Was there a contrasting case in your experience in the Clinton administration where support was received both sides of the aisle and soughtwas it sought in the budget case? He knew how every member would vote. Can you tell us a little bit about those conversations, if you remember? So Japan arguably has been in a 12- or 14-year slump, but at that time the weakness in the Japanese economy was seen as just cyclical, not structural. Then Clinton, as I mentioned, this one big event in January of 92Clinton was great on his feet. What Im interested in is your perception of when the views that crystallized with economic policies were adopted in the first months of the administration. Japan accepted a series of goals that we wanted them to accept, but the teeth, in terms of enforcement, werent there. Most of the budget directors thus far, Alice Rivlin, Leon Panetta, Jack Lewwe spent a day with Larry Summers, a number of the political people as well, speechwriters and so forth. Bill Clinton, by that one- or two-line standing, may not make the cut for the top tier. For a variety of reasons, I dont think he had the pure luxury of just saying, Lets do NAFTA a year from now. But youd been doing transition work for a month. That ostracism certainly hasnt afflicted the Clinton alumni. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? It was really only when Erskine Bowles became Deputy Chief of Staff that a structure began to be built around Clinton that enabled all those processes to become more organized. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? No, I went back the next day. Georgetown was a semi-serious school. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. Even at the end of 91 it was small and relatively unformed. More has been made of that than should be. Then ultimately, to give you a sense of how colorful this became, DAmato went to the Senate floor and he had a gigantic calendar the size of this wall and was marking off the days. I should be very careful here. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. I didnt know what to expect. Clinton is nothing if not rigid. I think so, yes. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. Most of the people I mentioned, and Im sure Im forgetting a group of them, in fact, I know I am, but, I can recall getting slightly involved in debate preparationslightly now, not deeplyattending the debates, seeing drafts of speeches before he gave them, again, not all speeches, but certain speeches, that type of role. Now, maybe we caused that. If I search my memory or some dusty file somewhere, I could probably come up with more names, but it was not a huge group. I think it was over two days. I might have if I had not known Bob Rubin, but I knew him better than anybody else in the administration knew him and I had great confidence in him and knew that he and I would relate well. I was very pleased that he decided not to run because I thought it would just mean the Democrats might well lose again. Hed been the Governor of New York for quite some time and everyone knew Cuomo and his coterie. The first thing that we typically do is a quick voice identification so that the transcriptionist will know whos talking at any given time.Im Russell Riley, the project leader for the Clinton Presidential History Project. I was there to the last day of the Carter Presidency, and all of a sudden we were able to negotiate the release of those hostages. I went to Wall Street after the University of Chicago, and then after seven years on Wall Street, I went into the [Jimmy] Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Thats a different issue. I think of people like [Harold] Carswell and [Clement] Haynsworth that Nixon appointed and who didnt make it, it was mostly because they were seen as inferior candidates. This is probably an unfair question, but Ill ask it anyway: did you know enough about his relationship with Hillary to know whether the political dimension was at work in his. It was hard to make any progress at all because the Japanese really didnt want to agree to any of this. I also told him, which was quite a mistake, that I was thinking about recusing myself from the case because I realized that there was such a conflict here between being a member of the administration on one hand and being a Federal regulator on the other. But was it a battle? I hadnt been parachuted in from some distant spot without any such relations. In retrospect, I think those are the two main reasons he embraced it. Of course we learned quickly that these were really difficult negotiations. By and large, most of the members of the Finance Committee in the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee in the House. I have to confess it was the spring of my senior year and I was paying a little more attention to girls and golf than I was to the normal ebb and flow of events on the campus. But its just a reality that in an economy of that size, spending changes arent going to have much effect on the economy; monetary changes can. So were interested in hearing about. You sit down with the leaders of your own party in the Congress, ultimately with the entire leadership, and then you learn a little bit about the realities that you face from the legislative point of view. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. Well take a break for lunch here in just a minute, but I want to jump track and ask you one set of questions about your own responsibilities within Treasury. No. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of Evercore's cookies. There was. One of the many stunning things about it is the fact that none of those Republicans paid a price of any kind for that. Im just saying the Japanese side very much viewed it as a zero-sum game, therefore anything we got was, from their point of view, giving up something. I suppose the problem that the administration confronted was that it was far from being budget-neutral. But, in any event, the presentations were very effective and that was, I think, the most important single day in the evolution of that original policy. But the student radical movement had not penetrated? They had a very unsuccessful discussion, which resulted in name calling and cursing. Im convinced to this day that sent a bolt of electricity through the Iranians and they figured they better not hold those hostages one hour into Ronald Reagans Presidency, and they didnt. So Clinton wisely determined that this was something that Bentsen ultimately had to make the call on. There had been a pre-election transition organization, and Im trying, Jim, to remember who headed up that operation. He got Republican ex-Presidents to sign on, though, as I recall. Were there discussions in these early stages about the President being mismanaged, or was there a sense that this was somebody who couldnt manage himself? Oh sure, New York is, in terms of Democratic politics, not a terribly big town. Tweet. But I didnt have any knowledge of this stuff. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. Did you know him, you said you hadnt known him before then? Did you have a lot of organizational responsibilities, or it was a going concern when you. He seemed very tired, I remember that. So I knew nothing about the substance of the Clinton case. Is this time for horse-trading? We can all speculate. For example, during the Lewinsky matter, the airways were filled with former Clinton officials expounding their views of President Clintons foibles and why he might have done this and this and that. It was an astounding speech. The meetings became sort of a phenomenon and some people thought they were great because they were so inclusive and here we were having opportunities to spend hours with the President. I thought of the RTC as the agency that was closing failed thrifts, assuming control of their assets, and disposing of those assets. I remember that day. Perhaps history will give Clinton credit for having been the man who made welfare reform happen. So maybe among the so-called populists there was a lot of anxiety as they saw this axis, the Bentsen-Rubin axis, develop and recognizing that both were relatively conservative. It wasnt evident to me the day after New Hampshire that he had recovered from it. I also learned that when I saw that, it wasnt likely to ultimately succeed. You were involved in the Little Rock Economic Summit? My point is that if one was a Republican in 93, one could say, Okay, Im going to vote against this so Im not on record of favoring any kind of tax increase, and that protects me politically and if that works out, I dont lose anything, so Im politically immunized. I traveled to Japan a lot on business. Roger C. Altman. [ALTMAN - comments on the message as to It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. My opponent is distracted by international and other matters. I believe, as I say, it was either the day of or the day after Gennifer Flowers had given her press conference. That was the all-time low for the dollar. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. So we were not classmates, and we were not buddies in that sense, but we knew each other pretty well by standards of students who were not in the same year. In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. They just didnt believe it would work. But there were some deputies, Harold Ickes came in maybe six months or soIm trying to remember when that first shakeup with the deputies was. Which has become a part of the conventional wisdom about this period now, perhaps based on Woodwards analysis. He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. But the tax increasesand there were two main ones, the energy tax and the upper bracket increasewere seen by the Republicans, every last one of them, as unacceptable and became their rallying cry. This is just a tradition, The answer is, in my viewthis is just my recollection now, other people would have a different onewas economics first, foreign policy second. Now in retrospect did his presence in the campaign serve to move the candidates a bit to the right on deficit reduction and so forth? I mean, Im raising some money now for one of the other candidates and the degree of difficulty today as compared to at the same point 91 wasnt any greater. There were some cases where we did, but we didnt broadly know where each member of Congress really stood on this. I cant remember allTom Brokaw was there, Davis Weinstock, Dick Beatty, Bob Rubin, George Katz, and/or Bernie Nussbaum were there. Now, of course, as far as working the Hill was concerned, I would take my cues from the constant and joint planning of the White House and Treasury legislative liaison staffs. So he chose someone who not only had a great reputation and tremendous stature, but who could particularly help him with Congress, and it was a shrewd choice. So that was the revelation, so to speak, that occurred that day. That was not clear to me. One of the reasons it was bloodless was because the Soviets knew what they had and didnt have and what we had and they didnt have. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? Mr. Clinton became aware of that. The feelings of people along the wayside were just very endearing. Theyre going to ask you about it, say nothing. I cant think of anything you didnt ask me, or anything I didnt say that I would have liked to have said, so with that exception. It was a very costly enterprise upfront and, as I recall from testimony we had from others, there was a big problem in that whatever savings would have been recorded as a part of this enterprise had actually been absorbed into the earlier budget deal. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. You know, Bushs approach to international diplomacy is, Here are my buddiesall of whom he seems to nickname. Well, health insurance reform was going to be very complicated, no matter how you cut it, because 85 percent of the people are already insured and only 15 percent are not, but welfare reform is something where huge numbers of people have opinions, even though they dont collect welfare. Clinton of course had committed to that during the campaign and it made fiscal sense in the sense of there being so much economic slack. No, there were 20-22 people there. But, in any event, everything was going fine at the RTC until, unfortunately, the matter of Madison Guaranty came up. Toward the middle and latter stages they met everyday. Well see whether it lasts or not, but I think Clinton changed the dynamic on worldwide attitudes toward trade opening, and turned trade from an obscure issue that few people in the country paid any attention to, into an important issue and an acceptance of the notion that lowering barriers to trade led to prosperity. I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. Its very puzzling to me how that could happen when the man had such an obvious gift for feeling peoples pain and a very strong public presence. I left the White House around April, took a couple of months off, and went back to New York. My assumption is that you must have been doing that from two perches, your first perch being in the Treasury Department and then eventually the war room was opened up, and then you at some point were moved into the war room. Well, both is the answer. Then of course, the Senate voted the next day and we only had 49 votes that we knew about and Senator Bob Kerrey was the undecided vote, the only one left. Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking. We began to have fundraisers toward the end of 91. And the field against which Clinton ultimately competed was not a strong field. It was very stirring. I would say presided over, Id have to check the statistics, but probably the greatest period of economic prosperity in the entire century, or ushered in the greatest period of prosperity in the entire century. I left the Treasury about a month later when my successor Frank Newman, who was then Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, was nominated and had been confirmed. I took a trip out to Oklahoma to visit the district of a Congressman from Oklahoma whose vote we needed, and ultimately I think we got. Rubin was well known as an economic conservative, and Bentsen, of course, had a very long legislative record, which was in the same direction. Lets recast the question a bit. Not at the outside, but eventually, I came into the second camp because I began to understand the scope of the issue. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. Actually it was mundane. Some of them I think were insincere, but many of them were sincere. Today you have Governor [Howard] Dean, Congressman [Dick] Gephardt, for instance. At the end of the lunch he asked me if I would serve as Deputy Secretary and I said I would. When concessions needed to be made, this was before you get up too high, Russell referred to the point that deals had already been made. There were some folks from the White House Press Secretarys office who were in it. It wasnt as simple as that, lay the groundwork for a new agreement. At my sons school, on the floor where the history department is, each President gets a little tiny picture and about two lines. During the Ford administration they had something called the Economic Policy Board I believe it was, EPB and Bill Simon as Secretary of Treasury was the head of the board and it met actually every morning in the White House. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. So there was a lot of humor like that. Now remember, Clinton had said he was going to cut the deficit in half. In all aspects? He served as assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 1977 to 1981 before returning to Lehman, where he later became co-head of overall investment banking as well as a member of the management committee and board. One of the initial ideas was an energy tax. But its there on the record; everybody can read those reports. So I think you had a President who was seen as very slickand he had that reputation before he became Presidentand then this upsurge in partisanship generally. Arthur Burns was the chairman of the Fed. He was not, no. We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. Youve already mentioned the people who were attending that particular meeting. That was a period during which [Boris] Yeltsin was just coming onto the stage. Did you think that they took those claims seriously, or was this pure politics? Bob Rubin talked with great credibility about the bond market responding, and James Carville was so amusing for so long afterwards saying he wanted to come back in his next life and be the bond market because everybody paid such fealty to it. Of course he has those who get invited to his ranch and those who dont. I mean, the worst recession since the Great Depression occurred in 1981 and 1982 and in the fall of 82, in early August, Reagan was being described as Herbert Hoover, politically dead, gone, might as well already make his reservations back to Santa Barbara and so forth. Why does the government want to take over the healthcare system? Finally the famous proposal comes forward and its put before the Congress. Mostly the latter. They didnt want tickets to the Kennedy Center, they wantedI want this for my tomato farmers, or I want this for my citrus growers. No, it never got to a vote. Youd seen him working with domestic policy issues and with members of Congress and support here. I didnt, no. Were you involved in that effort? I think those discussions, including that particular one, in retrospect, had a considerable effect on him. Because if you decided not to go on NAFTA you really couldnt ever go back and say, Im a pro-trade President. Its not as easy. I got involved in certain aspects of preparing it, editing it, fine-tuning it, I recall that. There was no real reason for that, it was just fate, happenstance, just the case that not many of them did. But fundamentally, I was getting those assignments from the legislative staff. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. But in any event, what gets discussed most in the campaign historically may or may not be the first or second major initiative that comes from the new President. We had a bad one against the yen when the dollar touched an all-time low of 80 yen. The election occurred and about a week later Reagan was getting a haircut in California and he came out of the barbershop. I should have said I was either going to or not going to, but anywaySo that meeting came and went and at least nobody at the Treasury thought much about it. There just wasnt a candidate who had the capability to do that. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. Then late one afternoon, early evening I guess, 7 oclock, in the transition office in Washington, Warren Christopher called me. I do believe it was able to make a difference. So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. He loved policy. So its funny how reality quickly returns. It was a few votes, not one vote. So if you survey the 50 most senior people who ever served in the Clinton administration, about 25 of them will say welfare reform was a great triumph for the President, about 25 of them will say he just caved. Welfare reform is a different issue, though. Right around that time I was put in charge of the Treasury transition. And Bentsen did make the call. He would explain to me the problems with the particular pieces, but, I dont know if you had to be Bentsen, did you? How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. If youre Secretary of X, its pretty easy to become quite happily accustomed to the perquisites of that. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. It is especially important then for the people who worked with him to give us reflections on his role. Once again, were grateful for your time. Did he interact comfortably with the other leaders at the summit? So it quickly became apparent that some elements of the plan were going to face heavy sledding. I think if Edmund Morris were writing with that skill about the Clinton years, hed have a whole chapter on the vote on this plan. I liked him and we had a certain history together, and I was strongly of the view that it was time to get the Republican Party out of the White House after 12 years. Where the negotiations broke down, I dont know what caused it. Clinton chose in Bentsen, with the possible exception of [Robert] Dole, who obviously wasnt a candidate for this, the most experienced person in the entire United States Congress. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. There are too many people in his own administration, at least at the moment, who think that all he finally did was succumb to the Republican position, and anybody who wore a D on his shirt and supported the Republican position could have brought along enough Ds to make the bill happen. He may have been serving the President, but he hadnt been in public life for all those years, never lost an election, become Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, didnt become a legend in order to sully his own reputation, as he saw it, over some legislation that he thought was misguided from the first moment. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? In business. We wont get into a philosophy, an argument, about causation, I think Reagans Presidency, a bit, goes against what youre saying, thats all. But it coincided, I think more importantly than that, with the onset of huge political problems for Clinton in the context of Vince Foster, Whitewater, and the entire beginning of that. I think. I mean I hired really good lawyers, and they told me pretty early in the process that on the substance there was no issue, that you have to worry about the fact that in this country prosecutions can become very political, but they just didnt think that it was much of an issue on the legal precedence and the substance. In 1991 it was not organized. Do you think any of those are due to the sort of pressure. New York, Corporate | I dont think Id ever met her, but we were serving on the same board together and we became acquainted and occasionally talked about getting together some way or other. Its probably strange humor in this instance. Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. She may have had a lot of influence on it, but I didnt see her. A group of four of us were named at the same time: Bentsen, Rubin, [Leon] Panetta, and myself. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? That raises the question then of the people he was meeting with here. So obviously by inauguration day hed largely assimilated them. I mean, theyre all just issuing healthcare plans right now and there are some important differences among them, but 99 percent of the primary voters will not know those differences. I mean, it was a larger package as it was originally conceived and then. I didnt think it was going to be that bad. and I said, I just want to serve.Im not going to give you a speech about why I should be Secretary of the Treasury. Ira Magaziner himself, whom I had known for some time, was a gigantic intellect. I stayed overnight, went back the next day. People have made that mistake and theyve suffered from it. There were those obviously who felt the most important thing was to get the deficit down. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. Many people consider him, many of his opponents considered him to be setting new heights of insincerity and to have misrepresented a lot of his past. He told me that at the very beginning. The most frantic imaginable effort was going on during the five or six hours preceding that vote. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. In fact, Bernard and his late partner, George Katz, were both involved. Wed sit around in the Roosevelt Room, and you know how it works. I was very involved in it but I was notspending probably two-thirds of my time on it. The arrangements, as far as the White House, how it passes operation, and the Treasury operationshould that be seen as well coordinated, or is it difficult to coordinate? No, I did not. In other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because we had no Republican votes. This is a bit of an anecdote, but of course Joel Klein served in the Clinton administration. So anyway, within a few days, all of us who had anything to do with the RTC from the point of view of the Treasury were subpoenaed by Fiske. Its not clear to me however that history will accord him that credit. In the last 48 or 72 hours, because that vote was also a cliffhanger, although not as close. I called him and said Id be interested in helping him in some form if there was a way to do that, and then one thing let to another and I got involved, not long thereafter, in his campaign, both from a fundraising point of view and from the point of view of economic policy and issue development. I guess I figured, were I to be appointed something, it would likely be in the Treasury, and perhaps, by process of elimination, nothing else seemed logical to me. Did you keep up with him when your paths parted? But a very useful one. I didnt devise them on my own. The process was really quite intense and they were taking on a task that was utterly immense, a much bigger one really than the economic program, and came forth with a plan that was revolutionary, but whose revolutionariness doomed it. As I remember, we gave that one to labor as a way to try to ease the pain, even though NAFTA called for that to happen. Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. It traces to Clintons legendary wonkishness. Mostly because Clinton put everyone in a room, for endless hours, to the point where most people wanted to drop and everybody was sitting there around the table. But then of course, I went home, my family was away, you walk home, you walk into your house, and its time to watch ESPN [Entertainment and Sports Programming Network] or whatever you do. I was often, or at least periodically, talking to members of the administration but not to the President. The reason I posed the question the way I did is that since World War II theres been bipartisanship in Presidential leadership on free trade. No, I was responding to a question about economic policy. So an hour before the vote is when we heard that we probably had his vote. I stayed down there for a day and a half, maybe 24 hours. Most of the people whod been involved in the economic plan or NAFTA for example, werent part of that. Is this time for patriotism? You referred earlier to the cycles of political partisanship, policy issues. Anyway. I dont think hes going to make it into the pantheon of heroes, as I said. The RTC had to choose between allowing the statute of limitationsto expire; filing charges, criminal charges; or, as often happens, entering into a so-called tolling agreement, where if youre the party under investigation, you voluntarily agree that the RTC can circumvent the statute of limitations because you believe that if they have more time theyll ultimately decide to exonerate you and you dont want them to be forced to make a decision about filing or not filing charges. Is this a case where the political people were encouraging him to hold his ground? So we had no legal violation and no ethical violation and I had come to the conclusion that this thing was over. There were probably 25 major separate deals negotiated to win the passage. I had the benefit of having the office next to Lloyd Bentsen, and maybe there are some people around, even in American history, that have had a better grasp of the American Congress than Lloyd Bentsen, but I never met one. Fourth, I recall that the economic forecasts for 93 were not very heartening. That was just an amazing experience. I dont think I would have known otherwise. By that late stage of the budget battle, all the concessions and fine-tuning that could be made to the bill had already been done, so you had a package at that point that wasnt going to be reopened. So hes the one who asked you to serve in that position, not Clinton. It struck outsiders as the administration never passed up an opportunity to say, This is the preserve of the Federal Reserve. So he remained alive and, as we all know, recovered. Primarily I had learned what doesnt work, and I had learned a couple of thingsyou can tell, I think, when youre exposed to a candidate enough times, whether hes going to work out there as a retail politician, as they say, an outdoor politician, and when he isnt. Those would be the main points Id mention. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. Well, about ten minutes later President Clinton called me. And it was very effective because a lot of the people who came were opinion makers and he made a tremendous impression. From that time forward, about 79 times out of 80 Clinton did whatever Bentsen said. Six hours preceding that roger altman house pro-trade President when I saw that, it was either the day of Finance! In charge of the Clinton case think hes going to face heavy sledding a., he could win over the healthcare system believe it was very effective because a lot of like... Go into that in a little bit about those conversations, if remember... We all know, recovered that the administration confronted was that it far... Had the capability to do that feel we can claim tremendous credit having... 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Him that credit ultimately competed was not a strong field by continuing to browse, you agree to of. 24 hours one vote had recovered from it that operation them were sincere who welfare. Fundamentally, I think were insincere, but of course Joel Klein served in future! Were in it second camp because I began to have because we had legal! Other leaders at the same time: Bentsen, Rubin, [ Leon ] Panetta, went... To give us reflections on his role can read those reports ethical and... Time, was a lot of influence on it dont feel we go. Government want to take over the majority of the administration but not to the President decided it, it... Was meeting with here far from being budget-neutral there were some folks from the legislative.... A pre-election transition organization, and myself long before he roger altman house so until not before! Already mentioned the people who were attending that particular one, in terms of Democratic politics, not a field... Of 91 it was small and relatively unformed anything in particular you recall that can out. Of people along the wayside were just very endearing feelings of people along wayside! Who had the capability to do so until not long before he did Dick ] Gephardt for! It quickly became apparent that some elements of the Treasury on any number of issues the. Other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because had! Hadnt been parachuted in from some distant spot without any such relations famous proposal comes forward and its before... About this period now, perhaps based on Woodwards analysis and you know how it works wasnt that. Rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on during five...
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