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I had an extraordinary childhood, but I was an ordinary kid.
I was a good student, never a great student. I was a decent athlete, nothing special. I wasn’t particularly ambitious or hardworking. By the time I went to college, I had lived in Africa, India, and Thailand, through wars and coups, but I had little interest in politics, economics, or even current events. I had all kinds of amazing experiences—trips to Kashmir and Kenya, Beirut and Bali—but I rarely stopped to think about them.
My exotic upbringing didn’t feel exotic at the time. It felt like life. Mostly, it felt like fun. I was lucky to grow up in a big, close, raucous family, with a lot of love and laughter, without a lot of drama. My sister, Sarah, is two years younger; my twin brothers, Jonathan and David, are four years younger. We were too busy playing and exploring to do much reflecting. My early memories are pleasant memories: trekking in Nepal, driving a small Boston Whaler off Cape Cod, dumping colored powder on my siblings during the Indian holiday of Holi. We weren’t rich by American standards, but we were very privileged.
As unremarkable as my childhood seemed to me at the time, it exposed me to the world, to extreme poverty and vicious inequality, to diverse customs and cultures. My parents, Peter Franz Geithner and Deborah Moore Geithner, gave me this amazing gift of a global education. Even more important, they gave me a constant, generous, unconditional love. They taught me—by example, not by lecture—how to take life seriously without taking myself too seriously. They showed me how helping others can give work meaning. They modeled humility. They never pressured me to do this or do that, other than to be kind and curious, but they always seemed to have confidence in me, and that created confidence within me.
M Y MOTHER is a musician, a teacher, a bleeding-heart liberal bursting with empathy and optimism. She says she has “up genes”; she got a tattoo of a horseshoe crab to keep her breast cancer scars company. She studied Hindi, Thai, and Chinese while living abroad. She’s an enthusiast who shares her enthusiasm with everyone she meets, who makes lifelong friends everywhere she travels. My father is quieter, more reserved, more skeptical, more conservative in every way. He’s an understated child of the fifties, a nice complement to my mother’s exuberant spirit of the sixties. He’s also a lifelong Republican, although he came of age in the Eisenhower era, before much of his party veered to the far right. He devoted his professional life to global development, not a typically conservative cause, and he voted for President Obama in 2008. But he supported Mitt Romney in 2012, even though I was still working for the President.
My mother is from a New England family dating back to the Mayflower , with relatives including the architect Buckminster Fuller, the journalist Margaret Fuller, and the novelist John Marquand. Her father, Charles F. Moore, Jr., was, among other things, a newspaperman, vice president of Ford Motor Company, and an adviser to President Eisenhower. Later in life, he served as a town selectman in Orleans, the small town on the Cape where my parents now live. My mother’s older brother, Jonathan, spent his whole career in public service, helping to preserve the Cape Cod National Seashore as a Republican congressional aide, holding influential jobs at the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Justice, serving as the foreign policy adviser to Mitt’s father George Romney’s presidential campaign. I remember visiting him during the Watergate summer of 1973, just before President Nixon fired his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, in the Saturday Night Massacre, and he resigned in protest. He was always busy, on the phone, doing consequential things. It made an impression on me.
My father’s family didn’t come to America on the Mayflower or work inside the American establishment. His father was a German immigrant who settled in north Philadelphia and ran a small business as a cabinetmaker. My father went to a public high school, mostly African American, where he was a star athlete, an excellent student, and his class president, a serious young man with a serious crew cut. The U.S. military paid his way through Dartmouth, where he made Phi Beta Kappa and—even though he was just five-foot-nine—captained the basketball team. He then spent four years as a Navy pilot, flying FJ-3 Furies and other fighter jets off carriers after the Korean War.
My parents met at Uncle Jonathan’s wedding in 1957; my father, a friend of Jonathan’s from Dartmouth, was the best man. He was also dating the sister of the bride. But my mother, then a freshman at Smith College, was drawn to him. When she heard he had moved to New York a few years later to work for a chemical manufacturing company, she sent him a Valentine from her dorm room. Nine months later, they were married. And they stayed married.
I was born in a Manhattan hospital on August 18, 1961. My mother says I was a wild and energetic baby, chasing her around our apartment before I could even walk. (To this day, I have a hard time sitting still.) My father soon joined the U.S. Agency for International Development and moved us to southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, then to Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. He took a job back at USAID headquarters when I was four, so we moved again to the Washington suburbs.
