from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. It was the best political speech, with a couple of exceptions, Id ever heard, which prompted a wonderful comment from former President Bush, who then came to the microphone and said, Now I know why Im on the outside looking in. I know the Congress and the Congress isnt going to buy it. I just remember that being contemporaneous with the real beginning of an organized effort here. Ive never either been attracted to that approach nor felt that it was an effective one. Did you go to Little Rock for the election? Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? I mean, theyre all just issuing healthcare plans right now and there are some important differences among them, but 99 percent of the primary voters will not know those differences. And presided over eight years of peace. Did the portfolio members that you were approaching on NAFTA change from the work you were doing. Right as it was up, the Wall Street Journal does a full-page profile on Bentsen, right here on the right. Was it Mickey Kantor? The following MondayI was out West actuallyI flew back to Washington and I believe I resigned on Wednesday. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. So there are the four main elements. Its very difficult to do that during a campaign. 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. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? There was a stimulus package that dwindled, right? Now, it may last five or six more years, it may last 25 more years, I dont know. I went to Wall Street after the University of Chicago, and then after seven years on Wall Street, I went into the [Jimmy] Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Im Jim Young. 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? Was there a representative of the campaign. What political or personal characteristics does she have that he doesnt have, what does she bring to the. And also, the opportunity to finally address what the real economic situation and fiscal situation was. WebCornerstone Recovering Community (11001 South Wentworth Avenue) located at 11001 South Wentworth Avenue, Chicago, IL 60628, United States is a drug rehab facility Then I would have discussions with Clinton, usually on the fly, about certain economic issues I thought were important. But it was not a novel idea at all. What are the lasting accomplishments, the lasting legacies of this administration, regardless of whether the historians are going to pick up these strains as being historically important or flamboyantly important enough to elevate Clinton into an upper- echelon Presidency? I just never took him seriously as a candidate. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. But why was it bloodless? But for reasons I dont fully understand, it goes in cycles, and we came into office at a time when an up cycle so to speak on partisanship was asserting itself. So heres a person who knew how to manage himself. I talk to the President now from time to time with some frequency. 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. But the election result itself was anticlimactic. So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. 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. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? One of the reasons it was bloodless was because the Soviets knew what they had and didnt have and what we had and they didnt have. 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. Whats the question, why didnt Clinton embrace welfare ahead of healthcare? Then, as the weeks and months went by, it came closer and closer and closer to whip counts. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. He was not confronted with a grave crisis, but I think history will treat him very well, because essentially. For some people the idea was, a southern Governor almost by definition has a better chance than a lot of other candidates. So the question naturally arises, was it his economics? For other people it was Clintons legendary one-on-one prowess and his effectiveness in small groups, but I dont think theres any one reason why this person or that. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. Why was that a federal regulatory issue? Im trying to get a sense of what their input to the whole process was. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. The Times, which is typically, of course, a Democratic-leaning paper, was Clintons severest clinic throughout his whole Presidency, and on Whitewater went crazy. When you say the coordinator, you mean of the Presidents message? If Whitewater occurred today or there was some like set of issues surrounding President Bush and his past, I dont think thered be a single hearing about it. I also learned that when I saw that, it wasnt likely to ultimately succeed. I didnt have a background in healthcare of any kind, and I began to see that it was overloading the circuits to try to do as much as some wanted to. That was the logical place because I served there before. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. But in any event, the cooperation in both cases was optimal. The reason it didnt succeed a lot more than that is because its really macro factors that drive this. I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. Those things were at a peak in 94, just at the time healthcare was on the table. Its not clear to me however that history will accord him that credit. You were both involved then in student government. 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. So its funny how reality quickly returns. WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by We wont get into a philosophy, an argument, about causation, I think Reagans Presidency, a bit, goes against what youre saying, thats all. Clinton loves meetings like that. Im not sure it makes entire sense, however, to judge or to assess a Presidents contribution by the standard of those who are given, in effect, a free gift of power to deal with a crisis. Were you involved in discussions at this point about what would be next in the queue for the administration, because there were some other. There were those obviously who felt the most important thing was to get the deficit down. That raises the question then of the people he was meeting with here. Did it come out of Arkansas? But Clinton went for it, Clinton listened, Clinton deserves tremendous credit. He said, I know this will be hard, but I think I can get those folks. One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. I started getting inundated with letters from Congress asking how the RTC intended to handle this, stirred up by this Republican campaign. The Republicans in the Senate especially, led by Senator [Alfonse] DAmato who was Chairman of the Banking Committeeno, he was ranking minority member, became Chairman after the election of 94. I dont really think Bentsen knew me at all. Did you do any traveling with Clinton on the campaign around New York or outside of New York? But its there on the record; everybody can read those reports. Some of them I think were insincere, but many of them were sincere. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. How were those dealt with, the decision to make a significant concession in the bill? Not too much, though. I want to come back to something that we had touched upon earlier, and that was this question about the administrations prioritizations, because you had suggested that there were some internal discussions, even at the time that NAFTA was taken on, as to what to do next. This goes back to that question about the interim between the pain and the payoff. He and Kerrey had a very close relationship. He was quite in the minority at the time. But my guess is that those kinds of. I really think its just that basic. It pains me to recognize that thats 35 years ago, but no, it wasnt the case. Thats something we dont have a lot of information about. There were so many different Japanese Prime Ministers in that period I cant remember which one we had at that moment. There were probably 25 major separate deals negotiated to win the passage. We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. So it depends a lot on the people. 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. 