The Times today reviews Ron Susskind’s history of the economic policymaking of the Obama administration, and boy, does it sound brutal to Larry Summers.

Summers, according to the Times, is “characterized by colleagues in these pages as a bullying know-it-all who acted as a kind of gatekeeper to the Oval Office on things economic.”

Summers addressed that portrayal in an email to the Washington Post the other day:

Summers, who left the administration last year, said, “The hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion, and words taken out of context. I can’t speak to what others have told Mr. Suskind, but I have always believed that the president has led this country with determined, steady and practical leadership.”

So…these are two very different impressions. One Larry Summers is gracious, respectful, and fair. The other: bullying know-it-all.

Which one is more accurate? (What do you think?) Let me put it this way: It would be inconsistent of Summers to be gracious, respectful and fair.

Sam Spektor posted a terrific link to a New York magazine conversation about the book featuring editor Adam Moss and columnist Frank Rich.

Here’s Moss:

…Summers is portrayed as an egotistical nut job, single-mindedly determined to get Bernanke’s job; when he doesn’t get it, he goes bananas. He is supposed to be a conduit for the collective advice of the team, but undermines his colleagues, only passing along advice and information that supports his positions. I was kind of stunned how many officials were willing to go on the record against him.

Larry Summers as Fed chair? The most powerful unelected official in the world? America and everyone else dodged a bullet there.

You know, as a general matter I hate to say “I told you so,” or lament that more people have not read one of my books. But anyone who read Harvard Rules could have predicted this outcome with certitude. As I watched Larry Summers try to rise from the ashes of his Harvard ouster in 2007 and 2008, I was alarmed that his PR campaign seemed to be working, and distressed that Barack Obama, so smart in so many ways, was buying it—a tragic mistake.

(It does point up something I’ve noted for years, one of the less-frequently observed but important things to know about Larry Summers, which the Harvard Corporation experienced, but probably wasn’t aware of, in the year 2000: He has a talent for sucking up when he wants to, and can present a highly misleading portrait of himself when he does—a portrait which vanishes the second he gets what he wants.)

Here’s some more Moss:

In the end, nobody’s talking to Summers — not even his crony Geithner. Furious that Geithner didn’t recommend him for Bernanke’s job, he stands Geithner up at a dinner for all the former Treasury secretaries — Summers is the only living former secretary not there. Geithner says, “Larry would rather be in Davos than at dinner with me.” At least according to Suskind, the only person who could stand Summers was Obama, which — in Suskind’s telling — was a misjudgment that had a rather profound effect on the first chunk of Obama’s presidency.

To be fair, Summers would rather be in Davos than have dinner with anyone. (Except maybe Sheryl Sandberg.) So Geithner, who doesn’t sound so great himself, shouldn’t take that personally.

And then there’s the issue of the women in the White House—Elizabeth Warren, Christy Romer and Sheila Bair come to mind—who seem consistently marginalized by Geithner and Summers, perhaps because they’re not particularly interested in bailing out working for the big banks and perhaps because they’re less obsessed with personal power than Geithner and Summers seem to be. For whatever reason, Romer is walking back her remarks now, downplaying the tensions. I wish she’d stick to her guns. There are too many red flags here not to believe that the men on the economic team pretty systematically isolated the women, and given how impressive those women are, and the fact that they represented a challenge to the banks uber alles philosophy of the men, that’s really a loss for the country.

Frankly, I’d rather have an economic team of Warren, Romer and Bair than one of Geithner and Summers.

Of course, as Frank Rich points out, the buck really does stop with Obama, and how do we who admire the man reconcile that admiration with our disappointment at the self-serving, egotistical economists whom he hired and allowed to hijack his economic agenda? (Including, apparently—Jesus, will we never be rid of him—Bob Rubin.)

Here’s Rich;

I have sympathy for [Obama], too, and I have heard him express that (charming and genuinely modest) amazement that he ended up sitting in the White House, the most unlikely president imaginable. His turning to Rubin during the transition — as he hired his economic team — may have been out of some understandable human insecurity. Or was it because he’s too easily impressed by the type of elite he met at Harvard?

Really, he should have read my book…