Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

by Ron Suskind

  At 3:00 p.m. on the thirteenth, a Tuesday, the bankers filed into the conference room, several of them grousing about why they had been summoned to D.C. Paulson attempted his ultimatum.

  “Let me be clear: if you don’t take it and you aren’t able to raise the capital that they say you need in the market, then I’m going to give you a second helping and you’re not going to like the terms on that.”

  He paused, and reached for the high ground: “This is the right thing to do for the country.”

  Geithner then rattled off the amount each bank would be given. Bank of America: $25 billion; Citigroup: 25; Goldman Sachs: 10; JPMorgan: 25; Morgan Stanley: 10; State Street: 10; Wells Fargo: 25.

  The quid pro quo, Paulson stressed, was that the banks use this money to lend. Nods all around.

  But this initial receptiveness dissolved when John Thain, now technically an employee of Bank of America, mentioned the CEO’s version of the “third rail.”

  “What kind of protections can you give us on changes in compensation policy?”

  The Treasury was giving the banks cheap capital, in the midst of a crisis, and Thain was asking if their bonuses would be safe? CEO arrogance, though now tinged with a bit more unspoken desperation, had restored itself. The CEOs started to push back. What would the government demand in return for this “investment”—influence over operations, corporate decisions, and strategies? Though Thain was no longer a member of that exclusive club, he could still play the part—now they all were.

  If nothing else, this prompted Bank of America’s actual CEO, Thain’s boss, to assert his primacy.

  “I have three things to say,” Ken Lewis intervened. “There’s obviously a lot to like and dislike about the program. I think given what’s happening, if we don’t have a healthy fear of the unknown, then we’re crazy.”

  “If we spend another second talking about compensation issues, we’ve lost our minds!”

  And, finally, “I don’t think we need to be talking about this a whole lot more . . . We all know that we’re going to sign.”

  Slowly the tension subsided and the group acquiesced. The CEOs one by one took the plunge, allowing the federal government to essentially take a stake in their companies. By 6:00 p.m., all the bankers signaled that their boards had either approved or soon would approve the proposal. Signatures poured in. The government had handed $125 billion to nine banks, without conditions. Lending? Paulson’s assurance that the U.S. government would not intrude on the sovereignty of the banks receiving taxpayers’ money would make the issue of what to do with the money a matter ultimately of CEO discretion.

  Not every president gets an era. Bush “41” didn’t. Reagan did, and of course FDR got his. Clinton yearned for his eight years in office to mark an era, but he sensed they fell short. He often said a president needs to have governed during a crisis to be considered “great.” But clearly greatness calls for stiffer stuff than that. Bush II and LBJ got their eras, but in large part they saw their presidencies swallowed by titanic events, forces capable of crushing best-laid plans and magnifying their errors of judgment.

  By November 3, the forty-third U.S. president had all but vanished. He had only a handful of public events scheduled for the final weeks of October and none for the first few days of November. Bush’s 20 percent approval rating, the lowest on record for any president, stood as a testimony to the country’s rejection of his prideful, intensely personal style of leadership. During the decades since Nixon, Republican politicians had found success in a particular model: stalwart, unreflective leadership that championed America’s greatness at every turn and conceded nothing to their opponents. But Republican presidents had a tendency to turn away from party dogma by the end of their tenures. The term “Nixon to China”—referring most literally to the direct talks Nixon held with a Chinese leadership he had long reviled—is now a catchphrase for how a leader can move in an unexpected direction. Reagan, who won the presidency advocating tax cuts, saw in his second term that he had gone too far and reined in those cuts. Then he sat down rather amicably with Gorbachev, head of the “evil empire,” to work on ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Even Bush the Elder went back on his “No new taxes” pledge in an effort to balance the budget—a decision that helped set the table for Clinton’s budgetary success.

  But Bush the Younger never made a similar leap. He watched the election approach from inside the White House, a pariah now across the land he had governed with will and nerve. He remained forthright, unwilling to apologize for anything that might have gone wrong during his eight years, uninterested in second-guessing himself. No, he was going into hiding, not planning to emerge from the White House. He voted by absentee ballot. The leader of the free world, head of the world’s longest-standing democracy, would be staying home on Election Day. He had already mailed it in.

  Eras end with a whisper, reflection, and the quiet drift preceding sleep.

  But they start with a roar, the forceful declaration of a new dawn, different from all those that came before.

  A wave was gathering force across the country on the night before the election. It had been gathering for weeks. The grass roots that had taken hold in Iowa a year before had steadily spread, gaining purchase from state to state, and by November 3, 2008, Team Obama was running through fields of tall grass, in city after city, town after town.

  The senator would give the final speech of his campaign that night in Manassas, Virginia, and everything was clicking for him. David Axelrod, his campaign manager, worried now about the fact that he could not think of anything to worry about.

  “I don’t have much time to reflect on what’s happening—to ask the why questions—and Barack doesn’t, either,” Axelrod said. But as he paced the carpet, he was reminded of the original why question that had gotten all this started.

