I think so, yes. I wasnt there because I was an expert in tax policy. No, no. 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. 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. There was, I cant remember exactly, but we had some innumerable number of economists of all stripes and persuasions in favor of this. and he said, No. So again, it wasnt all about President Clinton. I suppose everyone has his own definition of intimate, but by any standard Im familiar with, I was not an intimate of Clintons. That happened, I want to say, late 93, that his nomination was effectively killed. But, in any event, as soon as I flew back from Tokyo, I moved into this area in the old Executive Office Building they had cleared out and I was the person in charge of the war room, and it worked I think for five weeks give or take. I think I testified before the Senate for about thirteen consecutive hours and six or eight hours on the House side the very next day. But I didnt have any knowledge of this stuff. But it was quite obvious that wed lost the battle. So he didnt have the luxury of saying, Lets do it a year from now, as you often do with other things. Okay, the election occurred and, for reasons Ive never fully understood, Alice Rivlin and I were the first two to go down to see Clinton, of those he was looking at for appointment purposes. By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of Evercore's cookies. Again, I had the benefit of Lloyd Bentsens views. Youre working on prospective personnel issues? In the Carter administration, there was no real sense of what the Federal Reserve really was, what it did, how to deal with it. I was to call Bentsen promptly. Its actually enjoyable, its fun. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. You didnt have to spend much time around them to see this. Were there Republican members that he particularly relied on. And it was very effective because a lot of the people who came were opinion makers and he made a tremendous impression. I suppose you could have strengthening of the yen, coordinated G7 action to do that. No, I just remember the meeting in Little Rock quite vividly, and I think one of the first presentations was given by Allen Blinder about the economic outlook and the extent to which certain amounts of interest rate response would produce likely amounts of growth response. In fact, thats an important point. That was the all-time low for the dollar. Yes, and also there was considerable uncertainty as to whether Cuomo was indeed a candidate, which, as we all know, he proved not to be. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. The election occurred and about a week later Reagan was getting a haircut in California and he came out of the barbershop. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? He didnt want to be involved in the daily ins and outs of those jobs. Well, I recall particularly how weak the field was. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. 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. Some people thought they were misguided. Bentsen had run for Congress at a very young age, successfully, was re-elected two or three times, then quit and went into business and was very successful in business. There was a whole bunch of work going on on that but I was completely preoccupied with the Presidents economic program and trying to get it passed, not just during the war room period but before that. But you ended up doing a lot of strange things. Those would be the main points Id mention. Im not sure he would have known me really at all. and I had no previous knowledge of it at all. @ 34.032138, -118.722249. There was very little interest in that. 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. It was a bit of a love fest. That has historically been, or at least in the modern era, a successful approach. So most of what you were doing was drawing from the people who would not have been supportive of Cuomo in any event. Well of course, McLarty was replaced by Leon Panetta roughly a year after the administration began. In part, there was a sectoral approach. Of course Mack McLarty was there and all theif I can call them factionswere represented. And then, of course, the political people in the White House: George Stephanopoulos of course, and others in the White House. There were ten or twelve or fourteen or fifteen, big numbers. 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. Then, in 1995, he formed Evercore. But the student radical movement had not penetrated? Its not as easy. 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. That was a wonderful comment. I was on the board of the Childrens Television Workshop, now called the Sesame Workshop, the entity that produces Sesame Street and related childrens programming. That was not a high point of the Clinton Presidency. But in retrospect he basically decided in his simple-minded way that he was going to grind the Soviet Union right into the dust, and he did. Clinton was offered a compromise by Senators [John] Breaux and [David] Boren. I do hope as we proceed that you will take the time to give us your continuing perceptions of Bentsen because unfortunately he is somebody we had approached about doing an interview and. Altman made a point to carry shoes as tiny as size 5 and mammoth as size 20, with widths ranging from super skinny AAAA to 6E and kept 23 basement storage I dont recall precisely, but Im sure Im right that Clintons standing in the polls was ebbing. 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 do believe it was able to make a difference. I stay in touch with him. But the main argument was economic. We had so much going on that Bentsen asked me if I would just, on an interim basis, serve as interim chairman of the RTC. You look at the relationships he ended up having with a lot of people that he was initially close to and were central to his administration, whether its George Stephanopoulos or whoever else it may be. I went back to the airport in Austin, reported that to Warren Christopher, and I think we were all announced within a week. Can you tell us about how that unfolded, your perceptions of Mrs. Clintons role in all of this? That notion took hold at that meeting. I have a very old-fashioned view about that. What specifically arose was that the statute of limitations on any prosecution involving the failure of an S and L was about to expire. Did he come to you with an idea about what he wanted to focus on with the economy or some of his primary domestic policies, or was this at this point still in the process of being formulated? I was struck from the beginning that Clinton was blessed with a very weak field, which, for example, is not the case today. What external factors were at work here? 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? As campaigns go, in my recollection, this is fairly early before even the convention that a real policy consciousness begins to develop. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. But there was the sense, based on conversationsI think you could go back and say that there were some discussions between Bentsen and Greenspan, Rubin and Greenspan, Clinton and Greenspan, although the sum total of those conversations probably took an hour. No admission fee, no contribution required. The independent counsel statute had, if my memory serves, expired during the Clinton first year, then was revived, and then was allowed again to expire. 