But its just one of those periods in Washington when partisanship is at a peak. Were you consulting with the President occasionally after you left Washington and came back to New York? They had a very unsuccessful discussion, which resulted in name calling and cursing. Carter had the famous $50 rebate, which became the object of much derision ultimately. Thats a very important difference, because it addressed healthcare, various items on childrens policy, crime initiatives, urban policythe full span of domestic policy issues, of which economic policy was just one element. Today it is seen as structural. But really, not until the spring of 1991 when I began to hear rumblings that he was thinking of running. There were so many different Japanese Prime Ministers in that period I cant remember which one we had at that moment. I should double-check that. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? I wasnt involved in any of the delegate-related strategies, no. Clinton made an error, didnt take it. 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. So hes the one who asked you to serve in that position, not Clinton. In the 12 years between Clinton and Carter, there had been famous acrimony between the Fed and the White House and the Treasury. I take these observations, very astute observations, from people who live in this discipline. 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. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. So its really a role that varies from Secretary to Secretary in terms of what that Secretary wants, and thats just a history of it. I recall reading in one account that Clinton had worked on a kind of unusual cluster of issues as a candidate for student body president at the time. If you can think of a great President, a President who is seen as really great, who didnt have such a crisis, Id like to hear it, because I dont think there is one. Senior Management, U.S. Investment Banking and Evercore ISI businesses are conducted through Evercore Group L.L.C., a member of. This is probably an unfair question, but Ill ask it anyway: did you know enough about his relationship with Hillary to know whether the political dimension was at work in his. That was his answer. He knew the rhythm, so to speak, of the Democratic Party, including in New York. Ive never either been attracted to that approach nor felt that it was an effective one. The answer to that is yes. So again, it wasnt all about President Clinton. Now, of course, as far as working the Hill was concerned, I would take my cues from the constant and joint planning of the White House and Treasury legislative liaison staffs. I dont think hes going to make it into the pantheon of heroes, as I said. Ford actually attended regularly, I dont mean every day, but regularly, and it was just a version of what Clinton did. Lets face it, NAFTA has worked. 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, both is the answer. Because they thought, If we hold those hostages very long at all after this man becomes President, we may be nuclearized. I think there were missed opportunities, yes; I dont believe they would have made a big difference however. I think thats a wonderful tradition. 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. We had a good discussion and I went back to the airport and flew home. Roger C. Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, which has become the most active independent investment bank in the world. Bentsen really respected Dole. It was after all largely negotiated by his predecessors, and yet he took a big gamble on that one, too, and thats sort of a kick in the midsection to a lot of his Democratic supporters. Now, theyre sometimes minor changes that dont require that, but any meaningful change in the later stages required the Presidents approval. It was just not very well run, as I recall it, until that time. There could be a lot of backsliding on that, well have to see. I remember that day. I went down there one day, came back the next day. Bentsen tended to say very little at those meetings except at the end, when Clinton would turn to Bentsen and say, What would you do, Lloyd? I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. The President relied on Bentsen and Altman to take on some of his Administrations toughest tasks. Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett) tells off her sister-in-law (Peggy Ann Garner) in Robert Altman's "A Wedding." By the time 94 was over, the Congress was in Republican hands. 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. Well, about ten minutes later President Clinton called me. Roger Altman April 4 2016 Receive free US trade updates Well send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest US trade news every morning. 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. We might have a thousand independent counsels operating under the freedom of the press, investigations. In a curious way hed compromised his own position. Only to a degree. 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. 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? Before the grand jury before Starr, and how was that experience? 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. Yes. That by choosing Panetta, and Bentsen, and Rubin, he chose economic conservatives. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? 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. and I had no previous knowledge of it at all. Obviously he balanced the budget, now its unbalanced. Some of them, yes. Yes, hes just that way. Some people thought they were misguided. But was it a battle? Weve talked about the general idea that the administration was going to accept pain by having deficit reduction in the early years, but theres still the question of how youre going to mete out the pain. That was the fundamental choice they made in devising the reform. Thats true, yes. Im Jim Young. It got more organized as 92 unfolded. 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. I had no background for that. We came into office, the trade imbalance of payments deficit with Japan had risen to very high levels. Also, wed had 12 years of Republican rule and there was a widespread sense of time for change. I dont think I would have known otherwise. 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. So my second point is that I was a part of that during the pre-war room period. I just didnt; it wasnt my style. @ 34.032138, -118.722249. All the groundwork had been done before the storm broke, so there were probably three to four hundred people. I sat there for two or three hours and he took the measure of me and at the end he said, Would you like to do this? Clinton, as I mentioned before, held a series of marathon meetings, I recall that virtually all of them were on the Roosevelt Room, and they went on for four, five, six, seven hours, talking about possible elements of the economic program. So I had that meeting with Clinton. I remember Allen going through that. We knew each other, but we turned out to be the first two to go down and I dont know why that was. I think Clinton authentically saw healthcare as more important, believed it was a bigger national problem, and thought he was tackling the bigger of the two. Can you tell us generally about your role during the general election campaign? He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. That was just how all Presidents should act. Youre working on prospective personnel issues? Altman gave Those are my exact words. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, Notice of Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunity. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. 