Steven Rattner
Why can't they make a Corolla?" President-elect Barack Obama asks a week after his election in 2008, when he is informed how close the U.S. auto industry is to a catastrophic meltdown.
While his advisers respond that they don't know, the real answer is that Detroit had tried - at least General Motors did, going so far as to partner with Toyota in a California factory that made Corollas for the Japanese automaker and Chevrolet Novas for GM.
Although they were virtually the same car, whatever Toyota was doing right never seemed to filter its way through to the rest of GM, and the auto giant soon diverted more and more investment to the sport utility vehicle war it was waging with Chrysler and Ford.
Alas, that was a war with no victor, and it contributed mightily to the car crisis in the fall and winter of 2008 that eventually led to what until then had been unthinkable: Chrysler and GM filing for bankruptcy protection.
The lament from Obama is one of several juicy anecdotes in Overhaul, by Steven Rattner, who joined the Obama administration as its so-called car czar and was put in charge of fixing the mess.
As Rattner recounts, it was a perilous time. The banking-industry disaster that autumn had already pushed the U.S. economy into a deep recession. A complete collapse of Chrysler and GM was imminent, and with it the dire prospect of hundreds of thousands more Americans - and more than 100,000 Canadians - being thrown out of work and the economy plunging into a depression.
Rattner, a former New York Times Washington bureau reporter who left journalism for Wall Street, was well aware of the ways of Washington. He was shocked, however, that the auto executives, particularly those from GM, seemed unaware of how close to the brink they were.
The new, liberal administration is reluctant to save the two companies, but intervenes with tens of billions of dollars in taxpayers' money, backstopped by another $13-billion or so from the Canadian and Ontario governments.
The team also discovers a little-known section of the U.S. bankruptcy code that allows the two companies to be sold quickly during bankruptcy, avoiding the protracted mess that typically occurs in bankruptcy filing. That allowed Washington to take over quickly as the majority owner of GM and the United Auto Workers health-care trust to hold the biggest stake in Chrysler.
But saving GM comes at a steep price for chief executive officer Rick Wagoner, who had presided over a decade of decline and deep financial losses at a company that once so dominated the U.S. market that Washington was ready to break it into pieces.
Wagoner gets the axe from Rattner, and minutes after hearing the news, he walks into a conference room where his chief financial officer Ray Young pipes up, half in jest: "Do we still have jobs?"
"You do," Wagoner replies tersely in Rattner's recounting of events.
The auto team comes within a whisker of pulling the plug on Chrysler, but Obama gives the No. 3 Detroit company a 30-day reprieve to reach a deal with Italian saviour Fiat.
It's an intriguing insider tale that offers valuable insight into how government can often be useful, even in the cathedral of capitalism.
There is no doubt that had the companies been allowed to disappear, the recession would have deepened and Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and probably some other states would have gone broke, too.
Part of the value of Overhaul is that the events are still very fresh and the effects of the decision to save Chrysler and GM are still playing out. Taxpayers in the United States and Canada are still on the hook for more than $50-billion of the money used to bail out the two companies.
Chrysler was taken over by Fiat, but the jury is still very much out on whether that marriage will succeed or turn into a third divorce for Chrysler.
GM is profitable again after the quick bankruptcy, stripped it of billions of dollars in debt, and is in the midst of trying to raise money to reduce the governments' ownership to less than a majority position.
Where Rattner falls short is in his failure to offer a prescription or recommendation to make sure such a bailout is not needed again.
Given the hubris of American capitalism, that may be too much to ask.
Greg Keenan has covered the auto industry for The Globe and Mail since 1995.