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I consider that another important legacy, since not that many Presidents of the 20th century have it. A lot of funny things were happening. Its curious to me, but thats how it worked. It was an astounding speech. 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 should double-check that. Obviously Sam Rayburn. But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. When you were suggesting Edmund Morris I was thinking. For the first part of the Clinton years, Arthur Burns was famously mystical, quite like Greenspan. You might call it something different. I dont think hes going to make it into the pantheon of heroes, as I said. We talked for about 12 seconds about any role that I might play. Can you tell us about his decision-making process on this? Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. We had an autos task force with certain members of the Clinton administration and certain Japanese counterparts on that. 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. 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. Actually the bigger debate was over what came after NAFTA, welfare reform or healthcare. You had been given a portfolio before that time? And I dont accept entirely your formulation, even though I think theres a lot to it. I was the class of 1967 and he was the class of 1968. Were you privy to the conversations that he had? Born on April 2, 1946 in United States of America, Roger Altman started his career as Financial professional . I would say presided over, Id have to check the statistics, but probably the greatest period of economic prosperity in the entire century, or ushered in the greatest period of prosperity in the entire century. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. And I dont have any different set of reactions than anyone else watching the thing at the time. But it was not a novel idea at all. They just called someone in the war room and they had an immediate answer or immediate access to whatever they needed. But Clinton did care quite a bit about it. He didnt say so, but supposedly he never does. His view was, I want to pick good people and let them do their jobs. In the early period, there was a lot of discussion of broad strategy, how to create support for deficit reduction as a whole, how to talk about the program, what type of interest groups we needed to particularly work with and work on. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. I dont think thats a very good answer to your question, but I dont think I have a better one. Gene Sperling was in it. But yes, we had meetings in his hotel room at three in the morning. But its interesting to put it into perspective. As I say, it was sort of a double-barrel summit. Then later in the process I was asked if I would go do a war room for healthcare of the type we did for the budget. Altman ran the White House war room during last Clinton moved quickly. So that was the revelation, so to speak, that occurred that day. Did you have close relations with people in Cuomos operation, because I think, at least in the early stages, there was still a consideration that he might come out? 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. Of course I would say were not proposing to take over the healthcare system. I do believe it was able to make a difference. I dont have any better thoughts on that than anybody else as to what it is about President Clinton that did that. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? Its not as easy. But I was briefed on the procedures the RTC had to follow here. My memory is a bit fuzzy on 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. For a variety of reasons, I dont think he had the pure luxury of just saying, Lets do NAFTA a year from now. You asked me when the most important policy development occurred and I would say there are several answers to that but number one would be post election, not pre-election. I mean, it was a larger package as it was originally conceived and then. 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. Presidents should be presented with options that have been carefully developed, really carefully vetted, and those options should be written down in the usual way, and that wasnt the case here. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. Can you tell us how you first got to know Bill Clinton? But in any event, there I was, and this guy, as I say, was a master of the game. I moved over to the White House, was given a strange assignment, which was to go run this thing called the Summit of the Americas which occurred in December of 94, which was this meeting of literally 35 heads of state in Miami for three days to talk about why you would have a hemispheric free trade agreement. Before we come back to this, I want to pose one question and that is about the Presidents style when he was working the phones with members of the House. In fact, it was six months before. WebKathryn Reed Altman and Roger Altman attend State of the Union Dinner at The Re-Opening of the Plaza Hotel Ballroom on January 28, 2008 in New York Roger Altman and Mayor Michael Bloomberg attend THIRTEEN and WLIW 21 Annual Gala Salute at Gotham Hall on April 30, 2007 in New York City. Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. Can you tell us a little bit about the second role? Well, when we actually re-did Putting People First, we went to Little Rock and worked on it for a few days. It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. Then we put on our battle armor and went back into battle. Im just saying that Im a little too close to it because I recall so many of those battles, and I recall so many people feeling that, as you remember, the administration, in some form or other, lost three times, and each time came back with a more conservative version. I respected him, but I never identified with him and I didnt see him being a successful Democratic nominee. Mike Blumenthal, the first Secretary of the Treasury, knew, but he didnt have a close relationship with Carter. Lets hold off if we can just a couple of minutes before getting into the transition period and let me ask you a couple of questions about the campaign itself. 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. That was the first time we had an opposition takeover. You couldnt say to yourself, Well in the end hell be fine. I mean, Lloyd Bentsen had been Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for a long time, knew Alan Greenspan very well, knew the Fed very well. But you ended up doing a lot of strange things. So the experience of visiting these guys, some of whom were right on the edge, made tremendous impact on me. He earned an A.B. 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. Does that mean that the first initiative of the new President, should he, she, be a Democrat be healthcare? Having watched very carefully what Bob Carswell, who served for three plus years of the four Carter years as Deputy Secretary, did in that role, and that was actually rather different than my role. I mean, I have no reservations about when Lloyd Bentsen approached me, I think he thought it was just going to be very brief and wed send some name up and it wouldnt take long to get that name confirmed and I might end up spending two or three months doing this. There were not pitched battles. What political or personal characteristics does she have that he doesnt have, what does she bring to the. There was a widespread sense that Japan was taking advantage of the relationshipin various ways. Youre in such a good position to give us a comparative portrait of transitions internally. Were there any members in particular with whom you worked directly that you felt you were personally responsible for salvaging? Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? I dont think its wholly right becauseand this may sound strange coming from mePresident Reagan I think will be seen very favorably by historians, mostly because hell be seen as the man who ended the Cold War, and Reagan didnt have to take the position of aggressive anti-Soviet behavior, but he did. Who was the coordinator, if any, in the first follow up? 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. Obviously he balanced the budget, now its unbalanced. I think I called that evening. It sounds like Bentsens Congressional or legislative savvy was not being availed of in these chaotic meetings, the policy-making meetings. We still joke about that today. I think it was serious as a political thing, meaning you had three candidates instead of two and of course, the dynamic was different. 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. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? He was not confronted with a grave crisis, but I think history will treat him very well, because essentially. We had had recent experience in which the President of the United States took very strong actions against the Japanese, with these agreed-upon quotas for U.S. exports, exports in autos to the U.S., I dont quite remember how longThat was negotiated certainly over the wishes of the Japanese but less than ten years. You had some experience with Japan before? No, it was not at all. There are too many people in his own administration, at least at the moment, who think that all he finally did was succumb to the Republican position, and anybody who wore a D on his shirt and supported the Republican position could have brought along enough Ds to make the bill happen. What was going on? Why? It was killed when Senator [Donald] Riegle, the chairman of the Banking Committee, announced that he would oppose it, so that was the end of that. More in terms of ostracism from your former colleagues. They were done among the United States, Mexico, and the Congressional parties involved. So that the link in Clintons mind between deficit reduction and stimulus disappeared when it got into the political arena. I was politically active, though. The answer to that is yes. There was quite a discussion that day about long-term interest rates, as I said the credit markets rather than the Fed. So yes, the themes were in the State of the Union. 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. Right. I dont believe Yeltsin attended the summit, but there was a lot of focus on Russia and what the G7 could do for Russia at that summit, so it was all kind of nice, uplifting stuff. A few questions about that. If were talking about 1991, I think his ideas were in formation. It was a very simple letter that was done up for me and I sent it to everybody saying, Just so you know, the RTC has only these procedural options in matters like this, and we will be reaching a decision on which of them to do before the statute of limitations expires. Twofold. The President made a decision he was going toand he discussed this during the campaign at lengthbe more aggressive with Japan to have a fairer, more level playing field. 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. But, in any event, there was some sense that if we would tighten fiscal policy, there was the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. Howard Paster at the White House, Mike Levy at the Treasury. How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. But Clintons worked largely because of the people, and mostly Bob Rubin, but anyway, it worked well. Bob Rubin. I was very pleased that he decided not to run because I thought it would just mean the Democrats might well lose again. A group of four of us were named at the same time: Bentsen, Rubin, [Leon] Panetta, and myself. I was elected twice vice president of my class. Hed be speaking someplace and Id be playing some role at the same conference at one of the usual conference locations, and we would briefly renew the acquaintance, but I did not stay, in any organized way, in touch with him. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. Well help you over here We didnt have to have the President do every one of those. But I interpreted that to mean, Maybe you should, because I felt that if he thought I shouldnt, hed say so. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. You may not have been conscious of it. So the question naturally arises, was it his economics? 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. 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. In the last 48 or 72 hours, because that vote was also a cliffhanger, although not as close. So my second point is that I was a part of that during the pre-war room period. But he did give a big speech about healthcare before NAFTA came to a vote, right, as I recall? They didnt want tickets to the Kennedy Center, they wantedI want this for my tomato farmers, or I want this for my citrus growers. They werent really involved in the doing of the plan. There was no real reason for that, it was just fate, happenstance, just the case that not many of them did. I stay in touch with him. How were those dealt with, the decision to make a significant concession in the bill? If you look at the history of American reform, at that scale of change, usually you have a little bit more consensus than a 43 percent electoral. 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. Bob Rubin never uttered a single syllable except of friendship and support of President Clinton. 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. The two camps were right there sitting in front of the President for six hours at a time. Yes, and Im sure that any number of opponents to the Presidents plan were sincere in their expectation that it wouldnt work. Then, as the weeks and months went by, it came closer and closer and closer to whip counts. So one knew through the press who was going and so forth. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? Most of the people whod been involved in the economic plan or NAFTA for example, werent part of that. Weve all seen this happen often in Washington. As I remember, we gave that one to labor as a way to try to ease the pain, even though NAFTA called for that to happen. 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. He and Kerrey had a very close relationship. You havent told us about your own appointment. I think less well than he was treated while he was in office. Definitely working on personnel. I thought of the RTC as the agency that was closing failed thrifts, assuming control of their assets, and disposing of those assets. It was the usual degree of difficulty that early, not really greater because he was from Arkansas. Sure, Greenspan was in favor of deficit reduction, so when the administration came forward with an actual deficit reduction plan, which, as we all know, was a bit unexpected, Greenspan supported it, testified for it and so forth. People have made that mistake and theyve suffered from it. It had a very different constituency than the economic plan. During the day two or three people from the administration spoke to KerreyMack McLarty and Leo Panetta spoke to Kerrey. Theres a time lag between taking painful steps to do something with the deficit and getting some response in the. We didnt have a crisis in the foreign exchange markets. Help us understand why he would elect to move NAFTA at this point? Thats just the way history works. Well, about ten minutes later President Clinton called me. When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. Dont ever let those conversations be public. 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 thought he was finished. If you think about his history, Bentsen had been a highly decorated war hero. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. I was an Assistant Secretary, I had a few meetings with President Carter but not that many, so I wasnt familiar, But it was not the way you would organize, and one wonders, Mack McLarty was the Chief of Staff at the time and came out of a business. There have been a lot of great American Presidents. 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 in any event, Madison Guaranty had failed. Now streaming on: Powered by I mean, it was just a morgue. There were so many different Japanese Prime Ministers in that period I cant remember which one we had at that moment. We came up with a Btu [British thermal unit] tax. All types of dire predictions were put forward. 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. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. We had a couple of others. And deficit reduction was his top priority, a focus at the top? The basic point was Ill focus on it, Ill get it moving. It wasnt evident to me the day after New Hampshire that he had recovered from it. He was the head of the transition together with Vernon Jordan. It was a good-sized ballroom here in New York. Those carve-outs were all done on a tripartite basis. So my wife and I flew down to Little Rock and I met with Clinton for about two hours. No admission fee, no contribution required. Only to a degree. 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? It was after all largely negotiated by his predecessors, and yet he took a big gamble on that one, too, and thats sort of a kick in the midsection to a lot of his Democratic supporters. I know the Congress and the Congress isnt going to buy it. 