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no-win," the senator bluntly declared. "The situation is probably unsalvageable. You'll run up against the unions and get eviscerated by your own party. Work on housing—it's a big, important issue, it affects everybody, it has to get resolved, and the politics are easier."
    A week went by and the holidays came. On December 26, I took my family to Spain for a week of sightseeing ("history trips," our kids called these annual expeditions). But Tim's office interrupted our vacation on the thirtieth, asking to schedule a call for the following day. When my cell phone rang on New Year's Eve, Tim offered me the auto assignment, reporting to both him and Larry. I was very positively inclined, I said, but needed to discuss it with Maureen and a few others. Other than his telling me I would be a counselor to the Treasury secretary, there was no talk of terms or responsibilities, and the call ended in less than five minutes.
    A few hours later, as we were about to go to dinner, the phone rang again; this time it was Larry, calling from vacation in Jamaica. "I know you talked to Tim," he began. "It would be great if you did this." He was surprised to discover I was in Barcelona and said, "It's a good thing I didn't call much later." Never one to stay up late, even on New Year's Eve, I replied, "My phone would have been off." I gave him the same response I had given Tim and went to join my family.
    I lay awake for a while that night as 2009 began, sensing I was on the verge of the experience of a lifetime. I was being given a chance to play a central role in the largest industrial restructuring in history from within the most powerful institution in the world—the United States government. I would come to the job thinking I knew a lot about business and a reasonable amount about Washington. I didn't realize that my eyes would be opened to harsh new perspectives on both worlds. I would learn of both the devastation across our manufacturing sector—in part, collateral damage from our sound commitment to free trade and NAFTA— and the intimidating challenge of reversing the trend or even just halting the decline. I would discover that the struggles of GM and Chrysler were as much a failure of management as a consequence of globalization, oil prices, and organized labor. I certainly understood the importance of management to the small companies in which my firm invested; what would astound me was how important one or two individuals could be to the fortunes of businesses that were among the largest on the planet. And I would witness the dysfunction of Congress, its inability to rise above deep partisan divides and narrow parochial interests and produce legislative action to address in a thoughtful manner the many challenges that we face. I would conclude that if sunshine is indeed the best disinfectant, as Justice Brandeis once said, we need to find the most powerful lenses available to focus the sun's rays on the U.S. Congress and, particularly, the Senate.
    In the end, the auto rescue would prove to be not just the story of two iconic automakers. It would exemplify many of the challenges that confront Americans in the twenty-first century—from our struggling manufacturing base to our declining middle class—and illustrate how difficult it is in the hothouse of Washington, so deeply divided along partisan lines, to take the desperately needed swift actions. I believe firmly in President Obama's efforts to restore our economy, yet because of such obstacles, the auto rescue remains one of the few actions taken by the administration that, at least in my opinion, can be pronounced an unambiguous success. Detroit should count itself lucky.
    ***
    It had taken America's automakers my entire lifetime to come to the crisis they were in. I grew up during Detroit's heyday, the fifties and sixties, when the Big Three were just that. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler controlled 90 percent of the U.S. car market, by far the