David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal’ economics editor and author of “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic,” recently finished “On the Brink,” the new book by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, which covers much of the same time period from a different vantage point. Wessel says he’ll leave the book reviewing to other more neutral observers, but offered this list of nuggets he gleaned from Paulson’s account.

1. Paulson says that ever since high school he has had occasional bouts of “dry heaves” at moments of exhaustion, of which there were several during his tenure as Treasury secretary. During contentious September 2008 negotiations on Capitol Hill over the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s restrictions on executive compensation, he recalls: “Exhausted, I went back to the small office I was using and had a bout of the dry heaves in front of Judd Gregg [a Republican senator from New Hampshire.] I wasn’t that sick, but I made a lot of noise, which seemed to galvanize Rahm Emanuel. ‘We need to get everyone back together again and get this thing done,’ he said. Harry Reid [the Senator majority leader] came in and asked if I needed a doctor. I said no, I was just tired.”

2. When Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage lender, for $4.1 billion, it expected to get some relief from regulatory capital requirements from the Federal Reserve for saving Countrywide. But in September 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond instead was putting pressure on Bank of America to redo its capital plan and cut its dividend. When Paulson encouraged Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to buy Lehman Brothers, Lewis asked for help in getting the Fed off his back. Paulson agreed to talk to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, though the issue became moot when BoA decided against buying Lehman. Bank of America went on to buy Merrill Lynch. In October 2008, after the government had pumped money into BofA, Merrill and other big banks, Lewis confided to Paulson that he was worried Merrill CEO John Thain would try to wiggle out of the deal; he wanted Paulson to insist that Thain go through with it. Paulson says he never mentioned the call to Thain. Less than three months later, of course, Lewis would talk about backing out of the deal, completing the purchase under pressure from Paulson and Bernanke.

3. The day after Lehman went into bankruptcy, Paulson told the press: “I never once considered it appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.” But with the benefit of hindsight, he says, he realizes “I ought to be have been more careful with my words,” he writes. “Some interpreted them to mean that we were drawing a strict line in the sand… and that we didn’t care about a Lehman collapse or its consequences. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I had worked hard for months to ward off the nightmare we foresaw with Lehman. But few understood what we did — that the government had no authority to put in capital, and a Fed loan by itself wouldn’t have prevented a bankruptcy.”

4. Paulson is full of praise for most government officials with whom he worked — with a couple of exceptions, among them Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, among them. About Dodd and his House counterpart, Barney Frank, Paulson writes, “Barney was scary-smart, ready with a quip, and usually a pleasure to work with….Dodd was more of a challenge. We’d worked together on Fannie and Freddie reform, but he had been distracted by his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and seemed exhausted afterwards. Though personable and knowledgeable, he was not as consistent or predictable as Barney.”

5. Another exception is Sheila Bair: “I respected Sheila… (B)ut sometimes she said things that made my jaw drop. That morning she had said she wasn’t sure that Citi’s failure would constitute a systemic risk,” the threshold for extraordinary federal action. “She spoke as if Citi were just another failing bank and not a world leader — with $3 trillion in assets, both on and off its balance sheet — imploding in the midst of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression… Although I believed she was simply posturing, I replied, ‘If Citi isn’t systemic, I don’t know what is.'”

6. Toward the end of the Bush presidency, Paulson heard more than once from Bob Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary and former colleague of Paulson’s at Goldman Sachs who was then among those at the top of Citigroup. “Bob Rubin… called to tell me that short sellers were attacking the bank… Always calm and measured, Bob put the public interest ahead of everything else. He rarely called me, and the urgency in his voice that afternoon left me without doubt that Citi was in grave danger.”

7. The federal rescue of Citi led directly to the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler. “Nancy Pelosi [the speaker of the House]… told me point-blank that it was politically impossible to rescue Citi and not help the automakers. She had until recently opposed bailouts for the car companies, which she considered poorly managed.”

8. Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, frightened Paulson in early September by calling to say GE, which Paulson describes as “an American business icon,” was having trouble borrowing money by selling IOUs known as commercial paper, and visited Paulson several days later in person. In mid-October, Paulson called Immelt to discuss imminent plans for a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantee of all new bank debt, but not GE’s. Immelt told him not to worry, GE would manage and would benefit indirectly by a more stable banking system. The next day, Immelt called back and said the bank guarantees were hurting GE’s finance unit because banks could borrow with U.S. government guarantees and GE couldn’t. And on Oct. 16, 2008, Immelt came in person to press the matter with Paulson. Over the following weeks, Paulson and Treasury official David Nason “worked hard to get Sheila [Bair] comfortable” with extending the guarantee to GE. In November, she did. GE’s finance unit, along with Citi, became one of the biggest users of the program.