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. That was on a Friday evening. I was the natural person to do that, having served in it before. 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. There were so many exceptions and carve-outs and so forth from the final bill that you couldnt count them. WebBy tlp333 @ 2008-03-23 21:45:51. There were so many different Japanese Prime Ministers in that period I cant remember which one we had at that moment. At the time we were working on it there was a sense on the Japanese side that it was a zero-sum game. The great Presidents that you mentioned, the ones that loom large, as you said, are all crisis Presidents. So, the decision-making process was more than a bit chaotic, and the decision on the energy taxes was reflective of that. So is there a lot of policy difference today between the nine candidates running for the Democratic nomination in June 2003? Mickey Kantor was in charge of the famous Little Rock Economic Summit. I can recall David Halberstam on the way out saying to me that he never heard a politician as effective as Clinton since JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy]. The social aspect of it also involved here? Lloyd Bentsen was a classic Texas conservative Democrat. 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. The most frantic imaginable effort was going on during the five or six hours preceding that vote. I raise the question because one of the outside perceptions that you get later on is when, in the early post-election period of the administration, theres some considerable debate within the administration about which of the priorities ought to come first, and among some of the people that you mentioned in Little Rock at the time. Is he somebody who, from your perception, makes close friends at all? Now I did not attend that, but the issue of the Presidents economic plan and whatever adjustments were going to be made and the efforts to push it forward were discussed, perhaps in most cases the number one item, at the senior staff meeting each day. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. As I say, it was sort of a double-barrel summit. 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. Was there anything that particularly distinguished this campaign from what youd seen in these other instances thats noteworthy? So I dont think my reactions to that were really any different than anybody else following the campaign. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. So the vote ended, Senate vote I mean, and we had that celebration. We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. Do you have anyyou were sort of one of the casualties of this campaign, but was the Whitewater thing separate from this hate stuff? 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. Do you think any of those are due to the sort of pressure. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. Sure. Were there things about those campaigns that you had learned in preparation for this one that proved to be particularly helpful? He didnt say so, but supposedly he never does. 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. Exactly. Although the President really thought he could convince more Democrats of the merits of NAFTA than he ultimately did. They were using very powerful weaponsI think .20 caliber weapons. 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. We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. Then he asked me to begin to work on certain personnelpresent him possible choices for the senior jobs in the department. During the preparation would you call that an organized group? But you know, theres a real sense of the torch passing and history, and one had to be struck, even though Id been involved with Clinton from mid 91, by the youth and vigor that Clinton and Gore exuded, and Ive always personally liked the south, so I enjoyed being there, so I did go. No, he was working the Hill like everyone else, but he was important. Everything imaginable. 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? They were cutting deals like there was no tomorrow. There was no surprise. Now, it may last five or six more years, it may last 25 more years, I dont know. Fifty Republicans had announced their opposition, 49 Democrats had announced their support, and Bob Kerrey was strolling around, going to the movies, which is what he was doing. Alan Greenspan was on it; Simon was chair of it. And the field against which Clinton ultimately competed was not a strong field. Its interesting too at this very moment with her book having just come out to watch some of the tapes being played on television about some of her own moments. We believed our model would attract the most talented senior finance professionals to our firm. No, let me just correct the record. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? Id met Bentsen a few times. I was involved in the Carter campaign in 1976 and the Mondale campaign in 84, [Michael] Dukakis in 88, Clinton, now Im involved again this time, and, knowing that, I never met anyone who had the appetite for policy itself that Clinton did. Right off the bat in the administration, a group of us were deputized to try to lay the groundwork for a productive summit. But I interpreted that to mean, Maybe you should, because I felt that if he thought I shouldnt, hed say so. There was a camp around that view. Thats something we dont have a lot of information about. Its a strong field. So my wife and I flew down to Little Rock and I met with Clinton for about two hours. He earned an A.B. Why didnt that work, from your perspective? He had tried to offer every imaginable olive branch to the Iranian leadership. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? He managed himself beautifully and with great self-control, and Clinton had very little self-control. He is also a trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, serving on its finance committee. The media to some degree has shifted for, in my view, simple generational reasons, to the right, and the right-of-center media is much more monolithic than the rest of the media, and so its ability to concentrate its opposition and its influence emerged as much greater during the Clinton years. During the transition period, you are formally involved in the transition effort. 