There were some enormous differences. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. I recall taking maybe one or two trips with him outside New York, mostly just for my own enjoyment, to see what it was like. Ive seen it happen so often in business as well as in government. I dont mean that facetiously. But, in any event, as soon as I flew back from Tokyo, I moved into this area in the old Executive Office Building they had cleared out and I was the person in charge of the war room, and it worked I think for five weeks give or take. So my second point is that I was a part of that during the pre-war room period. One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? You never saw, one time, Bob Rubin do that, not one time, after he left. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. For example, a year later, the fall following my graduation, I attended the University of Chicago, which was perhaps more than any other university, except the University of Wisconsin, the center of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activity. He could have been all rhetorical about it. But a very useful one. I respected him, but I never identified with him and I didnt see him being a successful Democratic nominee. Well, that was just one of the many fatal diseases that this bill had. I remember the very stirring tableau as you may remember, the Clintons and the Gores came out onto this beautifully lit portico and there were, it seemed, thousands of people on the street in front of them. In general, no. I cant remember allTom Brokaw was there, Davis Weinstock, Dick Beatty, Bob Rubin, George Katz, and/or Bernie Nussbaum were there. Did the portfolio members that you were approaching on NAFTA change from the work you were doing. 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. That was pretty damn effective. You look at the relationships he ended up having with a lot of people that he was initially close to and were central to his administration, whether its George Stephanopoulos or whoever else it may be. 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 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. Then maybe half of them we discussed about this person, that person. So actually I didnt have any concerns. You referred earlier to Garys question that most of the decisions that Clinton made about his priorities came post-election, but the process. I mean one of the oldest rules of Presidential management is, take your pain up front. 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. Mr. Altman began his investment banking career at You know, Clintons Presidency coincided with a lot of big changes in the body politic at large. By that time, Clinton had his idea of the middle-class tax cut, and he had his idea of cutting the deficit in half during his first term, I think it was. Certainly the appointment of someone with the stature of Rubin signaled that this was not going to be a junior level kind of a thing and it was not going to be headed by one of the usual powerful people, OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or Secretary of the Treasury. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. Who was the coordinator, if any, in the first follow up? Ultimately they were in effect combined into one big wish list, and that wish list went forward. The assessment was correct because, I cant recall the size of the economy then, but today it is about $10.7 trillion. But the main argument was economic. You had some experience with Japan before? There was quite a discussion that day about long-term interest rates, as I said the credit markets rather than the Fed. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. I talk to the President now from time to time with some frequency. Its really a bad thing to say to a senior Cabinet officer, Well, your deputy isWe dont want to get off on that, but thats a very bad approach. 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. That by choosing Panetta, and Bentsen, and Rubin, he chose economic conservatives. There have been a lot of great American Presidents. The phone rang and I was told by the Under Secretary for Enforcement that there had been a raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on a complex in Waco, Texas, which had gone terribly wrong. I think its wrong from a policy point of view. And I also think that theres a certain sense of loyalty among the people that are currently serving in this administration, which is more in keeping with tradition, than the Clinton folks, or many of them I should say, brought to it. This would have been before you were in the transition office? It was quite a full-bore effort. We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. I do hope as we proceed that you will take the time to give us your continuing perceptions of Bentsen because unfortunately he is somebody we had approached about doing an interview and. I also think Clinton knew he was going to go up against some of his oldest allies, whether it was Marian Wright Edelman, whomever it was, in terms of welfare reform, and was prepared to do it, but wasnt really looking forward to it. But the burden of my question was it would be a lot of the people whod voted for the economic package that youre putting in this position, right? But at the end it was breathtaking. Remember, I was there during the 1963-67 period. Arthur Burns was the chairman of the Fed. My testimony was rather a highlight of that. I think each person makes his or her own decision. So there was a lot of humor like that. There was concern that we had already spilled an enormous amount of blood on the economic plan. Do you remember at what point this revised estimate comes in? 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. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. You might call it something different. 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. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. 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. So, to some extent, the President had put himself in a tough spot. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. WebRoger Altman: Formerly deputy Treasury secretary, Altman resigned Aug. 29, 1994 following revelations he tipped the White House off to criminal referrals made by None of the aspects of her role bothered me at all. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. Did it come from DAmato, or what? Just promotes disunity and so forth. The process for conceiving it was a frail one, poor one. You see people scrambling to monopolize the left. Theres a time lag between taking painful steps to do something with the deficit and getting some response in the. We had a chronic problem with Japan because they had so many Prime Ministers. Of course that depends on the moment in question. He has difficulty speaking. 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. Yes, but typically you wouldnt resort to that with relative stability in the exchange markets, and we did have relative stability. She wears her heart on her sleeve much more than he does. But in any event, it hasnt ended with President Clintons leaving. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. By and large Bentsen talked to Clinton when Clinton called him.That was the way it worked. Hed been shot eight times. Why a war room? 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. I think it was serious as a political thing, meaning you had three candidates instead of two and of course, the dynamic was different. But I didnt unilaterally choose all the members of it. That was all part of the same ultimate mix. Of course, there was Leon Panetta, and Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen, Alice Rivlin, Laura Tyson, myself, Gene Sperling, those were really the main members. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. I didnt know what to expect. I sat next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. We had a good discussion and I went back to the airport and flew home. He created a big expectation with that speech that he gave I think in the fall of 1993. Those are my exact words. But the election result itself was anticlimactic. At my sons school, on the floor where the history department is, each President gets a little tiny picture and about two lines. 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. The President said to me at one moment when we were alone, and with great heat, he said to me, Roger, you see, theres no constituency at all for Wall Street economics, which is how he viewed his plan, that hed sold himself to Wall Street and you see theres no constituency for that because were about to lose. The contrast between Chicago, which was in an uproar at the time, and Georgetown couldnt have been more vivid. That approach hasnt been able to capture a majority of the American public for 40 years and I dont think its going to capture the majority of the American public for another 40 years. I think our administration tried, as hard as it was possible to try, to change the dynamic of the U.S.-Japanese trade relationship. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. 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 think. The chief, the captain of that ship with Mickey Kantor, USTR [United States Trade Representative], and to some considerable extent Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, and Lloyd Bentsen played a big role in it. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? He does not see that as one of his own great accomplishments. They were using very powerful weaponsI think .20 caliber weapons. No, first of all, it wasnt his focus. 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 worked in the White House another three or four months, worked on, for example, the bailout of Washington, D.C., and then the passage of the new control board type legislation and then my kids got out of school in June. Nothing, zero, never did, never would have. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. And also, the opportunity to finally address what the real economic situation and fiscal situation was. To this day, I have a much closer relationship with her than I do with him. But in any event, what gets discussed most in the campaign historically may or may not be the first or second major initiative that comes from the new President. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. I would say it had to do with an overall perception that he was the most substantive and the best politician. The idea of making changes or improvements in the IRS is a pretty tough idea, but you find yourself doing things like that. Were you involved in discussions at this point about what would be next in the queue for the administration, because there were some other. Is this time for patriotism? That certainly, in terms of social assistance to low-income working age people, that was a transformative administration. I dont really think Whitewater, at least this part of it, was terribly different from some of the other such situations that weve all seen, whether its the John Tower hearings or its Bert Lance or whatever it is. Its a famous meeting in the sense that Woodward wrote a lot about it, other people have written about it. They just didnt do it. He gave the best speech I, at least to that point, had ever heard him give, and I think almost everyone in the administration who was in the room felt the same way. But I think one misunderstood aspect of his embracing NAFTA wasat that point he was being widely criticized for lacking in principle, lacking in conviction, a weathervane all over the place politically. You can see it in real life at 3901 S. Michigan Avenue, about 20 minutes from the What really happened was that the stimulus was entirely spending-side stimulus. When the voting began, we did not know if we were going to win. 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. You had that, and then the legislative group, meaning Howard Paster and his counterparts from Treasury and Commerce and so forth, would meet every afternoon. Where the negotiations broke down, I dont know what caused it. But there was the issue of the Clintons association with it and the fact that Madison Guaranty had made loans to the actual Whitewater Development Company, and the question of whether those loans had been made under pressure from the Clintons and in fact whether [James] McDougal, who ran it, had defrauded the depositors in cahoots with the Clintons. Rob Rubin and I went together, Bob Reich was there, Gene Sperling was there, Bob Shapiro was there. 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. So were in a partisan phase. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. Well, you know that whole thing turned out to be quite an astonishing fiasco with the ultimate FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] raid and the immolation of 80 Branch Davidians. Abraham Lincoln saved the union. I called him and said Id be interested in helping him in some form if there was a way to do that, and then one thing let to another and I got involved, not long thereafter, in his campaign, both from a fundraising point of view and from the point of view of economic policy and issue development. Its quite a difference and I ascribe it to the fact that she does not look at the world as, or at least in my experience, as solely and only politically. I went back to the airport in Austin, reported that to Warren Christopher, and I think we were all announced within a week. But its the economy, stupid doesnt communicate a set of priorities within the administration about what steps they will take. Everything is susceptible to being phased in, to being cut back, to being pilot-programmed. There was no committee per se but he had a few people who were involved at that point and doing something like looking at Putting People First and editing it, and then just these periodic conversations we would have on the fly. It traces to Clintons legendary wonkishness. Exactly. And its not the right move to inform a Cabinet officer that his team is Mr. X, Miss Y, and Miss Z. Well help you over here We didnt have to have the President do every one of those. 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. There was a group of three or four of us who were doing Japan policy. For example, the Btu tax and the raising of the highest rate, highest bracket. The ultimate plan was way too complicated for the Congress and the country to grasp and understand and soberly assess. He told me what was going to happen to the Clinton healthcare bill the day it was announced, actually before it was announced. Some of them, yes. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. I mean, its amusing in a certain sense, but of the hundred members of the Senate he probably talked on any kind of regular basis to about ten. I suppose you could have strengthening of the yen, coordinated G7 action to do that. You raised this issue with respect to the designation of sub-Cabinet officers. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. He wanted me to go see Bentsen. We know youre extremely busy. Georgetown was the equivalent of a placid, slow-moving river and Chicago was the equivalent of a roaring torrent. I think everybody has a different calculation. That was before the convention. 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