As the world’s financial structures buckle and sway, seemingly on the verge of collapse, Barney Frank lumbers into a threadbare AM-radio station in the old mill town of Brockton, Massachusetts. He is, as usual, a bit exasperated—and he seems close to sartorial entropy, his shirt half tucked, cuffs unfastened, and tie skewed at an unlikely angle.

These are harried times for Frank, the famously irascible chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Since the financial system began tottering in the fall, Frank has joined Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in an informal troika of crisis managers, pushing through hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money as institution after institution, industry after industry, slides toward insolvency. (View an interactive feature showing how the federal government has intervened during times of economic crisis.)

The measures are unpopular even among many of Frank’s fellow congressional Democrats. But they are unfathomable in Brockton, a working-class burg where boxer Rocky Marciano remains a hometown hero 50 years after his last bout. Frank settles into a chair in the station’s studio. Adam Bond, a talk show host in a baseball cap, is finishing up with another guest, the ruddy-faced owner of a nearby dog track.

Frank is under the impression that he’s there to talk about local issues in the district he has represented for nearly three decades. But Bond immediately bores in on the financial crisis and Frank’s role in it.

“Is your position that in this fiasco you are without fault?” Bond asks. “Or that you’re no more at fault than anybody else?”

The congressman, his lips pursed and gray hair mussed, lurches forward in his seat. Bond is treading on his already frayed nerves. Much to Frank’s dismay, this is a question he is hearing everywhere. No Democrat in America is more closely associated with the bailout plan. For the 68-year-old Frank, the economic collapse offers a chance to build his legacy as a great lawmaker, remaking the nation’s financial system by enacting changes comparable, in Frank’s typically immodest estimation, to the greatest reforms of the New Deal.

“Our job next year,” he says, batting away Bond’s questions, “is to do what Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s.”

Bond is having none of it. He pulls out a list of campaign contributions showing that Frank has received more than $40,000 from the quasi-public mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over a 20-year period. The amount is far smaller than the sums others accepted, but the implication is that Frank was as much an accomplice as a reformer.

Frank becomes irate, repeatedly pointing out that during the period Bond is highlighting, the Republicans were in control of Congress. “I was in the minority when these things were happening,” Frank says. “You’re asking me to account for them. I can’t account for other people’s mistakes!”

The interview ends, and Bond’s wife and producer, Victoria, escorts Frank out.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asks, as they ride down in a cramped elevator together.

Frank shoots her a glowering look. “No,” he replies curtly.

Outside, Victoria tries to apologize; her husband didn’t mean to offend, she says. Frank, unmoved, disappears into a late-model S.U.V.  The producer returns to the studio, her eyes full of tears.

With the nation’s economy in meltdown, the nexus of American capitalism has shifted to Washington. Congress, led by Frank’s committee, is now in the process of deciding the future regulatory structure of Wall Street, the pay of investment-banking executives, the fate of Detroit’s Big Three auto­makers, and how many homeowners will face foreclosure. Not since the New Deal has Washington assumed so much power over private industry so quickly.