Culture | The Obama White House

A cantankerous crew

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. By Ron Suskind. Harper; 528 pages; $29.99. Buy from Amazon.com

BARACK OBAMA has been portrayed as everything from post-racial political saviour to underground socialist. In Ron Suskind's telling, Mr Obama is reduced to a hapless rookie manager presiding over insubordinate, quarrelling aides and aggrieved women. It is not news that Mr Obama and his aides were often at odds on issues ranging from the size of the fiscal stimulus, whether to bail out Chrysler and when to proceed with health-care reform. Mr Suskind, an American writer and journalist, provides a more detailed picture, with the help of lengthy interviews with former officials.

Christina Romer, the first chairman of Mr Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, is taken aback by the White House's frat-boy atmosphere and often finds her views ignored until they are also championed by Larry Summers, Mr Obama's domineering National Economic Council director. Mr Summers comes across as a preening bully who boasts of his ability to take whatever side of an argument he chooses, and win.

In particular, he rubs Peter Orszag, Mr Obama's first budget director, the wrong way. Mr Orszag provides the most unflattering observations of Mr Summers, quoting him as claiming that they are “home alone” and that Mr Obama's White House makes mistakes that Bill Clinton's never would. Mr Summers's dominance and insistence on “relitigating” decisions, Mr Orszag tells Mr Suskind, stymied the president's “raw ability”.

Mr Suskind paints Tim Geithner, Mr Obama's treasury secretary, as a virtual fifth column inside the White House for the banks, “his longtime constituents”. Anonymous bankers speak of Mr Geithner the way a KGB handler might refer to a mole in the CIA. Mr Suskind's most damning charge is that Mr Geithner deliberately ignored Mr Obama's instructions (and the advice of Mr Summers and Ms Romer) to develop a plan to wind up, rather than bail out, Citigroup in early 2009.

“Confidence Men” is packed with many such sizzling claims and memorable scenes. But they are undermined by the book's numerous errors and unsupported allegations. For instance, Harvard's endowment did not lose almost one-third of its value on derivatives (it was hedge funds and private equity), Gene Sperling did not play tennis at the University of Michigan (it was Minnesota), and BASEL is not an acronym for the Bank for International Settlements (it is the town where the bank is based). At times the author confuses liquidity with capital and debt with equity.

Such mistakes may be mere annoyances, but others verge on smears. In early 2010 Mr Geithner was under fire for controversial decisions by the New York Fed while he was its president in late 2008. The Treasury, Mr Suskind writes, “was busy saying publicly” that Mr Geithner had signed a recusal agreement upon being nominated to be treasury secretary. At a congressional hearing he was forced to “admit he had signed no such agreement”. In fact the Treasury did not say Mr Geithner had signed such an agreement, only that he recused himself, which is what Mr Geithner told the hearing. “So did the secretary instruct his deputies to lie? No response,” Mr Suskind continues. But no such exchange occurred according to the hearing transcript.

Mr Summers disputes the words attributed to him and the Treasury says the account of Mr Geithner refusing to act on Citigroup is “simply untrue”. It is hardly unusual for subjects of a political tell-all to claim misrepresentation. But the frequency of errors and misconceptions in “Confidence Men” (the publisher says that some corrections will made in later printings) lead the reader to question its broader credibility, in particular its many detailed scenes reconstructed from the memory of often unnamed participants.

Even if most of what Mr Suskind writes is factually true, he frequently misses the broader story. Mr Geithner is too kind to banks, yet in hindsight his decision to reject nationalisation (as this newspaper among others urged) and instead force banks to undergo stress tests and raise more capital, was right. Most American banks are now well capitalised and lending more. For all the dysfunction Mr Suskind portrays, Mr Obama's White House somehow oversaw the most sweeping reforms to health care and finance that America has seen in generations. Not bad for a rookie manager.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A cantankerous crew"

Many miles to go

From the October 1st 2011 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Could your marriage survive a shipwreck?

“Maurice and Maralyn”, a new book about a couple stranded almost four months at sea, makes you wonder

What lies behind Beyoncé’s country turn?

The star singer has always been a canny interpreter of musical trends


Museums are becoming more expensive

Will it kill off future patronage and attendance?