I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. You look at the turnover that she hador in her case did not haveon her staff, and the turnover that he had. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. I said, Yes, I had this one meeting, and told him what it was. But my guess is that those kinds of. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. In other words, at the time I just didnt take Perot seriously. Pretty difficult to make major progress in that context. The country needs it, the Democratic Party needs it, I need it. Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. I sat next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. But Lloyd Bentsen was in that league, top five or six or seven. It was not an accident that he did that. But why was it bloodless? Its curious to me, but thats how it worked. There was not a war going on. But apropos of my comments earlier that classic, unreconstructed liberalism had never been my cup of tea, I never identified with Mario Cuomo. That was my third or fourth trip, in 93. 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. Everyone understood there was a lag factor. She figured in some bumper stickers also. There were deals being cut like crazy, deals on tomatoes, deals on Florida citrus. Do you have any recollections of seeing anything different in him as a candidate at that point for that position? Under the normal circumstances, like Clintons, they have considerable difficulties in an adverse political environment to get anything done, and that is the more normal historical situation. One of the initial ideas was an energy tax. It wasnt going to be a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. I wasnt making a distinction between Clinton and his predecessors, but rather making a distinction between Clinton and his successors since there wont be any more. It used to be, I believe, that they were graded on grounds of competent scholarship and so forth. Andrew Garfield presented the Robert Altman Award at the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Awards to his old friend, Fran Kranz, for his film Mass. I ran for president of the student body in the spring of my junior year, and he did the same in the spring of his junior year, which was one year following mine. So in the early period, Id have to go back and look at when the President laid the legislation forward, but I want to say it was first of March or something like that. I went there every Tuesday and every Thursday and had a staff meeting and spent a couple of hours there and tried to be sure I was aware of the key stuff going on. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. Now we became aware pretty early that there were some real problems with this proposal. There were not pitched battles. Right as it was up, the Wall Street Journal does a full-page profile on Bentsen, right here on the right. You had been asked to be a part of that enterprise. 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. 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. The Senate Finance Committee is the most powerful committee, Bentsen had been chairman for quite a few years, was seen universally as a very effective, powerful chairman. Then ultimately, to give you a sense of how colorful this became, DAmato went to the Senate floor and he had a gigantic calendar the size of this wall and was marking off the days. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. Ira Magaziner himself, whom I had known for some time, was a gigantic intellect. Nineteen sixty-seven to sixty-eight, of course, were peak years in terms of the Vietnam War and antiwar activism, but Georgetown was not at all in the center of that. Only to a degree. 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. 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. He is a trustee of MIT and serves on its Governance Committee. Its always a mistake to get in any kind of hassle with the Federal Reserve Board, always. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. 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. What specifically arose was that the statute of limitations on any prosecution involving the failure of an S and L was about to expire. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. Did Bentsen then become sort of a one-man legislative strategy group? He didnt say so, but supposedly he never does. He was quite an unknown in New York, wasnt he, until he came, appeared, and talked? I think it counts for four, five percent of the spending. Was that true of Georgetown at the time that you were there? I believe Stan Shuman was there. 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. That happened, I want to say, late 93, that his nomination was effectively killed. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. No, but Clintons clear priority was, and was going to be, steps to stimulate the economy and indeed, as soon as he took office, he submitted a package of measures which constituted his stimulus program and they rather promptly went down to defeat. Ill never forget, I went in to see one of them whod been shot eight times. Youd suggested earlier that a National Economic Council wasnt anything that was a particularly major innovation. 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. Decided to do this. It was an all right agreement. I stayed overnight, went back the next day. You know, you call in for five minutes apiece and theyre all lined up. And I dont accept entirely your formulation, even though I think theres a lot to it. Was there anything that particularly distinguished this campaign from what youd seen in these other instances thats noteworthy? Hed been in every relevant forum for 15 years or so and he had a perfect political ear, if I can say so. Remember, I was there during the 1963-67 period. So most of what you were doing was drawing from the people who would not have been supportive of Cuomo in any event. 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. But it was really episodic, it wasnt regular. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. He just knew how it worked. There was very little interest in that. And author of the Statute of Religious Freedom for the State of Virginia. Then there were other people who went down and the press was following all this. I do believe it was able to make a difference. They werent just opponents, they were angry and intense opponents and vitriolic opponents. Then I came upstairs, Hillary was there. Toward the end it was all about these four names or these six names and how do we get their votes. Did it succeed? I think I called that evening. Secretary Bentsen didnt know about it but a lot of other people did, and nobody paid much attention to it. He said, Its up to you. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. He told me what was going to happen to the Clinton healthcare bill the day it was announced, actually before it was announced. I doubt that youll see that. I can remember feeling very chastened because he talked about how many children we were helping and how many families we were helping and I chose to try to makejust in the spirit of celebration, a few jokes. You never saw, one time, Bob Rubin do that, not one time, after he left. So he was frantically calling members of Congress as various requests came in for him to do so. I guess that again leads to the question about the uncertainty and anxiety of a transition period, trying to figure out which person. Yes. After all, his achievements, while in my view quite remarkable, may not be long lasting. So Clinton wisely determined that this was something that Bentsen ultimately had to make the call on. But that group, top five, or six or seven, just masters of the game. She may have had a lot of influence on it, but I didnt see her. You say he didnt inspire fierce loyalty amongst a lot of his subordinates, but interestingly, I think a lot of the senior Cabinet members lasted a long time, I mean, they stayed for muchDonna Shalala was Secretary for eight years, Rubin was in for a long time, given the fact that his family didnt move to Washington. I consider that another important legacy, since not that many Presidents of the 20th century have it. Of course, we were in a different time zone, 12 hours different. and I said, I just want to serve.Im not going to give you a speech about why I should be Secretary of the Treasury. But there was the sense, based on conversationsI think you could go back and say that there were some discussions between Bentsen and Greenspan, Rubin and Greenspan, Clinton and Greenspan, although the sum total of those conversations probably took an hour. It doesnt make sense, it belies any grasp of history, and so forth. We had a chat; we had a nice time. I think it was serious as a political thing, meaning you had three candidates instead of two and of course, the dynamic was different. What really happened was that the stimulus was entirely spending-side stimulus. Im a little too close to this, because Im not sure how history will view it. Were you helping write drafts of Putting People First, platform areas? Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking. But a very useful one. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. 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. He helped me in my efforts and then a year later I helped him in his. Well, Theodore Roosevelt is a fascinating President, mostly by dint of his gargantuan personality and the way that he bestrode the country like some titanic figure. That was the moment, that day. 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. But it doesnt mention that he was President. The Treasury has a wonderful history of its own and a great deal of pride suffuses those halls. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? But it was a rather fluid, floating group. Twofold. This wont help you because its not very original, but theres something about President Clinton that had the effect of rubbing salt on a wound as far as his opponents were concerned. But the student radical movement had not penetrated? So if you survey the 50 most senior people who ever served in the Clinton administration, about 25 of them will say welfare reform was a great triumph for the President, about 25 of them will say he just caved. Then President Clinton went out on the balconythe front porch of the White House, on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, and had a press conference. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. Do you have the perception that there were some other instances where maybe this wasnt done? Clinton loves meetings like that. May I ask you if a part of the political calculus at the time was, Weve just come through a bruising battle with no Republican votes, weve got to do something to reach out and to reestablish better relations with a party thats not going anywhere over the next year, probably for the rest of the Presidency? 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. But there was a discontinuity between the campaign and the administration, In this respect exactly right. It really wasnt that way. Before we close, Id like to make one pitch though. 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. Right, but if you take too much pain up front. Then we ended up for some strange set of reasons having a giant turnout and he wowed them. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. But it wasnt political on one hand, policy on the other, just different ideologies. We didnt know if we were going to win. Were you consulting with the President occasionally after you left Washington and came back to New York? 