You Want Paulson on That Wall! You Need Paulson on That Wall!

You’ve all started the task of unpacking some of the book’s broader themes, questions, and issues, which I hope to add to, but let me start by diving right into the topic at hand: Hank Paulson. Who is he?

In the crime scene of the financial crisis, it seems clear to me that Andrew Sorkin’s Hank Paulson is something like Aaron Sorkin’s Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men. I mean, he even looks a little like him:

Paulson, for all his flaws, is all that stands between civilization and chaos. Unelected and, outside of the bubbles of New York and (to a lesser extent) Washington, unknown, he seizes the reins of power in order to protect the world from what he thinks is waiting for it.

Looking at Paulson’s pedigree, it would take a true financial apostate to think that the canny, catholic CEO wouldn’t be among the best-equipped persons in the world to manage this crisis. But that doesn’t mean we’ll like how he does his job.

(By the way, if you read another of Sorkin’s profiles, of Erin Callan on Pages 29-30, and this Wall Street Journal article, which he cites in his endnotes, you can see a larger problem with all the space and time wasted in what Felix accurately describes as “accidental mock-epic.” The citation rightfully means I’m not using the p-word here, but why waste readers’ time doing such a thin rewrite of a well-known profile of Callan, when anyone who buys this book is going to know enough about her to work with? I agree with Felix that too much great reporting of what we don’t know is buried, throughout the book, in clumsy rewrites of things we already do.)