The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. I was involved in the Carter campaign in 1976 and the Mondale campaign in 84, [Michael] Dukakis in 88, Clinton, now Im involved again this time, and, knowing that, I never met anyone who had the appetite for policy itself that Clinton did. Id become a pretty active Democrat in New York, particularly active by standards of Wall Street, which still had relatively few visible Democrats in its midst. Were you privy to the conversations that he had? Did Bentsen then become sort of a one-man legislative strategy group? Right. The reason it didnt succeed a lot more than that is because its really macro factors that drive this. No. She wasnt a participant in those. There were certain others, I cant recall now, but a group of six or eight or nine, and we literally sat around with pieces of paper and drafts and hammered it out. One of the reasons why the ultimate votes on his economic plan were as close as they could possibly be, one vote in the House and tie vote in the Senate, was because he was dealing from weakness. No, there were 20-22 people there. The Regency Hotel. But was there any perspective then that in fact, the Japanese economy was weak relative to the other G7? He just determined each time that what he had to do was get through this chapter and somehow live to fight for the next one and didnt take the longer view. Well, that was just one of the many fatal diseases that this bill had. One, the recession of 91 and early or mid 92, the economy was performing poorly. 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. Or was it just that you were persuaded that he was going to be a great candidate? But that was about as specific as you can get. Yes, it was a help. Were there any members in particular with whom you worked directly that you felt you were personally responsible for salvaging? Theodore Roosevelts name comes up occasionally as somebody that even Clinton himself had at least a temporary fixation on when he was evidently considering his own legacy as some one who took a progressive era, being a kind of rough approximation to the. Maybe we ought to move to the actual setting up of these priorities and the choices made and that process, from post-election into the actual post-inauguration time. I mean just the vote itself and the fact that not a single Republican voted for this, which even by its critics is seen now as having been at least a contributor to the economic prosperity and fiscal balance that later resulted. That was the first time we had an opposition takeover. Will policy differences be the reason that candidate X or candidate Y emerges with the nomination? Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. No, Im sorry, it didnt have the power to do that, but there were ways of achieving that outcome. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. Once he decided he was for it, he really got into it. The presumption of course at the beginning was that I knew what the substance of the investigation was, or what the actual issues were from an investigatory legal point of view, and that I had conveyed that to the White House, which was impossible by its turn, absolutely impossible, but in politics thats not often the important thing. It was, in any normal historical context, yes, right of center because it focused on deficit reduction, tighter fiscal policy, more conservative budgeting. I, and quite a few other people, had dinner with him, quite a few meaning 15 or so. Was it the selection of the people who were going to do the economic. There were no violations of ethical guidelines, there was certainly no legal violation, and that proved to be pretty meaningless in the context of the uproar. Clinton had plied the waters of the Democratic Party with great assiduousness for many, many years. A lot of kids who went to Georgetown were interested in having a good time, and most people who went to Chicago were really serious about their academic pursuits and the world around them. President Clinton, in retrospect, his disavowals on some of his private life were almost certainly false and the way he handled the Lewinsky matter was about as bad as it could be because heessentially swore before the American people that he didnt do it, and of course then recanted. Im just saying that Im a little too close to it because I recall so many of those battles, and I recall so many people feeling that, as you remember, the administration, in some form or other, lost three times, and each time came back with a more conservative version. He talked about a middle-class tax cut and, of course getting the economy moving. Clinton gave his State of the Union address, the 28th of January, eight days after being inaugurated. In the Carter administration, there was no real sense of what the Federal Reserve really was, what it did, how to deal with it. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. We havent exhausted the topic of budgets and we want to talk further about that, but since youve already opened the door on this question about historical opposition and so forth, I thought that you might want to discuss your perceptions about how the existence of that institution changes the dynamic in Washington. Clinton is nothing if not rigid. I started having to respond with a standard boilerplate response to the effect that the RTC has these procedural options and we were choosing among them. One is that it had a very rocky beginning in New Hampshire, and Im wondering if you have recollections about your reaction to the news events that occurred and to the electoral results in New Hampshire and how the President was able to deal with those things. Roger C. Altman. Then later in the process I was asked if I would go do a war room for healthcare of the type we did for the budget. If Whitewater occurred today or there was some like set of issues surrounding President Bush and his past, I dont think thered be a single hearing about it. Its worth asking. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. Carter had the famous $50 rebate, which became the object of much derision ultimately. His Presidency itself I think was a very strong one, but it doesnt make it into the top five or six. Its really quite stunning. Exactly. We were very explicit. It turned out that the thing had really been left by the wayside and there was very little of the necessary planning that had gone into it and it was about two months off. There is a No. 