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. We were the easy solution for the press. Dont ever talk down your currency; dont ever quarrel with the Federal Reserve Board. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. The only reason I think it worked was Bob Rubin, who had the skill and the temperament to make it work. Clinton had talked of course during the campaign about cutting the deficit in half during his first four years. The war room was very effective for Clinton, and of course, it was to some degree patterned after the war room in the campaign, which was then the object of an interesting film among other things. As has been, as I said, so widely chronicled, the focus was on the economy because the economy was sluggish, in a recessionary state. WebRoger Ebert March 07, 1978. But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. So, to some extent, the President had put himself in a tough spot. We had a macro economic task force. Im not the best witness on that because I didnt see it or feel it, but there may well have been. He loved policy. There were those who feltI would put Bob Reich at the top of the listwho felt the most important thing was to do a big stimulus program involving a lot of spending initiatives. 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?" The Putting People First document, is it fair to characterize that as the menu choices that the administration was going to be making when it took office, but that there was not a great deal of attention at this point on priorities from among the elements in the menu? They were taking, to some degree, a thousand-year view. You sit down with the leaders of your own party in the Congress, ultimately with the entire leadership, and then you learn a little bit about the realities that you face from the legislative point of view. That was partly because Bentsen was a person who had never failed at anything. Then it went down to defeat. I dont think there have been many members of Congress in the 20th centuryI would think of Lyndon Johnson, Russell Long, Richard Russell. There were those obviously who felt the most important thing was to get the deficit down. Im sure there are numerous aspects of that that the administration given a chance would like to do over, to prepare better, and it was a team that didnt have a lot of legislative experience, although, in the case of Panetta and Bentsen, it had a couple of very strong elements. Youve already mentioned the people who were attending that particular meeting. There was. He could have just been rhetorically difficult about it and kind of accepted the fact that were steady as she goes on the Cold War, and he didnt. Sure. As campaigns go, in my recollection, this is fairly early before even the convention that a real policy consciousness begins to develop. At my sons school, on the floor where the history department is, each President gets a little tiny picture and about two lines. Nobody said to me, Hes there. I think Clinton was better served by virtue of Perots presence in the campaign than without it. Was it the selection of the people who were going to do the economic. So the Congress decided to hold hearings on all aspects of Whitewater and, as everybody remembers, everyone from Maggie Williams to Harold Ickes to everybody had to testify. Oh sure. So I was going down to Waco, Texas. It begins I think with the economic and fiscal circumstances that the administration faced, and two in particular. 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 didnt devise them on my own. No, let me just correct the record. 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. So its clear that the idea about deficit reduction and fiscal policy takes root really during this transition. While most of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself. I think those discussions, including that particular one, in retrospect, had a considerable effect on him. By the time 94 was over, the Congress was in Republican hands. 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. He was not, no. I mean, we had these discussions, we had these ways to measure progress and so forth, that sometimes alarmed economists in the United States because they seemed protectionist. Did you stay in Little Rock for a while afterward? He just determined each time that what he had to do was get through this chapter and somehow live to fight for the next one and didnt take the longer view. Then once he started to make the rounds in New York, he generated very considerable positive reaction and became self-fulfilling, and raising money for him became quite a bit easier. The President said to me at one moment when we were alone, and with great heat, he said to me, Roger, you see, theres no constituency at all for Wall Street economics, which is how he viewed his plan, that hed sold himself to Wall Street and you see theres no constituency for that because were about to lose. I believe Greenspan went to Little Rock. Yes, he did. For example, keeping its currency weak, not taking some of the steps to improve domestic demand such that Japan could become a stronger force for imports into Japan, ironically some of the same issues that are just as present today. 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? It was going to be a different kind of animal. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. But I would also say he contributed to his own under-appreciation. From the very beginning I was spending a lot of my time on the Presidents economic program. 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