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. Healthcare got the nod. So the fact that if we were sitting here in 2053, that a President 54 years ago balanced the budget wouldnt mean a heck of a lot to us, right? I dont think anybody during the campaign expected that Clinton would turn out to be the deficit hawk that he did. She wasnt a participant in those. Some of thats a function of, for lack of a better word, the culture within the group of people who worked in this administration, so that there is no penalty paid, in effect, among your former colleagues for being outspoken or saying something in the press critical to the President. I was often at the National Economic Council meetings that deliberated on those. I was very pleased that he decided not to run because I thought it would just mean the Democrats might well lose again. 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. Maybe we ought to move to the actual setting up of these priorities and the choices made and that process, from post-election into the actual post-inauguration time. The Regency Hotel. 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. They all came to the same conclusions. No, not at all. How do you think Clinton ultimately is going to be read by historians, this Presidency? I think hes deeply appreciated. It had a very different constituency than the economic plan. We went back to square one. I didnt, no. So he performed a similar role. We had a couple of others. I want to be sure that there is a clear picture of that because he cant offer it himself. Clinton was here, and Mrs. Clinton. I dont know. But my first point is that that entire team was out there promoting the Presidents economic package, both crisscrossing the country for that purpose, speaking, visiting Congressional districts and so forth, testifying on it of course, visiting one-on-one with members of Congress. I spoke to the Oklahoma state legislature. Well, I was thinking of both actually, but in the bill. 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. Before we close, Id like to make one pitch though. Yes, but even more than that, its one thing to say to your Secretary of State, at this time Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright, its another thing to say to your wife, I dont like it. By the way, when the three-judge Washington panel that chose Fiske threw him out and replaced him with [Ken] Starr, Starr went back to the beginning and went over the entire thing again and came to the same conclusion. Bob Dole. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, Notice of Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunity. Theyre already heavily taxed, its their money, not the governments money and all of that, and if it works, nobody will remember that I opposed it. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. Yes, here in New York. I know this will sound quite strange, but Clinton was in some awe of Bentsen and a little bit of fear of Bentsen. We met for six or seven hours in the Governors mansion there. 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. And, to some degree it was also, of course, for Clinton to take the measure of certain people he might be appointing. No, two funny stories, Jim, dont let him off so easily. There were those obviously who felt the most important thing was to get the deficit down. 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. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. That was not a high point of the Clinton Presidency. He served as assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 1977 to 1981 before returning to Lehman, where he later became co-head of overall investment banking as well as a member of the management committee and board. There ensued a quite Byzantine process, as has been so widely written about with multiple task forces and enormous numbers of people involved.There were a lot of these Bill Clinton-style meetings, great big long meetings with far too many people in the room. Rubin was well known as an economic conservative, and Bentsen, of course, had a very long legislative record, which was in the same direction. But as often happens, there is a moment when positions shift. New York, Corporate | There werent many people in the administration who fully understood it. 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. Its mostly things I learned that dont work. You ultimately get into a room like this and you say, youd better start to train me, tell me how this happened. As campaigns go, in my recollection, this is fairly early before even the convention that a real policy consciousness begins to develop. There are extremes here. I think everybody has a different calculation. Did you go to Little Rock for the election? 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. In other words, at the time I just didnt take Perot seriously. Today it is seen as structural. Stephanopoulos was there and Sperling was there. But absent such a crisis, history tends not to treat you as a great President. From that time forward, about 79 times out of 80 Clinton did whatever Bentsen said. Id served four years in the Carter Treasury but I hadnt had that much exposure in those years to the President. I did not have a crystal ball to the effect that he was going to make it and that the dominos were somehow going to fall in a certain way that enabled him to do so. So, looking back on it, the nature and the history of those three men had a lot to do with the eventual outcome. He said, I know this will be hard, but I think I can get those folks. This is a transcript of the interview, which you may watch here. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. Well, the war room, first of all, was operated quite differently from the National Economic Council. I know Bentsen, especially in retrospect I know Bentsen. I dont think hes going to make it into the pantheon of heroes, as I said. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. Ive known many members. I also learned that when I saw that, it wasnt likely to ultimately succeed. and I had no previous knowledge of it at all. They didnt want tickets to the Kennedy Center, they wantedI want this for my tomato farmers, or I want this for my citrus growers. Because I think if you serve an administration, and you then decide to comment in some form or other, including in private, about the President and hes got these problems, or hes screwed up in this way, youre just lowering yourself. But it was not a novel idea at all. It was a very costly enterprise upfront and, as I recall from testimony we had from others, there was a big problem in that whatever savings would have been recorded as a part of this enterprise had actually been absorbed into the earlier budget deal. So its a free vote, ideologically and politically. Im not quite sure what their input was. 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. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. I was just going to make an observation about history, historians and non-historians who study Presidents past and present. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. That was before the convention. They just didnt come to the Secretary, to the Chairman of the RTC, no more than investigations being pursued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or the Secret Service or what have you come to the Secretary of the Treasury. Ive seen it happen so often in business as well as in government. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? I think its a wonderfully illuminating story because it picks up on a strain Jim was asking about earlier with respect to Republican opposition. But as to whether it was an innovation, I doubt it. No. Clinton had plied the waters of the Democratic Party with great assiduousness for many, many years. Were you privy to the conversations that he had? But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. This giant controversy erupted over that. Mr. Altman began his investment banking career at Carter had the famous $50 rebate, which became the object of much derision ultimately. Senator Kennedy was for it from day one. They just didnt believe it would work. First of all, the Clinton White House wasnt really oriented to that. So actually I didnt have any concerns. He may be forever seen in the middle. Because they thought, If we hold those hostages very long at all after this man becomes President, we may be nuclearized. So, when it came to answering Congressman Smiths questions, or Senator Jones questions, we were able to get those answers up there within two hours because we had all the people right in the room. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. A few questions about that. By the way, in any matter where the statute of limitations was about to expire, there was nothing specific about the Madison matter that was any different. 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. 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. In 1987, Mr. Altman joined The Blackstone Group as vice chairman, head of advisory business, and investment committee member. Anyway, then Secretary Bentsen and I repaired to the little study off the White House, the two of us, just to watch the actual vote. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? Its a famous meeting in the sense that Woodward wrote a lot about it, other people have written about it. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. And deficit reduction was his top priority, a focus at the top? Within a month, I remember vividly one day, I had seven radio shows. I mean, maybe Reagan was to some degree briefly an anomaly, although he never had the reputation of being an anomaly, and so I wondered if the President, as Commander-In-Chief, also responsible for foreign policy, viewed this particular policy in that light too. 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. So it depends a lot on the people. 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 predicted them. Some of them I think were insincere, but many of them were sincere. Could you tell us what your portfolio was within Treasury and what your primary responsibilities were? In other words, all the work that goes in before its actually sent to the Hill. By the time 94 was over, the Congress was in Republican hands. But that was about as specific as you can get. Yes, but typically you wouldnt resort to that with relative stability in the exchange markets, and we did have relative stability. Its not as simple as that. Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. 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. The period during which Bentsens views werent treated with quite enough respect was a very short one. Thats how I feel about it. And it was just fuel on the already roaring fire of Whitewater. Founder and Senior Chairman | So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. There was not a war going on. Every imaginable issue arose and Clinton hit all those balls out of the park and it gave the American public a chance to see how astonishingly smart and deep this guy was. So the question in part was: Are you going to really drive forward with an aggressive trade agenda for this administration or not? But why was it bloodless? I didnt. Then of course, the Senate voted the next day and we only had 49 votes that we knew about and Senator Bob Kerrey was the undecided vote, the only one left. It was really quite revealing of Clintons inexperience to do it that way, and, for that matter his style, a poor way to do it. Do you recall in your conversations with Senator Bentsen, were there missed opportunities for developing a more bipartisan atmosphere in Washington at this time, or was it pretty much just a foregone conclusion that because the Republicans were now completely in the minority that they were going to obstruct from the outset? WebRobert Altman's House (former) Malibu, California (CA), US Like Tweet Share Pin The film director, known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized Now we became aware pretty early that there were some real problems with this proposal. I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. 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. 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. Would take that position may last 25 more years, I know this will sound strange... 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