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Brand New Barack Obama Apple Amazon The Atlantic April 2010 Magazine
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April 2010 The Atlantic Magazine
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Product Description/Details:Joshua Green on Timothy Geithner’s rise, Robert D. Kaplan on whether
General McChrystal can save Afghanistan, Michael Kinsley on inflation,
Jonathan Rauch on caring for his father, James Parker on hospital drama,
and more,
Features
Inside Man
The story of Timothy Geithner’s rise is one of hard
work, bureaucratic mastery, and the culmination of a 40-year evolution
in Democratic thinking about finance. His experience made him
indispensable to saving the economy—and quite possibly the wrong person
to reform it.
Video: Joshua Green explains the secret of Geithner’s success
A Nation on the Brink
It’s not just Al-Qaeda. Water shortages, collapsing oil supplies, war, refugees, pirates, poverty—why Yemen is failing.
Letting Go of My Father
His elderly father insisted that he could manage by
himself. But he couldn’t. The author found himself utterly unprepared
for one of life’s near certainties—the decline of a parent. Millions of
middle-aged Americans, he discovered, are silently struggling to cope
with a crisis that needs to be plucked from the realm of the personal
and brought into full public view.
Man Versus Afghanistan
Will General Stanley McChrystal be our deus ex
machina in Afghanistan? Or just the latest commander to succumb to the
impersonal forces of history and geography?
Slideshow: Stanley McChrystal and his team take on the war in Afghanistan
Dispatches
Exodus
Less traffic through the Suez Canal means less of everything else for Egyptians—including hope.
Wild Ride
The short and brutal life of a Nascar engine
Outback Steakhouse
Australia’s bush meat is tasty, healthy, and enviro-friendly. But can you get people to eat it?
Let Us Now Trash Famous Authors
James Agee’s Depression classic still stings the family of its subjects.
Slideshow: Author Christina Davidson discusses how Walker Evans’s Depression-era photography is viewed by his subjects’ descendents.
Hipster Moonshine
Hooch isn’t just for hillbillies anymore.
All the Sheikh’s Horses
By the skin of his teeth, Dubai’s ruler opens the world’s most ambitious—and outrageous—racetrack.
Dirigible Dreams
Is one of aviation’s most enduring technological hopes about to become a reality?
Books
Intimate History
A grand history and an elegiac new film explore Britain’s recent, and irrecoverable, past.
Video: Benjamin Schwarz comments on scenes from Terence Davies’s nostalgic documentary
The Enthusiast
Bill Simmons has set a new and unbeatable standard by writing like a fan—just far better.
Quiet Desperation
Mrs. Bridge is an American masterpiece of prewar repression and postwar realism.
Lost in the Levant
Kai Bird’s affecting personal history of the Arab-Israeli tangle
Cover to Cover
Snake eyes; the asylum seeker
Interview/Slideshow: Images and insights from the author of a new photography book about abandoned mental asylums
Columns
Saints on Percocet
Drug-addicted healers are elevating hospital drama to metaphysical art.
E-Donnybrook
No matter who wins the battle between the Kindle and the iPad, it marks the return of machines as market-makers.
My Inflation Nightmare
Am I crazy, or is the commentariat ignoring our biggest economic threat?
BusinessInside Man
Congress members accuse Timothy Geithner of coddling
Wall Street. Wall Street accuses him of abetting socialism. Yet when the
history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack
Obama’s key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the
finance system. Economically, Geithner’s plan has worked better and more
cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago. Politically, it
threatens to undermine Obama’s presidency. Is Geithner a courageous
public servant doing the right thing? Or have his years as a player in
global finance made him loath to change an industry that needs
fundamental reform?