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. I recall taking maybe one or two trips with him outside New York, mostly just for my own enjoyment, to see what it was like. He was quite an unknown in New York, wasnt he, until he came, appeared, and talked? The film director, known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized Our labor leadership did not want that, especially of course, the Teamsters. I think the days for that have largely passed, I dont think members of Congress care much about that. I think part of him saw an embrace of NAFTA as an opportunity to reestablish that he was a person of conviction, that he wasnt just in the pocket of the old traditional Democratic constituencies, wasnt just a tax-raiser and spender. What are the lasting accomplishments, the lasting legacies of this administration, regardless of whether the historians are going to pick up these strains as being historically important or flamboyantly important enough to elevate Clinton into an upper- echelon Presidency? Ill never forget that, he was a good guy, a real good old boy, I cant recall his name now, hes not in Congress any longer, but I arrived at the airport and he meets me and he says, Look, just get one thing straight, youre not going to say a word today about guns, nothing. 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. WebNot only are 10% of the U.S. House and Senate Jesuit-trained from Georgetown, but so are many of the world's political leaders, which should have you asking What are they really up to?" 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. For example, out of that Tokyo summit, bilateral summit, Clinton, [Kiichi] Miyazawa, or whoever the Prime Minister was at the moment, came a commitment from the Japanese to lower their current account deficit from what I think was 2.5 percent of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] to less than 2 percent. He created a big expectation with that speech that he gave I think in the fall of 1993. 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. NAFTA has been successful. We then embarked on a search for a candidate and give or take three or four months later found one who, ironically, was a Republican. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. He was the head of the transition together with Vernon Jordan. Its not clear to me however that history will accord him that credit. It was a successful fundraiser. You were responsible then for recruiting the people who were going to be in it? Do you have any recollections of seeing anything different in him as a candidate at that point for that position? There werent many people in the administration who fully understood it. Of course, we were in a different time zone, 12 hours different. 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. Those meetings were, at one level, rather riveting, but at another level they were disorganized. Reagan had a group called the legislative strategy group, the LSG, which was intended, whether this is reality or not, to look at the legislative strategy or legislative implications of the policy as a part of the process, developing very soon after his inauguration. Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. Mr. Altman returned to Washington in 1993 to serve as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for two years. During the day two or three people from the administration spoke to KerreyMack McLarty and Leo Panetta spoke to Kerrey. While most of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself. But the next day, Monday, I was on a plane to Waco, Texas. Bentsen managed himself with extraordinary skill. I dont know this, but I suspect that was decided largely between the President and Mrs. Clinton. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. I take these observations, very astute observations, from people who live in this discipline. Georgetown was the equivalent of a placid, slow-moving river and Chicago was the equivalent of a roaring torrent. 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. The reason it didnt succeed a lot more than that is because its really macro factors that drive this. The only reason I think it worked was Bob Rubin, who had the skill and the temperament to make it work. By the end of the year it had become a massive issue. There was concern that we had already spilled an enormous amount of blood on the economic plan. He told me what was going to happen to the Clinton healthcare bill the day it was announced, actually before it was announced. But apropos of my comments earlier that classic, unreconstructed liberalism had never been my cup of tea, I never identified with Mario Cuomo. So it was job one, so to speak. That was just how all Presidents should act. It was quite an experience, in retrospect. Well, you know that whole thing turned out to be quite an astonishing fiasco with the ultimate FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] raid and the immolation of 80 Branch Davidians. Was Bernard Nussbaum involved in the financing in this early period? Exactly. He didnt say so, but supposedly he never does. 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. 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. 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. 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. Was there a representative of the campaign. I think Clinton recognized that, by virtue of his being an outsider in Washingtonhe never served in Washingtonhe needed a link to the Congress, a really superb link, of the type that Bentsen afforded, especially since Clintons first priorities were economics.The Senate Finance Committee was going to be, more than any other single place, where the action was. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. In general, no. Wasnt that a state-chartered institution? 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. 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. She herself has expressed regret over them. When it came to responding within the same news cycle to an allegation or some criticism of the program, we were able to respond immediately, and rapid response became a part of the political lexicon. You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. So I think Clintons own behavior did play a role in it and that in retrospect there would have been better ways for Clinton to have dealt with some of these things. Which did he bond most closely with and were there instances where there were tough nuts for him to crack? Because the opponents had succeeded in changing the question, or framing the question, however you want to put it and that had taken hold in the country and the perception across the entire country, from North to South and so forth, was that this is nationalization of healthcare, which nobody in the United States favors. There were some folks from the White House Press Secretarys office who were in it. Mexico was looking for the freedom for its trucks to cross the border and continue to deliver in the United States. I didnt. He told me that at the very beginning. So there was a lot of humor like that. So the fact that a variety of people serve a long time, theres nothing mysterious about that, that had nothing to do with Bill Clinton. There could be a lot of backsliding on that, well have to see. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. Somebody was wrong. 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