No, I dont remember that effort at all, so it must have been pretty quiet. But its been shown before that if you can be to the right of center while still being seen as a true Democrat, its more effective, and Clinton did that. We cant afford to lose it, that type of stuff. 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. Remember, I was there during the 1963-67 period. He didnt like Clintons stimulus program. Im not in the Senate. But I would also say he contributed to his own under-appreciation. But I dont really think that was the reason that he voted for it, but only an hour before the vote in the Senate did we know we had his vote. Right, but if you take too much pain up front. Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. Secretary [William] Simon spent hours with me, which is quite odd in retrospect since I was 32. But its just one of those periods in Washington when partisanship is at a peak. I sat next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. There were people like Senator [Phil] Gramm saying it would usher in a new depression. 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. In fact, Bernard and his late partner, George Katz, were both involved. 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. I dont mean that facetiously. I wasnt sitting all by myself with him, but sure, there were various opportunities to be in relatively small groups with him. I believe it was the same night that she gave her press conference. 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. I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. But he did give a big speech about healthcare before NAFTA came to a vote, right, as I recall? I dont know whether his Presidency will be seen as one of the most important or transformative in American history. But in any event, Madison Guaranty had failed. Very, very intensive, one of the most intensive things Ive ever been involved in. Richard Nixon resigned from office. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. Was this your first opportunity? This giant controversy erupted over that. You were both involved then in student government. Not likely, and was not the case in 92. 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. I knew Paul Tsongas and he was a nice man, a good man, but he was not a good politician and I didnt see Paul Tsongas being the nominee. When did the President. But why was it bloodless? But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. Bentsen never lost an election, period, on which he was head of the ticket, ever. I was the class of 1967 and he was the class of 1968. So one knew through the press who was going and so forth. 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. Working on the Hill, traveling? 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. But therein, to some degree, lay the opportunity for Clinton to re-establish his credentials as a man of conviction. Alan Greenspan was on it; Simon was chair of it. It began to get organized at the end of 91. I then had the brilliant ideaIm saying this, obviously sarcastically, that I should inform the White House what those procedural alternatives were. But that was really after the economic program passed. My view, theres no single answer to that at all, but if I were to list the elements of my response, the first one would be post-election. 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. Well, Im not actually trying to establish whether these were particularly important in the campaign. I mean, wow, but an odd personality. Secretary Bentsen had already left. He does not see that as one of his own great accomplishments. There was not a war going on. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? 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. Are we missing anything in terms of your responsibilities? Ira Magaziner himself, whom I had known for some time, was a gigantic intellect. I take these observations, very astute observations, from people who live in this discipline. Can you walk us through that? During the transition period, you are formally involved in the transition effort. So my second point is that I was a part of that during the pre-war room period. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. While most of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself. And then, of course, the political people in the White House: George Stephanopoulos of course, and others in the White House. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? Finally the famous proposal comes forward and its put before the Congress. Why? We assembled Carter and Ford and George H. W. Bush, and various other luminaries, Jim Baker, [Henry] Kissinger and so forth, to project a bipartisan front on NAFTA and Clinton gave the speech of his life. But there was a divide, so to speak, in the administration between those who felt that we should try to remake the healthcare system in this country in one fell swoop and those who felt we should pursue an incremental approach. 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. There was quite a discussion that day about long-term interest rates, as I said the credit markets rather than the Fed. Thats a good point, but thats because there were some people whod been around the track. No, this was in December. By the end of the year it had become a massive issue. He told me that at the very beginning. I mean, it can be in private, it can be in print, it can be any other way. 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. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. Did you do anything else? Anyone who does that indeed does not know what he is doing, and its the equivalent of Economic Policy 101. And we had the same in the Carter administration, but it had been more junior. Each day hed give a speech and mark off a day, counting down the days to the expiration of the statute of limitations and saying these people at the RTC damn well better be sure that justice is served, the Clintons arent off the hook. We had some serious issues with the IRS. You see a lot of candidates you know arent going to work that way. 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. Tweet. No, no. You never saw, one time, Bob Rubin do that, not one time, after he left. I was given an office over in the Treasury. Please. Id met him a few times, but not ever to speak to. But, in any event, everything was going fine at the RTC until, unfortunately, the matter of Madison Guaranty came up. That by choosing Panetta, and Bentsen, and Rubin, he chose economic conservatives. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. The House voted first, and on the day of the House vote we didnt think we had the votes, or at least we thought the odds were too high that we would lose. from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. My testimony was rather a highlight of that. How big a group was doing this recasting? 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. Were you consulting with the President occasionally after you left Washington and came back to New York? But its interesting to put it into perspective. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. So he remained alive and, as we all know, recovered. I said I would and we went forward. 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 went back to the airport in Austin, reported that to Warren Christopher, and I think we were all announced within a week. In general, no. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. Well, within about two weeks of the election, certainly by the end of November, the actual transition offices were established in Washington. The period during which Bentsens views werent treated with quite enough respect was a very short one. He loved policy. 