My mother tells stories about my close encounters with cobras, and a cloth diaper stuffed with coins that I used as a security blanket—my first interest in finance, she says—but I don’t remember anything about Africa. I was apparently a mischievous kid. When our dachshund bit me, I tearfully admitted that I had bitten the dachshund first. Somewhat later in my youth, my mother tried washing out my mouth with soap when I cursed, but as my friends and colleagues know, that did not have a lasting effect. One of them suggested the title of this book should be Bonfire of the Profanities .
When I was six, the Ford Foundation asked my father to help run its programs in New Delhi. I still remember that first shock of India, driving in from the airport, overwhelmed by the heat and the smell, the strange and the awful. We drove to school seeing Brahman bulls wandering the roads, malnourished children—some crippled by adults to make them look more sympathetic—begging at every intersection.
I went to the American International School, which had an American curriculum, and I did American-kid things like join the swim team and play baseball. But unlike Foreign Service families, who were usually stationed at the embassy compound, we lived with other expats in an Indian neighborhood called Friends Colony. It was a quasi-colonial existence, with drivers, maids, gardeners, and night watchmen, but my parents’ friends were Indian artists, activists, and intellectuals, as well as expats who worked at interesting places such as Oxfam, CARE, and the World Bank. My siblings and I played cricket with our cook’s kids in our yard. We studied Hindi. My mother wore saris and salwar kameez , and sometimes dressed us in Nehru jackets and churidar pajamas. Our swim meets were sometimes held at the national stadium, in a pool full of dark green water, with frogs in the deep end and biting ants all over the deck.
Still, the contrast between how we lived and how most Indians lived was a constant presence in our lives. We always knew we were separated by fortune from hideous deprivation. I remember once after David had recovered from a broken leg, he handed his crutch out the car window to a disabled street kid. And since the Ford Foundation let us return to the United States every summer, we were always reminded of the wealth gap between America and much of the rest of the world. At a local supermarket in suburban Virginia one summer, I was stunned to see an entire aisle stocked with pet food. It seemed bizarre in a world full of starving people.
We returned to the United States after I finished sixth grade, when the Ford Foundation asked my father to run its developing-country programs from its headquarters in Manhattan. We settled into a traditional suburban lifestyle in Pelham, New York, a classic bedroom community north of the city. My father took the 5:36 p.m. train home from Grand Central almost every night when he wasn’t traveling, so we could eat dinner together as a family. We attended an Episcopal church on Sundays, although we weren’t very religious. I went to the public junior high school.
Initially, I felt like a visitor from another planet. I was tiny and scrawny, twenty pounds too light to qualify for Pop Warner football. I didn’t make the basketball team, which was disappointing; my father once got an offer to try out for the Celtics. I had longish hair when that wasn’t cool. I suffered a bit of junior high torture, kids dumping my school binders on the floor, papers flying everywhere. The culture was all new to me. I had never seen All in the Family or Hawaii Five-0 . I didn’t know what Pink Floyd was until a friend played me an album. The whole concept of going out with a girl seemed bizarre. Where were you supposed to go?
But I adapted. I played street hockey and touch football and stickball after school with a great group of kids on my block. I had a paper route. And toward the end of ninth grade, just as I was feeling comfortable in my own country, my parents announced that we were moving to Thailand, where my father was going to run the Ford Foundation’s programs in Southeast Asia. He wanted to be back in the field, not behind a desk in New York.
There’s some trauma in moving a lot and having to find your place in new environments, but there’s also the thrill of discovery. Bangkok was an incredibly appealing city, full of warm, tolerant, open people. My parents let me explore it on my own, by bus and taxi and three-wheel tuk-tuks. The end of our street was a typical crush of massage parlors and prostitution. Drugs were everywhere, and there was no apparent drinking age. That erased a lot of the allure.
I went to another American school in Bangkok. I got good grades without much effort. I liked the simple clarity of physics and math, much more than the messy complexity of government and history. I played baseball and tennis with modest distinction, but got cut from the basketball team twice; I served as manager for two seasons, taping my friends’ sprained ankles, until I finally made the team. Somehow, I got elected president of my junior and senior classes; my main memory of that initial experience in leadership was how much I loathed public speaking. I’ve always gotten along pretty well with others, but I’ve never been a great communicator. When I left Treasury for the first time a couple decades later, a colleague would say in her farewell tribute that I spoke “a version of English so stripped down to the essentials that, like modern art, it can be incomprehensible.” I guess I always have.
