Somebody was wrong. Every imaginable issue arose and Clinton hit all those balls out of the park and it gave the American public a chance to see how astonishingly smart and deep this guy was. Those are my exact words. I doubt that youll see 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. I direct the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center. I think his views at that point were in formation. Dont ever let those conversations be public. He served as assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 1977 to 1981 before returning to Lehman, where he later became co-head of overall investment banking as well as a member of the management committee and board. It wasnt a process where people were maneuvering furiously to see who could get the last word in to the President or something. Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. And it was just fuel on the already roaring fire of Whitewater. But, in any event, everything was going fine at the RTC until, unfortunately, the matter of Madison Guaranty came up. We had a couple hundred people there. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. But I interpreted that to mean, Maybe you should, because I felt that if he thought I shouldnt, hed say so. 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. WebKathryn Reed Altman and Roger Altman attend State of the Union Dinner at The Re-Opening of the Plaza Hotel Ballroom on January 28, 2008 in New York Roger Altman and Mayor Michael Bloomberg attend THIRTEEN and WLIW 21 Annual Gala Salute at Gotham Hall on April 30, 2007 in New York City. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. There were certain others, I cant recall now, but a group of six or eight or nine, and we literally sat around with pieces of paper and drafts and hammered it out. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. He was shot eight times, mostly in the chest. But the key revelation was the most stimulative thing we could do for this economy is to induce a monetary response. The IRS employs 120,000 people or so. But youd been doing transition work for a month. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. There were, however, many people who thought, I would say this was the majority view: well ask for this, were going to end up with this. There were a lot of people who did take that candidacy very seriously though, right? But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. So, looking back on it, the nature and the history of those three men had a lot to do with the eventual outcome. We sat there, the two of us, watching it on television, mostly in silence. I referred to the Bert Lance affair when I was serving the Clinton administration, and in that case the controller of the currency, who is an independent regulator, was charged with looking into it and delivered a report that ultimately proved to be Bert Lances downfall. Were there things about those campaigns that you had learned in preparation for this one that proved to be particularly helpful? We came up with a Btu [British thermal unit] tax. No, it never got to a vote. We made two or three trips to Japan and then there was the Tokyo Economic Summitthe G7 Summit in the fall of 93 which happened to be planned many years in advance for Tokyo. This had been the thrust of the campaign, so expectations were very high that Clinton would come forward with a real economic program, a comprehensive program, and from the moment that all these folks were chosen the question was, what is that program going to be? Somethings pretty strange here. She may have had a lot of influence on it, but I didnt see her. I mean, by that time, the group that was advising him on economic policy had become reasonably well set. The Clinton stimulus plan just was not well conceived. We talked a lot about the organization of economic policy-making and the role of the Treasury because I had a certain history. I think each person makes his or her own decision. It wasnt evident to me the day after New Hampshire that he had recovered from it. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. 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. There had been some minor event that day and he was asked what he thought of the latest developments in Iran and he said, I dont talk about barbarians. So they came in and interviewed him. So yes, the themes were in the State of the Union. He knew the rhythm, so to speak, of the Democratic Party, including in New York. Some time around 1989 or so, Hillary Clinton went on the board. 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 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 in any event, the cooperation in both cases was optimal. I was just going to make an observation about history, historians and non-historians who study Presidents past and present. It should have been, I suppose, more evident at the time, but such things never are. The Japanese economy was relatively weak at that time although it was in perhaps the first third of its now 12-year, or 14-year slump after the Nikkei peaked at 39,000. If you think about who are almost universally considered the three or four greatest American Presidents, they all faced enormous crises, of course Lincoln, [George] Washington, FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and so forth, and Clinton didnt. Were there different views? Those would be the main points Id mention. Well, Im not actually trying to establish whether these were particularly important in the campaign. I should have realized I was stepping into a potential mine field but I didnt, although I do have to say that I called my lawyer and asked him if there was any reason I shouldnt take this and he said, Yes, there are about 200 reasons. No. There were some folks from the White House Press Secretarys office who were in it. Of course, any situation like that always has its humor. Then there were other people who went down and the press was following all this. I took a trip out to Oklahoma to visit the district of a Congressman from Oklahoma whose vote we needed, and ultimately I think we got. The election took place on the first Tuesday of November. They began to mount quite a drumbeat of Republican outcry to the effect that it was the responsibility of the RTC to unilaterally extend that statute of limitations on the theory that it would be wrong to let the Clintons off the hook, and the RTC had the power to do that. But was it a battle? Healthcare got the nod. It was an all right agreement. The arrangements, as far as the White House, how it passes operation, and the Treasury operationshould that be seen as well coordinated, or is it difficult to coordinate? I had known him just slightly. I put the President on the phone with her and of course, she cast the decisive vote. We might have a thousand independent counsels operating under the freedom of the press, investigations. So the swing votes were the object of our attention. Well, when we actually re-did Putting People First, we went to Little Rock and worked on it for a few days. I know I didnt and I was very involved in trade policy as a whole because much of our trade policy involved Japan and I was very involved in that. He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. 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. which was a separate agency and Presidential appointment. I left the Treasury about a month later when my successor Frank Newman, who was then Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, was nominated and had been confirmed. I can remember very well when Breaux and Boren offered Clinton that compromise, and Bentsen said, You should take it. So we already had quite a taste of the Congressional dynamic and overall political dynamic. We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. Howard Paster at the White House, Mike Levy at the Treasury. It was the usual degree of difficulty that early, not really greater because he was from Arkansas. There was no surprise. I dont think anybody during the campaign expected that Clinton would turn out to be the deficit hawk that he did. But you know, theres a real sense of the torch passing and history, and one had to be struck, even though Id been involved with Clinton from mid 91, by the youth and vigor that Clinton and Gore exuded, and Ive always personally liked the south, so I enjoyed being there, so I did go. Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. But Clintons worked largely because of the people, and mostly Bob Rubin, but anyway, it worked well. 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 I spent a lot of time on healthcare. I was the senior Treasury person day-in, day-out on the major healthcare task force that Mrs. Clinton herself chaired. He earned an A.B. I can even imagine an independent counsel of some kind being unlikely, but not impossible, designated in the whole weapons of mass destruction issue. I would say we had a definite policy, we just didnt achieve too much of it. I didnt think it was going to be that bad. 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. I worked very closely with Bob Kerrey, with Senator [Max] Baucus, who had such a problem with the gas tax. He has his own views in private, of course. Well, nobody took more pain up front than Ronald Reagan. Yes. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. There are some people who wouldsome of the George H. W. Bush people date the partisanship from the budget deal. He talked about a middle-class tax cut and, of course getting the economy moving. My role was also shaped by the fact that Bentsen picked his spots very carefully and not only didnt want to be involved in everything, only wanted to be involved in a very few things. For a variety of reasons, I dont think he had the pure luxury of just saying, Lets do NAFTA a year from now. So were in a partisan phase. So I had that meeting with Clinton. 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