White has a reputation as a tough litigator, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she is initiating wholesale change at the S.E.C. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a personal page on the New York Road Runners Club Web site, which records a battery of figures (Pace per Mile, Age-Graded Performance Percentage, and so on) for each of the official events she has completed. There are two hundred and seven entries since the first one, which was recorded a week before her fifty-sixth birthday, in 2003, seven of them since she began working in Washington, late last year, just as she was turning sixty-five. Friends and colleagues characterize White as the most competitive and driven person they have ever encountered.

In the nineties, when White was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, she would arrive in her office, a few blocks from Wall Street, early in the morning, with a stack of newspaper clippings. They were marked with yellow Post-Its bearing a recipient’s name and a nudge: Where are we on this? Are we on top of this? She had a famously expansive sense of what her office should be worrying about. She once sent Patrick Fitzgerald, who was in charge of terrorism cases, a note about some white powder that had been found at the site of a truck accident in another state, involving a driver with a Middle Eastern name. Today, she blizzards her staff and her friends with e-mails at all hours. Friends with insomnia who write to her at 2 or 3 A.M. may get an immediate reply.

White is plainspoken and doesn’t seem slick or fancy. Every year, she holds a Super Bowl party. Her favorite band is Fleetwood Mac. Her favorite charity is the A.S.P.C.A. She has had the same cohort of intimate friends since the seventies—three or four women who worked together in the U.S. Attorney’s office and helped form a female basketball team there. When she returns to New York on weekends, they still try to have dinner, and they go on occasional trips together. She does not put her competitiveness aside when conducting her social life. She and her husband, John White, have a tennis court at their country house, in upstate New York, where her style of play led her friends to give her the nickname Sid Vicious. After she organized a team to run in an athletic event called the Great Race, and it finished second, she successfully petitioned the race officials to create a special certificate for her team to take home. She makes sure to win even at Boggle or crazy eights. Although she is a sports fan (baseball first, especially the Yankees, football second, horse racing third) and often invites people to join her at games, she doesn’t carry on conversations while the ball is live. She doesn’t read much for pleasure. She doesn’t belong to a church. Her large apartment, on the Upper East Side, is said to look about as lived-in as a suite in an extended-stay motel. White’s life is about working, and winning.

Mary Jo White was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father spent his career as a lawyer for the Social Security Administration. Her grandfather was a lawyer, too, and so was her uncle. Her only sibling, an older brother named Carl Monk, recently retired from a long term as the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools. After her father was transferred to the Social Security Appeals Council, in Washington, she went to junior high school in McLean, Virginia, where she met John White. They married in 1970. He is a senior member of the Wall Street firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and sold his ownership share there so that White could take her job at the S.E.C. Her only child, a son, is a student at Columbia Law School, and so is his wife.

In a small gesture of rebellion, White decided, after graduating from college, at William and Mary, to become a psychologist, although she also applied to law school. “I was going to be a therapist,” she told me, sitting in an armchair in her vast tenth-floor office at the S.E.C. “I find people fascinating—how they behave and why.” She enrolled in a master’s-degree program at the New School for Social Research (on a competitive scholarship that she had won), but she also sat in on one of her husband’s classes at N.Y.U. Law School. She completed her degree in a year, and then enrolled in Columbia Law School.

“Law is easier,” she said. “Everything is a problem.” She thinks lawyers “look at the world in a slightly different way. It’s almost a difference in physical perception. You look at the facts, you see the parts, and you repackage them into the analysis that produces the answer. In college, I took courses in English literature. I loved it. I loved Virginia Woolf.” But law school, she said, changes the way you think. “You’d read the book and ask yourself, What’s the point?” After law school, White became a litigator. “Litigators get a mess,” she said. “I prefer that. It’s back to problem-solving.”

As a litigator, White has spent her career moving back and forth between one of the big New York law firms, Debevoise & Plimpton, where she worked in three stretches over thirty-five years, and the federal government. Sometimes, the problems she has been assigned to solve have been those of Wall Street firms and corporations that are in hot water with the government, or in private disputes; other times, she has been one of those responsible for putting people like her private-practice clients in hot water.

Wall Street is the problem that White is now charged with solving. The S.E.C. is a child of the 1929 stock-market crash, the Great Depression, and the New Deal: it was created at the outset of Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency to keep Wall Street from fleecing ordinary investors. (Its first chair was Joseph P. Kennedy—the fox in the henhouse.) Back then, the S.E.C. had a strict disclosure regime for newly issued stocks and bonds. Over the years, it came to be seen as the model of an effective government regulatory agency.

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But, after waves of financial deregulation in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the S.E.C.’s job got much bigger. Ordinary investors who call their broker and place an order for a specific stock or bond are now an insignificant part of the markets. Because there is no longer a wall between banks and stockbrokers, it falls to the S.E.C. to oversee some of the activities of the largest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and the rest. And, because the major Wall Street firms are vast, high-tech, high-speed global operations that make much of their money from trading in exotic and volatile financial products, the S.E.C. has to think about protecting people from the risk that the whole system could go down and take their savings with it.

Even before the 2008 financial crisis, the S.E.C.’s reputation was getting wobbly. When Eliot Spitzer was New York’s Attorney General, and known as the Sheriff of Wall Street, he discovered that research analysts for the banks were writing overly optimistic reports about the prospects of new stocks that their employers were trying to sell to the public. The S.E.C. should have got to that problem first. Between 2000 and 2008, a Boston financial gumshoe named Harry Markopolos went to the S.E.C. five times with his suspicions that the investor Bernard Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme, and the S.E.C. did not investigate. In 2004, the commission permitted the big brokerage houses to take on a much higher level of debt. The firms quickly began borrowing at possibly ruinous levels, which made them feel the effects of the crisis even more acutely. Among the financial firms that the S.E.C. was supposed to be regulating were the three largest that collapsed in 2008: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. It picked up some warning signs, but failed to act.