In an Uncertain World by Robert Rubin, Jacob Weisberg

to go out and make a public statement. We are going to hold a press conference and announce that you have changed the deal. And I’m not going to go ahead with the Mexican program.”
    Michel said, “You can’t do that.”
    I replied that, in fact, we could. The moment was dramatic, but in the end, Camdessus came around, and our strong relationship with him—so important in the years ahead—was not harmed. My approach in general is to try to see both sides and work to find common ground. But sometimes there is no good alternative to an adamant stand calmly taken.
    We signed the Mexican rescue agreement as planned that day in the Cash Room at the Treasury Building. The Cash Room was where citizens once came to trade paper dollars for gold. The location seemed appropriate, since the closing of the gold window and the creation of the ESF in 1934 had made the action we were about to take possible. But we were all concerned. After the signing, I walked back to my office in worried silence with Sylvia Mathews and David Dreyer, another senior adviser. David tried to cut the tension with humor. “I guess we’ll never see that money again,” he joked. Sylvia and I didn’t smile. It’s funny to me now, but it wasn’t then.
    A night or two after that, when the positive market reaction to the agreement had already dissipated and markets were once again dropping, Larry came into my office and offered to resign. It was about eleven in the evening, and we were both still at work. Larry felt personally responsible for an effort that might well fail. I told him that his talk about resigning was ridiculous. While I understood how Larry could feel his responsibility so keenly, I told him he wasn’t any more responsible than the rest of us and he was taking the matter much too personally. What we were doing was right, and we were all in it together. We’d just have to hang on and get through it, one way or the other.
    In the next few weeks, we all felt the pressure. Jeff Shafer told me a story somewhat later about having a drink with friends before a baseball game at Camden Yards in Baltimore on a rare evening off. When a friend asked him something about the Mexican “bailout,” the term that most irritated us, Jeff’s response—“It was
not
a bailout!”—was loud enough to stop conversation in the crowded bar.
    I didn’t discuss my own feelings with anyone at work, but I too had focused on what the possibility of failure could mean for me. Losing $20 billion in public funds, especially on such a controversial and high-profile matter, could substantially taint how I would be seen as the Secretary of the Treasury. But even if I had to step down, I could deal with that. I felt better thinking that I’d helped set up the National Economic Council at the White House, which was working well. No one could take that away from me, no matter what happened afterward.
    As markets continued to fall, Larry and I had a difficult phone call with Guillermo Ortiz. This was after we had signed the agreement but just before the first disbursement of funds. As we explained how bleak the situation looked, Guillermo, though sounding overwrought, tried to paint a rosier scenario for us. We weren’t persuaded, but I understood he could do little else. After the call, we went right over to the Roosevelt Room in the White House for a meeting with Panetta and Berger. I felt, in light of the circumstances, that we had an obligation to raise the question of whether to exercise our right to withdraw from the arrangement unilaterally.
    â€œLetting Mexico go” at this stage would turn the possibility of default into a virtual sure thing—but I thought I should raise the issue even though I personally believed we should still proceed. My question was greeted with surprise. Only Erskine Bowles, the deputy chief of staff, who, like me, had worked as an investment banker,