I cant recall what year it was but it was in the late 80s, and now its seven or eight thousand, actually up toward nine, but has more or less slid ever since. 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. I dont think thats a very good answer to your question, but I dont think I have a better one. Can you tell us about that? There were not pitched battles. Im in the first camp, it was a great triumph, but Im not sure that history will accord him that. How can you get more quantitative and specific than that? But of course Republican support was sought. Is this time for patriotism? Were there Republican members that he particularly relied on. He was very disciplined and he went to bed at a certain time and he went home. 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. Its always a mistake to challenge the Federal Reserve. 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 remember sitting there, thinking to myself, This guy just did something that I could no more imagine myself capable of doing than I could jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. My comment is a retrospective comment. But thats the type of thing the Deputy Secretary sometimes does, or when there are problems with the IRS. I knew Bentsen enough by reputation to know it was not by any means all set up, so to speak, by the time I went in there. Do you have the perception that there were some other instances where maybe this wasnt done? Youre working on prospective personnel issues? By the time 94 was over, the Congress was in Republican hands. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? In 1991 it was not organized. So he was frantically calling members of Congress as various requests came in for him to do so. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. I was struck from the beginning that Clinton was blessed with a very weak field, which, for example, is not the case today. It was killed when Senator [Donald] Riegle, the chairman of the Banking Committee, announced that he would oppose it, so that was the end of that. So I spent a lot of time on healthcare. Within a month, I remember vividly one day, I had seven radio shows. I think his views at that point were in formation. I think there were missed opportunities, yes; I dont believe they would have made a big difference however. That was a period during which [Boris] Yeltsin was just coming onto the stage. 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. But most of my time was spent on legislation. Then, as the weeks and months went by, it came closer and closer and closer to whip counts. Do you have any recollections of seeing anything different in him as a candidate at that point for that position? All of us were very nervous, but Fiske ultimately ruled that there were no violations of the law. Ill never forget that, he was a good guy, a real good old boy, I cant recall his name now, hes not in Congress any longer, but I arrived at the airport and he meets me and he says, Look, just get one thing straight, youre not going to say a word today about guns, nothing. People forget that, even today. Georgetown was the equivalent of a placid, slow-moving river and Chicago was the equivalent of a roaring torrent. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. Lets take five minutes and well come back for the rest of the morning session. He was not confronted with a grave crisis, but I think history will treat him very well, because essentially. Certainly on free trade you would say that there was a consistency in his rhetoric during the campaign and the behavior of the administration after he was elected. I just remember that being contemporaneous with the real beginning of an organized effort here. Phil Gramm, Ill never forget, predicted that it would usher in a new depressionI mean depression, not recession. Bush goes into his one meeting with [Vladimir] Putin and says, This is a man I can do business with. In other words a handful of conservative Democrats whose votes we had to have because we had no Republican votes. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. Somethings pretty strange here. he is one of famous Financial professional with the age 75 years old group. Because it promotes a lack of confidence in financial markets and, for that matter, a lack of confidence in the business community, a sense that that administration doesnt know what its doing. I think those discussions, including that particular one, in retrospect, had a considerable effect on him. It just depended on the size of the concession. So, looking back on it, the nature and the history of those three men had a lot to do with the eventual outcome. You look at the turnover that she hador in her case did not haveon her staff, and the turnover that he had. You were responsible for organizing the war room. His popularity had sunk to low levels. The notion, by the way, in Bob Woodwards book, The Agenda, that Greenspan was hovering over the proceedings like an angel of death is completely fictitious. Everything is susceptible to being phased in, to being cut back, to being pilot-programmed. You were responsible then for recruiting the people who were going to be in it? So there were four, Fiske and the other three, and they all came to the same conclusion, and the latter three also addressed the question of whether any of the government ethical guidelines had been violated and they all concluded no, they hadnt been. I knew Bob Kerrey quite well by that time and Bob was very unpredictable. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? You didnt have to spend much time around them to see this. Was there awareness at that time, I mean, in the perspective of 2003, I recognize the world looks different. You couldnt do that. Thats something we dont have a lot of information about. I was exposed to that, but I didnt have a particular say in it. 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. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. 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. We founded Evercore in 1995, on the premise that clients would be best served by an investment banking firm free of the conflicts of interest inherent to large, multi-product financial institutions. Id had served before and seen how not to do it. We just discussed one of them, which is the up cycle in partisanship, as I call it. We didnt have a crisis in the foreign exchange markets. I direct the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center. On the policy issues at this point are you beginning to see any kind of evolution or any kind of establishment of governing priorities, or again, is this a question thats held off on until after the election? Whatever was going on on the deck of the Titanic was comparable, but it was absolutely frantic and incredibly dramatic and tense. In any event, we didnt have a currency crisis at the time of that summit, or really didnt have one until the very middle, latter stages of the Clinton years. They had a very unsuccessful discussion, which resulted in name calling and cursing. For one reason or other, Clinton developed some very powerful antagonists in the press, most notably Howell Raines of the New York Times editorial page, and the New York Times treatment of Clinton became a virtual industry unto itself. You may remember that Clinton put forward a white paper, if I can call it that, called Putting People First, which came out I believe at the end of 1991. You referred earlier to Garys question that most of the decisions that Clinton made about his priorities came post-election, but the process. We were very explicit. Did you do anything else? Im not sure thats true or it isnt. But the presumption was that the head of the agency of course did know that. I respected him, but I never identified with him and I didnt see him being a successful Democratic nominee. No, no. The second was the evolution of the deficit estimates during that period. But I worked on a lot of members of Congress, I enjoyed that, I just did. The period during which Bentsens views werent treated with quite enough respect was a very short one. We havent exhausted the topic of budgets and we want to talk further about that, but since youve already opened the door on this question about historical opposition and so forth, I thought that you might want to discuss your perceptions about how the existence of that institution changes the dynamic in Washington. I did, not before Congress, before the grand jury. 