For a teenager, I was relatively free of angst, pretty comfortable in my skin. But I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I remember taking one of those What Color Is Your Parachute? assessments, which concluded that I’d be good at a career in business. I thought: Well, maybe, but it doesn’t sound that compelling. Other than an uncle who worked as a community banker, I had no real commercial influences in my life. I worked during our summers back in the States in Orleans—cleaning up a store on Main Street, then selling clothes at the store—but that didn’t spark any entrepreneurial enthusiasm. I didn’t think much about how I would earn a living.
I was still generally clueless about the world. My father rarely talked about his development work, even when he took us on trips to visit orphanages in India and hill tribes in northern Thailand, and I rarely asked about it. India and Pakistan had a brief war while we were living in New Delhi, so we had curfews and early lights-out, but I didn’t really understand what they were fighting about. There was a coup in Thailand while we were there, but I wasn’t aware of the cause; my brother Jonathan remembers me consoling him because the coup forced us to cancel a beach vacation.
Still, it was impossible to live in Southeast Asia in the wake of the Vietnam War without becoming conscious of the world’s ambivalence toward America. In many ways, being abroad made me more aware of the exceptional things about America, but it took the edge off the more triumphal forms of American exceptionalism. I read The Ugly American and The Quiet American , books about our arrogance and ignorance of the world around us. I had an early exposure to the capacity of America to affect the world, in many ways for the better, in some ways not.
My parents didn’t preach to us about these things. They believed in show, not tell. They exposed us to an incredible diversity of cultures and religions and customs, always without judgment. We learned to draw our own conclusions, to be curious about the world yet humble about our ability to understand it.
M Y FIRST real adult decision was where to go to college. I had no idea what I really wanted, but I got into Dartmouth and Carleton; I got wait-listed at Williams and Wesleyan. My father and several other relatives had gone to Dartmouth, and I initially resisted the idea of going there—partly because I wanted to carve out my own path, partly because I felt guilty about the advantages I had applying as a legacy. I decided those were weak reasons not to go to a good school.
Dartmouth and the small college town of Hanover, New Hampshire, offered extreme culture shock when I arrived from Bangkok in 1979. It was cold, and I showed up without a winter coat. Academically, Dartmouth was much harder than my high school. And socially, I felt similar to the way I had felt after moving from India to Westchester for junior high: unfamiliar with and uncomfortable in the dominant culture. Most of my classmates seemed like they had been born at Exeter or Andover, and already knew exactly where their lives were headed. I had no idea.
I did have a moment of serendipity on my way to register for classes, when I overheard a professor swearing in Thai. It turned out that he had attended the same schools I had in India and Thailand. He suggested I sign up for Chinese, which I did and came to love, with the guidance of a great professor, Susan Blader. Otherwise, I was an unexceptional and mostly uninspired student. I had a few government classes I liked, but I took just one economics class and found it especially dreary. I had good friends, but I was not part of the fraternity mainstream on campus. I worked part-time throughout college to help cover the cost—washing dishes in the dining hall, taking photos for the college news service, working as a drill instructor for other students taking Chinese. I also did internships at Mobil Oil’s corporate communications office and the Sawyer Miller political consulting firm. They were good experiences, I guess, but mostly in demonstrating that those lines of work were not for me.
I was a registered Republican then, but without much conviction. I had no passion for politics. I took pictures of the 1980 primary campaign for the college newspaper, but I don’t remember if I even voted that year. I did develop a strong aversion to the strident conservative Republican political movement that was spreading across college campuses at the time. After the Dartmouth Review , the intellectual center of the movement, published a McCarthy-style list of gay students on campus, I ran into a Review writer named Dinesh D’Souza at a coffee shop and asked him how it felt to be such a dick. D’Souza would later become a celebrated right-wing intellectual and author of conspiracy-minded best sellers about President Obama, so I guess I didn’t sway him. Several other Review founders would join the Wall Street Journal editorial page; they would not be big fans of my later work.
Some of my most important experiences during college happened off campus. The first was over Christmas break of my freshman year, when I got to photograph refugees in two massive camps along the Thai-Cambodian border for the Associated Press. These camps extended as far as the eye could see, with a horrifying level of deprivation and filth. They were filled with Khmer Rouge in black pajamas, fleeing the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. These victimizers turned victims cast a morally confusing shadow on the tragedy, but even after my experiences in India, the suffering left me numb. I took a lot of pictures, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in depicting misery well. I loved the craft of photography, but I started to realize I did not want to spend my life as an observer. I wanted to do things, not just see things, even though I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do.
