For the year and a half Summers served as secretary—from July 1999 until the end of the administration—Summers proved that he had learned much from his mentor. He managed the bureaucracy well, remaining a close adviser to the president and maintaining the political capital the Treasury had built up during the Rubin years. He kept relations with the other branches of the government civil and productive. He demonstrated his skills as a people picker, finding a wealth of talent to fill openings beneath him and coordinating the restructuring of the IRS that culminated with the search to pick a new director. And probably not entirely unrelated to Harvard’s interests, he oversaw the last year and a half of the longest economic expansion in American history, during which Harvard’s endowment swelled to an unprecedented $19 billion.

“You are not going to get a sleepy, white-haired old man who says forgettable things” in Summers, Neff says. For all of Summers’ civilizing at Rubin’s elbows, he hasn’t completely left behind his former self. “New Larry”—the managerial, governmental, political Summers—has its merits, but the search committee made its decision with full knowledge that many of the aspects that characterized “Old Larry” are still kicking around.

In some cases these “Old Larry” qualities were desirable. Summers was and still is brilliant. In other cases it was neutral—like the disorganized lab partner that Neff remembers from high school, the Summers of today requires a rule that says you are “never to give Larry the only version of anything” lest it “disappear into the pile.”

And, as even admirers admit, there are still aspects of “Old Larry” that will require further adjustment.

Summers has a reputation for arrogance that has persisted despite efforts to assume Rubin’s humility. The perception, his defenders explain, comes from his penetrating and incisive intellect. He can see to the core of an issue so accurately and quickly that those who don’t know him sometimes see ego instead of efficiency. That said, Summers has at times brought the criticism on himself—one colleague remembers him holding up a briefing book and asking the room if there was anything in it he didn’t already know.

Flashes of the “Old Summers” would appear when Summers held meetings, and in 10 minutes discuss and dissect memos that underlings had spent six months constructing. “If you wasted one moment, he’d cut you off,” a friend says. The quality of his analysis was always impeccable, but his style ruffled feathers.