They’ve put my story about Hank Paulson online, a day before the issue of TIME in which it appears comes out. Here’s how it begins:
It is late on a summer afternoon, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is sipping a Diet Coke in his giant corner office a patch away from the White House and doling out career advice. His secret to success? “You define your job expansively.”
He practices what he preaches. Lured to Treasury from Goldman Sachs two summers ago by a President in need of domestic-policy credibility, Paulson has grabbed the rudder of a $14 trillion national economy churning its way through a maelstrom. There’s always a danger in attributing too much economic impact to one government official, and Paulson certainly shares responsibility with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Congress — and with his boss, President George W. Bush. But if there is one person whose actions right now will determine whether the combination of crashing house prices, struggling lenders and punishingly high energy prices proves catastrophic for the U.S. economy, it is the man at Treasury. Read more.
I’ve already gotten some razzing elsewhere for the “borderline-anecdotal lede” and the lack of plain old wonky assessment of Paulson’s initiatives. Feel free to pile on.
I’ll be posting excerpts of my interview with Paulson (and possibly some of the other interviews I did for the story) here later. And maybe I’ll even offer some wonky assessment.
