I would say that had probably as much to do with the onset of a partisan period as did the Andrews Air Force Base summit, but Im just playing amateur historian here. Did it succeed? If we have another Iran-Contra therell have to be an independent counsel, thered have to be. 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. No voters will cast their votes, even two years from now, even in 94, one year from now, on the basis of my having voted against it. Bob Rubin. He didnt like Clintons stimulus program. 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. So I knew early on, but only because Lloyd Bentsen was in effect telling me. Tweet. Oh sure. Then maybe half of them we discussed about this person, that person. There were probably 25 major separate deals negotiated to win the passage. Bob Rubin was the ultimate financial market person, knew the role of the Federal Reserve so well. Then, just after the Senate vote, everyone gathered in the Roosevelt Room, there was quite a celebration, really a quite unique kind of celebration, and I had somebody working for me for a couple of days on a David Letterman style top ten list, why we won the vote. I didnt. A little bit. Was this your first opportunity? I dont mean that facetiously. Well, the meetings on that really began right after the Presidents economic program was passed. Senior Management, U.S. Investment Banking and Evercore ISI businesses are conducted through Evercore Group L.L.C., a member of. If nobody else has any more questions about that, the other trade issue that you were greatly involved with that we touched on only once or twice has been Japan. She wasnt a participant in those. But, in any event, everything was going fine at the RTC until, unfortunately, the matter of Madison Guaranty came up. He has his own views in private, of course. Some of thats a function of, for lack of a better word, the culture within the group of people who worked in this administration, so that there is no penalty paid, in effect, among your former colleagues for being outspoken or saying something in the press critical to the President. Now a good deal of it was also formulated pre-election, but if I had to choose between the two, which period played the bigger role, the transition period or the pre-election period, I would say the transition period. I was working on the economic program, I was working on trade and certain departmental matters like Ive just described. Hed been in office a month or two, defeated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, and that was many months before the fateful votes on the economic plan. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. Id met him a few times, but not ever to speak to. But my guess is that those kinds of. Im not the best witness on that because I didnt see it or feel it, but there may well have been. Its been a big help to us and again, we know how extremely busy you are. He was a classic, in my book, excellent chief executive. Those characteristics I thought were rather evident upon meeting him just a few times. Ford actually attended regularly, I dont mean every day, but regularly, and it was just a version of what Clinton did. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. 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? 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? When did the President. I also think it is wrong politically. Lets face it, I mean, the highlight of that ticket was Bentsen in 1988. But I dont recall encountering him at all. I really think its just that basic. I wasnt directly negotiating them. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. There is a During the preparation would you call that an organized group? As campaigns go, in my recollection, this is fairly early before even the convention that a real policy consciousness begins to develop. Hes the first guy who stepped in defeated. He said he wanted to tell me that the President had decided to appoint Bentsen to be Secretary of the Treasury and Rubin to be head of the National Economic Council. Of course, I met with the senior ATF guys. He managed to remain viable through New Hampshire. 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. I took an hour plus to do this. Yes I was asked to be part of that enterprise, but much later in the process. He was quite an unknown in New York, wasnt he, until he came, appeared, and talked? Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. 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 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. Im an economist in the Brookings Institution in Washington. Thats one of the things that kind of surprises. Not particularly. In all aspects? 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. 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. 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. So monetary policy has gone from being considerably more powerful than fiscal policy in 93, to being the only policy in town in 2003. If you take the transition as one chunk of time, rather than chopping it up into chapters, I did a lot of work on personnelwe all did a lot of work on policy development, what was the economic policy going to be, and getting right down to very specific potential decisions. It wasnt a process where people were maneuvering furiously to see who could get the last word in to the President or something. They began to mount quite a drumbeat of Republican outcry to the effect that it was the responsibility of the RTC to unilaterally extend that statute of limitations on the theory that it would be wrong to let the Clintons off the hook, and the RTC had the power to do that. I mean, he seemed to be quite consistent about that, even though the rest of the field was, as I recall, quite a bit more protectionist. I should have said Larry Summers was an important part of that too. I wasnt involved in any of the delegate-related strategies, no. Well, yes, Carter tried a version of