The Jack Lew You Don't Know

Jack Lew, who’s tipped to be the next treasury secretary, is every bit the budget wonk that conventional wisdom says he is. What’s less known about the 57-year-old Mister Inside is that he’s played Mister Outside as well. He spent the first two years of the Obama administration at the State Department in a desk job that nonetheless took him as far afield as Afghanistan’s remote Khyber Pass. He’s passingly familiar with the canyons of Wall Street, too. In 2008, the year before joining State, he earned about $2 million as the chief operating officer for Citigroup’s alternative investments unit.

Timothy Geithner had far more experience in foreign affairs and finance when he took office than Lew does now, but that didn’t prevent the occasional faux pas. In congressional testimony in early 2009, Geithner garbled the explanation of the administration’s financial-crisis response so badly that Representative Connie Mack (R-Fla.) urged him to resign “for the good of the country.” In Poland in 2011, Geithner annoyed a group of European finance ministers by offering unsolicited advice about the unfolding debt crisis. Jean-Claude Juncker, the group’s president, said, “we are not discussing” such matters “with a nonmember of the euro area.”