When the housing bubble burst in 2008, Geithner was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Along with Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary at the time, Geithner was charged with essentially saving the economy from sliding into the abyss. The so-called troika devised the plan to inject billions of the government’s dollars directly into the banking system, effectively turning taxpayers into shareholders of massive, failing institutions. When he then ascended to Treasury secretary in 2009, Geithner became the public face of an economic-recovery program that, in Paulson’s words, “polled worse than torture.” The far-left labeled him an Ayn Rand capitalist, the far-right a socialist. Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, called his appointment to Treasury a “punch in the gut.” The Daily Kos, a left-leaning blog, published a story titled, “Why Tim Geithner Should Go to Jail.” At the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2009, even President Obama joked that a goal of his second hundred days would be to house-train his new dog, Bo, “because the last thing Tim Geithner needs is someone else treating him like a fire hydrant.” 
 
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 Through it all, Geithner has maintained that saving the banks was the only way to protect the U.S. economic system and, by extension, its taxpayers. “I would say that there’s lots of messiness and unpleasantness and awkwardness and a lot of unjust collateral beneficiaries of our rescues,” he told the students at Harvard. “No doubt about it. It would be nice if it were otherwise.” But there was a more salient point he wanted to convey. “People think we gave the banks this free gift of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, using the taxpayers’ money that we would never see again,” he said. “People thought we would lose $2 trillion on our financial rescues.” 
 
 He paused and looked out at a crowd that, it’s safe to say, probably did not fully appreciate how intense the anger around the financial bailouts had been and how close the country was to the precipice of a full-on depression. “We are going to earn, all in, a couple hundred billion dollars,” Geithner said. And six years after the bailouts, the too-big-to-fail banks and the insurance giant A.I.G. have since repaid the money they took from the government. Even the rescues of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-lending companies that once had to borrow $187.5 billion, have turned profitable. “Much of the dominant view about the strategy,” Geithner said, “is the inverse of the truth.” 
 
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 To clarify his perspective on all of that “messiness and unpleasantness and awkwardness,” Geithner has spent the past year writing a book — “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises” — that will be published on May 12. It is filled with revealing and sometimes gripping behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Geithner acknowledges for the first time, for instance, that he was initially at odds with Paulson and Bernanke over whether to bail out Lehman Brothers in advance of the famous weekend meeting in which they sought to find a solution before the firm collapsed. (“I sensed their advisers pulling them toward political expedience,” he writes, “trying to distance them from the unpalatable moves we had made and the even less palatable moves I thought we’d have to make soon.”) 
 
 Geithner also discloses that some members of the administration talked openly about nationalizing some banks like Citigroup. (“If you want to go in, you better be sure there are W.M.D.'s,” Lee Sachs, an economic adviser, said during a meeting with Obama in the Roosevelt Room.) And Geithner discloses that he refused to fire Ken Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, who was near retirement. (“Tim, I’m trying to look out for you,” Geithner reports Gene Sperling, a counselor to him at the time, saying that he didn’t owe Lewis any favors. “If he’s going anyway, why don’t you push him out?”) He even concedes that he and Summers were initially opposed to the Volcker Rule, the widely popular regulation barring commercial banks from proprietary trading. His support, he writes, was “certainly political.” 
 
 But “Stress Test” is also surprisingly personal. Geithner confides that he actually didn’t want the Treasury job in the first place and that he tried on multiple occasions to resign, but Obama wouldn’t “liberate” him. He is also forthcoming — albeit in the somewhat unemotional language of the technocrat — about his own regrets. (“Before the crisis, I didn’t push for the Fed in Washington to strengthen the safeguards for banks, nor did I push for legislation in Congress to extend the safeguards to nonbanks,” he writes. “I wish we had expanded our housing programs earlier, to relieve more pain for homeowners.”) 
 
 Geithner likes to say that all the criticism and the second-guessing and the vitriol directed his way never got to him. “I try to pay no attention to that,” he told me over lunch one afternoon in New York. Almost indignantly, he added, “Our job was to fix it, not to make people like us.” Later, though, he softened and qualified the statement. “I’m human, and I like to be liked,” he said, “even if I didn’t expect to be liked in this.” 
 