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. Youve already mentioned the people who were attending that particular meeting. The idea of making changes or improvements in the IRS is a pretty tough idea, but you find yourself doing things like that. The process for conceiving it was a frail one, poor one. And then, of course, the political people in the White House: George Stephanopoulos of course, and others in the White House. My role was also shaped by the fact that Bentsen picked his spots very carefully and not only didnt want to be involved in everything, only wanted to be involved in a very few things. And the field against which Clinton ultimately competed was not a strong field. Id had served before and seen how not to do it. Everything is susceptible to being phased in, to being cut back, to being pilot-programmed. So, to some extent, the President had put himself in a tough spot. Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. They just didnt believe it would work. I went also for the election. Nothing, zero, never did, never would have. The buzz on Clinton, even then, among those few following it, was positive. Everyone was thinking about one thing and not expressing it. Lets face it, NAFTA has worked. Stay as long as you can figure out how to cling to it. NAFTA had much broader support among the so-called or self-styled elites, the business leadership, all the economics community, the foreign policy establishment. So my wife and I flew down to Little Rock and I met with Clinton for about two hours. There was some action forcing the schedule and the President would have had to ditch the treaty, just say, Ive decided Im not for it. So were in a partisan phase. I guess we have to just win then. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? So a group of us at the deputy level, Joan Spero, Charlene Barshefsky, Bo Cutter, me, who were the four senior members of that group, started entering into discussions with our Japanese counterparts. I never heard of them. We know youre extremely busy. Things like, I cant remember what example we used, but Senator X voted for us because he was afraid hed have to have lunch with the President again, things like that. WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by If anything comes to mind that we havent talked about, that youd like to have included. In some measure. Carter, whos a wonderful man, God knows, however is very rigid. We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. Yes, hes just that way. 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. Well, I was thinking of both actually, but in the bill. But I would also say he contributed to his own under-appreciation. Nobody said to me, Hes there. 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. David Gergen was brought, which I think was probably the fall of 93 and Panetta replaced Mackthat was an awfully big event, of course. Actually I delivered mine to great jocular reaction, but then Gene Sperling stood up and he talked about the ten reasons why this was a good bill. It wasnt between the political people and the policy people, it was among the policy people and involving some of the political people. We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese. 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]. Bob Dole. The process was really quite intense and they were taking on a task that was utterly immense, a much bigger one really than the economic program, and came forth with a plan that was revolutionary, but whose revolutionariness doomed it. He was shot eight times, mostly in the chest. The film director, known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized But the reason I remember it was that it was funereal. When did the President. The next thing is a free-trade agreement, which I think the President could have dodged, he didnt have to go all out on that. In fact, it was six months before. No, I had very little contact with Mr. Clinton for roughly 20 years after leaving. They just called someone in the war room and they had an immediate answer or immediate access to whatever they needed. I traveled to Japan a lot on business. I dont recall precisely, but Im sure Im right that Clintons standing in the polls was ebbing. 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. I went down there one day, came back the next day. I might have a point of view about what those ought to be based on certain inputs I was receiving directly from the Hill and we need to work more on this or that. That was the first time we had an opposition takeover. Then it went down to defeat. If were talking about 1991, I think his ideas were in formation. Actually, each White House that I was familiar with had its own version of what we called the National Economic Council, and if you look back for example, during the Nixon and Ford administrations, they had something quite similar. But absent such a crisis, history tends not to treat you as a great President. Can you give us a picture? 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. I had the benefit of having the office next to Lloyd Bentsen, and maybe there are some people around, even in American history, that have had a better grasp of the American Congress than Lloyd Bentsen, but I never met one. 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. Yes, that was bad advice. There was a stimulus package that dwindled, right? 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. 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. On the other hand, in the Carter White House it worked very poorly. I think each person makes his or her own decision. So people should think of it in those very basic terms, and a lot of people havent and I think less of them for that. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. I have always liked Mrs. Clinton and I had a lot of respect for her and do have a lot of respect for her. 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. Thats just the way history works. The assessment was correct because, I cant recall the size of the economy then, but today it is about $10.7 trillion. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. Its very puzzling to me how that could happen when the man had such an obvious gift for feeling peoples pain and a very strong public presence. 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