In the Q&A session that followed ­Geithner’s speech, Whalen asked a question about a topic that remains pertinent today—the 2004 Basel II accords, which set new global bank-capital standards. Whalen pointed out that one of the objectives of Basel II “was to actually grind the particular risk exposures”—that is, to require lenders to compute the probability of their borrowers’ defaulting on loans. “But banks said, ‘Oh, no, this is too expensive. You can’t do that.’ It didn’t fit with the quant, credit-derivative worldview,” Whalen said. It didn’t happen.

“I said, ‘Tim, isn’t this backsliding?’ ”

Geithner fixed Whalen with a vacant gaze and simply moved to another questioner, mumbling that he wasn’t prepared to answer the question.

Whalen was stunned. “It seemed to me that he had no idea what I was talking about,” he recalls. As for the look: “Think Bambi looking into the headlights on an 18-wheeler.”

There is something deeply disturbing about a Treasury secretary showing flop sweat in the middle of the worst economic crisis since Herbert Hoover was president. “Some people rise to the occasion, and some don’t,” says Peter Cohan, a management consultant and the author of You Can’t Order Change. “You really want somebody who’s confident, realistic, and coming up with better ideas and seeing the ideas work.”

For Geithner to fully revamp his image, he will have to break free of some personal history. The Geithner I profiled last year was very much a product of bureaucracy, a man who, as I described at the time, was born with a briefcase tucked under his arm. He hasn’t misplaced it.

For example, Geithner’s early public comments on the bailouts emphasized how immense, difficult, and complicated the crisis is. That’s certainly true. But how much reminding do we need? As former General Electric CEO Jack Welch wrote in his BusinessWeek column (without mentioning Geithner by name), the Obama administration broke a fundamental rule of leadership. “Your people know perfectly well how complicated the situation is,” Welch said. “They don’t need or want you to tell them. They need and want you to do your job by finding the solution, explaining it, and energizing everyone to execute it successfully.” Welch decried what he described as “CYA management”—cover-your-ass management—emphasizing the risk of failure in order to protect oneself.

Geithner’s many years in the bureaucracy have shaped him in other, less than flattering ways. Bill Seidman, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., considers the Treasury secretary to be “a smart guy but a certified bureaucrat.” He speaks from firsthand experience. It was the late 1990s, Lawrence Summers was Treasury secretary, and Geithner, as the undersecretary for international affairs, was his loyal deputy. Summers gave a speech on Japan’s troubled banking system, a subject that Seidman, who then worked for Morgan Stanley, knew intimately from his frequent visits to the country. “It was essentially not relevant,” Seidman says of Summers’ speech. It showed “a lack of familiarity with what’s going on there.” Seidman, never a shrinking violet, said as much at the time when a reporter asked him in Japan for a comment—at which point he ran afoul of Geithner. According to Seidman, Geithner called him and said, “You’re a disloyal American. You can’t make statements like that on foreign soil about a secretary of the Treasury.”

Seidman, who was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, wasn’t accustomed to having his loyalty questioned, certainly not by someone approximately 40 years his junior. “I said, ‘Where does it say that in the Constitution?’ ” Seidman tells me.

That episode provides a peek into Geithner’s character and offers up clues to his behavior during the current crisis. Seidman hadn’t been confronted by ­Geithner, the precocious junior official of his early years, or Geithner, the brilliant problem grasper he was reported to be as he matured at Treasury. Instead, he encountered Geithner, the government cog, who apparently served his mentor Summers with such unquestioning fealty that he was willing to upbraid a well-reputed private citizen for an offhand remark.

Seidman says he bears Geithner no ill will, but he has no illusions about what he witnessed. Geithner, he says, “was doing what his boss wanted, I assume. Everybody is a product of what they’ve done. I have high respect for bureaucrats, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to have the leadership quality needed when they get to be something like secretary of the Treasury—particularly now.”

Viewed through the lens of his bureaucratic background, Geithner’s behavior since coming to the Treasury—tentative, sometimes hesitant, always hedging with his comments, lacking in boldness and imagination—seems not only logical but inevitable.