There were probably 25 major separate deals negotiated to win the passage. So I had that meeting with Clinton. You can do all kinds of approaches to anything. I mean, I saw a lot of the two of them and I became quite friendly with Hillary, and by the time I left the administration was actually much more friendly with Hillary than I was with the President, even though ironically Id obviously known him first. There is a You raised this issue with respect to the designation of sub-Cabinet officers. So is there a lot of policy difference today between the nine candidates running for the Democratic nomination in June 2003? 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. In retrospect, I think those are the two main reasons he embraced it. Do you have anyyou were sort of one of the casualties of this campaign, but was the Whitewater thing separate from this hate stuff? Im Jim Young. No. Toward the middle and latter stages they met everyday. 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. He knew what the House would do. 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. 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. What external factors were at work here? I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. Youre an exception to this. Its always a mistake to get in any kind of hassle with the Federal Reserve Board, always. Bob Dole. No, no. You dont want to start your Presidency off with a legislative defeat. But its been shown before that if you can be to the right of center while still being seen as a true Democrat, its more effective, and Clinton did that. I ran into Alice on the plane. This was breaking news, CNN [Cable News Network] was interrupting its programming and so forth and President Clinton said, What is this about? We had so much going on that Bentsen asked me if I would just, on an interim basis, serve as interim chairman of the RTC. And, of course, the ATF agents didnt know what they were going to experience and he found himself exposed to an open line of fire. Yes, actually there was a big debate about healthcare, welfare reform, and NAFTA. It was a few votes, not one vote. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. But I worked on a lot of members of Congress, I enjoyed that, I just did. So I knew we had a problem. Altman ran the White House war room during last which was a separate agency and Presidential appointment. How did the decision-making go about to decide on these different components of the package? In fact, it was six months before. I doubt that youll see that. Of course he has those who get invited to his ranch and those who dont. I have to admit I didnt. One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. 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. 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. I think it was over two days. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. Theodore Roosevelts name comes up occasionally as somebody that even Clinton himself had at least a temporary fixation on when he was evidently considering his own legacy as some one who took a progressive era, being a kind of rough approximation to the. Can you tell us a little bit about the second role? Well, both is the answer. He did a version of what Carter did earlier, which was end up positioned to the right of most of his opponents in the Democratic primaries. That has historically been, or at least in the modern era, a successful approach. Now streaming on: Powered by So Clinton wisely determined that this was something that Bentsen ultimately had to make the call on. 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. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. Were there any members in particular with whom you worked directly that you felt you were personally responsible for salvaging? There was no real reason for that, it was just fate, happenstance, just the case that not many of them did. We had a chat; we had a nice time. Was this your first opportunity? Pretty difficult to make major progress in that context. But it wasnt political on one hand, policy on the other, just different ideologies. Were you helping write drafts of Putting People First, platform areas? 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. Exactly. 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. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. No. 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. Mike Levy, our person, whod been Senator Bentsens primary legislative staffer, was a true pro, and that particular axis worked like a charm. I think of people like [Harold] Carswell and [Clement] Haynsworth that Nixon appointed and who didnt make it, it was mostly because they were seen as inferior candidates. 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 That was in recognition of that. Its not as easy. So it became effectively a simultaneous multilateral and bilateral summit because it became the setting for Clintons direct discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister. Thats why the current President may turn out to be lucky. Youre in such a good position to give us a comparative portrait of transitions internally. 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. You know, Bushs approach to international diplomacy is, Here are my buddiesall of whom he seems to nickname. But thats the type of thing the Deputy Secretary sometimes does, or when there are problems with the IRS. No I dont. 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. We cant afford to lose it, that type of stuff. Might have been established by Washington. I dont know why we were the earliest on the list. Youd seen him working with domestic policy issues and with members of Congress and support here. Three-quarters of the people who go into the Cabinet never want to leave it, its great being a Cabinet officer. I think my point is slightly different. So I dont think my reactions to that were really any different than anybody else following the campaign. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. We were tough on them on autos. Keeping in mind that with the exception of labor, which is a heck of a big exception, all of the powerful economic groups in the United States were for it and Clinton had just gone through a bruising battle where many of them were on the other side of him. Can you tell us about his decision-making process on this? Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. Right. It wasnt between the political people and the policy people, it was among the policy people and involving some of the political people. Hes chancellor of the Board of Education of New York, hes a good friend of mine, and I had dinner with him about a month ago and I said, Does it make any difference who the President is as far as youre concerned? I said, Yes, I had this one meeting, and told him what it was. I remembered him of course, but I dont think he knew me. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. No. Is this time for horse-trading? But in retrospect he basically decided in his simple-minded way that he was going to grind the Soviet Union right into the dust, and he did. We had a macro economic task force. And the next point I want to make is, there was a fateful meeting, like most of these things, very well chronicled now, in Little Rock, up at the transition, the economic team, lasted many hours, very organized meeting in the sense that it had a set of presentations and then a broad discussion. They were cutting deals like there was no tomorrow. Thats just the way history works. Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times US managing editor, interviewed Roger Altman, co-CEO of Evercore Partners. I view that as a very unfortunate decision the Democrats made, but that was a new low, or a new high, however you look at it, in partisanship. I should be very careful here. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. You had some experience with Japan before? And author of the Statute of Religious Freedom for the State of Virginia. In other words, all the work that goes in before its actually sent to the Hill. Theyre going to ask you about it, say nothing. The answer to that is yes. Could you tell us what your portfolio was within Treasury and what your primary responsibilities were? 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. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. We believed our model would attract the most talented senior finance professionals to our firm. Was that true of Georgetown at the time that you were there? 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. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. 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. Now, theyre sometimes minor changes that dont require that, but any meaningful change in the later stages required the Presidents approval. Am I misremembering, did the President invite Mr. Greenspan, to sit in the gallery next to his wife when he delivered his economic policy. 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. 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? Before we close, Id like to make one pitch though. He may have been serving the President, but he hadnt been in public life for all those years, never lost an election, become Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, didnt become a legend in order to sully his own reputation, as he saw it, over some legislation that he thought was misguided from the first moment. Well, that was just one of the many fatal diseases that this bill had. I was onboard before then, but at the end of 1991 it would have been Bob Rubin, Ken Brody, me, Stan Shuman. Any meaningful change in the bill, particularly if were talking about the last month or two, was only done with the approval of the President. I think Clinton was better served by virtue of Perots presence in the campaign than without it. But it was a mixture of considerable travel, considerable speaking, lots of radio and television shows, in some cases done locallyin other words, youre in St. Louis, youre doing them, or, alternatively from Washington where you go over to the White House and sit on a chair and do seven satellite feeds in a row, or five radio shows, or what have you. You can have whatever conversations you want to have in private. In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. Why was that a federal regulatory issue? I think well probably want to pick up there and find out about that experience. Hed been the Governor of New York for quite some time and everyone knew Cuomo and his coterie. I think we had a sandwich or something and I took off and went back to the airport. Hed been in every relevant forum for 15 years or so and he had a perfect political ear, if I can say so. Did it come from DAmato, or what? During the transition period the question was, Who are we going to nominate the head the RTC? They especially resented the role that Hillary played. You didnt need to be a management consultant to see they werent well organized. 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. 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