 Geithner has remained silent about his time at Treasury, but over the past month, he and I met several times to discuss and debate his tenure. Despite the wonky monotone he often projected during the worst moments of the crisis, he is lively and quick-witted in person, and he has a special proclivity for particularly graphic language. Over lunch at Café Centro, near Grand Central Terminal, he told me a story from a few months earlier: “I was crossing Lexington Avenue and some guy said, ‘You’re one of the Goldman [expletive] who ruined the country.’ ” Geithner said he replied, “Thanks for sharing.” At another point, he cheerfully relayed a story that also appears in his book about the time he sought advice from Bill Clinton on how to pursue a more populist strategy: “You could take Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley,” Clinton said, “and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days. Then the blood lust would rise again.” 
 
 Little of this personality emerged when Geithner was in office. A career public servant, whose work often took place behind the scenes, he seemed an unlikely fit for a high-profile position in the Washington fishbowl culture. When his name was floated for the Treasury job in the fall of 2008, he was busy helping stave off, as the president of the New York Fed, the collapse of Citigroup. Geithner had moved for work before, during the 1990s — from Washington to Tokyo and back to Washington for jobs at the Treasury Department — and now wanted to stay put in Larchmont, N.Y., a comfortable suburb a half-hour from Manhattan. “I felt guilty that I was even thinking about relocating again,” he writes in his book. “I had also promised Carole” — his wife — “that we would never again live apart, not for anything, and I knew we couldn’t move the kids in the middle of the school year.” Carole Geithner, a social worker and author, was openly resistant to the idea of her husband’s becoming the next Treasury secretary. “Carole didn’t just have reservations,” Geithner writes. “She was opposed.” 
 
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 When he was summoned in the fall of 2008 to see Barack Obama, then a candidate, at a W Hotel in Manhattan, Geithner offered a series of arguments to disqualify himself from the job: He looked deceptively young; he had little media experience; and, he recalls, “in a period of turmoil and uncertainty, the public would want to see a familiar and reassuring face in charge of the country’s finances.” (Geithner, after all, had spent his career with titles like “deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy.”) Perhaps most crucial, he writes, he told Obama: “I’ve been up to my neck in this crisis. You’re going to have a hard time separating me from these choices if you ask me to work with you.” The implication was that by appointing Geithner, one of the main architects of the rescue strategy, the president would essentially be forced to endorse the bailouts, which could have negative political consequences. He suggested to Obama that Summers or Robert Rubin, his mentors, would be fitter for the job. 
 
 But Geithner and Obama had a somewhat natural rapport. Geithner, like Obama, had an itinerant childhood. His father worked for U.S.A.I.D., and the family lived in India, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Thailand. In the conversation, they discovered that Geithner’s father ran the Ford Foundation’s Asia grant-writing program in the 1980s at the same time that Obama’s mother was at its office in Indonesia. It was a nice coincidence, Geithner says, but it still didn’t make him want the job. 
 
 ‘The accusation or the charge that our motivations were to help banks is kind of offensive to the people who worked with me and definitely to the president.’ 
 
 That didn’t stop Obama from inviting him for another meeting after the election, this time in Chicago. On his way to meet with the president-elect, Geithner bumped into Summers, whose name had also been floated for the Treasury job, at O’Hare International Airport. “I ran into Larry, who was, I’m pretty sure, in the process of checking the Intrade odds on Obama’s choice for Treasury,” Geithner writes, referring to the online market where investors bet on political outcomes. “It was kind of awkward for both of us. I told Larry I had not sought the job and had urged Obama to choose him as secretary, which didn’t really make the situation less awkward.” 
 
 On his way back to the airport after his meeting with Obama, Geithner received a call from Rahm Emanuel, who had been appointed the president-elect’s chief of staff. Emanuel wanted to know whether Geithner would accept either the Treasury job or a job as the director of the National Economic Council, a less-prestigious post, if one of them were offered to him. “I said I would not do N.E.C., but if you asked me to do Treasury, I would do Treasury,” he said that he replied. In Emanuel’s telling, Geithner was not drafted into the job with such reluctance. “I’m not here to disagree with Tim,” he told me. “He said he wasn’t going to lobby for the job or put a campaign on for it, but obviously, if asked, he would serve.” He was asked, and he did choose to serve, and in a role reversal, Summers accepted the N.E.C. post. 
 
