When Bolten called and repeated his pitch, Paulson wondered whether his resistance to the overtures was really a matter of a fear of failure. At Goldman he was known as someone who “runs to problems.” Was he now running away from them?
Paulson is a devout Christian Scientist and, like most members of the faith, he deeply admires the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, who, seeking to reclaim early Christianity’s focus on healing, founded the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston in 1879. “Fear is the fountain of sickness,” she wrote. Fear “must be cast out to readjust the balance for God.”
Paulson was already having second thoughts about turning down the Treasury job when James Baker followed up on Bolten’s call. Baker, the GOP’s eminence grise, confided to him that he had told the president that Paulson was by far the best candidate for the position. Deeply flattered, Paulson assured him that he was giving the idea serious consideration.
That same week, John Bryan, the chief executive of Sara Lee and a longtime friend, Goldman director, and client of Paulson’s from when he was an investment banker in Chicago, offered him this advice: “Hank, life is not a dress rehearsal,” he said. “You don’t want to be sitting around at eighty years old telling your grandchildren you were once asked to be secretary of the Treasury. You should tell them you did it.”
Paulson finally accepted the position on May 21, but because the White House did not plan to announce the appointment until the following week after running a background check, he was left in the awkward predicament of attending the annual meeting of Goldman partners that weekend in Chicago without being able to tell anyone that he was resigning. (Ironically enough, the guest speaker that day was the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.) But with the newspapers—not to mention his colleagues—still speculating about whether he would join the administration, Paulson hid upstairs in his hotel room throughout the event.
On Wall Street, there are two kinds of bankers: the silky smooth salesmen who succeed based on wits and charm, and those who persist with bulldog tenacity. Paulson was of the latter type, as the White House soon discovered. Before he officially accepted the job, Paulson made certain to see to a few key details. If thirty-two years at Goldman Sachs had taught him anything, it was how to cut the best deal possible. He demanded assurances, in writing, that Treasury would have the same status in the cabinet as Defense and State. In Washington, he knew, proximity to the president mattered, and he had no intention of being a marginalized functionary who could be summoned at Bush’s whim but couldn’t get the chief executive to return his calls. Somehow he even got the White House to agree that its National Economic Council, headed by Allan Hubbard, a Harvard Business School classmate of Paulson’s, would hold some of its meetings at the Treasury Building, and that the vice president, Dick Cheney, would attend them in person.
Hoping to silence any suggestion that he would favor his former employer, he voluntarily signed an extensive six-page “ethics” agreement that barred him from involving himself with Goldman Sachs for his entire tenure. His declaration went far beyond the regular one-year time period required for government employees. “As a prudential matter, I will not participate in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is or represents a party for the duration of my tenure as Secretary of the Treasury,” he wrote in a letter that served as the agreement. “I believe that these steps will ensure that I avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in the performance of my duties as Secretary of the Treasury.” It was an avowal that would certainly hinder his power, given Goldman’s role in virtually every aspect of Wall Street, and one that he would later desperately try to find ways around.
One additional condition came with the appointment: Paulson would have to divest his huge holding of Goldman Sachs stock—some 3.23 million shares, worth about $485 million—as well as a lucrative investment in a Goldman fund that held a stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Because new Internal Revenue Service rules allowed executives who entered into government service to sell their interests without a penalty, Paulson saved more than $100 million in taxes. It was perhaps one of the most lucrative deals he ever struck, but for many months prior to the crisis, he watched chagrined as Goldman’s shares rose from about $142, when he sold them, to their high of $235.92 in October 2007.
Henry Merritt Paulson Jr. was officially nominated for Treasury secretary on May 30, 2006. Just seven days later, the
Nothing could have played more effectively to his immediate sense of buyer’s remorse—and motivated him to overcome the challenge.
By Wall Street standards, Paulson was something of a baffling outlier, a titan who had little interest in living a Carnegie Hill multimillionaire’s life. A straight-shooting Midwesterner, he had grown up on a farm outside Chicago and had been an Eagle Scout. He and Wendy assiduously avoided the Manhattan society scene, trying to get to bed before 9:00 p.m. as often as they could, and preferred bird-watching in Central Park—Wendy led tours in the mornings for the Nature Conservancy—near their two-bedroom, twelve-hundred-square-foot apartment, a modest residence for one of the highest-paid executives on Wall Street. Paulson wore a plastic running watch, and any inclination he might have had to spend money was discouraged by Wendy, the daughter of a Marine officer whose frugality had kept him firmly grounded. One day, Paulson came home with a new cashmere coat from Bergdorf Goodman, to replace one that he had had for ten years. “Why did you buy a new coat?” Wendy asked. The next day, Paulson returned it.
And despite his prodigious fund-raising for President Bush, he hardly fit the image of a Republican hard-liner. A hard-core environmentalist whose only car was a Toyota Prius, he was the subject of a good deal of negative publicity—and the scourge of some annoyed Goldman Sachs shareholders—when in 2006 he donated 680,000 acres of land Goldman owned in the South American archipelago of Tierra del Fuego to the Wild-life Conservation Society. As it happened, his son was on the society’s board of advisers. Although the irony could not be appreciated by anyone at the time, the firm had acquired the ecologically sensitive South American land as part of a portfolio of mortgage defaults.
Paulson had a long history of exceeding others’ expectations. Despite his relatively modest frame—six feet one, 195 pounds—he had been an all-Ivy League tackle for Dartmouth, where his ferociousness in playing earned him the nicknames “The Hammer” and “Hammering Hank.” But unlike his hard-partying teammates, he kept orange juice and ginger ale in a refrigerator at his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, to drink during beer parties. (He met his future wife on a blind date when she was a student at Wellesley; Wendy’s classmates there included Hillary Rodham, who in some ways was her rival. Wendy was president of the class of 1969; Hillary was president of the student body.) Paulson graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth in 1968 with a major in English literature.
Paulson had first come to Washington in 1970, after graduating from Harvard Business School, and at the time he didn’t even own a suit. Armed with a recommendation from one of his undergraduate professors at Dartmouth, Paulson landed a job as a staff aide to the assistant secretary of Defense and would soon display some of the skills that would later make him such an effective salesman at Goldman Sachs. In just two years he advanced to the White House, where he became assistant director of the Domestic Policy Council, then headed by John Ehrlichman, who would later be convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the Watergate cover-up. Paulson served as a liaison with the departments of Treasury and Commerce. “Given how [Hank] moved from a low-ranking position in the Pentagon to the White House, you have to conclude he’s got pretty good antenna for what’s going
