Summers' proudest achievement had been the 1995 bailout of Mexico, which as undersecretary of treasury he had helped engineer with his friend and mentor, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The bailout was equally obnoxious to both the left and the right and would no doubt prove a brutally hard sell to the American public. Rubin and Summers' solution? Bypassing Congress and the public, they took $40 billion from a Treasury reserve fund and handed it over to Ernesto Zedillo. As Summers has been fond of saying since, "The Marshall Plan was never focus grouped."