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. That certainly, in terms of social assistance to low-income working age people, that was a transformative administration. Ill just go to the highlight reel, but reality is that on the day of the vote, we didnt think that we had the votes. I first met Bill Clinton in college. That was a factor. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. No. There was no surprise. 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. In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. They werent just opponents, they were angry and intense opponents and vitriolic opponents. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? Roger Altman (left) launched Evercore in 1995 and shed the CEO title in May of last year when Ralph Schlosstein (right) took it and quintupled assets under management to $15 billion. So you can imagine sitting next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. But its the economy, stupid doesnt communicate a set of priorities within the administration about what steps they will take. But the next day, Monday, I was on a plane to Waco, Texas. So there was not a war of the type that has so often been written about, just not true. Most of the budget directors thus far, Alice Rivlin, Leon Panetta, Jack Lewwe spent a day with Larry Summers, a number of the political people as well, speechwriters and so forth. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. Even at the end of 91 it was small and relatively unformed. 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. Bob Rubin. Just be sure it doesnt collapse during the interim. Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. I spoke to the Oklahoma state legislature. I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. 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. First of all, Clintonand I consider this a very important historical achievement, well see how it lastsmay turn out to have transformed the Democratic party. Two questions, one of which was minor. Im not the best witness on that because I didnt see it or feel it, but there may well have been. 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. But I dont think Ive ever witnessed, I can only call it a hate campaign, or feeling of hate I guesswhether its a campaign or not I dont knowbut this intense animosity to Bill Clinton and to Hillary Clinton. Altman gave 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. 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. I would actually like to hear you answer that question too. Everybody gets a nametag, and theres the Secretary of the Treasury, the Deputy Secretary of this and Director of OMB, and youre all sitting around, a very staged setting. Mr. Clinton became aware of that. I went down there one day, came back the next day. I disagree that hes under-appreciated. He wouldnt call the others back; hed have me do that because when youre Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and some freshman Senator called you, you didnt tend to talk to him. 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. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. Some people thought they were misguided. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. That was the all-time low for the dollar. Yes, there was a big debate about whether it should be healthcare or NAFTA. Im not sure that was what they originally intended, I suppose it was, but I wasnt involved in the planning of the summit, I just went to it and had a role on one of the panels and sat around for a couple of days, really. So is there a lot of policy difference today between the nine candidates running for the Democratic nomination in June 2003? When we had the opportunity to sit down, our own leadershipyou mentioned Leon Panetta, for example, having been chosenand formulate a fresh set of estimates based on all the then latest data, and obviously reaching out to a whole host of experts, it became clear that the deficit outlook was considerably worse than we thought. Well, let me stop. No, he doesnt, not in terms of the way I would define close friends, genuine friends. Only to a degree. So that the link in Clintons mind between deficit reduction and stimulus disappeared when it got into the political arena. You referred earlier to the cycles of political partisanship, policy issues. But the other approach for a short-term stimulus would be to do what this President did, or maybe it was the Democrats that forced him to do when he took office, which is refundable credit that goes out in the middle of the summer of your first year in office. 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. 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?" Well, it was also a surprise to many in the administration because the truth is, the fight over the economic plan took every ounce of energy that everyone had and attention didnt really turn to NAFTA until that was over, and that was over in August. That was the first thing I did. So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. I remember that vividly the day of the convention, the morning the convention ended, or maybe the morning after it ended. He said, Its up to you. Was this your first opportunity? In that regard, I would guess that your background on Wall Street was a big help in terms of talking with these members and having a rapport with them that they would feel comfortable with? Remember, youre playing for four years, youre not playing for one year. The process for conceiving it was a frail one, poor one. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. But why was it bloodless? So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. The President made a decision he was going toand he discussed this during the campaign at lengthbe more aggressive with Japan to have a fairer, more level playing field. I took it anyway. Can you give us a picture? We wont get into a philosophy, an argument, about causation, I think Reagans Presidency, a bit, goes against what youre saying, thats all. I mean, to give you an example, wed been in office I think several days, and the Sunday after the inauguration I was sitting at home in New York because my family hadnt moved yet. Altman Thats true, yes. 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. He should have taken it. We knew each other, but we turned out to be the first two to go down and I dont know why that was. 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. 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