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. So I was going down to Waco, Texas. Oh sure. So my wife and I flew down to Little Rock and I met with Clinton for about two hours. The President and Vice President, I think it was Leon Panetta, and myself, one other person, he and I were standing there, looking out, it was a beautiful August night, not too hot, and it was just an amazing moment. So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. Where the negotiations broke down, I dont know what caused it. But, I can tell youa bit of a digression. Richard Nixon resigned from office. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett) tells off her sister-in-law (Peggy Ann Garner) in Robert Altman's "A Wedding." So not long after arriving in the new offices, which were over there on Vermont Avenue, I remember that, I went over to the Treasury and met with Secretary [Nicholas] Brady and the Deputy Secretary, very nice manname escapes me at the momentand began to debrief the senior members of the department. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? So monetary policy has gone from being considerably more powerful than fiscal policy in 93, to being the only policy in town in 2003. So it depends a lot on the people. 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. Ive known many members. The Clinton stimulus plan just was not well conceived. The Wall Street Journal reporter says to Secretary Bentsen, Mr. Secretary, if you were in the Senate, would you vote for the Presidents healthcare bill? That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. 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. He wanted me to go see Bentsen. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. Tweet. Theyre already heavily taxed, its their money, not the governments money and all of that, and if it works, nobody will remember that I opposed it. In any event, we didnt have a currency crisis at the time of that summit, or really didnt have one until the very middle, latter stages of the Clinton years. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. So what I actually spent my time on ranged all over the lot. Then the reality is, it seems to me, that most Presidencies, Im sorry, great Presidencies, are forged in crisis. I dont know about developing the convention. Clinton had in fact been working on Capitol Hill during this time and I guess I was just trying to get a sense about whether that was unusual. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. It wasnt how he said it, it was what he said. Bentsen could tell you, within 4 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to every one of these bills. She figured in some bumper stickers also. You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. One was in connection with Putting People First, when we had the wonderful experience of taking a cab from the Little Rock airport and having the cab driver slow down and practically come to a stop for a second, and excitedly point out to us Gennifer Flowers apartment building. Not particularly. In other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because we had no Republican votes. I appreciate that and I think youve done us a big favor today by illuminating that. Did he interact comfortably with the other leaders at the summit? I mean, the reasons why Japan has had such difficulty in terms of its domestic economy are not reasons that an agreement with the United States is going to importantly affect, no more than our signing a trade agreement with Japan that committed us to try to do more at home to pump up our economy would be a big element in whether we did or didnt ultimately see economic growth here. 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. But I would also say he contributed to his own under-appreciation. You see people scrambling to monopolize the left. Yes. I wouldnt necessarily accept that. Did it come from DAmato, or what? But unfortunately the real show was about to begin, which I didnt realize, which was the Congressional hearings. No. How were those dealt with, the decision to make a significant concession in the bill? There were not pitched battles. And it turned around and by November 84 as you remember, it was Morning in America and he won 49 states. Ultimately they were in effect combined into one big wish list, and that wish list went forward. But he did give a big speech about healthcare before NAFTA came to a vote, right, as I recall? So I wasnt sure what was going to happen, but there was no one in the field that was suddenly squashing everyone else including Clinton. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. Sure. There were, however, many people who thought, I would say this was the majority view: well ask for this, were going to end up with this. 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. I mean, it was just a morgue. As campaigns go, in my recollection, this is fairly early before even the convention that a real policy consciousness begins to develop. So, in August whatever it was the final vote was cast and the economic bill became lawwell, with the Presidents signature it became lawwe didnt really know what we were going to do on NAFTA. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. That was in July or June or something. I stay in touch with him. Less and less now that shes her own public figure, but thats her nature. Was this your first opportunity? 