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. Thats why I wonder whether there was some kind of perception, outside. But by historians. So no, Bentsen did not go over to the White House, hang around, talk about legislative strategy. His popularity had sunk to low levels. The first thing that we typically do is a quick voice identification so that the transcriptionist will know whos talking at any given time.Im Russell Riley, the project leader for the Clinton Presidential History Project. Yes. I wasnt there because I was an expert in international finance. Yes, there was a big debate about whether it should be healthcare or NAFTA. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. So it became effectively a simultaneous multilateral and bilateral summit because it became the setting for Clintons direct discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister. 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. Youre referring to the environmental and labor side issues. Am I misremembering, did the President invite Mr. Greenspan, to sit in the gallery next to his wife when he delivered his economic policy. Well, it was just a strange evening. I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. We began to have fundraisers toward the end of 91. There was. I dont know about developing the convention. Bentsen never lost an election, period, on which he was head of the ticket, ever. I mean, the reasons why Japan has had such difficulty in terms of its domestic economy are not reasons that an agreement with the United States is going to importantly affect, no more than our signing a trade agreement with Japan that committed us to try to do more at home to pump up our economy would be a big element in whether we did or didnt ultimately see economic growth here. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. Once you get NAFTA behind you, my guess is that there were further discussions at that point about what ought to be next and this is when healthcare becomes a priority. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. Whenever the times got tough or after they left or whatever it was, I think a lot of people who left the Clinton administration lowered themselves by their own behavior in terms of lesser loyalty than they should have had. I knew a lot about Perot, having been heavily involved in Wall Street for many years. 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. He must have wondered what he was doing. You were involved in the Little Rock Economic Summit? 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. Can you tell us about that? At the time we were working on it there was a sense on the Japanese side that it was a zero-sum game. But, in any event, there was some sense that if we would tighten fiscal policy, there was the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. Now remember, Clinton had said he was going to cut the deficit in half. Secretary [William] Simon spent hours with me, which is quite odd in retrospect since I was 32. 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. So it quickly became apparent that some elements of the plan were going to face heavy sledding. But I think if you study American history and you look at any number of earlier periods, the attacks on Abraham Lincoln for example comes to mind, the Andrew Jackson period, such extreme partisanship is common in American history. There were ten or twelve or fourteen or fifteen, big numbers. Its a famous meeting in the sense that Woodward wrote a lot about it, other people have written about it. I appreciate that and I think youve done us a big favor today by illuminating that. I think part of him saw an embrace of NAFTA as an opportunity to reestablish that he was a person of conviction, that he wasnt just in the pocket of the old traditional Democratic constituencies, wasnt just a tax-raiser and spender. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? I took it anyway. She wasnt a participant in those. I went and visited the injured agents in the hospital. I attended Georgetown University and I was a year ahead of him. But an awful lot of people love being Cabinet officers and leave only most reluctantly. Youre working on prospective personnel issues? That was just an amazing experience. Most of the trade was being handled by what was called the NEC [National Economic Council] deputies, which is the Deputy Secretary level of the NEC. Every time they had a new Prime Minister, we had a new set of characters. Did you do anything else? That is foolish because history provides lessons on these matters. Before the grand jury before Starr, and how was that experience? I guess I figured, were I to be appointed something, it would likely be in the Treasury, and perhaps, by process of elimination, nothing else seemed logical to me. No, not at all. If you go to Monticello, to his actual tombstone, then you know that he drafted his own epitaph: Governor of Virginia, founder of the University of Virginia, and author of the Declaration of Independence. He was not, no. 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 Will policy differences be the reason that candidate X or candidate Y emerges with the nomination? Clinton was offered a compromise by Senators [John] Breaux and [David] Boren. Could you tell us what your portfolio was within Treasury and what your primary responsibilities were? Where the negotiations broke down, I dont know what caused it. Nothing, zero, never did, never would have. But when youre in the administrationI mean, as you well know, there are many on the more liberal side of the Clinton alumni who think the administration basically adopted the Republican position on welfare reform and that was what enabled it to happen, and anybody could have done it and Clinton doesnt deserve a lot of credit for it. And the field against which Clinton ultimately competed was not a strong field. Not necessarily. I mean, obviously, if it came down to the crunch time, youre going to have the President call. His view was, I want to pick good people and let them do their jobs. 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. Or was it just that you were persuaded that he was going to be a great candidate? Well, we were talking about lasting changes. If Im not mistaken, we were looking at a $350 billion deficit, up from about $260 or something that we had been generally using during the campaign. I was working on the economic program, I was working on trade and certain departmental matters like Ive just described. 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. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? I hadnt been parachuted in from some distant spot without any such relations. Then I came upstairs, Hillary was there. The assessment was correct because, I cant recall the size of the economy then, but today it is about $10.7 trillion. Then about an hour before the vote, thats it, we knew that Kerrey would vote for us and then of course Gore could break the tie. I mean just the vote itself and the fact that not a single Republican voted for this, which even by its critics is seen now as having been at least a contributor to the economic prosperity and fiscal balance that later resulted. He may have kicked it off in a certain sense, but it has continued even more strongly to some degree in the last couple of years, but that was another broad historical development, critical historical development, which characterized the Clinton period. 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 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. 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. There are many people in the administration who dont like the welfare reform that was ultimately signed, believed that Clinton ultimately turned centrist on the issue and anybody could have done that and once you did it as a Democratic President, you were going to have welfare reform. You dont want to start your Presidency off with a legislative defeat. 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? He didnt like Clintons stimulus program. There was a widespread sense that Japan was taking advantage of the relationshipin various ways. He knew what the House would do. Ive known many members. Those are two different questions, Id rather answer the will be question. Then he asked me to begin to work on certain personnelpresent him possible choices for the senior jobs in the department. So anyway, within a few days, all of us who had anything to do with the RTC from the point of view of the Treasury were subpoenaed by Fiske. That was his answer. So there was not a war of the type that has so often been written about, just not true. 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. Fortunately Secretary Bentsen said, No, not fine. 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