  It had come in December 2006. Obama, Michelle, and eight others were gathered in Axelrod’s downtown Chicago office. If Obama was going to run, he had to decide soon. The group had laid out what the primary schedule would look like, alongside a thorough game plan for fund-raising and organization building. Insights and queries shot back and forth across the room.

  But it was Michelle, Axelrod remembered, who stopped the show.

  “You need to ask yourself why you want to do this,” she said. “What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?” Obama sat quietly for a moment, while everyone waited to hear what he would say.

  “This I know,” Obama said. “When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across the country will look at themselves differently.”

  Obama understood, from his own search for identity, how America’s struggle with race was part of a larger story—a quest for dignity and hope that defined countless lives across the globe. This battered and downcast nation, he believed, was ready—eager, even—to prove the truth of its sacred oaths and, in so doing, prove itself once again to the broader world: liberty and justice for all. If through his own ambitions he could offer the country a chance to step forward, the country just might rise to the occasion and step with him into a brighter future.

  And it had. You could see it clearly, at this highest peak of the journey, the last night of a historic twenty-one-month campaign. By 10:00 p.m., a hundred thousand people had gathered at the Prince William County Fairgrounds in Manassas. They had been gathering since midafternoon, matching, person for person, the largest crowd Obama had ever drawn.

  Manassas lay on one of those border territories where the two Americas met, where the edge of D.C.’s suburbs bled into the real Old Dominion, where Starbucks gave way to gun shops, whole grains to grits. Under a dark and starless sky, people arrived from every direction, trekking miles on foot from the nearest parking spots, through a cool, misty bite of the November air. The crowds pressed thick along the fences, Americans of all backgrounds and skin colors huddling close. A special-ed teacher and her sister, who said, “I neve
r felt this way. I just feel like he can save us,” stood beside an American-born Rothschild, a big contributor who had met Obama at a fund-raiser and said she’d “never been the same.” Down the row, a Virginian farmer, thick-necked, calloused, and brush-scrubbed after a day with his hogs, remarked that it was “a long way from the War of Northern Aggression, which my great-greats fought in, to here.” But not so far. It was only about five miles from the battlefield where northern and southern troops first clashed in the battle of Bull Run to start the Civil War. One hundred and forty-seven years later, at 10:28 p.m., a black man stepped to the stage, the presidency within his grasp.

  “What a scene, what a crowd,” Obama said, half to himself, half to the roiling sea of humanity screaming in jubilation and waving American flags. He shook his head. “Wow.”

  The crowd seemed to swell with recognition. This is the way great speeches work: the call and the response. The giver receives, the receivers give, and they are one. With long-deferred dreams waiting in the wings, tonight, for the last time, the crowd could watch their hero reach, fingertips outstretched, for the great prize, and say, like a silent hymn, So close, so close, and when you reach it, we will reach it, too.

  America believes it is a blessed nation, that its triumphs and misfortunes bear the imprint of higher purpose. Everyone in the crowd knew the heartrending final twist of the story, that Obama’s grandmother—the tough Kansan lady who worked in a bomber factory through World War II and raised Barack—had died that day. Obama teared up in Charlotte in the afternoon, one lone drop on his cheek and his voice catching, just once, as he talked about her being “a very humble person and a very quiet person, she was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America.” He pushed through the swell of emotion. “In this crowd there are a lot of quiet heroes like that, mothers and fathers and grandparents who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children, or maybe their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, live a better life than they did. That’s what America is about.”

  A promised land—what it has always been about. It is through this self-conception that America has fit itself most powerfully into the greatest of human narratives: the journey narrative, of the elusive “up ahead,” and of those who usher us forward with sacrifice and faith but cannot themselves cross over. So it seemed fitting in a way that “Toot,” the quiet hero, could not “be there with us,” as her black grandson, the boy she had loved so dearly, finally led the way into Canaan.

  Obama reconciled himself to being a vessel for this narrative, although he knew its perils. So in Manassas he tried not to say too much about what he would do when, along with all those surging behind him, they reached this promised land. It was an idea, after all, more than a place. But in the hopeful electricity of the air, a careful-enough listener might have heard this tension, between symbol and reality, crackle softly. What substance of triumph to come, what feat of world-beating diplomacy or legislative derring-do, could shine as brightly as this victory of emblem and ideal?

  “I have just one word for you,” Obama intoned to the crowd. “Just one word, a single word: tomorrow. Tomorrow.”

  Then he ran through the obligatory riffs about policies encouraging “hard work and sacrifice,” reinvesting “in our middle class” and giving everybody “a chance to succeed.” But not too much of this. People didn’t care to hear more than a few familiar cadences of these old platitudes of slow, steady progress and fair play. So he wrapped it up, this final campaign speech, by reaching back for his best stuff, a tale he hadn’t told since Iowa and the primary, the story of down-and-out Obama, from back when “nobody gave us much of a chance.”