 The last part of his acceptance was breaking the news to his wife. “I remember the moment,” Carole Geithner recounted to me. “He walked in the door, and I just saw it in his eyes. He couldn’t tell me verbally, because we had a friend visiting who just before said, ‘I don’t think you need to worry, I really think it’s gonna go to Larry Summers.’ And we had to wait till everyone went to bed, and he told me, but I could tell just when he walked in. And there’s this pit in your stomach.” She added: “I’d already had a taste of the fishbowl, and I’d also seen other people’s relationships, what happens to them when they’re in the fishbowl. So I really had a sense of dread.” 
 
 That dread materialized quickly. During his nomination hearing, questions emerged about why Geithner had not properly filed his tax returns in 2001 and 2002. Geithner, who after a career in Civil Service was probably one of the least wealthy nominees in the history of the office, told the senators that he used TurboTax to calculate his filings. The perception that he was overmatched for the position was strengthened when he responded to a congressman’s question at a second hearing by saying: “I just want to correct one thing. I have never been a regulator, for better or worse.” The flub, his critics said, was revealing. Geithner had run the New York Fed, whose job is to supervise and regulate financial institutions, at the very moment when Wall Street’s largest banks were gorging on debt and packaging toxic assets. 
 
 Geithner likes to say that his initial reluctance to take the job gave him an enormous amount of freedom once he had it. On his third day, for instance, while heading to a meeting in the Oval Office, he was handed talking points for a brief statement that he and Obama would make about the latest Wall Street bonus numbers. Geithner looked over the talking points, which were meant to express outrage, and decided he was simply not going to make them. So he sat silently and let the president express outrage for the two of them. “There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses,” Obama told the press. “Now’s not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them, I expect Secretary Geithner to send to them.” 
 
 But Geithner’s refusal to condemn the bankers became a recurrent theme during his time at Treasury. According to Bernanke, “I didn’t and Tim didn’t go very far in lambasting individuals in Wall Street, maybe partly because we were more focused on the problem than on the politics.” Others, however, have suggested that Geithner was simply too cozy with Wall Street. He had never worked as a banker himself, but he grew up inside the bubble of elites. (Before going into government, his first job was working for Henry Kissinger at Kissinger Associates.) He was tutored at Treasury by Summers, who later worked for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Company, and Rubin, who came up through Goldman Sachs and eventually joined the board of Citigroup, where he has been blamed in some circles for its taking on excessive risky debt that nearly caused the firm to collapse. Each man played a significant role in deregulating the financial industry in the 1990s by supporting the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking; they also pushed to limit future regulation of derivatives. 
 
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 This criticism that he was too close to Wall Street was also fueled by the fact that Geithner, with his English spread-collar shirts and his perfectly coifed hair, just looks like a banker. He often tells a story about how Emanuel’s wife, Amy Rule, once told him at a dinner party, “You must be looking forward to going back to that nice spot you have waiting for you at Goldman.” During an April 2009 hearing about the financial-bailout program, Damon A. Silvers, a panel member, seemed almost incredulous that Geithner had never worked on Wall Street. 
 
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 “You have been in banking — " Silvers said. 
 
 “I have never actually been in banking,” Geithner interrupted. “I have only been in public service.” 
 
 “Well, a long time ago. A long time — “ 
 
 “Actually, never.” 
 
 “Investment banking, I meant — “ 
 
 “Never investment banking.” 
 
 “Well, all right,” Silvers conceded. “Very well then.” 
 
 What is certain, however, is that for all the malfeasance of the biggest banks, Geithner had a predisposition that Wall Street, even as it was, remained essential to the functioning of the U.S. economy in just about every sector. “I did not view Wall Street as a cabal of idiots or crooks,” he writes in “Stress Test.” “My jobs mostly exposed me to talented senior bankers, and selection bias probably gave me an impression that the U.S. financial sector was more capable and ethical than it really was.” During his first few months in the job, Geithner fought with Summers, who felt that his protégé had become overly solicitous of the banks. Geithner dismissed Summers as espousing “the hedge-fund view.” (“Hedge-fund executives tended to see the banks as dumb, lumbering giants,” Geithner writes.) He disagreed when Summers suggested to Obama that the administration pre-emptively nationalize banks like Citigroup or Bank of America or even to try to embarrass them into changing their compensation structures. “I feared that the tougher we talked about the bonuses, the more we would own them,” Geithner writes, “fueling unrealistic expectations about our ability to eradicate extravagance in the financial industry.” 
 
 Geithner’s stance often came off as aloof, or worse. For all the time he spent focusing on how the financial industry functions, and for all his knowledge of past crises, critics wondered how someone with his experience could be surprised that some bankers might operate less than ethically. In many ways, Geithner’s first year validated the reservations he shared with Obama. His first public speech, as he described it, “sucked.” (As he spoke, the Dow Jones began a near-400 point drop.) Geithner offered his resignation, but Emanuel told him he had to stay. “Given what we were facing, three months into the administration,” Emanuel told me, “finding a new Treasury secretary wasn’t the solution.” Instead, Emanuel says he instituted a quick primer in politics for Geithner, holding a daily meeting with him and Summers in his office to go over talking points and strategy. “We did that for about six to nine months. The answer was not resigning; the answer was building.” 
 
 ‘I thought the only thing I could really do about that was to make sure I didn’t go work for a bank or a firm that we’d regulated or that we’d rescued directly.’ 
 
 The job, meanwhile, was exacting the personal toll that he feared it would. Geithner, who lived at a friend’s house in Washington, tried commuting to Larchmont for the weekends with the Secret Service in tow (his code name: Fencing Master) but rarely made it. “We did not see much of him then, I can tell you that,” Carole says. “And when he was home, it was for really brief times.” When the family decided to relocate to Washington, in the summer of 2009, John Oliver, then of “The Daily Show,” reported on the family’s unsuccessful effort to sell their home. (“Hold on. Timothy Geithner, the man responsible for getting us out of this [expletive], cannot sell his house?” Oliver said. “Oh, God.” He referred to the home as “a toxic asset.”) Geithner told his wife that she might want to tone down her media consumption. “He discouraged me from doing it, but I couldn’t not,” she said. “I felt like, Well, our friends are reading this, and people are reading this, and this is what they think about you.” 
 
 Around this time, Geithner consulted his predecessor, Henry Paulson. In recalling the conversation, Paulson says that Geithner confided to him that “Carole is not of this world. I remember that very well because he might as well have been speaking of Wendy” — Paulson’s wife. “There’s a fair amount of hypocrisy in Washington. Before a tough hearing, you’ll sometimes have the congressional committee chairman say to you, ‘I love you, you da man!’ But when the cameras are on and the lights go on, they’ll rake you over the coals for the benefit of the voters back home. And while you may learn to accept this and deal with it, understandably your wife and your kids never do, you know? They take it more personally.” After just two years in Washington, Carole moved the family back to Larchmont. 
 
 Perhaps the main challenge that Geithner has found in selling his argument is that to believe that the bailout truly worked, you have to believe that the other side of the cliff would have been worse. This makes his argument something of a counterfactual one, a hypothesis that will always be open to interpretation. 
 
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 As such, it has left him open to endless criticism that he was a prisoner of “cognitive regulator capture” by Wall Street or suffered so greatly from “Lehman Syndrome” that he became soft on the industry. Simon Johnson, an economist at M.I.T., has argued that bailouts were necessary but executed in the form of a great giveaway. He has compared Geithner to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French statesman “who served the Revolution, Napoleon and the restored Bourbons — opportunistic and distrusted, but often useful and a great survivor.” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has written in her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” that Geithner “believed the government’s most important job was to provide a soft landing for the tender fannies of the banks.” It’s an opinion shared by Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general of TARP. He told me in an email that Geithner and his team “consistently put the interests of the banks over those who were supposed to be helped, like struggling homeowners.” While Barofsky acknowledges that TARP “undoubtedly helped save the system,” he also says, “it was supposed to do so much more.” 
 
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 That remains Geithner’s fundamental problem. Even those who concede TARP’s success can find fault with it. “It’s impossible to know whether the economy would have bounced back more quickly and we would be closer to full employment now without the bailouts, since none of us know what other policies would have been pursued,” Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, has written. “We do know that we would have been freed of the albatross of a horribly bloated financial sector that sucks the life out of the economy and redistributes income upward to the very rich. For that fact, Timothy Geithner bears considerable responsibility.” 
 
 Geithner waved off much of this criticism. “The argument that there was a way to somehow protect people without doing things that looked like you were protecting the banks — was deeply confused and mistaken,” he said, anger rising in his voice. “And the accusation or the charge that our motivations were to help banks is kind of offensive to the people who worked with me and definitely to the president.” But perhaps the more stinging criticism comes from Bair, who has said that Geithner basically made a gamble. “Tim had no idea whether the government’s money would be lost,” she told me. “Taxpayers will never be adequately compensated for the tremendous risks he took with their money.” 
 
 I repeated the charge to Geithner. “How could you be certain?” he said. “Let’s just go through the natural experiment. The British tried a couple things that I think are good counterexamples.” He referred to the British government’s lending targets, which were intended to show that the bailouts were keeping credit flowing to regular people. “Not to be unfair to them, but those are largely fake, and they were sort of ridiculous, because their economy was way overleveraged, too, and lending was going to fall even in the best sort of circumstances. And did it help the British in terms of taking some of the sting out of the public anger? No.” Then he brought up the British government’s decision to cap executive compensation. “It wasn’t really designed to change comp,” Geithner said. “It was designed to create the impression that they were changing comp. Did it significantly diminish the popular version of what they did and make them more popular for doing it? No. Was it effective? No.” 
 
 As for the argument that he didn’t focus on the homeowners, Geithner said that’s a myth, too, listing TARP housing programs, a lending program to state and local housing-finance authorities and the mortgage-modification-guarantee program. But when I mentioned the passage in “Stress Test” in which he regrets that he hadn’t done more and asked him to elaborate, he became feisty. “It’s kind of too unicorny to frame it this way,” he said. “Because if you suspended disbelief and say: ‘If we had no constraints on resources or authority, could we have done more?’ If we had no constraints on resources or authority, yeah, we could have done more. And we could have done more, quickly.” He added that if they had full control over the government-sponsored enterprises and the Federal Housing Administration, which insures many mortgages, “absolutely, we could have done dramatically more.” He paused for a moment. “But that’s not the real world. In the real world we had to act within the constraints we faced and the limits of the authority we had.” 
 
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 Congressman Barney Frank, whose name is on the signature, if limited, reform bill that emerged from the crisis, once said, “You don’t get any credit for disaster averted.” But Geithner’s explanation recalled how almost pre-emptively he forfeited the public relations battles at Treasury. When he had the chance to jump on popular issues, like supporting the Volcker Rule, he declined, because he never believed that proprietary trading led to the financial crisis. The big institutions that failed — Fannie, Freddie, Bear Stearns, Lehman and A.I.G. — weren’t the types of banks the legislation was designed to regulate, he told me. (He later changed his mind on the Volcker Rule after he determined that it would help make the Dodd-Frank reform legislation easier to pass. Still, he was happy to leave the impression he was against it so as to make it more palatable to the Democratic left, he writes.) When outrage erupted over A.I.G.'s decision to give bonuses, Geithner said they had signed contracts, and the government couldn’t rip them up. These decisions lent credence to the impression that he started with the idea of saving Wall Street instead of the people who needed it most — that he gave a dollar to the banks rather than the homeowners. 
 
 Geithner is confident that the empirical data has already vindicated his decision. And while there is some debate over how to calculate the proceeds from the various bailouts — TARP, the auto companies, the F.D.I.C. programs and Fannie and Freddie, among others — the evidence is persuasive. ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative organization, which keeps a tally of the bailout, puts the current profit at $32 billion. The White House Office of Management and Budget estimates that Fannie and Freddie will turn a profit of $179 billion over the next decade. (Critics might contend that these figures don’t include the costs of the stimulus or the Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing programs.) And regardless of the math, a larger point is indisputable: While the returns were never the goal — saving the system was — they are indeed evidence of its success and support, to some degree, Geithner’s counterfactual argument. If the system had been allowed to collapse or TARP had failed, there would have been enormous taxpayer losses. 
 
 On some level, though, data cannot settle the argument. During our time together, Geithner spoke about the “collateral beneficiaries” of the bailout, by which he meant the inconvenient fact that certain investors and institutions came out of the crisis better off. And for some, that is direct proof of another counterfactual argument. To believe that the bailout worked, they would argue, you would have to believe that the system itself was worth saving in the first place. 
 
 For much of the past five years, Geithner has publicly been fighting with the idea of too-big-to-fail, which implies that executives at the top banks were willing to take on remarkable risks because they knew that the government would ultimately bail them out, given the devastation their collapse would bring. Geithner and Obama marketed the Dodd-Frank bill as a way to end future bailouts. In 2010, right before the bill passed, Geithner said, “The reforms will end too-big-to-fail.” Obama went further: “Because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. There will be no more tax-funded bailouts, period.” 
 
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 But it is now clear that Geithner never believed his own talking points. To him, too-big-to-fail and the so-called moral hazard, or safety net, that it would create can’t really ever be fully taken away. During his lecture to Summers’s class, one student asked a question about “resolution authority,” a provision of the reform laws that is supposed to let the government wind down a complex financial institution without creating a domino effect. The question prompted Geithner onto a tangent about too-big-to-fail. “Does it still exist?” he said. “Yeah, of course it does.” Ending too-big-to-fail was “like Moby-Dick for economists or regulators. It’s not just quixotic, it’s misguided.” 
 
 Geithner paused for a moment. “Can you design a system ever that allows you to be indifferent to the failure of any institution, in any state of the world?” he asked aloud before answering his own question. “You can design a system, and I think we have, that allows you to be indifferent in most states of the world: the five-year flood, the 15-year flood, the 30-year flood, maybe even the 50-year flood,” he said. “But there are constellations of storms, of panics, of fires that are so bad that it’s very hard to imagine that you could be indifferent to the failure of the financial system.” 
 
 One exception to that moral hazard, however, seems to be Lehman Brothers. Some have speculated that Geithner, Paulson and Bernanke let the bank fail in order to send a political message about their vigilance. The troika have long said they were always in agreement to find a partner for Lehman Brothers and were prepared to use government funds to make a deal, as they had when they matched Bear Stearns with JPMorgan. All have repeatedly said, under oath, that they tried to do all they could, but that by late Sunday, Sept. 14, with no credible buyer (Barclays and Bank of America, Lehman’s two last suitors, dropped out), an analysis of Lehman’s assets indicated that they couldn’t legally lend money to the company. 
 
 Yet in “Stress Test,” Geithner reveals a crucial tactical rift between the three men going into that weekend. Geithner writes that he was worried that Paulson’s public insistence that there would be no taxpayer bailout was being driven by politics, not pragmatism, and that he believed that a “no bailout” message could undermine the government’s further ability to pursue a rescue if one were needed. Instead, Geithner preferred to send the impression that a bailout might be available, if necessary, which could have made the bank more desirable to a suitor. We’ll never know if that would have saved the bank, and Geithner won’t play that guessing game, either. Later, he writes: “These disagreements did not turn out to be consequential. Hank and Ben would have the courage to change course and do what needed to be done.” 
 
 When I ran the earlier passage by Paulson, he paused for a moment. “While we discussed and sometimes debated tactics, we were unified in our resolve to avoid the failure of systemically important institutions and that certainly included Lehman Brothers, where we worked hard right up until the end to prevent a failure,” he said. In his own account of the financial crisis, “On the Brink,” Paulson explained why he was so insistent that the public believe there was no bailout coming. “The New York Fed would be inviting Wall Street C.E.O.'s for a meeting, and we didn’t want them to arrive thinking that we would be there waving a government checkbook.” 
 
