Warsh Will Need His Vaunted People Skills at Fed He’s Scorned

In the summer of 2002, 32-year-old Kevin Warsh found himself at the center of a political fight over some of the era’s most complex financial legislation.

Warsh was just a junior White House staffer. But at the climactic moment of closed-door negotiations on Capitol Hill, he was the one playing point man for the Bush administration – and under forensic cross-examination by Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes, co-author of the bill to clean up corporate reporting after the Enron scandal.

“Every single person was leaning in, in the aggressive position,” said Marc Sumerlin, then Warsh’s senior colleague on the ...