Overhaul by Steven Rattner

was delayed, so we used our cell phones and wireless cards, wondering how past incoming administrations had functioned. The windows of the room looked out on the White House, a constant reminder of the pressure on us.
    Officially I had no office. Not having completed the appointment process, I was not supposed to be in the Treasury building except for meetings, although many rules were bent in this crisis atmosphere. I was given the use of a cavernous office, decorated with an antique typewriter and a framed collection of 1938 currency, a dozen or so doors down from Tim's suite. History seeped from the walls. In this room, President Andrew Johnson had signed the Amnesty Proclamation on May 29, 1865, restoring the rights of those who had joined the Confederacy. A printed copy hung on the wall with his signature, although it turned out to be a facsimile.
    I felt like a kid in a new school, but all the teachers were also new. It was so hard to get through the Secret Service checkpoint that on my second day, I e-mailed Haley, "Is there a cafeteria in this building? I'm afraid to go out—I may never get back in!" Everything was complicated, including communicating with Tim, who I assumed would have e-mail and a BlackBerry. But within ten days of his taking office, e-mails to his address were routed to the "Executive Secretariat," a group whose job was to manage the message flow to Tim, with rules and forms for everything. Every communication needed to adhere to a specific format and clearance process.
    Meanwhile, January auto sales were abysmal—GM was down 49 percent, Ford 40 percent, and Chrysler 55 percent. The companies were burning through their money at an alarming rate. GM's cash position was skirting close to the $11 billion minimum the company said it needed to operate; Chrysler forecast that it would drop below its minimum operating requirement of $2.5 billion before March ended.
    Given these figures and the Bush loan agreements, which set very specific benchmarks for the automakers to achieve by February 17, we could not delay opening a dialogue with both companies. The first call—between Ray Young, of GM, and Brian Deese, Diana Farrell, and Mike Tae, a new arrival at Treasury—revealed that GM was still dreaming. Each company was required to include a pessimistic or "downside" assumption about future auto sales, but GM's idea of a downside was 20 percent market growth. Diana tried to push Ray to think of more appropriate downside cases but couldn't make him understand. "Okay, let me try this one more time," she finally said. "Ray, I'm not sure you're hearing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that your
worst
case is our view of the absolute
best
case, and you need to start thinking about radically different outcomes."
    So concerned were Brian and Diana (I was still operating behind the curtain) that they recommended to Larry that he alert the GM board. He agreed and called Erskine Bowles, his friend who had been one of the directors who had visited Paulson back in October 2008. We also worried that GM had too little contingency planning under way. Thanks to Wagoner's refusal to consider bankruptcy, the company had not even hired restructuring lawyers until mid-December. With Chrysler, the task force did a similar reality check, emphasizing the need for conservative assumptions about demand. Chrysler was already pessimistic in its downside assumptions, though with its sales down 55 percent, the company's planners could hardly have been otherwise.
    Bankruptcy, of course, had always been the elephant in the room. It was scary even to think about. Yet if managed successfully, it could enable GM and Chrysler, under the protection of a court, to stay in business while restructuring debts, renegotiating contracts with unions and suppliers, selling or scrapping obsolete and underused plants, and otherwise positioning themselves for a fresh start.
    From the first moments in December when Josh Steiner had