 Bernanke suggested they “were very much on the same page,” but he made another point regarding the popular opinion about Lehman’s failure. “Ironically, the conventional wisdom now is that it was obvious that Lehman should be saved but that the Fed and the Treasury went ahead and made the big mistake of letting it go,” he told me. “The truth is actually quite the opposite. Conventional wisdom at the time was overwhelmingly in favor of letting Lehman fail, but Tim, Hank and I were very much convinced that we should do everything possible not to let it fail. But then of course we ran out of options.” 
 
 In January 2013, Geithner was finally “liberated.” He had been pressing Obama to let him step down since 2010, suggesting replacements like Erskine Bowles and Hillary Rodham Clinton. At one point, during an event at the White House, Obama resorted to taking Carole aside and trying to persuade her to have her husband stay. “I wasn’t an easy person to be convinced,” she recalls. “I mean, I knew it was kind of a hopeless cause — that if he needed to stay, he needed to stay — but I was not easily convinced. And that was probably a little surprising to the president.” 
 
 After much back and forth, Obama eventually appointed his chief of staff, Jack Lew, to the job. Geithner returned to Larchmont as an empty-nester, in the same house he could not sell, where he has spent the last year writing his book, working out of the Council on Foreign Relations and giving speeches for six-figure sums. While he claims he is through with government, he still maintains an intimate relationship with Obama, who was rumored to have recruited him to succeed Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. 
 
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 When I asked him about it over lunch, Geithner originally glossed over the point, as if he declined the post. But as lunch continued, he stopped himself. “You didn’t ask me whether — I didn’t say that I declined it, I just said I was not interested in it. Just to clarify.” When I asked if he officially declined, he responded: “I didn’t speak to that question, I was just saying that I didn’t. You said that you — you phrased my thing as if I had declined. I wasn’t interested.” 
 
 Geithner admitted that he struggled over what to do next. He didn’t want to go back into government, and he wasn’t inclined to go into academia, but he worried about the optics of going into finance. “I think the perception problem — first of all it’s very damaging to me as I was trying to do some tough things, and I think it’s kind of very damaging to the country at the moment because it sees this basic loss of faith in government,” he said. “I thought the only thing I could really do about that was to make sure I didn’t go work for a bank or a firm that we’d regulated or that we’d rescued directly.” 
 
 Last month, Geithner officially began a new job as president of a modestly sized private-equity firm, Warburg Pincus. It may not be investment banking, but it’s possibly finance’s second-most-vilified industry, given how Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital experience played out in the 2012 presidential campaign. It’s very unlikely that Geithner will be using TurboTax anytime in the near future, though; he is likely to make millions if not tens of millions of dollars over the next decade if he stays in the business. 
 
 As we spoke, it became clear that this new job was one Geithner actually wanted. “The private sector is what most people do for a living,” he said. “I thought that the possibility some people would criticize me for not staying a public servant was not a good reason not to go try and learn something new.” It was also clear he had finally learned some public relations pointers from Treasury. 
 
 On a Saturday in late April, I called Geithner for the last time to talk about the Volcker Rule and a few personal facts. (“I’m almost 5-9, just below 5-9. 5-8-and-¾, something like that. You can round down, you can say 5-8. I’m relatively secure in my height.”) He told me he was enjoying his new job and that he was preparing to take a flight to Asia later that day for work. 
 
 I asked if the job meant that he had finally given up socialism, which his more severe detractors had accused him of, and embraced capitalism. 
 
 “No,” he said, with a laugh. “I wouldn’t claim that yet.” ||||| Faced with public anger over Wall Street bailouts and the economic wreckage left in the wake of financial crisis, Timothy Geithner sought former President Bill Clinton’s advice on how to address the populist unrest. 
 
 “You could take Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days,” said Clinton, referring to the CEO of Goldman Sachs. “Then the blood lust would rise again.” 
 
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 That and other revelations about Geithner’s government tenure as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and then treasury secretary are contained in a New York Times Magazine article published on Thursday in advance of Monday’s release of Geithner’s book “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.” 
 