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. And deficit reduction was his top priority, a focus at the top? I went straight down to Washington and moved in, and I was there on the day the office opened, as were many other people. And it was just fuel on the already roaring fire of Whitewater. So it could be revived again tomorrow. I personally thought Rubin was most likely to be Secretary of the Treasury. They just called someone in the war room and they had an immediate answer or immediate access to whatever they needed. Well, within about two weeks of the election, certainly by the end of November, the actual transition offices were established in Washington. So what I actually spent my time on ranged all over the lot. Disrespecting the President. No, two funny stories, Jim, dont let him off so easily. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. He was named the first week of December. He loved policy. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. Then President Clinton went out on the balconythe front porch of the White House, on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, and had a press conference. We recommend you to check the complete But most of my time was spent on legislation. I think it did. How did the decision-making go about to decide on these different components of the package? You didnt have to spend much time around them to see this. It was really only when Erskine Bowles became Deputy Chief of Staff that a structure began to be built around Clinton that enabled all those processes to become more organized. I stayed down there for a day and a half, maybe 24 hours. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. At best I had an input, and in some cases it was just obvious that some of these other folks had to be in it. Well, it was supposed to become the law of North America on January 1st, wasnt it? I mean, by that time, the group that was advising him on economic policy had become reasonably well set. But, first, right at the outset, it was a terribly flawed idea to have a full-time member of the administration serving also as the head of an independent regulatory agency and that should have dawned on me in the earliest going, just the inherent conflict there. Exactly. I think the days for that have largely passed, I dont think members of Congress care much about that. It used to be, I believe, that they were graded on grounds of competent scholarship and so forth. Or was it just that you were persuaded that he was going to be a great candidate? It just depended on the size of the concession. But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. Well, I dont think theyd like it. There was not a war going on. 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. I was asked a second time to do it on the healthcare. 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. Those meetings were, at one level, rather riveting, but at another level they were disorganized. I was not. He loved it. It was just not the way to run the railroad. Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. The Regency Hotel. It was quite a full-bore effort. But part of our efforts were to get the Japanese to agree to certain pump-priming measures at home to lift domestic demand, increase the Japanese demand for imports, and better balance the current account relationship. Ill give you an answer but Ill preface it by saying Im not sure my memory is quite right here. I mean I hired really good lawyers, and they told me pretty early in the process that on the substance there was no issue, that you have to worry about the fact that in this country prosecutions can become very political, but they just didnt think that it was much of an issue on the legal precedence and the substance. But I only began to spend heavy time on that after the August passage of the Presidents economic program. I suppose everyone has his own definition of intimate, but by any standard Im familiar with, I was not an intimate of Clintons. Working on the Hill, traveling? Well, how do you know? There were people like Senator [Phil] Gramm saying it would usher in a new depression. Web(Studio: Charles Gibson) Earlier interview held with Evercore Partners Roger Altman about the House vote and the market reaction. No, I dont remember the actual moment when we met. Did you have a sense on the Japanese policy that we actually had a policy or that we had something that was in lieu of policy? You didnt have to spend a lot of time with Lloyd Bentsen to know that he wasnt going to be shunted aside. 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. I ended up doing that over the space of four, five, six weeks. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. I dont think this is what it really says, but I suppose in the distant lens of history, Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War. Lets face it, I mean, the highlight of that ticket was Bentsen in 1988. He would explain to me the problems with the particular pieces, but, I dont know if you had to be Bentsen, did you? There was also a whole series of other investigations undertaken at the same time, one by the Office of Government Ethics, one by the Treasury Inspector General, one by the Office of White House Counsel. The election took place on the first Tuesday of November. Bob Rubin was the ultimate financial market person, knew the role of the Federal Reserve so well. The President and Vice President, I think it was Leon Panetta, and myself, one other person, he and I were standing there, looking out, it was a beautiful August night, not too hot, and it was just an amazing moment. 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. First of all, the actual role of the Deputy Secretary as defined in the Treasury mission statement is to do what the Secretary of the Treasury asks him to. My testimony was rather a highlight of that. That was partly because Bentsen was a person who had never failed at anything. But the student radical movement had not penetrated? I would say presided over, Id have to check the statistics, but probably the greatest period of economic prosperity in the entire century, or ushered in the greatest period of prosperity in the entire century. I dont. Second of all, I am not a classic liberal, so Ive thought for 20 or 25 years that classic 60s liberalism was the wrong way to go. During the Ford administration they had something called the Economic Policy Board I believe it was, EPB and Bill Simon as Secretary of Treasury was the head of the board and it met actually every morning in the White House. I mean, there are libraries full of books that have already been written about that. You had made your choice to support him before it was clear that he was going to wow a lot of people in New York. From that time forward, about 79 times out of 80 Clinton did whatever Bentsen said. Then I would have discussions with Clinton, usually on the fly, about certain economic issues I thought were important. We had lunch. There were a lot of people who did take that candidacy very seriously though, right? Lets take five minutes and well come back for the rest of the morning session. So I guess wed like to hear the story about your involvement in both cases, focusing on your relationships with members of Congress, how the division of labor was, your relationships with the. 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 theres no reporting responsibility, its treated as one office, a little bit like a corporate office of the chairman which includes the chairman, and the CEO, and the President and chief operating officer, and maybe even one or two others. I think I called that evening. Clinton gave his State of the Union address, the 28th of January, eight days after being inaugurated. This goes back to that question about the interim between the pain and the payoff. Somehow it came off successfully in Miami with all these heads of state and everybody was very happy with it. Against that test, a noncrisis Presidency, what can they achieve, under the extremely adverse politics of this time, thats been building up. But its just a reality that in an economy of that size, spending changes arent going to have much effect on the economy; monetary changes can. I would say we had a definite policy, we just didnt achieve too much of it. So its funny how reality quickly returns. 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