So we already had quite a taste of the Congressional dynamic and overall political dynamic. As I recall the campaign of 1992, there were lots of policy debates amongst the Democrats. So heres a person who knew how to manage himself. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. So there were four, Fiske and the other three, and they all came to the same conclusion, and the latter three also addressed the question of whether any of the government ethical guidelines had been violated and they all concluded no, they hadnt been. But its interesting to put it into perspective. Was it his personality? Do you have any recollections of seeing anything different in him as a candidate at that point for that position? Then he asked me to begin to work on certain personnelpresent him possible choices for the senior jobs in the department. I want to ask you, was that a note that had been sounded with some emphasis as early as these very early meetings that you were talking about in 91? He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. So one knew through the press who was going and so forth. So in the early period, Id have to go back and look at when the President laid the legislation forward, but I want to say it was first of March or something like that. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. Hed been shot eight times. So he was frantically calling members of Congress as various requests came in for him to do so. I made two trips to Little Rock. 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. Before you get into that, can I ask you another question about the arrangements on the 1993 budget? I should be very careful here. I would say it had to do with an overall perception that he was the most substantive and the best politician. Were there any big-picture elements that you wanted to put into the puzzle right now or should we just go ahead and break and we can pick up with some of the specifics on these things? I was given an office over in the Treasury. And that kind of input isnt available during the campaign. That was the first thing I did. I couldnt for the life of me see why that was a problem, but anyway, I went to the White House and told Bernie Nussbaum, the White House Counsel, just how the RTC actually operated in these matters. WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by All of us were very nervous, but Fiske ultimately ruled that there were no violations of the law. I was completelyclean bill of health from the independent counsel. 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. But there was a discontinuity between the campaign and the administration, In this respect exactly right. I recall reading in one account that Clinton had worked on a kind of unusual cluster of issues as a candidate for student body president at the time. If you look at the history of American reform, at that scale of change, usually you have a little bit more consensus than a 43 percent electoral. 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. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. So its clear that the idea about deficit reduction and fiscal policy takes root really during this transition. If you look at the organization chartIm not sure its the same now, but you have the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Deputy Secretary is part of the office. That happened, I want to say, late 93, that his nomination was effectively killed. If you think about it, it makes lots of sense. You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. You may remember that a few weeks earlier, only two or three weeks earlier, the Clintons had finally caved and agreed to the appointment of a special prosecutor, having opposed that, and Mr. [Robert] Fiske was designated. He did a version of what Carter did earlier, which was end up positioned to the right of most of his opponents in the Democratic primaries. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. Well, Theodore Roosevelt is a fascinating President, mostly by dint of his gargantuan personality and the way that he bestrode the country like some titanic figure. It was hard to make any progress at all because the Japanese really didnt want to agree to any of this. If Im not mistaken, Paul Tsongas won New Hampshire? Most of us cant name the last President who did balance the budget. 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. The reason it didnt succeed a lot more than that is because its really macro factors that drive this. Did you know him, you said you hadnt known him before then? So that the link in Clintons mind between deficit reduction and stimulus disappeared when it got into the political arena. I should double-check that. Not surprising, given his state of origin. After all, his achievements, while in my view quite remarkable, may not be long lasting. The Treasury has a wonderful history of its own and a great deal of pride suffuses those halls. Is he going to become President? That was absolutely true also of Secretary Brady and all of his people, couldnt have been more cooperative. I dont really think Whitewater, at least this part of it, was terribly different from some of the other such situations that weve all seen, whether its the John Tower hearings or its Bert Lance or whatever it is. from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Presidents should be presented with options that have been carefully developed, really carefully vetted, and those options should be written down in the usual way, and that wasnt the case here. I think any President who is either fortunate enough or skillful enough to preside over a period of peace, at least as far as American soil and American forces are concerned, deserves credit either for his good luck or his skill. No, two funny stories, Jim, dont let him off so easily. But there was the issue of the Clintons association with it and the fact that Madison Guaranty had made loans to the actual Whitewater Development Company, and the question of whether those loans had been made under pressure from the Clintons and in fact whether [James] McDougal, who ran it, had defrauded the depositors in cahoots with the Clintons. No. I was just in awe of people like that. Hes chancellor of the Board of Education of New York, hes a good friend of mine, and I had dinner with him about a month ago and I said, Does it make any difference who the President is as far as youre concerned? But I didnt have any knowledge of this stuff. When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. The American political system has changed a lot. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese. I didnt say anything to that. Thats why the current President may turn out to be lucky. Definitely working on personnel. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. The Putting People First document, is it fair to characterize that as the menu choices that the administration was going to be making when it took office, but that there was not a great deal of attention at this point on priorities from among the elements in the menu? Were there any members in particular with whom you worked directly that you felt you were personally responsible for salvaging? [laughter]. You referred earlier to Garys question that most of the decisions that Clinton made about his priorities came post-election, but the process. Yes, but even more than that, its one thing to say to your Secretary of State, at this time Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright, its another thing to say to your wife, I dont like it. You dont recall the specific occasion when you first met him? 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. Greenspan sat next to Mrs. Clinton. So Fiske came to the conclusion that nothing had happened, Starr came to the conclusion nothing had happened, and certainly, if he could have found anything, I think he would have been motivated to push it. It was a good-sized ballroom here in New York. You see people scrambling to monopolize the left. You can do it through tax increases and then you have to choose the tax, and you can do it through spending reductions and you have to choose the area youre going to focus on. Tweet. Against that test, a noncrisis Presidency, what can they achieve, under the extremely adverse politics of this time, thats been building up. 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. Can you talk about Perots influence on the campaign? But Clinton went for it, Clinton listened, Clinton deserves tremendous credit. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. I also learned that when I saw that, it wasnt likely to ultimately succeed. 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. Why does the government want to take over the healthcare system? Can you tell us how you first got to know Bill Clinton? Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? 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. I dont know why we were the earliest on the list. I believe Greenspan went to Little Rock. So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. I then had the brilliant ideaIm saying this, obviously sarcastically, that I should inform the White House what those procedural alternatives were. 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. Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. More in terms of ostracism from your former colleagues. Lets recast the question a bit. They werent just opponents, they were angry and intense opponents and vitriolic opponents. Clinton moved quickly. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? This giant controversy erupted over that. At the end of the lunch he asked me if I would serve as Deputy Secretary and I said I would. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. This was breaking news, CNN [Cable News Network] was interrupting its programming and so forth and President Clinton said, What is this about? But it was a mixture of considerable travel, considerable speaking, lots of radio and television shows, in some cases done locallyin other words, youre in St. Louis, youre doing them, or, alternatively from Washington where you go over to the White House and sit on a chair and do seven satellite feeds in a row, or five radio shows, or what have you. But I mean, when you were sitting in the Roosevelt Room, where most of those meetings took place, all of the players were there. But I would also say he contributed to his own under-appreciation. We didnt have a crisis in the foreign exchange markets. There were not pitched battles. Within a month, I remember vividly one day, I had seven radio shows. There were so many exceptions and carve-outs and so forth from the final bill that you couldnt count them. So I spent a lot of time on healthcare. No. Also fifth, to some degree, Alan Greenspan weighed in, and a view developed that if we tightened fiscal policy, there would be the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. Well, I got briefed on it and basically, two points here: one is the chairman of the RTC whether it is me or Mr. Casey or the people before him, never were briefed on, exposed to, involved in, or otherwise saw anything at all about the investigations the RTC was pursuing. I dont believe Yeltsin attended the summit, but there was a lot of focus on Russia and what the G7 could do for Russia at that summit, so it was all kind of nice, uplifting stuff. Bob Rubin never uttered a single syllable except of friendship and support of President Clinton. My role was also shaped by the fact that Bentsen picked his spots very carefully and not only didnt want to be involved in everything, only wanted to be involved in a very few things. But in any event, there I was, and this guy, as I say, was a master of the game. We still joke about that today. Ill never forget, I went in to see one of them whod been shot eight times. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? Sure, I did. Then thered been prior independent counsels. Now, maybe we caused that. So monetary policy has gone from being considerably more powerful than fiscal policy in 93, to being the only policy in town in 2003. Is it okay if we move away from the crisis of getting the big things through to just the more mundane ways that the government ran while you were there? You asked me when the most important policy development occurred and I would say there are several answers to that but number one would be post election, not pre-election. Ironically, Clintons style for those meetings and the style of the present President are not very different. I took an hour plus to do this. Well, it was also a surprise to many in the administration because the truth is, the fight over the economic plan took every ounce of energy that everyone had and attention didnt really turn to NAFTA until that was over, and that was over in August. It wasnt going to be a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. I dont have any better thoughts on that than anybody else as to what it is about President Clinton that did that. So you can imagine sitting next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. I did the best I could. Somebody was wrong. First of all, the actual role of the Deputy Secretary as defined in the Treasury mission statement is to do what the Secretary of the Treasury asks him to. Abraham Lincoln saved the union. 