what is, and what his presence in the White House has changed for the better.

The "great progress" of the nearly four months since the midterms-a time when Obama's confidence and, according to polls, the confidence the public had in him, had both risen-highlighted what was so often absent in his first two years. The disclosures of his management struggles in making difficult decisions and demanding accountability of his top advisers, and their seeming loss of confidence in him, further stressed gaps about which he is understandably defensive. No president, after all, can afford to acknowledge a lack of confidence; not in this era, when the projection of confidence-justified or not, earned or willed or manufactured-remains the coin of the realm.

"I have to say this, though," he added, a touch defensively. "I actually felt very confident through the first year. And if I hadn't felt confident in my second year we would never have gotten health care pa.s.sed, because after Scott Brown in Ma.s.sachusetts, people around here were pretty depressed. I was still confident that doing that [health care] was the right thing to do and was right for the Congress."

But he backed away from this "to be sure" defense after a bit. It didn't suit him at this moment. He was struggling to express himself honestly, from a deeper core. Obama, after all, always felt that he was different from the others, from politicians, or Wall Street CEOs, or pitchmen all over America, who met challenges to the country's spirit and capabilities with a smile and a handshake and a feel for saying whatever their audiences wanted to hear.

"Part of what was important in the tax deal was not that my mind was changed around the Bush tax cuts. I still think they were a bad idea. What I think I was able to recognize was that, at this juncture, the country will feel better about itself and that will have important ramifications. If they see Democrats and Republicans agreeing on anything . . . Because right now they are just exhausted with the partisan wars that are taking place. In addition, it turns out that, technically speaking, the most important antipoverty program I can initiate, the most important deficit reduction program I can initiate, is to get the economy growing again."

Ever compet.i.tive, Obama's first urge was to try out this fresh construction of a sort of meta-confidence on his peer group, his compet.i.tors. At this point it was a mere handful of men, an all-but-extraterrestrial group of a few other presidents he emulated and measured himself against.

"You think about FDR and the New Deal. Three-quarters of the things he did didn't work. But what he was able to project was 'we are going to get through this.' n.o.body remembers Kennedy's economic policies. They remember Peace Corps, and they remember a few other New Frontier programs, but basically this job is not about just getting the policy right. It's about getting the American people to believe in themselves, and in our capacity to act collectively to deliver for the next generation."

He sat for a moment. It was all working, integrating nicely, with Kennedy and FDR. But there were other presidents he never wanted to be compared to. "Carter, Clinton, and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks," he said, clearly citing this shared characteristic as a liability. But now, with his new self-definition, this improved view, he could distance himself from them. "I think that if you get too consumed with that you lose sight of the larger issue."

This "larger issue"-a larger and ostensibly more effective model of leaders.h.i.+p-would be a star to guide him in the years ahead. And, he said, he now had the team to do it: "The reorganization that's taken place here is one that is much more geared to those functions." Almost reflexively, he snapped into a quick take-back, that his old team was "exactly the right team to get a lot of laws pa.s.sed through Congress," and that he's "incredibly proud" that financial reform has "made the system more stable" and health care reforms "have started what will be a long path toward a more sensible health care system." Then he just swept them, and all the sound and fury, away with a one-liner: "But I have very much internalized the fact that my job is not legislator in chief."

There was one president whom Obama seemed to be speaking directly to, though not yet mentioned. Ronald Reagan's ability to project optimism when there may be no defendable reason to be optimistic was his particular genius, his specialty, and a subject of controversy every day since he left office over twenty years before. Reagan was instrumental in defining confidence, and its many uses, in the modern era. Some say he allowed America to move forward in an age of limits. Others, that he was a charming agent of destruction.

"He was very comfortable in playing the role of president. And I think part of that really was his actor's background," Obama said, betraying, in his tone, a hint of envy. As he edged closer to Reagan, though, Obama seemed to squirm a bit in his chair, trying to get comfortable. Looking back over his life, the president said, Reagan always took pride "in pus.h.i.+ng against artifice" and "not engaging in a lot of symbolic gestures, but rather, thinking practically . . . And I think that the evolution that happened in the campaign was me recognizing that if I was going to be a successful candidate, then the symbols and the gestures mattered as much as what my ideas were."

And who could deny Reagan's mastery, his actor's grasp, of symbols and gestures?

No one can know what it's like to be president until they are one, and then they have to decide how much of what they feel, sitting in that lonely cornerless room, they ought to reveal. People, deep down, suspect that the life of a nation, like that of each of us, is shaped by forces well beyond our control, beyond earnest efforts and best-laid plans, just as we all tend to learn at some moment of discovery that those grown-ups who once seemed so a.s.sured and certain were neither. As the nation wrestled through a period of maturation, Obama considered how to reconcile his era's hard truths with a working definition of confidence in a world that often merits anything but. The age-old fear, after all, is that we are in fact "home alone," that there is no one responsible in charge. The role of government is to make a convincing case to the contrary, so everyone can get on with their lives and manage a good night's sleep.

