In his worst moments, when the camera lights are ­burning and the doubt, the contempt, in the Capitol Hill hearing rooms become palpable, Tim Geithner has a look in his eye—at once wary and alarmed, even as he speaks quickly, sometimes interrupting, sometimes repeating his talking points. It has become a look that he owns. It is his. It has made him famous in all the wrong ways. The Geithner Look.

Perhaps it’s the policy he is expounding—enough of an embrace of free markets and a disavowal of nationalization to alienate critics of Wall Street, but enough of a move toward “socialism” to infuriate the right. Perhaps Tim Geithner will be the Harry Truman of his generation, unappreciated by his contemporaries, awkward in public, but judged by history to have cured the nation’s economic ills and, in comic-book fashion, defeated the media bullies who kicked sand in his face. Perhaps all he needs is some TV coaching and a better haircut.

But just as this is no ordinary economic crisis, for Geithner this has been no ordinary public-relations challenge. He has gone into overdrive to counter all the atrocious press he initially received. After his disastrous public debut as Treasury secretary on February 10—when a speech billed as providing details of the bank bailout proved, at best, a broad outline—Geithner began learning to say the right things, to push back against the populist mob. He won immediate plaudits for a late-March appearance on Meet the Press. His announcement of a new financial regulatory framework caused the Dow Jones industrial average to jump nearly 500 points. And he wasn’t the bull’s-eye of the negative response to the restructuring plans for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, even though he oversaw the auto task force that created them.

When criticism was at a fever pitch, though, the constant undertone was one of surprise, even betrayal. It was unnerving that the most powerful domestic policy official in the Obama administration did not have anything approaching charisma, sometimes seemed to lack a sufficient grasp of finance, and at times came across as a soulless, unimaginative technocrat who seemed to be in thrall to the big banks. The whispers continue: Is Tim Geithner nothing more than Henry Paulson Lite, a creature of Wall Street but without the Goldman-Sachs-CEO financial chops?

That’s the central question that goes to the heart of Geithner’s recovery plan and its credibility. To answer it, you need an understanding of where he’s coming from. When I interviewed Geithner a year ago for a profile for this magazine, the longtime bureaucrat had been, thanks to his role as president of the New York Federal Reserve Board, present at every major meeting that dealt with the exploding crisis but was still largely unknown outside the world of finance. I found him to be insightful, intense, in command—not unfocused and scripted, as he so often seems now. He did not have the “eyes of a shoplifter”—to quote one of the less flattering reviews of his February speech—but rather a straight-in-the-eye gaze that would have satisfied John Wayne. He was considered by many to be the star of the Bear Stearns rescue, the man who saved Wall Street, but he was very clearly a man of Wall Street, with an array of advisers who spanned the length and breadth of the financial-services industry. Even though it was his moment in the limelight, he was still the protégé—and decidedly not the equal—of powerful members of the establishment.

At the time, some of the nation’s most prominent figures in government and finance—former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, as well as John Thain, then CEO of Merrill Lynch, and former New York Fed chief Gerald Corrigan—were only too happy to share fond anecdotes about this youthful public official on the rise.

When I approached them again for this article, to get a word in defense of their beleaguered friend, the reaction was far different. Greenspan was “working against a series of his own deadlines and sends his regrets,” a spokesperson told me. Volcker was “not granting interviews.” Corrigan also declined to comment on Geithner. “It’s just a little bit early in his tenure,” said a spokesperson. But Geithner would have an uphill battle against his critics even if every white male over 60 in Washington were to vouch for him. To succeed, Geithner must make the transition from loyal subordinate and hardworking bureaucrat to the imaginative, inspiring leader the times demand.

Some will never be convinced. Chris Whalen is editor of the newsletter Institutional Risk Analyst and a longtime Fed watcher. He is no fan of the Treasury secretary, believing that Geithner lacks a financial background and is in the pocket of Wall Street bankers. Whalen’s doubts began to build three years ago.

Whalen was in the audience when ­Geithner, then president of the New York Fed, spoke at a conference on credit risk at New York University’s Stern School of Business in mid-2006. Geithner was still an ordinary bureaucrat, albeit one who had made an astonishing climb up the ladder of government service, rising through Treasury posts and the International Monetary Fund, encouraged and nurtured by elders like Henry Kissinger, his first employer after leaving Johns Hopkins; Corrigan, lately of Goldman Sachs; Pete Peterson of the Blackstone Group, who had recruited Geithner to the Fed; Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, two Clinton-era Treasury secretaries; and Volcker and Greenspan. These mentors were always available at the other end of the phone line, sometimes for several calls a day. But none of them were there at the conference at NYU. Geithner was the only guest onstage.