Benjamin, an eighth-grader behind her, he could certainly use the money.
He finally placed a call to his old pal Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and Citigroup’s lead director, to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake. Rubin, a longtime Geithner mentor, politely told him that he was backing Vikram Pandit for the position and encouraged him to stay in his current job. But the fact that he had been considered for a post of this magnitude was an important measure of Geithner’s newly earned prominence in the financial-world firmament and a reflection of the trust he had earned within it.
For much of his time at the Fed, he had detected a certain lack of respect from Wall Street. Part of the problem was that he was not out of the central banker mold with which financial types traditionally felt comfortable. In the ninety-five-year history of the Federal Reserve, eight men had served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—and every one of them had worked on Wall Street as either a banker, a lawyer, or an economist. Geithner, in contrast, had been a career Treasury technocrat, a protege of former secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. His authority was also somewhat compromised by the fact that, at forty-six, he still looked like a teenager and was known to enjoy an occasional day of snowboarding—and that he was given to punctuating his sentences with “fuck.”
Some Washington officials, journalists, and even a few bankers were charmed by Geithner, whose wiry intensity and dry, self-deprecating wit helped create the image of him as something of a policy-making savant: Although he often appeared distracted and inattentive during meetings, he would, after everyone had said his piece, give a penetrating analysis of the entire discussion, in coherent, flowing paragraphs.
Others, however, regarded these performances as what they saw as a form of controlling shtick. Every month the New York Fed would host a lunch for Wall Street chieftains, the very people his office oversaw, and every month Geithner would slouch in his seat, shuffling his feet, sipping a Diet Coke, and saying precisely nothing. He was as Delphic as Greenspan, one of his heroes, but he didn’t have the gravitas to pull it off, certainly not to an audience of major Wall Street players.
“He’s twelve years old!”
Such was the reaction of a nonplussed Peter G. Peterson, the former Lehman Brothers chief executive and co- founder of the private-equity firm Blackstone Group, upon first meeting Geithner in January 2003. Peterson had been leading the search for a replacement for William McDonough, who was retiring after a decade at the helm of the New York Fed. McDonough, a prepossessing former banker with First National Bank of Chicago, had become best known for summoning the chief executives of fourteen investment and commercial banks in September 1998 to arrange a $3.65 billion private-sector bailout of the imploding hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
Peterson had been having trouble with the search; none of his top choices was interested. Making his way down the candidates list, he came upon the unfamiliar name of Timothy Geithner and arranged to see him. At the interview, however, he was put off by Geithner’s soft-spokenness, which can border on mumbling, as well as by his slight, youthful appearance.
Larry Summers, who had recommended Geithner, tried to assuage Peterson’s concerns. He told him that Geithner was much tougher than he appeared and “was the only person who ever worked with me who’d walk into my office and say to me, ‘Larry, on this one, you’re full of shit.’”
That directness was the product of a childhood spent constantly adapting to new people and new circumstances. Geithner had had an army brat childhood, moving from country to country as his father, Peter Geithner, a specialist in international development, took on a series of wide-ranging assignments, first for the United States Agency for International Development and then for the Ford Foundation. By the time Tim was in high school, he had lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), India, and Thailand. The Geithner family was steeped in public service. His mother’s father, Charles Moore, was a speechwriter and adviser to President Eisenhower, while his uncle, Jonathan Moore, worked in the State Department.
Following in the steps of his father, grandfather, and uncle, Tim Geithner went to Dartmouth College, where he majored in government and Asian studies. In the early 1980s, the Dartmouth campus was a major battleground of the culture wars, which were inflamed by the emergence of a right-wing campus newspaper,
After college, Geithner attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he graduated with a master’s degree in 1985. That same year he married his Dartmouth sweetheart, Carole Sonnenfeld. His father was best man at the wedding at his parents’ summer home in Cape Cod.
With the help of a recommendation from the dean at Johns Hopkins, Geithner landed a job at Henry K issinger’s consulting firm, researching a book for K issinger and making a very favorable impression on the former secretary of State. Geithner learned quickly how to operate effectively within the realm of powerful men while not becoming a mere sycophant; he intuitively understood how to reflect back to them an acknowledgment of their own importance. With Kissinger’s support, he then joined the Treasury Department and became an assistant financial attache at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, where he ruled the compound’s tennis courts with his fierce competitiveness. The courts were also a place he could hold informal discussions with Tokyo correspondents from major publications, diplomats, and his Japanese counterparts.
During his tour in Japan, Geithner witnessed firsthand the spectacular inflation and crushing deflation of his host’s great bubble economy. It was through his work there that he came to the attention of Larry Summers, then the Treasury under secretary, who began promoting him to bigger and bigger responsibilities. During the Asian financial and Russian ruble crises of 1997 and 1998, Geithner played a behind-the-scenes role as part of what
When the South Korean economy almost collapsed in the fall of 1997, Geithner helped shape the U.S. response. On Thanksgiving Day, Geithner called Summers at his home and calmly laid out the reasons the United States had to help stabilize the situation. After much debate within the Clinton administration, the plan that emerged—to supply Seoul with billions of dollars on top of a $35 billion package from the International Monetary Fund and other international institutions—bore a close resemblance to Geithner’s original proposal. The following year, Geithner was promoted to Treasury under secretary for international affairs.
Geithner remained close to Summers, whom he used to play elaborate practical jokes on. More than once, when Summers was out giving a speech, Geithner would rewrite the wire news article about the presentation, purposely misquoting him. When Summers would return to the Treasury building after his speech, Geithner would present Summers with the doctored news report as if it were the real thing, and then just watch Summers blow up, threatening to call the reporter and demand a correction until Geithner let him in on the joke. The two men became