  It was really a preacher’s riff—of being lost and finding redemption—and even if the audience tonight hadn’t heard this particular story, they knew how it must turn out. So he worked it up, full of relish, recalling how he was limping along the campaign trail, town by town, at this point in South Carolina and without a prayer. He had somehow ended up in a field house in Greenwood on a rainy morning, about twenty people in the audience, and he was “coming down with a cold, and my back is sore,” and “I am mad, I am wet, and I am sleepy.

  “Suddenly I head this voice cry out behind me. ‘Fired up!’ I’m shocked. I jumped up. I don’t know what’s going on, but everyone else acts as though this were normal, and they say, ‘Fired up!’ Then I hear this voice say, ‘Ready to go!’ And the twenty people in the room act like this happens all the time, and they say, ‘Ready to go!’ . . . I looked behind me and there is this small woman, about sixty years old, a little over five feet, looks like she just came from church, she’s got on a big church hat . . . She looks at me and she smiles and she says, ‘Fired up!’

  “For the next five minutes she proceeds to do this. ‘Fired up?’ And everyone says, ‘Fired up!’ And she says, ‘Ready to go?’ And they say, ‘Ready to go!’ I’m standing there and I’m thinking, I’m being outflanked by this woman. She’s stealing my thunder . . .

  “But here’s the thing . . . after a minute or so I am feeling kind of fired up. I’m feeling like I’m ready to go. So I join the chant. It feels good. For the rest of the day, even after we left Greenwood, even though it was still raining, even though I was still not getting big crowds anywhere . . . I feel a little lighter, a little better . . .

  “Here’s the point, Virginia: that’s how this thing started. It shows you what one voice can do, that one voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

  That last part he said softly, his voice hoarse. Then he led them in the chant—“Fired up!” “Ready to go!”—thundering now as one hundred thousand voices, roaring through tears, sent their cries echoing across the old battlefield, just a few miles away, where the rebel yell once rang out to start a war and the century-long journey to King and then the path to Obama, cut across America to this night, full circle, in the long, fitful quest for a more perfect union.

  Tonight would come about as close to that perfection as may be attainable. When the chants died down, Obama stood there and waved, calm as the thunderous din washed over him. Then his whole body seemed to exhale. Game over. He grabbed the water bottle from the lectern and downed it. Rippling in the air, claiming its place among our most essential, was that single word.

  “Tomorrow.”

  Twenty-four hours later, a few minutes before 11:00 p.m., Barack Obama stepped onto the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park as president-elect of the United States. The ground was trembling from the streets of Chicago to the fertile fields of Kansas; from Montgomery, Alabama, to San Francisco; from the Great Lakes to the coasts, and across the world. And there was something sobering, even ominous, in the shaking earth. It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, but quite another to lead them.

  You could hear a certain relief in John McCain’s gracious concession speech, the half-contented sigh of a man who could now return to the self-deprecating, no-bullshit persona he liked best, without the fate of a nation resting on his shoulders. But for Obama, who had so powerfully joined hands with the country’s yearning and beleaguered, the road ahead had only gotten more difficult. The yawning chasm now loomed between who he was and what he really intended to do.

  It is a rare bond that allows a president and a nation to move as one. It forms when people, usually too busy to fuss over policy debates, see their leader as someone guided by a familiar internal compass, who will rise to meet the nation’s crises in the same way they meet the challenges in their own daily lives. Policies suddenly become not just what the president does at some adviser’s behest, to score a political point, but who he—or, someday, she—is. It is then that president and public enter their shared moment.

  Bush rose up, harnessing his basic trust in emotion and impulse, to meet the fir
st challenges of 9/11. But then he froze solid. The crisis, so unprecedented and fast-moving, demanded reappraisal as it unfolded and deepened. Bush, instead, kept returning to his own inner issues, his old battles and insecurities, which proved too static and too limited for the dictates of the moment. He needed to grow, and he didn’t.

  Obama’s charmed journey would soon bring him to a similar crucible. But not just yet, not tonight. The crowds in Grant Park, those around the country and the globe, wanted for now to live in this shared moment, to live in their champion’s victory and to make it theirs. It was no longer about tomorrow but about today.

  And yet, inside Obama, another quality was at work, one that had remained largely hidden from view during the campaign—an anticipatory sharpness, a sensitivity to how his actions would be seen and his words taken. He tended to trust this instinct too much, to give in to his tendency to assert control, and this could cut him off from the dynamism of the present tense, from the shared moment, even though, as in Manassas the night before, it was often when he was at his best.

  He had thought through this victory a thousand times before—what it would look like, what it would mean. But before he had even stepped to the stage, into that very moment for which he had been waiting his whole life, he grabbed Axelrod and told him to cancel the fireworks. Too celebratory. The country was in crisis, after all, and it was the wrong tone.

  In this moment he had brought to ignition, his response was to manage expectations and gently tamp them down. The canceled fireworks would be just the beginning; the job promised to be one hell of a challenge. As Michelle and the girls walked back across the floodlit runway to the wings, Obama turned to deliver a speech that, from the start, would strike a subdued note. It was as much his manner as his words, which began memorably: