Eventually they did, but it wasnt because of this agreement, big macro forces had them do it. And I also think that theres a certain sense of loyalty among the people that are currently serving in this administration, which is more in keeping with tradition, than the Clinton folks, or many of them I should say, brought to it. He wanted to focus on a few important things at any particular time. 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. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. I was not. Was there a representative of the campaign. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? Was it his personality? I was completelyclean bill of health from the independent counsel. 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 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. 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. I left the White House around April, took a couple of months off, and went back to New York. Stephanopoulos was there and Sperling was there. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. Wasnt that a state-chartered institution? They were taking, to some degree, a thousand-year view. I have to tell my most famous Bentsen story because it really illustrates what an extraordinary person Bentsen was. As has been, as I said, so widely chronicled, the focus was on the economy because the economy was sluggish, in a recessionary state. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. By that time we were all being treated very well by the campaign because we were seen as the guys who were there at the beginning. Mexico was looking for the freedom for its trucks to cross the border and continue to deliver in the United States. That approach hasnt been able to capture a majority of the American public for 40 years and I dont think its going to capture the majority of the American public for another 40 years. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. He was a classic, in my book, excellent chief executive. Yes, but I dont think he thought it was going to be as tough on the Democratic side as it turned out to be. Oh sure, sure, well have another major Presidential uproar. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. Lets recast the question a bit. he is one of famous Financial professional with the age 75 years old group. I thought maybe we should step back and let you give us a more organized picture of what it is that you were doing with respect to U.S.-Japanese relations. I believe it was the same night that she gave her press conference. It began to get organized at the end of 91. 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. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. So he chose someone who not only had a great reputation and tremendous stature, but who could particularly help him with Congress, and it was a shrewd choice. I think this had to be artfully crafted in order to get through. That they felt that people who had served the President. Well, health insurance reform was going to be very complicated, no matter how you cut it, because 85 percent of the people are already insured and only 15 percent are not, but welfare reform is something where huge numbers of people have opinions, even though they dont collect welfare. He was very disciplined and he went to bed at a certain time and he went home. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. 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. The two camps were right there sitting in front of the President for six hours at a time. By and large Bentsen talked to Clinton when Clinton called him.That was the way it worked. Is that a fair assessment? If you can think of a great President, a President who is seen as really great, who didnt have such a crisis, Id like to hear it, because I dont think there is one. Why? WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by Roger Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, the most active independent investment bank in the world today. During the Ford administration they had something called the Economic Policy Board I believe it was, EPB and Bill Simon as Secretary of Treasury was the head of the board and it met actually every morning in the White House. This is just a tradition, The answer is, in my viewthis is just my recollection now, other people would have a different onewas economics first, foreign policy second. 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. You were responsible for organizing the war room. How difficult was it to do what you were doing in an environment where Mario Cuomo was sort of floating around trying to figure out. Is he somebody who, from your perception, makes close friends at all? Roger Altman (left) launched Evercore in 1995 and shed the CEO title in May of last year when Ralph Schlosstein (right) took it and quintupled assets under management to $15 billion. He did, that was the first State of the Union. During the preparation would you call that an organized group? There were people like Senator [Phil] Gramm saying it would usher in a new depression. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. 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. I started getting inundated with letters from Congress asking how the RTC intended to handle this, stirred up by this Republican campaign. The political process requires an outcome. 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. 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. But the tax increasesand there were two main ones, the energy tax and the upper bracket increasewere seen by the Republicans, every last one of them, as unacceptable and became their rallying cry. I worked very closely with Bob Kerrey, with Senator [Max] Baucus, who had such a problem with the gas tax. So there was not a war of the type that has so often been written about, just not true. The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. We had a couple of others. Did you do anything else? I said I would and we went forward. For example, much has been made of the dueling camps, the deficit hawks versus the populists. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? Word comes up, you just say nothing. It was a voluntary choice. After all, John Kennedy is seen in the middle by historians. I ran into Alice on the plane. You said earlier you were involved raising some money, but also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy. Ive been struck on several occasions in response to questions, youve referred to historical patterns and trends. Before the grand jury before Starr, and how was that experience? There was. I was the senior Treasury person day-in, day-out on the major healthcare task force that Mrs. Clinton herself chaired. He was quite an unknown in New York, wasnt he, until he came, appeared, and talked? 