I spent that summer as a low-level chef at a restaurant in Chatham on the Cape. I loved the manic energy the job required, the thrill of having to do six things at once, the unbridled profanity of the kitchen. But my next two summers were even more memorable, because I got to study in Beijing very early in China’s opening to the West. Most of the foreign students there were from the Soviet Union or its satellites in Africa and North Korea; Americans lived in a special dorm, isolated from the others. On the walls of the showers, beneath a thin coat of white paint, we could make out Cultural Revolution slogans about evil American imperialists. The government read our mail. We were objects of fascination, surrounded by curious Chinese everywhere we went. We biked all over the city. I played Frisbee in Tiananmen Square. I remember one man at a market telling me he liked Americans, because we were optimistic and open like the Chinese—so different, he said, from the Japanese.
I was starting to wonder whether I wanted to live as a permanent expatriate, outside my own country yet never quite part of my host country, or whether I should become more of an American, with a community I could be part of. I took an unintentional leap toward door number two in the fall of my senior year, when I signed up to live in a run-down off-campus group house. I would join three housemates, all of them women. One of them was Carole Sonnenfeld.
Plenty of men live with their wives before marrying them. How many men live with their wives before dating them? We fell in love quickly. Carole is an unbelievably appealing woman: strong, smart, beautiful, off-the-charts empathetic. She was a policy studies major, with a minor in economics—back then, she knew way more about the stuff I’d devote my career to than I did—but she was destined to be a social worker. She had already worked at a group home for emotionally disturbed teenagers and a legal office representing abused children. Anyway, we hit it off, and living together obviously accelerated things. As Carole’s grandmother archly described our situation, it was convenient . We spent that wonderful first year living and studying together, cooking for our housemates, following recipes from her Moosewood Cookbook that still sits—heavily taped but intact—in our kitchen today.
C AROLE AND I graduated in the spring of 1983. Dartmouth’s commencement speaker that year was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, the gruff giant who was braving intense public outrage in his quest to tame inflation by raising interest rates. Volcker would later become an adviser when I headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—and even later an Obama administration colleague who didn’t always approve of my work—but at the time I don’t think I even knew what the Fed was. I’d like to say that his speech inspired me to pursue a career as a truth-telling central banker and public servant, but, honestly, the sound system was so garbled I couldn’t hear a word.
I had been considering the Foreign Service. Carole had intended to join the Peace Corps. But we abandoned those plans so we could stay together after we graduated in 1983. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, except be with her. Our classmates were flocking to corporate and financial jobs, but I wasn’t interested in those paths. Maybe it was just because I was fortunate enough to grow up without economic anxiety, but money wasn’t on my radar screen, and it didn’t occur to me that it might make sense to make some. I did endure one job interview with a management consultant, whose first question was about how I would turn around a small failing beer company. I had no idea.
Eventually, I decided to go straight to graduate school, if only to get it out of the way. I applied to a bunch of master’s programs in public policy, and eventually chose the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, which, again, happened to be the school my father attended after the Navy. I never planned to follow in my father’s footsteps, and he never put any pressure on any of us to take any particular path. But Sarah and David also went to Dartmouth, and Jonathan also went to SAIS. Sarah also followed our father into a career in global development, and is now a World Bank consultant, while Jon is a military analyst at a Washington think tank. David spent twenty years as an executive at Time, Inc., the only one of us to work in business. For me, at least, the richness and excitement of my father’s career of service—and Uncle Jonathan’s, too—dimmed the appeal of a lot of alternative paths. My parents would later head off on a new adventure in Beijing, where my father opened up the Ford Foundation’s first office in China. He funded postgraduate education programs in the United States for a generation of Chinese officials, many of whom I would later meet during my own time in government.
I spent that summer after college shucking oysters and tending bar on the Cape. Then Carole and I moved to Washington to start our new life together. She supported us financially while I was in graduate school, first working at an economic consulting firm in Washington, then researching tax policy for Common Cause. But what she loved—what steered her into a career as a clinical social worker and therapist—was volunteering at night at a crisis hotline. Carole has always been an amazing listener, so in tune with the pain and sadness and frustration of others. She would later take a job teaching medical students how to better listen to their patients. I tend to try to analyze or problem-solve when I ought to just offer a sympathetic ear; later in my public life, Carole would often remind me about the importance of displaying more empathy.