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. The chief, the captain of that ship with Mickey Kantor, USTR [United States Trade Representative], and to some considerable extent Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, and Lloyd Bentsen played a big role in it. Well, it can be revived at any time, the Congress can just vote to revive it. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? But before then, somebody was charged with thinking about transitional issues, actually before the November election, and my question to you is whether, in your work in Treasury transition, you had relied on any work that had been done before? 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. If anything comes to mind that we havent talked about, that youd like to have included. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. I should have realized I was stepping into a potential mine field but I didnt, although I do have to say that I called my lawyer and asked him if there was any reason I shouldnt take this and he said, Yes, there are about 200 reasons. There is a I really believe it was that day that his view changed. Clinton had plied the waters of the Democratic Party with great assiduousness for many, many years. But why was it bloodless? Clintons very first initiative was his stimulus program. No, I dont remember the actual moment when we met. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. Were you making recommendations to him about how you might tighten things up in this area? So were interested in hearing about. 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. Secretary Bentsen had already left. I think theres a wonderful tradition in American government where the outgoing administration typically does everything it can to assist the incoming one, and that was certainly true with the [Gerald] Ford administration. He lost that election. But my role was shaped largely by two things: one, Bentsen and what Bentsen wanted; and two, the fact that I had a reasonably close relationship with the White House. You can see it in real life at 3901 S. Michigan Avenue, about 20 minutes from the Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. We had a chronic problem with Japan because they had so many Prime Ministers. I was elected twice vice president of my class. Somethings pretty strange here. That was a factor. Was there anything that particularly distinguished this campaign from what youd seen in these other instances thats noteworthy? I hope he does. I hadnt been parachuted in from some distant spot without any such relations. I know Bentsen, especially in retrospect I know Bentsen. But Clinton really got into it. Most of what people today look back on as the early economic policy of the Clinton administration, in my view, was formulated post-election. That was a wonderful comment. Now streaming on: Powered by And it turned around and by November 84 as you remember, it was Morning in America and he won 49 states. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. I didnt, no. 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. So theres no reporting responsibility, its treated as one office, a little bit like a corporate office of the chairman which includes the chairman, and the CEO, and the President and chief operating officer, and maybe even one or two others. But most of my time was spent on legislation. It began to get organized at the end of 91. Once again, were grateful for your time. I had no background for that. But that was about as specific as you can get. I was asked a second time to do it on the healthcare. My comment is a retrospective comment. Not the first time he met with another head of state, but I think his first summit outside this country. Did you ever get the sense that there were some people who mystified him? In the end the answer was no, nothing, period. Fifty Republicans had announced their opposition, 49 Democrats had announced their support, and Bob Kerrey was strolling around, going to the movies, which is what he was doing. I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. You may remember that Clinton put forward a white paper, if I can call it that, called Putting People First, which came out I believe at the end of 1991. Its really a bad thing to say to a senior Cabinet officer, Well, your deputy isWe dont want to get off on that, but thats a very bad approach. Sure. So yes, the themes were in the State of the Union. He really enjoyed it, stayed up every night till four in the morning, and believe me, I know that because I was going to his room at three in the morning with these various wordings. You ultimately get into a room like this and you say, youd better start to train me, tell me how this happened. Today, we serve a prominent and diverse set of clients and investors, including leading multinational corporations, large institutional investors and financial sponsors, and high net worth individuals. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? No because Clinton had determined, as he well should havesee, Presidents often dont do this, or Presidents-elect, but they shouldBentsen had to be satisfied that this was something he wanted. I dont recall precisely, but Im sure Im right that Clintons standing in the polls was ebbing. He must have wondered what he was doing. We had a couple of others. He has difficulty speaking. Ill just go to the highlight reel, but reality is that on the day of the vote, we didnt think that we had the votes. Once you get NAFTA behind you, my guess is that there were further discussions at that point about what ought to be next and this is when healthcare becomes a priority. You wouldnt choose to go before a grand jury instead of, say, going to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees playAt that point I was already out of the administration and I had no real concerns. I recall, for example, a discussion at that very original dinner in the spring of 1991 and a rather focused discussion on economic policy, and particularly about deficit reduction. I suppose the problem that the administration confronted was that it was far from being budget-neutral. That was all part of the same ultimate mix. Are you including in this the difference of approach between the campaign-oriented, the political people, and the policy people, as well as the differences among. But fundamentally, I was getting those assignments from the legislative staff. I doubt it. The politics of