Sure. I dont know how many people would have the political courage to do that, but I know I wouldnt have. I would say we had a definite policy, we just didnt achieve too much of it. There was quite a discussion that day about long-term interest rates, as I said the credit markets rather than the Fed. This is a bit of an anecdote, but of course Joel Klein served in the Clinton administration. I think at the Pond House meetings there were also some of the Congressional leaders, werent there? I said to him, If I should resign, then thats what I want to do. How early were you beginning to get a sense that the Republicans were going to be an historically difficult problem for this President? There are extremes here. Youre only there because he allowed you to be, and you owe him a debt of gratitude for that because without him no service, and without service your life is less. I mean, by that time, the group that was advising him on economic policy had become reasonably well set. Carter did the same thing but much lower key. Now streaming on: Powered by It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. I stayed overnight, went back the next day. I just remember that being contemporaneous with the real beginning of an organized effort here. I want to ask you a general question since youve raised the Carter precedent again here.And that is, we get the perception in talking with some people that there was a conscious effort on the part of senior-most advisors to President Clinton not to reach out and rely on a lot of people that had Carter-era experience in the Presidency. But a very useful one. You say you knew Rubin well, but did you have a sense that in the other places where economic policy-making is made there was ever any tension over this kind of an arrangement? So I knew we had a problem. The chief, the captain of that ship with Mickey Kantor, USTR [United States Trade Representative], and to some considerable extent Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, and Lloyd Bentsen played a big role in it. I did the best I could. The President was in a tough spot because he was hearing from a lot of people that the effort was too ambitious, but on the other hand, Mrs. Clinton was in charge of it. I spoke to the Oklahoma state legislature. The hearings ended around the fourth or fifth of August and it was now the seventeenth or something. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. 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. From the very beginning I was spending a lot of my time on the Presidents economic program. He didnt like Clintons stimulus program. Education might be something in terms of opening. Fourth, I recall that the economic forecasts for 93 were not very heartening. You never saw, one time, Bob Rubin do that, not one time, after he left. Then we ended up for some strange set of reasons having a giant turnout and he wowed them. The most frantic imaginable effort was going on during the five or six hours preceding that vote. Of course Mack McLarty was there and all theif I can call them factionswere represented. Well, not really. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. It was just not very well run, as I recall it, until that time. I didnt, no. By and large, most of the members of the Finance Committee in the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee in the House. I couldnt for the life of me see why that was a problem, but anyway, I went to the White House and told Bernie Nussbaum, the White House Counsel, just how the RTC actually operated in these matters. He managed himself beautifully and with great self-control, and Clinton had very little self-control. He seemed very tired, I remember that. Not too much, though. As has been, as I said, so widely chronicled, the focus was on the economy because the economy was sluggish, in a recessionary state. So one knew through the press who was going and so forth. I attended Georgetown University and I was a year ahead of him. So were in a partisan phase. 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. It just depended on the size of the concession. Doing concerted, multilateral action of the type youre referring to is really only appropriate in the midst of a crisis. Does that mean that the first initiative of the new President, should he, she, be a Democrat be healthcare? There are some people who wouldsome of the George H. W. Bush people date the partisanship from the budget deal. Why dont we break now. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. Im not sure. Clinton was offered a compromise by Senators [John] Breaux and [David] Boren. I ran into Alice on the plane. 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?" Is it okay if we move away from the crisis of getting the big things through to just the more mundane ways that the government ran while you were there? Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. Certainly the appointment of someone with the stature of Rubin signaled that this was not going to be a junior level kind of a thing and it was not going to be headed by one of the usual powerful people, OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or Secretary of the Treasury. More in terms of ostracism from your former colleagues. You said earlier you were involved raising some money, but also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy. Four agents had been killed and others seriously wounded and it was the worst loss of life in the history of the ATF in a single incident. So that the link in Clintons mind between deficit reduction and stimulus disappeared when it got into the political arena. If you take the transition as one chunk of time, rather than chopping it up into chapters, I did a lot of work on personnelwe all did a lot of work on policy development, what was the economic policy going to be, and getting right down to very specific potential decisions. Yes, here in New York. He had tried to offer every imaginable olive branch to the Iranian leadership. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. So its really a role that varies from Secretary to Secretary in terms of what that Secretary wants, and thats just a history of it. I think each person makes his or her own decision. 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. It will be differences of style, differences of perception. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. 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? So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. 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. The Clinton process was much more flexible, and I think better, than the Carter process, but that reflected the personalities of the two men. 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. I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that anyone who makes either of those mistakes, and I can think of others, will ultimately rue the day that he made them. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. Bentsen also wanted the resignation of the Treasury General Counsel, who resigned too. I think thats a very important point because it turned out to be an awfully successful piece of legislation and not a single Republican voted for it. The ultimate plan was way too complicated for the Congress and the country to grasp and understand and soberly assess. Nobody knew, especially in the White House. 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. Mostly the latter. WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by I think less well than he was treated while he was in office. 