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. It was a mixture of people and some of the names I recall of course were George Stephanopoulos and Gene Sperling, Bob Rubin, Bob Reich, Rob Shapiro, myself. They just didnt do it. Now John Snow didnt learn that, hed never been there before and so forth and so on, whatever excuse fits him. I think we had a sandwich or something and I took off and went back to the airport. 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. The Republicans quite shrewdly picked out some that didnt make sense and off the bat marshaled a very focused attack on it. and Lloyd would say, I wouldnt do it, Mr. President, or I would do it. Clintons that way. I knew Bentsen enough by reputation to know it was not by any means all set up, so to speak, by the time I went in there. 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. But that was what one did as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. You can see it in real life at 3901 S. Michigan Avenue, about 20 minutes from the He had just made it through this cliffhanging vote on which the administrations credibility for the next several years, I think, would largely depend, and it depends on the support of overwhelming shares of Democrats in the House and the Senate to get through. Lets step back and just recall who the members of the senior economic team were because there was an entire team of people doing this. Were you involved in discussions at this point about what would be next in the queue for the administration, because there were some other. It was excellent. Right. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? 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. It was going to be a different kind of animal. I think it just evolved rather randomly that not many of those former Carter people got involved with Clinton. Earlier in Little Rock, was she in attendance at any of these meetings? But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. 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. I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. And there were obviously a whole host of people who were against it from day one and you werent going to change anybodys mind in the latter category. I think thats a wonderful tradition. There was no surprise. That was partly because Bentsen was a person who had never failed at anything. Yes, it was a help. WebCornerstone Recovering Community (11001 South Wentworth Avenue) located at 11001 South Wentworth Avenue, Chicago, IL 60628, United States is a drug rehab facility That was absolutely true also of Secretary Brady and all of his people, couldnt have been more cooperative. But that was really after the economic program passed. I dont include that on the list because the federal role in education is always exaggerated. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. Im Gary Burtless. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. The New York Times put it on the front page and this giant controversy erupted. Secretary Bentsen didnt know about it but a lot of other people did, and nobody paid much attention to it. I dont think thats a very good answer to your question, but I dont think I have a better one. Oh yes, this is not long after the key members of the economic team are chosen. The only other observation that just randomly runs through my mind is, I was always described in the press as an intimate of Clintons and that was just not the case. Not necessarily. Then Marjorie made her famous walk to the well, with the Republicans serenading her, Bye, Bye Marjorie, but if theres a more dramatic moment that one can have in government service, at least if youre working in some sort of economic capacity, I cant think of it. I was very involved in it but I was notspending probably two-thirds of my time on it. 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. He may have kicked it off in a certain sense, but it has continued even more strongly to some degree in the last couple of years, but that was another broad historical development, critical historical development, which characterized the Clinton period. I had no background for that. Bentsen had known the then head of it, Albert Casey, whod been chairman of American Airlines, and didnt have a high regard for him. Ive never either been attracted to that approach nor felt that it was an effective one. She wears her heart on her sleeve much more than he does. For a variety of reasons, I dont think he had the pure luxury of just saying, Lets do NAFTA a year from now. Talking out of turn you mean? Oh yes, sure. So he didnt have the luxury of saying, Lets do it a year from now, as you often do with other things. [laughter]. There was a group of three or four of us who were doing Japan policy. Does that mean that the first initiative of the new President, should he, she, be a Democrat be healthcare? 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. Bill Clinton, by that one- or two-line standing, may not make the cut for the top tier. We sat there, the two of us, watching it on television, mostly in silence. Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. So by the time 93 was over, he was not doing well. Howard Paster at the White House, Mike Levy at the Treasury. It should have been, I suppose, more evident at the time, but such things never are. I started doing a lot of the same thing Id done on the economic plan: radio shows, television stuff, running around the country. He told me what was going to happen to the Clinton healthcare bill the day it was announced, actually before it was announced. Well, not really. 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. But apropos of my comments earlier that classic, unreconstructed liberalism had never been my cup of tea, I never identified with Mario Cuomo. 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. It was an all right agreement. We nominated this guy, thought he was quite capable and in one of the wonderful ironies of Washington, the quixotic ironies of Washington, the Democrats defeated the nomination. 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 Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. 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