Steve Pyke
Last October, on
the day after the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed above 10,000 for
the first time since the economy had collapsed a year before, Timothy
Geithner appeared at a conference put on by The Economist, deep
in Manhattan’s financial district. Geithner was then, and remains, an
enormously disputed figure for his central role in shaping the
government’s response to the crisis, first as president of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank and now as President Obama’s Treasury secretary. In
some quarters of Washington, he is viewed as a fully housebroken
abettor of Wall Street, the man who, from his perch at the Fed,
conspired with Henry Paulson, the previous Treasury secretary and former
chairman of Goldman Sachs, to sluice trillions of taxpayers’ dollars to
what were once called “the malefactors of great wealth.” In Congress,
Geithner is the rare subject on which some Republicans and Democrats can
manage to agree: they agree he should resign. Since Geithner’s
disastrous public debut in February 2009 with a speech outlining the
White House’s plan to stop the crisis—the market responded by dropping
382 points—bashing him has become the preferred means of registering
one’s outrage about the economy without actually committing to a course
of action.
I’d arranged on short notice to join him in New York because I’d
assumed, in a spectacular misjudgment, that an audience of financiers
and the validation of Dow 10,000 would cast him in a different, more
triumphant light. The event took place in a moodily lit subterranean
auditorium that pulsed with the kind of understated techno music one
associates with designer vodkas and business-class air travel. The
audience was upper-middle-class Manhattan finance: hedge-fund employees,
bankers and lawyers, a smattering of business students—people who don’t
sit on panels or own jets but aspire to someday. Geithner was
interviewed by the magazine’s editor. Pivoting off the day’s good news,
Geithner said the government had “put in place the conditions and the
foundation for a resumption of growth and recovery” and emphasized, a
bit more forcefully than he does in Washington, just how much money it
had poured into the financial system to support that objective. It was
“hugely important,” he added, and a focus of government policy, that
there be no “headwinds or constraints on growth going forward.” He
distilled the strategy into two words: “First, growth.”
Eventually, he came to the issue of fixing the system. Asked to
respond to a Treasury official’s declaration that absent meaningful
reform, government intervention on behalf of banks will have worsened
the problem, he readily agreed: “Absolutely correct.” He spoke for a
moment about the need to constrain risk-taking in order to avoid ever
again placing such an “untenable cost on the taxpayer,” and then he
steered back onto friendlier terrain, reaffirming his opposition to
limitations on bankers’ pay. But he’d touched a nerve. During the
Q&A period that followed, the market’s rise went unhailed. Instead,
Geithner fielded skeptical inquiries about reform that culminated with a
middle-aged man in an expensive suit taking the microphone and
insisting, in the tremulous voice of someone struggling to maintain
decorum in the face of an outrageous affront, that the government
reconsider its plan to regulate hedge funds.
Geithner didn’t fare any better at his next stop, an interview with
Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. The network, a notorious cheerleader for the
stock market, seemed a cinch to celebrate any Dow milestone. So
Bartiromo’s sharp interrogation was jolting. She laced Geithner with
questions about whether the Obama administration was “anti-business,”
plotting to raise taxes and bullying banks to cut dividend payments, and
she even suggested he might be engaging in “class warfare” against the
rich. Bartiromo didn’t outright call Geithner an agent of Obama’s
socialist agenda, but that was the spirit of the affair. Geithner held
firm to the issue of growth, and persevered. Bad as it looked, this was a
mere dusting: he’d endured worse. When the cameras stopped rolling, the
pair stood up and briskly shook hands, and Geithner headed for the
door. Then, suddenly, Bartiromo spun around and called out after him, in
a tone that expressed something between self-justification and apology,
“I know you have an impossible job!”
The antithetical reactions to Geithner—agent of socialism or lapdog
of Wall Street—stem partly from how little is known about him. He lacks
the fully realized public persona most government officials develop by
the time they’re chosen for important Cabinet positions. He doesn’t look
like a Treasury secretary. He lacks presence. He’s trim and small,
practically elfin, and, at 48, young for the job (he looks even
younger). He doesn’t fit the Treasury secretary’s typical profile,
either, since he is neither a businessman nor an economist nor a party
eminence serving out a comfortable valedictory. Geithner is something
else entirely—a superstar of the bureaucracy, whose rapid rise during
the 1990s came in the Treasury Department he now runs. At heart, he’s an
institutionalist.
