With No Plan B, House Reluctantly Passes Politically Risky Measure

But in the end, none of these people proved decisive. Instead, for Myrick, it was the Charlotte banker who told her the night before the vote about how the credit market in North Carolina was heading toward rigor mortis. It was the woman in Cleveland, Tenn., infant son in arms, who looked into Tennessee Republican Rep. Zach Wamp's eyes and said, "I appreciate you voting no, but please don't come home and leave things the way they are."

And it was Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products in Maryland, who walked into Rep. Elijah E. Cummings's office Thursday to tell the Maryland Democrat's staff that his company had just landed a major contract for wire baskets, but when he went to the bank to get cash to meet the demands, he learned his credit line had been frozen.

"I decided late last night," Cummings said yesterday, just after he switched his vote. "I prayed on it, because this is a difficult situation. I needed to allow this moment in history to sink in."

'On the Brink of a Heart Attack'

It started to be a crisis a little more than two weeks ago, though for exhausted participants such as Paulson, it must seem like a lifetime. As congressional leaders assembled around the long wooden table in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shortly before 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18, many of them were thinking variations of the same lament: Here we go again.

They had been there before, sitting under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, absorbing the latest dispiriting account of another major American financial institution going down the drain. But with every frightful word uttered now by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the somber visage of Paulson at his side, it became apparent that this meeting was different, and worse.

In 10 minutes that shook Congress, if not the world, Bernanke laid out a scenario of financial dissolution so grave that for parts of it he swore his listeners to secrecy. The financial contagion, he said, had spread far beyond the securities companies of Wall Street to small businesses, the automobile sector and "any industry that depended on credit or loans."

These lines of credit served as arteries, Bernanke went on, employing a morbid metaphor to close his case. If they clogged completely, they would take down the system. The entire economy was "on the brink of a heart attack. We don't know when the heart attack will occur, but we know it will occur."

"I gulped," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "We all realized we're not in normal times."

Nearly a year ago, long before the collapse of Wall Street with the fall of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, Bernanke set up teams inside the Fed to prepare contingency plans, widespread interventions that they called "break the glass" options. The glass was now broken, he and Paulson agreed.

The problem was, lawmakers did not buy it, not on the left, not on the right. On a conference call the day after the meeting, Paulson and Bernanke spent half an hour with House Republicans, discussing in sketchy detail how the rescue plan would work.

The money men took only a handful of questions. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), the leader of the most conservative Republicans, asked how they could expect lawmakers to approve such a major measure after only a few days of discussion. He asked why Paulson and Bernanke did not consider scrapping a technical accounting rule, known as mark-to-market, that many conservatives wanted to see eliminated, thinking it was a culprit in the financial crisis. We are way beyond accounting rules, Paulson responded.

After Paulson and Bernanke hung up from the call, Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) led the conversation for two more hours. Frustration and anger kept bubbling up from other ends of the line. Conservatives in the House felt they had no relationship with Paulson. He seemed to be much closer to Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), the liberal Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, than to any of them, they said. And he had already upset them several times during his tenure in his handling of Social Security and housing issues.