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 Among the other revelations in the article: He doesn’t think the problem of “too big to fail” has been solved; he was at odds with former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke over the collapse of Lehman Brothers; and he floated Hillary Clinton as a candidate to succeed him before he left Treasury in January 2013. 
 
 Geithner became President Barack Obama’s first treasury secretary in 2009 after engineering the early responses to the crisis as president of the New York Fed. 
 
 Depending on your point of view, he’s either the hero or the goat of the government’s response to the financial crisis. Was he too quick to help out big banks and too reluctant to help troubled homeowners? Or was he willing to make the unpopular choices needed to save the financial system, damn the political blowback? 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: What Timothy Geithner’s new book won’t tell you) 
 
 The Times article, written by columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, previews the arguments Geithner will make in his book. What follows are some highlights from the article. 
 
 Hillary Clinton for treasury secretary? Convincing Obama to let him step down as treasury secretary was a hard sell that included floating the president’s onetime rival — Hillary Clinton — to replace Geithner. 
 
 “He had been pressing Obama to let him step down since 2010, suggesting replacements like Erskine Bowles and Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Sorkin writes. 
 
 The president was so determined to have Geithner stay on longer that at one White House event, he took Geithner’s wife aside to try to enlist her help. 
 
 “I knew it was kind of a hopeless cause — that if he needed to stay, he needed to stay — but I was not easily convinced,” Carole Geithner told the Times. “And that was probably a little surprising to the president.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: The Citigroup clique) 
 
 Too big to fail is alive: When Geithner was still at Treasury, he toed the line on the administration’s position that the 2010 Dodd-Frank law would, without a doubt, put an end to bailouts and the problem of “too big to fail” banks. 
 
 But he’s clearly ditched those talking points. 
 
 Sorkin describes a lecture Geithner delivered to Larry Summers’ Harvard class last year. Asked whether “too big to fail” still exists, he replied, “Yeah, of course it does,” describing attempts to end too big to fail as a “Moby Dick” for economists or regulators. “It’s not just quixotic, it’s misguided.” 
 
 He questioned whether policymakers could ever develop a system that allows them to be indifferent to the failure of an institution. 
 
 Lehman laments: Geithner had misgivings about not rescuing Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and felt then Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke were letting politics cloud their thinking. 
 
 “I sensed their advisers pulling them toward political expedience,” Geithner writes in his book, according to the Times, “trying to distance them from the unpalatable moves we had made and the even less palatable moves I thought we’d have to make soon.” 
 
 Any hard feelings didn’t linger. “These disagreements did not turn out to be consequential. Hank and Ben would have the courage to change course and do what needed to be done,” Geithner writes, according to the article. 
 
 Was he offered the Fed job? Geithner doesn’t seem to want to get into the rumors that he was considered as a replacement for former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke.
– The New York Times magazine has a lengthy profile of Tim Geithner ahead of Monday's release of the former Treasury chief's new book, and one bit in particular involving Bill Clinton is getting a lot of attention. Geithner had asked Clinton's advice on appeasing populist anger in dealing with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs: “You could take Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days," said Clinton. "Then the blood lust would rise again.” The Washington Post thinks that's interesting in the context of the 2016 election, considering that it could pit Hillary Clinton, seen as a safe choice by Wall Street, against the more populist Elizabeth Warren. Some other highlights, as spotted by Politico: Trying to leave: Geithner says he began pushing President Obama to let him step down in 2010, suggesting Hillary Clinton as his replacement. Obama resisted, however, even lobbying Geithner's wife, Carole. "I knew it was kind of a hopeless cause—that if he needed to stay, he needed to stay—but I was not easily convinced,” she tells the Times. “And that was probably a little surprising to the president.” Too big to fail: As Treasury chief, Geithner went along with the administration's reforms to end the concept of too-big-to-fail banks, but now he's got a different take. During a lecture, when asked about whether the principle still exists, he answered, “Yeah, of course it does.” Ending too-big-to-fail was “like Moby-Dick for economists or regulators. It’s not just quixotic, it’s misguided.”