Geithner came of age in Washington just after the Cold War ended,
when the country’s preoccupation with wealth and the long bull market
made Treasury a nerve center of the government. It helps explain
Geithner to think of him as someone whose formative experience was in
figuring out how to contain the series of upheavals that swept the
international financial community in the 1990s, from Japan to Mexico to
Thailand to Indonesia to Russia, and threatened the boom. Toward the end
of the Clinton administration, a view emerged that the government had
more or less figured out how to manage the global financial system.
Those at the helm won extraordinary renown. The era’s
time-capsule-worthy artifact is a Time cover touting Alan
Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman; Robert Rubin, the Treasury
secretary; and Lawrence Summers, Rubin’s deputy, as “The Committee to
Save the World.” Geithner was an aide de camp.
To outsiders, the Clinton Treasury doesn’t command the awe it once
did. Memories of the bull market have been replaced by anger at the
financial deregulation Clinton presided over, which precipitated the
current crisis. Greenspan’s reputation has been ruined; Rubin’s has
suffered as well, for the added sin of pushing his next employer,
Citigroup, to make risky bets that nearly sank the firm. But inside the
group, things look much different. Its members see themselves as an
elite corps, bound by the common experience of having battled the crises
of the 1990s and mostly prevailed. They share the belief that a potent
combination of speed, force, and nerve—a buccaneering willingness to
cast aside doubt, seize the levers of government, and apply its full
power—can halt financial panics. They also believe that governments
typically do too little to respond, rather than too much, and pay a
steep price for it. Applying this formula is what Geithner has been
doing in the biggest crisis since the Great Depression. Other Obama
officials share this outlook, notably Summers, who now directs the
National Economic Council. But the faith runs purest in Geithner.
From Geithner’s perspective, this approach is the surest, cheapest,
and least destructive way to save an economy in danger of collapse. But
it comes at a cost, which is that it is galling to the public. It
requires abstaining from moral judgments and pumping tax dollars into
the same institutions that inflicted the pain, as part of an
all-hands-on-deck effort to restore economic confidence. This has had
the politically deleterious effect on the administration, and especially
on Geithner, of appearing to routinely submit to Wall Street. It’s what
lies behind the public’s anger, the feeling that some fundamental
injustice is being allowed to perpetuate itself—a sentiment that
violently upended the Obama agenda in January, when the Massachusetts
Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election to replace Ted
Kennedy. Brown’s victory immediately derailed Obama’s signature
initiative, health-care reform. But his win was widely interpreted as an
expression of anger at the White House for its handling of the economy,
and particularly of Wall Street.
The fact that most of the bailouts driving this anger occurred
under George W. Bush has been easy to overlook, in part because Geithner
is the most visible constant between the two administrations. At every
stage, he has been central to the crisis—during the initial response,
the design of the recovery plan, and the effort to devise new rules.
“During the Bush administration,” Keith Hennessey, a former director of
Bush’s National Economic Council, told me, “you basically had three
people who were the core in making the policy recommendations to the
president and implementing them. And they were Hank Paulson, Ben
Bernanke, and Tim Geithner. Now it’s Larry, Ben, and Tim, and Tim has
moved chairs. What this means is that two-thirds of the core policy
group is unchanged from Bush to Obama. The Obama political and
communications operations have always wanted to emphasize just how
different and transformative the Obama solutions are, relative to the
Bush people who—they claim—left them this enormous problem. The reality
is, there is remarkable continuity, from a personnel standpoint and a
policy standpoint, in what’s being done.”
That reality has become a liability. Geithner designed Obama’s
response to the crisis—a response that, along with the stimulus and the
Federal Reserve’s actions, has been cheaper and more effective than many
people predicted, though still imperfect. But this success has been
obscured, partly by stubborn high unemployment but mostly by the
perception that Obama has “put the interests of Wall Street above those
of Main Street.” And more than anyone else, Geithner is held to blame.
But to think of Geithner only in the context of Wall Street, rather
than Washington and national politics, is to miss a lot of what’s going
on. Geithner’s career coincides almost exactly with an important shift
in how the Democratic Party thinks about finance, a shift that set off
the wave of deregulation and reoriented the institutions he served. Any
study of Geithner is unavoidably a study of how both political parties
came to agree that the interests of the financial sector must
predominate, of what went wrong when those interests did predominate,
and of how someone whose glittering career is a product of that system
wound up at the center of an effort to write new rules for it. At the
center, really, of the whole Obama presidency.
If Geithner were a character in a British period novel, he’d be the
diligent son of the head servant, someone whose outstanding qualities
are noted by the master and who, when the time comes, is unexpectedly
rewarded with passage to university and the world beyond. He makes a
deep impression. Almost anyone who has spent time with him can describe
his effect on people. A senior Treasury official in the George H. W.
Bush administration recounted for me, in vivid detail, 20 years after
the fact, a single briefing that Geithner, then still in his 20s, had
given him on Japan: “Within the building, Tim was already thought to be a
superstar. And in my experience, he was brilliant. Incredibly well
prepared, thoughtful. He still talked too fast, even then. But he was so
on top of stuff, so impressive professionally, that there was a ‘wow’
factor in dealing with him. You’d hear how good he was, and then you’d
deal with him, and then you’d think, ‘Oh my God, the guy really is just
better.’” Geithner’s career follows a pattern of his being not
necessarily the first, or the most obvious, choice for some important
job, getting it anyway, and performing so well that he quickly advances,
acquiring a patron in the process. He is the quintessential promising
young man. And he has many powerful patrons.
Geithner was born in Brooklyn in 1961, and grew up in a series of
far-flung, exotic locales. When he was 1, his father, Peter Geithner,
joined the United States Agency for International Development and moved
his family—his wife, Deborah, and Tim—to Salisbury, Rhodesia. Peter
Geithner came from Columbian Carbon International, a Fortune 500
conglomerate, as part of a Kennedy effort to recruit businessmen into
government. The Geithners’ daughter, Sarah, was born in Rhodesia, and
twin sons, David and Jonathan, followed two years later, when the family
was back in Washington. In 1968, Peter Geithner accepted a position
with the Ford Foundation and the family moved again, to New Delhi.
The Geithners took a full-immersion approach to living abroad:
Peter Geithner emphasized to me that his family’s social life in India,
and later in Thailand, did not revolve around the embassy crowd or
fellow foreigners, but rather locals he met through his work. To Tim
Geithner, the experience was indelible. “I was living in countries with
acute poverty,” he told me, in one of several recent interviews. “I saw
from an early age what impact the U.S. could have on the world, for good
and for not-so-good. My parents’ friends, from an early stage in life,
were in that world—Oxfam, CARE,
World Bank, Amnesty International.” To work as a Third World
development officer is to witness the limitations of government’s
capacity to solve problems on its own. Foundations like those to which
his parents and their friends devoted their lives exist to offset these
shortcomings. They exert influence obliquely rather than by force.
Geithner followed a path very similar to his father’s—up to a point. He
majored in government and Asian studies at Dartmouth, then took a
graduate degree in international relations, as his father had, from the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His interests
likewise tended toward Asia. After graduate school, his father had
deferred going into government to gain private-sector experience; so did
the son, landing a job in 1985 at Kissinger Associates, the consulting
firm founded by Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Lawrence
Eagleburger.
For a young man planning a career in the international side of
government, this was a stroke of almost unimaginable good fortune. It
did not come by chance. Scowcroft had called the dean at Johns Hopkins
and asked him to recommend an Asia specialist; he recommended Geithner.
Geithner was one of four analysts charged with covering the globe. He
wrote memos on political and economic developments in China, Japan, and
Southeast Asia, and then flew to New York to brief the firm’s
high-powered principals. Kissinger took note of his young charge.
