A Recurring Summer(s) Nightmare

Get me an Ambien, or whatever is the favorite of people having nightmares. I am having flashbacks and can't sleep. In a piece tactfully called "Larry Summers is an Unrepentant Bully," Huffington Post Business Editor Peter Goodman writes,

In the fall of 2008 -- just after many of the nation's largest financial institutions teetered toward collapse, prompting the government to unleash a taxpayer-financed rescue -- I called Larry Summers at his Harvard office to ask him whether he had any regrets. 

Specifically, I wanted to know how Summers had come to view his actions as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, where he had joined then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to dismantle the government's authority to regulate trading in derivatives -- the very financial instruments then playing a central role in the crisis. 

Summers immediately took charge, barking that we were off the record -- a directive that I rejected, prompting him to raise his voice. He accused me of conducting a "jihad" aimed at unfairly implicating him as a cause of the financial crisis. 

I promised to call him again before my piece ran, giving him time to reflect. I left messages but didn't hear back, so I left one more, reminding him of my previous calls. When he finally called, his legendary condescension was fully engaged. 

"The probability that you left me a message that I did not receive is approximately zero," he said. When it turned out that his secretary had been mixed up about the date of my messages (or maybe it was Larry who was mixed up?), he turned on her, criticizing her sharply with me on the line. 

There are worse things in life than terrible phone manners, imperiousness and excessive confidence, but …

That sounds just like the guy we remember fondly as president of Harvard. And then there is another piece, this one in the New Republic by Noam Scheiber, entitled "The New Larry Summers Sure Looks Like the Old Larry Summers." This is a commentary on an Ezra Klein piece in the Washington Post which reports that the White House thinks "a lot of the opposition to Summers is based on bad or outdated information." Now where have I heard that before? Oh, right. That is what Bob Rubin told the Harvard presidential search committee back in 2000 or early 2001. As Richard Bradley reports in Harvard Rules (pp. 78-79),

Rubin called three members of the search committee who had particular doubts …. It was true, Rubin admitted, that Summers had once had what Rubin would call "a rough edges" issue. But he'd mellowed, Rubin insisted. This was a man who'd successfully negotiated with congressional leaders and foreign treasurers, who'd survived and prospered for a decade in a viciously partisan Washington environment. His temper existed more in legend than in reality. Rubin's seal of approval worked. "Rubin made us confident that we weren't getting a bull," one member of the committee later said. 

I wonder, is it Rubin again who is telling Obama, "Don't worry, he's changed"? Scheiber goes on.

As for the other key criticism of Summers—that he doesn’t play well with others, something that’s central to making the Fed work—the White House suggestion that it, too, is “outdated” strikes me as delusional or willfully ignorant. … Summers clashed constantly with fellow administration officials, most famously budget director Peter Orszag and White House economist Christie Romer. Often it was about matters of national urgency, and so a little heat could be forgiven. But all too frequently it arose from pure pettiness and immaturity. One example:  

About six months into the administration, [Summers] and Orszag were scheduled to join the vice president at a White House event. When Orszag arrived, a body man seated him next to Biden, only to return a few minutes later and ask him to move. Summers had insisted on taking the seat even though it was assigned to Orszag. “I’m really sorry. We had a seating chart. But Larry walked in and saw that you were sitting next to the vice president,” the aide said. [Orszag agreed to move; a third administration official who was p