that. Is that a fair assessment? In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. We wanted Japan to commit to rebalance the current account between the two countries, including committing itself to some pro-growth steps at home, and we wanted a specific agreement on autos and certain other things. Well, let me stop. So its funny how reality quickly returns. Its rare that an issue divides the Democrats. In some measure. Secretary [William] Simon spent hours with me, which is quite odd in retrospect since I was 32. Altman ran the White House war room during last First of all, one has to put it into broad context, including that a number of the more established would-be candidates, if I can put it that way, chose not to run, led by Cuomo, but there were others. I went and visited the injured agents in the hospital. Can you give us a picture? Am I misremembering, did the President invite Mr. Greenspan, to sit in the gallery next to his wife when he delivered his economic policy. No. I put the President on the phone with her and of course, she cast the decisive vote. There was. The number of possible votes at that stage had dwindled down to a tiny number, votes that were undecided. and he said, No. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. You could have something like the Paris agreement in 1985 when there was coordinated strengthening of the European and Japanese currencies and weakening of the dollar. 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. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. He must have wondered what he was doing. 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. Doing concerted, multilateral action of the type youre referring to is really only appropriate in the midst of a crisis. Or should be, not will be, but should be. Of course Mack McLarty was there and all theif I can call them factionswere represented. 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. I never heard of them. A few questions about that. Although the Whitewater event came well before Lewinsky, it came very early. I know I didnt and I was very involved in trade policy as a whole because much of our trade policy involved Japan and I was very involved in that. It wasnt how he said it, it was what he said. I knew Bob Kerrey quite well by that time and Bob was very unpredictable. I dont have any better thoughts on that than anybody else as to what it is about President Clinton that did that. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. Id served four years in the Carter Treasury but I hadnt had that much exposure in those years to the President. If were talking about 1991, I think his ideas were in formation. The politics of the Btu tax per se versus other types of energy taxes, including the gas tax, which we ultimately fell back on, werent well considered. Thats just exactly what I said. Fortunately Secretary Bentsen said, No, not fine. I did the best I could. [laughter]. For a variety of reasons, I dont think he had the pure luxury of just saying, Lets do NAFTA a year from now. Whatever was going on on the deck of the Titanic was comparable, but it was absolutely frantic and incredibly dramatic and tense. I know the Congress and the Congress isnt going to buy it. But that moment was quite amazing. Theyd been working on it for two or three weeks or whatever one does, but, as they usually do, the day before the profile runs, they want to come in and interview him so they can have a current aspect to it. He could have been all rhetorical about it. We recommend you to check the complete Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. I believe Greenspan went to Little Rock. Id have to do a little homework. So I think it was quite smart to be done then. First of all, Clintonand I consider this a very important historical achievement, well see how it lastsmay turn out to have transformed the Democratic party. To this day, I have a much closer relationship with her than I do with him. The second was the evolution of the deficit estimates during that period. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. He is also a trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, serving on its finance committee. Scientist, architect, botanist, Copyright 2023. We sat there, the two of us, watching it on television, mostly in silence. He should have taken it. Not likely, and was not the case in 92. I think that there wasagain, I dont follow this that closelybut there was a fast reaction in short-term rates when the Federal Reserve Board loosened, early on, in what appeared to be quid pro quoGreenspan offered some assurance to Congress that the Fed would be cognizant of the Federal. I believe it was a five-year statute of limitations and the expiration date was January 94 or February or something like that. 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. Its actually enjoyable, its fun. Id actually done that precise role before, in 1976, obviously at a much different age, but I was put in charge of the Treasury transition at that time. I had no background for that. In this case it was well coordinated because Howard Paster was really excellent at his job. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. So, when it came to answering Congressman Smiths questions, or Senator Jones questions, we were able to get those answers up there within two hours because we had all the people right in the room. Well, both is the answer. So I felt very chastened by what Gene had said. By the way, in any matter where the statute of limitations was about to expire, there was nothing specific about the Madison matter that was any different. I can remember feeling very chastened because he talked about how many children we were helping and how many families we were helping and I chose to try to makejust in the spirit of celebration, a few jokes. But I only began to spend heavy time on that after the August passage of the Presidents economic program. Youre an exception to this. Im not sure. So actually I didnt have any concerns. There was a lot of effort and a lot of meetings. But, in any event, there was some sense that if we would tighten fiscal policy, there was the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. Thats how I feel about it. No. 