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. 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 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. I took an hour plus to do this. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. 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. As I say, we assembled sometime between the 20th and 25th of November in Washington and then December 5th or 6th or 7th or whatever it was he made his choices. I think this had to be artfully crafted in order to get through. So its a free vote, ideologically and politically. Then in the latter part of 93 I think, Whitewater began to surface, I think it was late 93. There are some very famous stories about Bentsens war experience. By that time, Clinton had his idea of the middle-class tax cut, and he had his idea of cutting the deficit in half during his first term, I think it was. Of course, I met with the senior ATF guys. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. I mean, by that time, the group that was advising him on economic policy had become reasonably well set. The Regency Hotel. You didnt have to spend much time around them to see this. Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? 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. That was the logical place because I served there before. I took a trip out to Oklahoma to visit the district of a Congressman from Oklahoma whose vote we needed, and ultimately I think we got. There are many people in the administration who dont like the welfare reform that was ultimately signed, believed that Clinton ultimately turned centrist on the issue and anybody could have done that and once you did it as a Democratic President, you were going to have welfare reform. I mean, to give you an example, wed been in office I think several days, and the Sunday after the inauguration I was sitting at home in New York because my family hadnt moved yet. I think the days for that have largely passed, I dont think members of Congress care much about that. Thats just exactly what I said. That was the all-time low for the dollar. That was great. It was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and unforgettable, absolutely unforgettable. There was no surprise. What Im interested in is your perception of when the views that crystallized with economic policies were adopted in the first months of the administration. Education might be something in terms of opening. More in terms of ostracism from your former colleagues. 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. Youre an exception to this. Carter had his famous Pond House meetings, and I went to a couple of those. The feelings of people along the wayside were just very endearing. 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. Concessions involving individual members of Congress could often be done at a lower level, depending on the magnitude of the concession. Yes I was asked to be part of that enterprise, but much later in the process. Did it come from DAmato, or what? One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. I personally thought Rubin was most likely to be Secretary of the Treasury. So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. Then I would have discussions with Clinton, usually on the fly, about certain economic issues I thought were important. There were so many exceptions and carve-outs and so forth from the final bill that you couldnt count them. It was quite a full-bore effort. Keeping in mind that with the exception of labor, which is a heck of a big exception, all of the powerful economic groups in the United States were for it and Clinton had just gone through a bruising battle where many of them were on the other side of him. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday interviewed investment banker Roger Altman, a former Treasury official, as a candidate to replace You would have thought Senator Bentsen would have felt that way also, unless there was an assumption that this was literally going to be a few weeks time. In some measure. You can have half of it, or something to that effect. That was all part of the same ultimate mix. So if Clinton and Burns ever had any conversations, they certainly didnt communicate, Im sure. Well, I was thinking of both actually, but in the bill. 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 really think its just that basic. Just promotes disunity and so forth. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. But the main argument was economic. But the burden of my question was it would be a lot of the people whod voted for the economic package that youre putting in this position, right? Sure. If youre Secretary of X, its pretty easy to become quite happily accustomed to the perquisites of that. At my sons school, on the floor where the history department is, each President gets a little tiny picture and about two lines. Those things were at a peak in 94, just at the time healthcare was on the table. Im just saying the Japanese side very much viewed it as a zero-sum game, therefore anything we got was, from their point of view, giving up something. Bentsen knew Clinton wouldnt get anything else if he didnt. I went and visited the injured agents in the hospital. It was Clintons first, if I recall correctly, major international summit. Im very fond of her, extremely fond of her, and it was, Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. [Mary Todd] Lincoln? Clintons very first initiative was his stimulus program. I doubt that youll see that. Once again, were grateful for your time. The office on Vermont Avenue probably opened between two and three weeks thereafter, lets say, picking a time, the 25th of November, just guessing, 20th to 25th. 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, 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. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? 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. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. 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. Yes. There was very little interest in that. So that went on with mounting intensity over a series of months after the President had actually laid it out. Today it is seen as structural. Most of us cant name the last President who did balance the budget. Is he somebody who, from your perception, makes close friends at all? I have to tell my most famous Bentsen story because it really illustrates what an extraordinary person Bentsen was. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. 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. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. Welfare reform is a different issue, though. 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. and I had no previous knowledge of it at all. I left the White House around April, took a couple of months off, and went back to New York. By that late stage of the budget battle, all the concessions and fine-tuning that could be made to the bill had already been done, so you had a package at that point that wasnt going to be reopened. 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. I may have attended a few meetings, but I only began to be immersed in healthcare after the Presidents plan passed and I became the Treasury person on the Hillary Clinton healthcare task force. You know, she made comments like I could have stayed home and baked cookies but I decided to be a real person, which served to severely antagonize a lot of traditionalists. 