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. We can all speculate. So the dynamic between the two was quite an interesting dynamic and quite quicklyto come to your pointafter the stimulus plan went down, Clinton began deferring to Bentsen on everything. It pains me to recognize that thats 35 years ago, but no, it wasnt the case. It was just not very well run, as I recall it, until that time. I raise the question because one of the outside perceptions that you get later on is when, in the early post-election period of the administration, theres some considerable debate within the administration about which of the priorities ought to come first, and among some of the people that you mentioned in Little Rock at the time. So I didnt take him seriously except as in a sort of inner political context. If you go to Monticello, to his actual tombstone, then you know that he drafted his own epitaph: Governor of Virginia, founder of the University of Virginia, and author of the Declaration of Independence. But in any event, Madison Guaranty had failed. Theyd review it and youd go to a meeting where you received a 900-page memo, three quarters of which you didnt understand. It was excellent. He lost that election. Well, if you were to ask me for a moment when looking back on it, one could perhaps see that we were moving into a new period of partisanship, I would have chosen instead the [Robert] Bork battle, which I think changed quite dramatically the whole process on Supreme Court nominations and the grounds on which they were debated. Do you remember at what point this revised estimate comes in? I never heard of them. So essentially you would not have been involved in any of the crafting, I guess, you basically were given an agreement and it was a question of just lining up the votes at this point. Nobody said to me, Hes there. Id met Bentsen a few times. You say you knew Rubin well, but did you have a sense that in the other places where economic policy-making is made there was ever any tension over this kind of an arrangement? So, third, economic policy was number one. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. There were quite a few members where I had lead day-to-day responsibility. In all aspects? He was clearly learning as he went. The social side of it had almost nothing to do with it. Youve had Chiefs of Staff, Don Regan comes to mind, who see themselves as all-powerful and go too far to one end of the spectrum, and youve had others like Mack, who are too deferential and too averse to confrontation and go too far in the other direction. The Treasury has a wonderful history of its own and a great deal of pride suffuses those halls. No. There were some folks from the White House Press Secretarys office who were in it. This was breaking news, CNN [Cable News Network] was interrupting its programming and so forth and President Clinton said, What is this about? But in 1987, I think it was, the Democrats in this case, I must say, rewrote the rules and decided that ideology should be the grounds on which this was decided, and Mr. Bork may have had great credentials, may have been a scholar of great distinction but his ideology was unacceptable. President Clinton, Democrat, nominated a Republican to this job and the Democrats defeated his nomination. 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. We talked for about 12 seconds about any role that I might play. And the field against which Clinton ultimately competed was not a strong field. In retrospect, I think those are the two main reasons he embraced it. You had the bilateral talks with the Japanese and the G7 format. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. I know this will sound quite strange, but Clinton was in some awe of Bentsen and a little bit of fear of Bentsen. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. The President was all over this. He managed himself beautifully and with great self-control, and Clinton had very little self-control. Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? How difficult was it to raise money in the environment, Cuomo aside, just for somebody who had been a Governor of Arkansas in a campaign season when theres. 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? From the very beginning I was spending a lot of my time on the Presidents economic program. If we have another Iran-Contra therell have to be an independent counsel, thered have to be. I had no background for that. Of course he has those who get invited to his ranch and those who dont. Very, very intensive, one of the most intensive things Ive ever been involved in. So the Congress decided to hold hearings on all aspects of Whitewater and, as everybody remembers, everyone from Maggie Williams to Harold Ickes to everybody had to testify. Were there Republican members that he particularly relied on. Now I did not attend that, but the issue of the Presidents economic plan and whatever adjustments were going to be made and the efforts to push it forward were discussed, perhaps in most cases the number one item, at the senior staff meeting each day. There was also a very memorable event that was held in the East Room of the White House, and recall that within a week or two of this event, Clintons own position on NAFTA was still up in the air. It wasnt difficult. Its a strong field. No, no. So it was job one, so to speak. So it became effectively a simultaneous multilateral and bilateral summit because it became the setting for Clintons direct discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister. Well, nobody took more pain up front than Ronald Reagan. You had made your choice to support him before it was clear that he was going to wow a lot of people in New York. I sat next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. It was a few votes, not one vote. Yes, Putting People First was reissued, I believe it was June. Were they talking about what you do with Senator X, with Congressman Y? She herself has expressed regret over them. I cant cite the examples that I can cite about the National Economic Council, because I studied that for Clinton, but I doubt it. 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. Most of the trade was being handled by what was called the NEC [National Economic Council] deputies, which is the Deputy Secretary level of the NEC. Dont ever let those conversations be public. 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. The second was the evolution of the deficit estimates during that period. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. Everybody gets a nametag, and theres the Secretary of the Treasury, the Deputy Secretary of this and Director of OMB, and youre all sitting around, a very staged setting. Sure, sure. Yes, he did. Then maybe half of them we discussed about this person, that person. No. Im Gary Burtless. You were both involved then in student government. 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. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. I think history will probably record that as the most important achievement of President Clintons overall Presidency, not the vote itself of course, but the ultimate effects of it. The number of possible votes at that stage had dwindled down to a tiny number, votes that were undecided. I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. So it was a very interesting dynamic. There had been some minor event that day and he was asked what he thought of the latest developments in Iran and he said, I dont talk about barbarians. You can do all kinds of approaches to anything. I believe Stan Shuman was there. No, I had very little contact with Mr. Clinton for roughly 20 years after leaving. Was it defined initially as a Democratic Party issue and Republicans were cut out, or how did that happen? What specifically arose was that the statute of limitations on any prosecution involving the failure of an S and L was about to expire. Thats one of the things that kind of surprises. WebCornerstone Recovering Community (11001 South Wentworth Avenue) located at 11001 South Wentworth Avenue, Chicago, IL 60628, United States is a drug rehab facility Somehow it came off successfully in Miami with all these heads of state and everybody was very happy with it. But I think one misunderstood aspect of his embracing NAFTA wasat that point he was being widely criticized for lacking in principle, lacking in conviction, a weathervane all over the place politically. The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. There was a lot of effort and a lot of meetings. It will be differences of style, differences of perception. 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. 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. When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. People trooped down and sat around and briefed Carter, but he was sitting there figuring out do I want to appoint this guy or that person, and so forth. I know the Congress and the Congress isnt going to buy it. I just want to make one point. Everything is susceptible to being phased in, to being cut back, to being pilot-programmed. Help us understand why he would elect to move NAFTA at this point? No. Then I would have discussions with Clinton, usually on the fly, about certain economic issues I thought were important. But lets talk for a moment about the end of 1991. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. Did you do any traveling with Clinton on the campaign around New York or outside of New York? He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. I raise the issue because I think theres an extraordinary difference in contemporary politics without the existence of that, without the fact of an independent counsel lingering over an administrations head, and you obviously having had some experience with this would be able to testify to infractions. If he predicted over the two years I worked for him, the fate of 25 pieces of legislation, he was right on all 25. But you know, theres a real sense of the torch passing and history, and one had to be struck, even though Id been involved with Clinton from mid 91, by the youth and vigor that Clinton and Gore exuded, and Ive always personally liked the south, so I enjoyed being there, so I did go. But the key revelation was the most stimulative thing we could do for this economy is to induce a monetary response. No, what Im trying to say is that there were several points of view advanced by some of the people there, who had, in one form or another, policy experience. Its not as easy. How early were you beginning to get a sense that the Republicans were going to be an historically difficult problem for this President? But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. 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. Stephanopoulos was there and Sperling was there. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? He knew what was possible; he knew what wasnt possible. I went also for the election. In the spring of 1991, I think it would have been May or June, we had the chance to have a talk here in New York, and I then talked to him by phone. I was struck from the beginning that Clinton was blessed with a very weak field, which, for example, is not the case today. Im not joking. 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. No, its time for Russell, I really need this, I really need it, the country really needs it. Im not quite sure what their input was. I think Clinton will come out pretty well. Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. Its not clear to me however that history will accord him that credit. 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. They were done among the United States, Mexico, and the Congressional parties involved. Our labor leadership did not want that, especially of course, the Teamsters. So he didnt have the luxury of saying, Lets do it a year from now, as you often do with other things. But part of our efforts were to get the Japanese to agree to certain pump-priming measures at home to lift domestic demand, increase the Japanese demand for imports, and better balance the current account relationship. When the voting began, we did not know if we were going to win. Anyway, then Secretary Bentsen and I repaired to the little study off the White House, the two of us, just to watch the actual vote. It wasnt evident to me the day after New Hampshire that he had recovered from it. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. The American political system has changed a lot. That was the moment, that day. People have made that mistake and theyve suffered from it. But it was quite obvious that wed lost the battle. I dont know this, but I suspect that was decided largely between the President and Mrs. Clinton. So the question naturally arises, was it his economics? 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. The Office of Government Ethics came to its conclusion and the Treasury Inspector General as you know is an independent party and came to the same conclusions, the White House counsel came to the same conclusion. So the vote ended, Senate vote I mean, and we had that celebration. One of the themes they advanced was deficit reduction, not the only one. 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. During the preparation would you call that an organized group? I think well probably want to pick up there and find out about that experience. They just didnt come to the Secretary, to the Chairman of the RTC, no more than investigations being pursued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or the Secret Service or what have you come to the Secretary of the Treasury. 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