LISBON—On May 6, top officials of the European Central Bank were sitting down to dinner with their spouses in the elegant Emperor's Room of the Palacio da Bacalhoa, a 15th-century estate and winery south of the Portuguese capital, when stocks in New York began a terrifying slide.
Trichet: Life's work on the line.
The bankers' BlackBerrys lit up with frantic notes. The euro was swooning. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plummeted 1,000 points in the "Flash Crash."
Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB's president, feared that a fiscal mess in tiny Greece, which had consumed Europe for months, was now touching off another global financial crisis.
It was perhaps the worst of many stomach-churning moments that spring for Mr. Trichet, an urbane 67-year-old Frenchman known as "Mr. Euro" for devoting much of his 40-year career to building the common currency. It now seemed possible the panic could derail his life's work.
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