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Summers believed that his style would inspire debate on the issues, but more often it only inspired debate about his style. “What was fascinating was to watch how people just shut down after a couple of meetings with him,” said another Treasury official. “No matter what people said, he would take them on or demean them in some way. Eventually people would just have nothing to say.”
    At one point the above-mentioned aide was drafting a relatively minor speech for Rubin. “The Secretary was okay with it,” the aide remembered. “But Summers came in and said, ‘I just read the draft, and we can’t give this speech; this would embarrass the administration!’ Just going apeshit. It came down to changing about three words and deleting a paragraph. But he made me feel like I had written a manifesto for the Shining Path.”
    With people on his level or higher, Summers was more deferential; he recognized that in politics he was the odd man out. “When Larry came to Washington, he started off thinking that he was smarter than everybody else, and soon realized that he was smarter than everybody else at things that weren’t always useful in Washington,” said one Clinton adviser who worked regularly with Summers. “We had a lot of eggheads in the Clinton White House, and a lot of them just kept banging their heads against the wall until they gave up. Larry looked at it as a learning process, and he kept banging his head against the wall until he began to understand the game. It was kind of Spock-like. He never quite fit in, but he was able to gather enough data that he could get by pretty well. He didn’t always make a great first impression, but the more we got to know him and the more comfortable he began to feel, the better he did.”
    This colleague thought that Summers struggled with the chronic pressure of great expectations. “Al Gore had a similar kind of problem,” the colleague said, “when your parents are going to be disappointed if you don’t grow up to be president. Larry seemed like if he didn’t win a Nobel Prize, he’d be letting down the side.”
    One person who wasn’t troubled by Summers’ bellicosity was Robert Rubin. The treasury secretary was secure enough not to mind Summers’ oversize ego and smart enough to realize that Summers’ intellect was an enormous asset to him. “Having an extremely bright and skillful deputy secretary greatly increased Treasury’s effectiveness,” Rubin said. “I also thought it made me look good.”
    â€œSummers was obviously smarter, more knowledgeable than Rubin about the economy, but Rubin was never intimidated by that,” said a colleague of both men. Anyway, they did have their intellectual similarities. Before making up his mind on an issue, Rubin liked to hear every point of view, sitting through hours-long meetings and filling yellow legal pads with notes. Summers explained that he and Rubin were intellectually sympatico because of their shared approach to problem-solving. While some people took data as a conclusion, the two of them saw data as an entry point for new questions; Summers and Rubin shared the approach not just to numbers but to all of life’s dilemmas.
    In other ways, the two men complemented each other. The slender, elegantly tailored Rubin was the money man with the Harvard pedigree—Harvard College, that is—suave, sophisticated, mannered, charming, and at the time worth about $100 million, according to conservative estimates. Summers was a product of the MIT debate team and Harvard graduate school economics, two forums that encouraged an argumentative nature but not the development of social graces. He’d never made any real money, and he had lousy manners. He was loud, overweight, impatient, constantly late, and poorly dressed—seeing him with his tie askew and his shirt half-untucked was routine. A