Obama, a brilliant amateur, arrived to power's pinnacle believing he'd make his case with a show of demonstrably correct answers to complex problems, solutions he'd competently execute to launch a new "era of responsibility."

It hadn't worked quite as he'd hoped, bruising the preternatural confidence-quite real-that, more than anything, is what got him elected.

Now, firmly along in a more dynamic "I'll just do it myself" model of leaders.h.i.+p, he reached for a compa.s.s for the course ahead.

"Going forward as president," Obama said, straightening up his chair, "the symbols and gestures-what people are seeing coming out of this office-are at least as important as the policies we put forward."

"I think where the evolution has taken place," Barack Obama said finally, looking into the middle distance, "is understanding that leaders.h.i.+p in this office is not a matter of you being confident. Leaders.h.i.+p in this office is a matter of helping the American people feel confident."

Acknowledgments.

It is always a privilege to offer of a few pages of grat.i.tude to close a journey of nonfiction. Many people conspire to help a book grow from first idea to a fully realized expression, and with this book there are many people to thank, starting with those who presided over its conception. This is my second book with my friend and trusted guide Tim Duggan, executive editor at HarperCollins, and Jonathan Burnham, the division's publisher.

Across more than two and a half years, from the book's starting point in February 2009, Tim was ever at my side, providing wise counsel and nouris.h.i.+ng enthusiasm as the project twisted and spun forward-and sometimes sideways-though many stages. Finally, when it all came together, an able HarperCollins team snapped into action. a.s.sistant Editor Emily Cunningham was a dream, already a seasoned pro, and Tina Andreadis, a publisher's row promotional whiz, each leapt into battle.

As with each of the last three books, my agent, Andrew Wylie, was a source of straight talk and sterling advice. He's one of the sanest madmen I know and just about the best corner man you could want.

I wrote a book in the late 1990s about a teenager's heroic rise from a blighted urban high school to the Ivy League, and saw how, along the way, that young man was often seen as both less and more than he really was, and how he was constantly wrestling with "what people wanted to see."

Something similar happened, writ large, with Barack Obama. I, like many Americans, felt a surge of pride when an African American was elected president. It took some time for me to see him simply as a man, with the full complement of gifts and faults, occupying the White House. An opposite, though similar, preconception existed in the early reporting about Wall Street. The emotional shock of the meltdown and the natural urge to uncover malice and affix blame became a barrier to cross.

What helped on both accounts were the many sources who, hour after hour, strove for honesty in helping me understand the complexities of the situation. I can't thank them all here and many, of course, would rather remain anonymous. But I am in their debt. In my efforts across twenty-five years, I've often said that nonfiction writing should dig beneath the alluring, often simplified narratives of heroes and villains in search of a deeper, more resonant rendering of human complexity. If this book has in any way managed that, it is due to hundreds of sources and their faith in being able to understand the times in which we live.

On this project I was particularly fortunate to have as my young deputy Will Kryder, a clear-eyed product of Boston College who signed on for a span that stretched nearly a year beyond initial projections. He didn't flinch. In fact, he rose to meet every challenge-as the number of characters, topics, and disclosures built-and acted as one of my key interlocutors in the shaping of the narrative. My dear friend Greg Jackson dove in to a.s.sist at a crunch time and offered fresh eyes for a final read.

The reporting and writing of this book stretched across three summers, and my friends at Dartmouth, where I've been a writer-in-residence since 2000, again provided me with a refuge. During this time, it has been at the John Sloan d.i.c.ke Center, led by a brilliant and seasoned diplomat, Ken Yalowitz, who has welcomed me into the company of scholars.

But, in terms of refuge-along with joy and sustenance, I've long been the most fortunate of men. During the nearly three years conceiving, reporting, and writing this book, my sons have grown, firmly, into manhood. Walter, just graduated from college, will read this book with critical faculties sharpened to a fine edge. My younger son, Owen, just off to college, speaks frequently of the nature of courage and friends.h.i.+p, and how "all great journeys are about facing your fears." As with fathers everywhere, I've learned from my sons much more than I could teach them, and those lessons have inspired this effort.

As for my wife, Cornelia, my partner in all things, I simply offer unspeakable grat.i.tude for her support and guidance, with additional acknowledgments remaining firmly off the record.

About the Author.

RON SUSKIND is the author of The New York Times bestsellers The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, and The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. He is also the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. He has written for The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. From 1993 to 2000 he was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He lives with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy Suskind, in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

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Also by Ron Suskind.

The Way of the World.

The One Percent Doctrine.

The Price of Loyalty.

A Hope in the Unseen.