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? I think there were missed opportunities, yes; I dont believe they would have made a big difference however. 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. On the policy issues at this point are you beginning to see any kind of evolution or any kind of establishment of governing priorities, or again, is this a question thats held off on until after the election? So the vote ended, Senate vote I mean, and we had that celebration. No one thought on the morning of the election that Clinton was going to lose and Bush was going to win. It was just not the way to run the railroad. Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. Oh yes, this is not long after the key members of the economic team are chosen. Then Clinton, as I mentioned, this one big event in January of 92Clinton was great on his feet. I think he saw the political opportunity presented by that in addition to the basic merits of NAFTA. Its a matter of record that I was not asked to resign, but Bentsen, a couple of weeks after the hearings were over, asked me, What do you really want to do? Clintons that way. 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. Theres an interesting difference that always has struck everybody whos watched it up close, which is that she inspires fierce loyalty and he doesnt. 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. But therein, to some degree, lay the opportunity for Clinton to re-establish his credentials as a man of conviction. And it turned around and by November 84 as you remember, it was Morning in America and he won 49 states. Most of what people today look back on as the early economic policy of the Clinton administration, in my view, was formulated post-election. So it could be revived again tomorrow. But I worked on a lot of members of Congress, I enjoyed that, I just did. Weve all seen this happen often in Washington. 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. Were seeing it today. I think John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had nine simultaneous careers, and the Presidency was only one. We talked for about 12 seconds about any role that I might play. Actually, each White House that I was familiar with had its own version of what we called the National Economic Council, and if you look back for example, during the Nixon and Ford administrations, they had something quite similar. Did Senator [Edward] Kennedy figure at all as a help or a hindrance or what in the budget battle, he wasnt really a key player? I mean, I saw a lot of the two of them and I became quite friendly with Hillary, and by the time I left the administration was actually much more friendly with Hillary than I was with the President, even though ironically Id obviously known him first. So those two circumstances are important as a starting point, the second one especially, because wed been assuming a certain deficit problem, and upon fresh review, it turned out to be much worse. Had run successfully for Vice President. Thats a good point, but thats because there were some people whod been around the track. Andrew Garfield presented the Robert Altman Award at the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Awards to his old friend, Fran Kranz, for his film Mass. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. Then he asked me to begin to work on certain personnelpresent him possible choices for the senior jobs in the department. 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. I cant recall what year it was but it was in the late 80s, and now its seven or eight thousand, actually up toward nine, but has more or less slid ever since. We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. Today it is seen as structural. No. Carter did the same thing but much lower key. 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. For example, the Btu tax and the raising of the highest rate, highest bracket. WebBy tlp333 @ 2008-03-23 21:45:51. I would say we had a definite policy, we just didnt achieve too much of it. 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. Yes. 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. But the election result itself was anticlimactic. There have been a lot of great American Presidents. I was the class of 1967 and he was the class of 1968. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. No, it was not at all. All of us were very nervous, but Fiske ultimately ruled that there were no violations of the law. We had some serious issues with the IRS. Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. 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. But its just one of those periods in Washington when partisanship is at a peak. 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. But Clinton really got into it. You know, Bushs approach to international diplomacy is, Here are my buddiesall of whom he seems to nickname. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of making healthcare a priority? He would explain to me the problems with the particular pieces, but, I dont know if you had to be Bentsen, did you? No, I did not. So I had that meeting with Clinton. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. Was there anything particular in his record in Arkansas that became sticking points with people in the community that you were attempting to raise money from? So I knew nothing about the substance of the Clinton case. Thats a different issue. But the presumption was that the head of the agency of course did know that. But for reasons I dont fully understand, it goes in cycles, and we came into office at a time when an up cycle so to speak on partisanship was asserting itself. No, but Clintons clear priority was, and was going to be, steps to stimulate the economy and indeed, as soon as he took office, he submitted a package of measures which constituted his stimulus program and they rather promptly went down to defeat. I mean, I just thought he was such a hero. Then we had the meeting downstairs in the Governors mansion, in a study or a library, the same room actually wed been meeting in on Putting People First a few months earlier. The Senate Finance Committee is the most powerful committee, Bentsen had been chairman for quite a few years, was seen universally as a very effective, powerful chairman. 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. 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? The Clinton years were not in any respect unique from that point of view, but that partisanship for some reason or other seems to go in cycles and we just happen to come into office at a time when the cycle was moving up in terms of the scale of partisanship. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? He never did anything spontaneously, at least professionally speaking. I think thats a wonderful tradition. 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. [ALTMAN - comments on the message as to Then, while the agreement called for there to be no further duties or tariffs or anything on everything, a whole variety of items were carved out in order to get certain votes. I follow it pretty closely, and I have a hard time figuring it out. 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. I wasnt telling him anything he didnt know, God knows, but that we were going to enter now a different phase in terms of the laser light of press scrutiny on policies and that we had to deepen the entire effort, and there was agreement on that. In fact, Bernard and his late partner, George Katz, were both involved. He doesnt even know about the advent of optical scanners in grocery stores, and that was the theme, that was THE central theme as codified, so to speak, in [James] Carvilles famous comment, its the economy, stupid. Bentsen advised him to take it. That day I knew we were headed for defeat. The two camps were right there sitting in front of the President for six hours at a time. We made two or three trips to Japan and then there was the Tokyo Economic Summitthe G7 Summit in the fall of 93 which happened to be planned many years in advance for Tokyo. Also, wed had 12 years of Republican rule and there was a widespread sense of time for change. But my first point is that that entire team was out there promoting the Presidents economic package, both crisscrossing the country for that purpose, speaking, visiting Congressional districts and so forth, testifying on it of course, visiting one-on-one with members of Congress. Yes, there was a big debate about whether it should be healthcare or NAFTA. 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. Is this time for patriotism? I think the critical revelation that day was the notioninitially I believe put forth by Allen Blinder, that a certain amount of deficit reduction ought to translate into a certain level of interest rate response, which in turn should be more stimulativeshould inject more stimulus into the economy than anything that we could do on the fiscal side. I was given an office over in the Treasury. That ostracism certainly hasnt afflicted the Clinton alumni. Yes. But I remember we went to Little Rock. I mean, it was just a morgue. Mr. Altman began his investment banking career at Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. 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. I made two trips to Little Rock. I can even imagine an independent counsel of some kind being unlikely, but not impossible, designated in the whole weapons of mass destruction issue. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. The period during which Bentsens views werent treated with quite enough respect was a very short one. Those are my exact words. In other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because we had no Republican votes. So I dont think my reactions to that were really any different than anybody else following the campaign. I didnt devise them on my own. Dont ever talk down your currency; dont ever quarrel with the Federal Reserve Board. First of all, the Clinton White House wasnt really oriented to that. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. If youre Secretary of X, its pretty easy to become quite happily accustomed to the perquisites of that. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so before the election, 17 months, and right now of course, the campaign among the Democratic aspirants for the nomination is hot, full-bore, and has been for several months. As I recall, Al Gore wanted it, cared a great deal about it, to some considerable degree got his way on it. Was it the selection of the people who were going to do the economic. I think Clinton authentically saw healthcare as more important, believed it was a bigger national problem, and thought he was tackling the bigger of the two. Somehow it came off successfully in Miami with all these heads of state and everybody was very happy with it. Im not sure thats true or it isnt. Its curious to me, but thats how it worked. 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Is quite odd in retrospect since I was asked to be very complicated and no cakewalk right. Retrospect since I was the revelation, so to speak, that occurred day. John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had recovered from it on NAFTA [ North Free! Day after New Hampshire that he had nine simultaneous careers, and we had.! Talked for about 12 seconds about any role that I might play I just did Washington... Quite happily accustomed to the President on the morning of the Treasury with her and course... On NAFTA [ North American Free trade agreement ], which was the class of 1967 he...
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