From Twitter, I’ve found an interesting Newsweek story on the blame game between Hank Paulson and Dick Fuld over Lehman (was Lehman the disease that took down the financial system, or just a symptom of it?), and why he should be glad Benny had his back. Some extractions:

In retrospect, it appears that Paulson was not the callous titan of Wall Street, but rather an earnest, sometimes bewildered man caught in a whirlwind he could not tame or even fully understand. He did the best he could, reaching, sometimes lurching for answers, but in the end he was rescued by the sort of nerdy professor type who might have been devoured on the trading floors of Wall Street. To the extent that there was a hero during those weeks, it was arguably Ben Bernanke, the quiet, shy chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose problem-solving and salesmanship before a skeptical Congress were critical to avoiding financial disaster.

…Paulson does not seem to have grasped the urgency of the looming disaster. Although top financial experts were warning about the housing bubble back in 2006, Paulson—by his own admission—was not paying much attention to the way banks were slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them as complex securities. “I didn’t understand the retail market; I just wasn’t close to it,” he told NEWSWEEK. But while he was at Goldman, he had lobbied Congress—successfully—for new rules allowing investment houses to at least double the amount of leverage they could carry.

…It was Bernanke who persuaded Paulson to go to Capitol Hill for massive bailout money, but it was a very tough sell, and Paulson nearly blew it. Congress originally rejected the bailout and approved it only with last-minute revisions—and after the stock market had plummeted. Bernanke’s low-key but incisive manner worked better with lawmakers than Paulson’s bluster. With the House resisting Paulson’s proposal to give him virtually unlimited authority to disperse funds to banks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she was getting ready to leave town the weekend after Lehman’s collapse and would be back Monday. Bernanke quietly but forcefully piped up, “We may not have an economy on Monday.”

Paulson’s not the only one coming out with a book; I’ve also recently been following a former Lehman VP on Twitter, who is decidedly in the Lehman-should-never-have-failed camp, I think. I don’t think the LOLFed Lehman tag is going to get to enjoy retirement for a while yet.