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. 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. We recommend you to check the complete I think as a general matter the perception, which has become the accepted wisdom, of those dueling camps, is much overstated. Were there Republican members that he particularly relied on. Theres some story that he demanded a commission on entitlement reform as a price. That was on a Friday evening. It got more organized as 92 unfolded. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. But it coincided, I think more importantly than that, with the onset of huge political problems for Clinton in the context of Vince Foster, Whitewater, and the entire beginning of that. I dont recall having a meaningful role at the convention. Im not sure anyone is ever going to pay a penalty in American society for that type of commentary. Secretary [William] Simon spent hours with me, which is quite odd in retrospect since I was 32. No, its time for Russell, I really need this, I really need it, the country really needs it. 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. They all came to the same conclusions. Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. I 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. They especially resented the role that Hillary played. No. And trade was one of Clintons priorities and of course NAFTA was followed by a series of other trade agreements, GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and so forth. If you think about it in the context of today, well see how the primary campaign plays out, but it will be unusual if differences on issues were the decisive factor. 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 began to see on pickup trucks around Charlottesville, very soon after Clinton became President, Impeach Bill Clinton and I dont thinkI remember Impeach Earl Warren signs, Im that old. He made quite a bit of money and then ran as a big long shot again, initially against Ralph Yarborough for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in 1970, upset Yarborough, then beat George H. W. Bush. In business. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. I think theres a wonderful tradition in American government where the outgoing administration typically does everything it can to assist the incoming one, and that was certainly true with the [Gerald] Ford administration. Yes, there was a big debate about whether it should be healthcare or NAFTA. 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. Clinton of course had committed to that during the campaign and it made fiscal sense in the sense of there being so much economic slack. What was going on? But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. It was a voluntary choice. 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. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. McLarty called me in my hotel room in Tokyo and asked me if I would be willing to take in effect a leave of absence from the Treasury and go to manage a war room that they wanted to set up to try to get this bill passed, the Presidents economic program. Might have been established by Washington. In other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because we had no Republican votes. 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. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? We had a chat; we had a nice time. The election occurred and about a week later Reagan was getting a haircut in California and he came out of the barbershop. You were responsible then for recruiting the people who were going to be in it? I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. Gene Sperling was in it. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. I dont know about developing the convention. His Presidency itself I think was a very strong one, but it doesnt make it into the top five or six. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? I was completelyclean bill of health from the independent counsel. Mickey Kantor was in charge of the famous Little Rock Economic Summit. You never saw it. So we already had quite a taste of the Congressional dynamic and overall political dynamic. The Japanese economy was relatively weak at that time although it was in perhaps the first third of its now 12-year, or 14-year slump after the Nikkei peaked at 39,000. I think it was over two days. I mean, it was just a morgue. I divided my time between the transition office and the Treasury. 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. That is foolish because history provides lessons on these matters. All types of dire predictions were put forward. After all, thered been only two Democratic Presidents in the last 25 or 30 years and theyd both been southern Governors. Then in the latter part of 93 I think, Whitewater began to surface, I think it was late 93. 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. Yes, but typically you wouldnt resort to that with relative stability in the exchange markets, and we did have relative stability. Im not quite sure what their input was. Yes, I believe the charter of the RTC transcended whether it was a state chartered or federally chartered S and L. Well, the guarantees were not Federal if they were state chartered. All the groundwork had been done before the storm broke, so there were probably three to four hundred people. So he performed a similar role. I spent the last couple of hours of that period in the Oval Office with the President and that was quite unforgettable too because the President was hugely animated, to some extent discouraged, to some extent angry, and there were moments when I was the only one in there with him. So its funny how reality quickly returns. A lot of people wanted to work on Capitol Hill or think tanks or with interest groups. I dont think I would have known otherwise. Altman Thats true, yes. I had known him just slightly. Theyd review it and youd go to a meeting where you received a 900-page memo, three quarters of which you didnt understand. Tweet. I mean, he seemed to be quite consistent about that, even though the rest of the field was, as I recall, quite a bit more protectionist. It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. Twofold. But that moment was quite amazing. Thats just exactly what I said. But my role was shaped largely by two things: one, Bentsen and what Bentsen wanted; and two, the fact that I had a reasonably close relationship with the White House. People forget that, even today. I think the answer to your question was, Yes, it was, but the RTC was charged with the responsibility of cleaning up all S and Ls [Savings and Loans]. It began to get organized at the end of 91. Hes the first guy who stepped in defeated. That raises the question then of the people he was meeting with here. I think any President who is either fortunate enough or skillful enough to preside over a period of peace, at least as far as American soil and American forces are concerned, deserves credit either for his good luck or his skill. 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. The politics of the Btu tax per se versus other types of energy taxes, including the gas tax, which we ultimately fell back on, werent well considered. The economic plan was, to some degree, controversial from the beginning because of the tax increases and some feeling that the deficit reduction was unnecessary or could be counterproductive. President Clinton gave you the opportunity to serve your country, its a privilege to serve your country. 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