Put the load right on me: for carrying the fate of world capitalism on his shoulders, our Mover and Shaker of the year got only grief. So he shrugged.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FEATURE

For all its commitment to facts and truthfulness, the writing of history always proves to be more art than science. Whatever version of past events you read today may be superseded by, and dramatically differ from, another version tomorrow. There's an obvious reason for that, of course. Every dawn brings the possibility of new information that changes our understanding of the past, When British cavalry made a death-defying charge into Russian guns during the Crimean War--an event immortalized in "The Charge of the Light Brigade"--the troopers were hailed for their courage and daring. Only later did it become clear that the charge was inadvertent, the result of a botched battlefield communication. What was first seen as a brave act was subsequently viewed as a stupid mistake.

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And thus we come to Ken Lewis, former chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp. and a man whose reputation we'll put through a similar revision here. There's a twist, though. Unlike the case of the Light Brigade, the first drafts of history have gotten Lewis wrong in the other direction: His actions during the Great Recession, initially judged to be bad, will surely be seen someday much more favorably. In fact, we'll skip ahead to someday right now and offer this bold bit of revisionist history sooner rather than later: Not only is Lewis not a symbol of all that's wrong about capitalism, he's the man who saved it in one stroke. That's why, during a period in which he was stripped of his title of chairman of the board, piled upon relentlessly by shareholders, regulators and politicians and which he ended by, in effect, quitting his job, he is Business North Carolina's Mover and Shaker of the Year.

It should be said right away that Lewis is no Lord Cardigan, who led the Lights on their charge. The flash and dash of a cavalry leader was never his style at BofA. That was left to Lewis' predecessor, Hugh McColl, the South Carolina-born ex-Marine whose assault on the banking establishment had a Light Brigade feel to it (but with a much more successful result). McColl spent most of the 1990s acquiring other banks at a clip of almost one a year, expanding BofA's geographic reach and deposit base so dramatically that the company came close to bumping against a federal regulation limiting any single bank's slice of the national deposit pie to 10%. When Lewis took over from McColl in 2001, industry observers expected a caretaker. Surprisingly, BofA found itself in the hands of someone whose style may have been much different from McColl's but whose results were not. In 2003, Lewis engineered the $48 billion acquisition of FleetBoston Financial Corp. and in 2005 the $35 billion purchase of credit-card issuer MBNA Corp. By mid-2008, after acquiring mortgage originator Countrywide Financial Corp. in a $2.5 billion deal, the only thing missing from Lewis' trophy collection was the same thing missing from McColl's: a brand-name investment bank with global reach.

Enter Merrill Lynch Inc. In September 2008, the Wall Street icon was...