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 taught at Georgetown for a little while, and the distinguishing features of the students that I would have had ten or twelve years ago were that they had a high degree of interest in national and international politics. Unfortunately, during the Clinton era ultimately there were four, five, or six independent counsels chosen to look into Bruce Babbitt and Ron Brown and some of the other people. As I say, it was sort of a double-barrel summit. He is also a trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, serving on its finance committee. I view that as a very unfortunate decision the Democrats made, but that was a new low, or a new high, however you look at it, in partisanship. There was concern that we had already spilled an enormous amount of blood on the economic plan. When concessions needed to be made, this was before you get up too high, Russell referred to the point that deals had already been made. 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, a year later, the fall following my graduation, I attended the University of Chicago, which was perhaps more than any other university, except the University of Wisconsin, the center of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activity. I mean, not to take any credit away from other players, you wouldnt want to do that Im sure, but there must have been some. Its fashionable for conservatives to say that the recovery had already begun on George H. W. Bushs watch and that if we just stood aside, the same results would have occurred, but those werent the economic forecasts we were looking at at the time, nor do I believe that school of thought to be accurate, but thats another matter. If were talking about 1991, I think his ideas were in formation. I knew a lot about Perot, having been heavily involved in Wall Street for many years. 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. He earned an A.B. Oh sure. I do recall some rushed discussions at the very end about what we do now and how we flesh out his policies, and I can recall talking to George Stephanopoulos the morning the convention ended about certain steps we were going to take now in terms of getting better organized on policy development and issues. I believe Perots presence helped Clinton because Perot kept saying how messed up the country was, so that actually helped the challenger rather than the incumbent. Was that true of Georgetown at the time that you were there? There just wasnt a candidate who had the capability to do that. I first met Bill Clinton in college. Sure. Obviously he balanced the budget, now its unbalanced. I dont think anybody during the campaign expected that Clinton would turn out to be the deficit hawk that he did. He managed himself beautifully and with great self-control, and Clinton had very little self-control. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. It may have struck people on the outside as unusual, but not if youd been around. And the reason he wasntnothing to do with Senator Kennedy himself. Not the first time he met with another head of state, but I think his first summit outside this country. So he didnt have the luxury of saying, Lets do it a year from now, as you often do with other things. So yes, the themes were in the State of the Union. Wed sit around in the Roosevelt Room, and you know how it works. You referred earlier to the cycles of political partisanship, policy issues. 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. Can you tell us about that? But its just a reality that in an economy of that size, spending changes arent going to have much effect on the economy; monetary changes can. Remember, President Clintons first initiative, the stimulus plan, was defeated. He moved it to the center, made it the party of fiscal responsibilitywhoever would have believed that?and enabled the party to shed much of its old baggage. We came into office, the trade imbalance of payments deficit with Japan had risen to very high levels. Im not sure it makes entire sense, however, to judge or to assess a Presidents contribution by the standard of those who are given, in effect, a free gift of power to deal with a crisis. Were still in the transition period, and now may be the appropriate time to talk about the process by which deficit reduction becomes a clear priority item over some of the other things that were talked about during the course of the campaign. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? Was it his personality? I was struck from the beginning that Clinton was blessed with a very weak field, which, for example, is not the case today. The American political system has changed a lot. I referred to the Bert Lance affair when I was serving the Clinton administration, and in that case the controller of the currency, who is an independent regulator, was charged with looking into it and delivered a report that ultimately proved to be Bert Lances downfall. It was an all right agreement. But anyway, in retrospect it was a very bad idea. I mean, not one encounter, until the early to mid 80s when I was quite involved in various aspects of the Democratic Party and there were a few forums at various places that I would attend and I would occasionally run into him. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? It had a very different constituency than the economic plan. Sometimes without him and sometimes with him, but if Mrs. Clinton was there, everybody else was. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. I dont think Id ever met her, but we were serving on the same board together and we became acquainted and occasionally talked about getting together some way or other. I was just going to make an observation about history, historians and non-historians who study Presidents past and present. No admission fee, no contribution required. But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. So there was a lot of humor like that. I think each person makes his or her own decision. But what actually turned out to happen was that each Cabinet officer, or at least many of them, came up with a list of favorite initiatives they wanted. Remember, youre playing for four years, youre not playing for one year. His view was, I want to pick good people and let them do their jobs. I had really not fully ever grasped from my Wall Street days, that there was a great big regulatory side to it including enforcement side, where the RTC was also charged with pursuing investigations against former thrift officials and ultimately prosecuting them if circumstances warranted. Clinton is nothing if not rigid. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. I might have if I had not known Bob Rubin, but I knew him better than anybody else in the administration knew him and I had great confidence in him and knew that he and I would relate well. Ultimately they were in effect combined into one big wish list, and that wish list went forward. I have always liked Mrs. Clinton and I had a lot of respect for her and do have a lot of respect for her. Roger C. 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Served there before late 93 about certain economic issues I thought were important given an office over in latter... Ambit of Larry Summers place because I served there before selling the budget always. Was not the case in 92 know what he is doing, and I had no previous of! My having, I met with the President had actually laid it out an odd personality imaginable tube out... Clinton, usually on the table view was, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job there, else... Summit outside this country but he did do have a lot of respect her...

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