Geithner was asked to write a series of longer papers, not for the firm
but for Kissinger personally, and they became part of the basis for Diplomacy,
Kissinger’s sweeping history of international statecraft. Although
Geithner moved on to the government after three years, Kissinger remains
an enthusiastic backer.
Geithner came to Treasury as a civil servant in 1988. After a year
in the trade office, he moved over to the Office of the Assistant
Secretary for International Affairs, which was known as OASIA (pronounced “Oh-asia”). At the time, OASIA
had a reputation as a rich-in-tradition, upper-echelon bureaucracy with
an experienced career staff, much like USAID. The institutional culture
was proudly nonideological, eastern-establishment, consensus-driven,
business-friendly, and consciously apart from the crude partisanship of
Capitol Hill. Geithner was sent to Tokyo as assistant Treasury attaché
in the U.S. Embassy in the spring of 1990, arriving just after the
Japanese real-estate bubble burst and the Nikkei index began its
dizzying fall—the beginning of Japan’s “lost decade” of deflation and
stagnation. The United States’ role was that of the stern parent, urging
Japan to confront the reality that its banks were paralyzed by bad
loans. The Japanese government was loath to recognize the problem,
preferring to wait in hopes that its banking system would heal itself.
This strategy of denial necessitated lots of diplomatic feints and
thrusts, and part of Geithner’s brief was keeping abreast of the
recondite details and knowing their possible second- and third-order
effects. For the most part, the U.S. pressure failed. But working on the
problem was enlightening. “You learn much more about a country when
things fall apart,” Geithner says. “When the tide recedes, you get to
see all the stuff it leaves behind.”
The Japanese experience underscored the limits of moral suasion and
the dangers of taking a gradualist approach to a banking crisis. It
would be eight years before the Japanese government began to fortify its
banks with public capital, and Japan still has not fully recovered.
“These were very capable people,” Geithner told me. “They were making a
completely conscious choice that they were going to take this strategy,
even though it was going to be costly in terms of growth forgone.”
Geithner returned to Washington and OASIA
in 1992, intending to stick around long enough to help a new boss
settle in and then pursue a different job within Treasury’s civil
service. The incoming undersecretary for international affairs was
Lawrence Summers, the brilliant, prickly Harvard economist entering
government for the first time. Geithner had never heard of Summers, but
agreed to stay on temporarily as a special assistant. He never left.
The pair fast developed a symbiotic relationship. Geithner had the
rare capacity to withstand Summers’s intellectual bullying and thrive,
giving back as good as he got. Summers found that Geithner possessed an
uncanny feel for how power functions in a bureaucracy, and could guide
him in the foreign culture of the government. (Geithner’s Secret Service
code name as Treasury secretary is “Fencing Master.”) His colleagues
rave, as Summers did to me, about how Geithner is always armed with a
plan: “Most people, when you ask, ‘What should I do about X?,’ will give
you a list of considerations. Tim always gave you a strategy.” The
partnership was the more striking to behold for the temperamental and
physical differences between the two men: Summers, the brash, slovenly
academic, and Geithner, his lithe and savvy aide.
Geithner has the schoolboy qualities of being hardworking, exact,
and deeply loyal to those above and below him. But there’s something
else there, too. The image of him that coalesced in the early weeks of
the Obama administration—awkward, halting, out of his depth, mocked on
Saturday Night Live—is precisely the opposite of the view held by those
who have known him, a view that is remarkably consistent. In the course
of many interviews about Geithner, two qualities came up again and
again. The first was his extraordinary quickness of mind and talent for
elucidating whatever issue was the preoccupying concern of the moment.
Second was his athleticism. Unprompted by me, friends and colleagues
extolled his skill and grace at windsurfing, tennis, basketball,
running, snowboarding, and softball (specifying his prowess at shortstop
and in center field, as well as at the plate). He inspires an
adolescent awe in male colleagues.
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Brand New Barack Obama Apple Amazon The Atlantic April 2010 Magazine
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