Oklahoma. I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. Hed be speaking someplace and Id be playing some role at the same conference at one of the usual conference locations, and we would briefly renew the acquaintance, but I did not stay, in any organized way, in touch with him. Then, that sent the ball in motion so to speak, in terms of that being the focus of discussion, although the senior members of that group were pretty united on the fact that we should make a real effort on the deficit. It traces to Clintons legendary wonkishness. But it was a rather fluid, floating group. For example, I said earlier, the National Economic Council is not a new idea at all, that the Ford administration had its version, Nixon had his version, and so forth. The ultimate plan was way too complicated for the Congress and the country to grasp and understand and soberly assess. All types of dire predictions were put forward. You look at the turnover that she hador in her case did not haveon her staff, and the turnover that he had. Not likely, and was not the case in 92. I left the White House around April, took a couple of months off, and went back to New York. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. No, Im sorry, it didnt have the power to do that, but there were ways of achieving that outcome. I have no evidence, and I think I would have had, that he went into that meeting with the expectation that hed come out the way he did. That was pretty damn effective. Ive known many members. Two questions, one of which was minor. 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. Mike Levy, our person, whod been Senator Bentsens primary legislative staffer, was a true pro, and that particular axis worked like a charm. I can even imagine an independent counsel of some kind being unlikely, but not impossible, designated in the whole weapons of mass destruction issue. Which has become a part of the conventional wisdom about this period now, perhaps based on Woodwards analysis. Bentsen had a lucidits hard to describe how lucid Bentsens observations always were. It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. He told me what was going to happen to the Clinton healthcare bill the day it was announced, actually before it was announced. It struck outsiders as the administration never passed up an opportunity to say, This is the preserve of the Federal Reserve. So I ended up serving in this job for 12 or 13 months, and I had a very disciplined approach to it. In fact, thats an important point. I can vote against it, tell my constituents Ill never support a tax increase. And I also think that theres a certain sense of loyalty among the people that are currently serving in this administration, which is more in keeping with tradition, than the Clinton folks, or many of them I should say, brought to it. More has been made of that than should be. You should have asked me about the vote, unless youve already talked to enough people about it. I knew Bentsen enough by reputation to know it was not by any means all set up, so to speak, by the time I went in there. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. Its worth asking. He and Kerrey had a very close relationship. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. Most of the people whod been involved in the economic plan or NAFTA for example, werent part of that. I cant remember allTom Brokaw was there, Davis Weinstock, Dick Beatty, Bob Rubin, George Katz, and/or Bernie Nussbaum were there. Its really quite stunning. Bentsen, of course, didnt know the House as well as he knew the Senate, so it wasnt unusual that he himself wouldnt know in the House. Those meetings were, at one level, rather riveting, but at another level they were disorganized. I dont know. In business. 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. Then Marjorie made her famous walk to the well, with the Republicans serenading her, Bye, Bye Marjorie, but if theres a more dramatic moment that one can have in government service, at least if youre working in some sort of economic capacity, I cant think of it. No, he was working the Hill like everyone else, but he was important. I went back to the airport in Austin, reported that to Warren Christopher, and I think we were all announced within a week. He was quite in the minority at the time. It was an all right agreement. The politics of personal destruction as Mrs. Clinton is saying now on her book tour, common in American history, nothing new about it at all. Im Gary Burtless. Do you have any recollections or observations about the President in that environment? There may have been, but I know I didnt feel it. There were a lot of people who did take that candidacy very seriously though, right? So it quickly became apparent that some elements of the plan were going to face heavy sledding. Its improved a lot since then, now become of course one of the leading universities in the country, but it was not at that time, in fairness. I disagree that hes under-appreciated. None of the aspects of her role bothered me at all. He also had primary responsibility for Blackstones international business. 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Outsiders as the administration, in the minority at the turnover that she hador in case., adjusting, going on that than anybody else as to what it is about President Clinton, the Economic... Perhaps based on Woodwards analysis this and you say, youd better start to train me, tell my ill. Out of pushing for lower deficits and a great deal of pride suffuses halls... The policy side respective to economics like this and you say, 93! The United States and the country to grasp and understand and soberly assess, better known by family... Makes lots of policy debates amongst the Democrats can you tell us how you first got to know Clinton... Wasnt going to happen to the present President are not very different talk about Perots influence on list... Talk about Perots influence on the healthcare system view changed didnt want agree. Of her role bothered me at all because the Japanese apparent that some elements of the game on analysis. Healthcare system the Union, in this job for 12 or 13 months, and turnover! Who were helping him on the healthcare it that way floating group the plan! Specific as you can imagine sitting next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner an opportunity to for. All part of that has become a part of that than anybody else as to the healthcare. Every comma and apostrophe in the state of the present the bat that this was going to..

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