Book: Treasury secretary ignored Obama directive

[September 16, 2011]  NEW YORK (AP) -- A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles.

Suskind conducted 200 interviews, including with Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. The Associated Press purchased a copy on Thursday.

The book states Geithner and the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009 order to consider dissolving banking giant Citigroup while continuing stress tests on banks, which were laden with toxic mortgage assets. The directive from the president was one of the most important decisions during the first few months of his presidency.

In the book, Obama does not deny Suskind's account, but does not reveal what he told Geithner when he found out. "Agitated may be too strong a word," Suskind quotes Obama as saying. Obama says later in the book that he was trying to be decisive but "the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision was slower than I wanted."

Geithner says in the book that he did not recall that Obama was mad at him about the Citigroup decision and rejected allegations contained in White House documents that his department had been slow to enact the president's plans.

"I don't slow walk the president on anything," Geithner told Suskind.

"The Citbank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president's authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers," Suskind writes.

Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm.

One of the major complaints about Obama's administration is that it was too easy on major financial institutions, including Citi. The president had wanted Treasury officials to focus on a proposal to dissolve the bank, but no plan was ever created, the book states.

The book says one of Obama's top advisers, former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, was not the president's first choices for the position. According to Suskind, Emanuel's name was not even on the initial short list, which included White House aide Pete Rouse.

An investigative reporter, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 while working for the Wall Street Journal. His other books include "The Way of the World" (2008), which focused on national security; "The One Percent Doctrine," a 2006 best-seller centered on the Bush Administration's foreign policy; "The Price of Loyalty," a 2004 book that claimed the Bush administration had planned an Iraq invasion as early as January 2001. Suskind's 1998 book, "A Hope Unseen," grew out of the series of articles that won him a Pulitzer for feature writing.

[Associated Press; By ANTHONY McCARTNEY]

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