At the time, I was finally getting motivated about school. SAIS had a practical, technocratic, problem-solving ethic that I found attractive. I became increasingly interested in Japan, which was getting a lot of attention back then as a potential threat to U.S. economic supremacy, and I started to study the Japanese language, while continuing Chinese. I got into Japanese films and literature, too. I loved learning something entirely new, as I had done in new countries while I was growing up.
I also slowly warmed up to economics. It wasn’t particularly advanced or math-intensive economics, but I liked the focus on how to make choices, how the world works, what determines how well economies perform. I did reasonably well, though I was in no danger of getting drafted into academia. I played a lot of pool. During my orals, when one professor asked which economics journals I read, I replied that I had never read any. Seriously? Yes, seriously. The professor seemed incredulous. He decided my clear lack of interest in economics disqualified me from an honors grade.
By the time I got my master’s degree in East Asian studies and international economics in 1985, I knew I wanted to try policy work with a global dimension. I had worked over the summer for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. government’s development finance arm—the successor to the USAID office where my father once worked—and I figured I’d try government work. But I turned down entry-level civil service jobs at the Commerce Department and a few other executive branch agencies. I applied for the Presidential Management Intern Program, a favored path to top executive branch civil service jobs, but I didn’t get it—perhaps because I botched the part of the interview that required role-playing in a fake government meeting, which seemed ridiculously forced and artificial to me. So I was still unemployed when Carole and I got married that summer at my family’s house in Orleans.
But not long after we returned from our honeymoon in France, Henry Kissinger’s international consulting firm hired me as an Asia analyst; my dean at SAIS had recommended me to Brent Scowcroft, one of Kissinger’s partners. I went to work for Dr. Kissinger knowing that he was a controversial and complicated figure, but I thought of him mainly as the preeminent strategic thinker of his era, the architect of our opening to China. My basic foreign policy views were the establishment views of the realist tradition: a focus on national interests rather than idealistic moral goals, general support for market economies and free trade, an overarching sense that the world is a messy and dangerous place. Kissinger was the foreign policy establishment personified, and I was drawn to that ultimate insider world, perhaps more so because I had grown up as an outsider. His partners, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, were also establishment internationalists who later served the first President Bush as national security adviser and secretary of state, respectively. They were imposing but smart, and Kissinger Associates seemed like an interesting place to start paying off my student loans.
I was now supposed to be something of an Asia specialist. For a time, I ran a Washington group of Japan policy analysts called the Kabanmochikai, “the briefcase carriers club.” But I was daunted by how little I knew about my supposed topic of expertise. I mean, Asia was a vast and complex place. I’d seen more of it than most twenty-five-year-old Americans, but not a lot of it. I was writing memos that were supposed to help Henry Kissinger and his partners stay abreast of the politics and economics of the entire continent, and flying to New York once a month to brief them in person. But I knew virtually nothing about finance or business. And I had never worked in government, never stood in the shoes of the people making the policy choices I was reading and writing about.
Kissinger Associates was a great three-year postgraduate education, but one thing it taught me was that I didn’t want to spend my life writing about what others were doing in government. I thought I should try doing it myself. I applied to the international division of the Treasury, which was at the center of what I thought were the most interesting policy issues of that time, and had a reputation for solid nonpartisan work. In August 1988, I accepted a civil service job in the International Trade Office of the Treasury Department. I was still a Republican—I voted for President Reagan in 1984 and George H. W. Bush in 1988—but I joined Treasury as a nonpolitical “career” civil servant, not a Reagan administration appointee. I was now a junior government official, a “GS-13,” a Washington bureaucrat.
A few days after I started in my cubicle at the Treasury, Kissinger called me, one of the few times he ever did that. He was working on a book and had asked me to write two long essays on Chinese and Japanese foreign policy. He complimented my work, probably the first time he ever did that, and told me he needed additional research on Japan. When I explained that I worked for the government now, and couldn’t continue to work for him on the side, he didn’t sound happy and didn’t prolong our conversation. We didn’t have any contact for another fifteen years or so, until I was chosen to run the New York Fed, when he invited Carole and me to a private dinner. He joked that he had played an important role in my education in economics—he was proudly indifferent about economics—and would later take a lot of pleasure in claiming he had always known I would rise to great heights.
If so, he might have been the only one. I was a seriously late bloomer. When I arrived at Treasury, I felt as underprepared as I had felt at Dartmouth. I still had no long-term career plan, either inside or outside the department. I just wanted to do interesting, hopefully consequential work. And after spending so much of my life apart from America, I wanted to work for my country.