";s:4:"text";s:31459:"But the presumption was that the head of the agency of course did know that. So there wasnt all that much time, maybe ten days, twelve days, between opening the office, showing up down there and then having the Treasury Secretary and the rest of the members of the economic team chosen. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. In addition, Mr. Altman is a director of New Visions for Public Schools and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. It wasnt difficult. By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of Evercore's cookies. I think Bush inspires greater loyalty than Clinton, just does. One, the recession of 91 and early or mid 92, the economy was performing poorly. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? Yes. Well of course, McLarty was replaced by Leon Panetta roughly a year after the administration began. So it was a quick learning experience for Clinton. But in 1987, I think it was, the Democrats in this case, I must say, rewrote the rules and decided that ideology should be the grounds on which this was decided, and Mr. Bork may have had great credentials, may have been a scholar of great distinction but his ideology was unacceptable. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. 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. Some of them I think were insincere, but many of them were sincere. Youre in such a good position to give us a comparative portrait of transitions internally. Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. 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. Why dont we break now. But Lloyd Bentsen was in that league, top five or six or seven. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. You might call it something different. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. There was no surprise. But it really was quite effective because one needed a military-like approach with only five or six weeks to go, and that bill was in trouble. That was a bad mistake. He loved it. If you take the transition as one chunk of time, rather than chopping it up into chapters, I did a lot of work on personnelwe all did a lot of work on policy development, what was the economic policy going to be, and getting right down to very specific potential decisions. I was completelyclean bill of health from the independent counsel. With the exception of his Vice Presidential candidacy, he never lost another election. 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. Georgetown was a semi-serious school. And every day I would speak to Bentsen about it. 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. That certainly, in terms of social assistance to low-income working age people, that was a transformative administration. By that time we were all being treated very well by the campaign because we were seen as the guys who were there at the beginning. There was no real reason for that, it was just fate, happenstance, just the case that not many of them did. [ALTMAN - comments on the message as to It wasnt evident to me the day after New Hampshire that he had recovered from it. I did have the impression from the beginning that he was politically gifted and ambitious. Did you think it was a waste of time at that point? So an hour before the vote is when we heard that we probably had his vote. Lloyd Bentsen was the very first person we tried when this whole project started, on the urging also of Clintons people because of his age, and they didnt know at that time that he was as ill as he was. But unfortunately the real show was about to begin, which I didnt realize, which was the Congressional hearings. I think as a general matter the perception, which has become the accepted wisdom, of those dueling camps, is much overstated. 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. And presided over eight years of peace. So I didnt take him seriously except as in a sort of inner political context. He seemed very tired, I remember that. He didnt think much of the Btu tax. You wouldnt choose to go before a grand jury instead of, say, going to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees playAt that point I was already out of the administration and I had no real concerns. I was very involved in it but I was notspending probably two-thirds of my time on it. No because Clinton had determined, as he well should havesee, Presidents often dont do this, or Presidents-elect, but they shouldBentsen had to be satisfied that this was something he wanted. So I would get, from Mike Levy, typically, what my assignments were. That was a factor. I thought that was pretty funny. Well, it was difficult in the beginning. In business. from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Did you go to Little Rock for the election? So that went on with mounting intensity over a series of months after the President had actually laid it out. He did quite well. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. 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. That was the first thing I did. I wasnt involved in any of the delegate-related strategies, no. But it was quite obvious that wed lost the battle. Well, the war room, first of all, was operated quite differently from the National Economic Council. She wasnt a participant in those. While at the University, 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. 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. 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. In 1987, Mr. Altman joined The Blackstone Group as vice chairman, head of advisory business, and investment committee member. 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. Once again, were grateful for your time. Ford actually attended regularly, I dont mean every day, but regularly, and it was just a version of what Clinton did. So one knew through the press who was going and so forth. I went and visited the injured agents in the hospital. As I recall, the distinctive thing about Clinton, if everyone had one courageous stand, his was on free trade. So we were not classmates, and we were not buddies in that sense, but we knew each other pretty well by standards of students who were not in the same year. Right around that time I was put in charge of the Treasury transition. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday interviewed investment banker Roger Altman, a former Treasury official, as a candidate to replace In some measure. You havent told us about your own appointment. I ended up doing that over the space of four, five, six weeks. I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. It was a very unusual evening, because there was a sense, as I say, we were interring the candidate. You were involved in the Little Rock Economic Summit? Help us understand why he would elect to move NAFTA at this point? I thought Perot was a flake, I think Perot is a flake, so I didnt take him terribly seriously. I took an hour plus to do this. I have no evidence, and I think I would have had, that he went into that meeting with the expectation that hed come out the way he did. Maybe there was, I wasnt privy to that or exposed to that. I just remember that being contemporaneous with the real beginning of an organized effort here. The politics of personal destruction as Mrs. Clinton is saying now on her book tour, common in American history, nothing new about it at all. What was different about it was that it worked, because most of them had been somewhat dysfunctional. Not surprising, given his state of origin. The media to some degree has shifted for, in my view, simple generational reasons, to the right, and the right-of-center media is much more monolithic than the rest of the media, and so its ability to concentrate its opposition and its influence emerged as much greater during the Clinton years. Against that test, a noncrisis Presidency, what can they achieve, under the extremely adverse politics of this time, thats been building up. That was absolutely true also of Secretary Brady and all of his people, couldnt have been more cooperative. 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?" 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. I went to Wall Street after the University of Chicago, and then after seven years on Wall Street, I went into the [Jimmy] Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Well, I recall particularly how weak the field was. Remember, President Clintons first initiative, the stimulus plan, was defeated. For some people the idea was, a southern Governor almost by definition has a better chance than a lot of other candidates. It should have been, I suppose, more evident at the time, but such things never are. But that moment was quite amazing. But Clinton really got into it. I was there to the last day of the Carter Presidency, and all of a sudden we were able to negotiate the release of those hostages. We had a macro economic task force. But an awful lot of people love being Cabinet officers and leave only most reluctantly. Theyd review it and youd go to a meeting where you received a 900-page memo, three quarters of which you didnt understand. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so before the election, 17 months, and right now of course, the campaign among the Democratic aspirants for the nomination is hot, full-bore, and has been for several months. Lloyd Bentsen was a classic Texas conservative Democrat. I stayed overnight, went back the next day. I said to him, If I should resign, then thats what I want to do. I think the Japanese have ultimately realized its in their own interests to make a lot of these changes. Did you do anything else? Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? First of all, the Clinton White House wasnt really oriented to that. I wouldnt necessarily accept that. Its possible that President Clinton rues the fact that 9/11 didnt occur on his watch, because it was a transforming crisis and did transform, at least to date, the present President. You know, Clintons Presidency coincided with a lot of big changes in the body politic at large. So I was going down to Waco, Texas. And it was very effective because a lot of the people who came were opinion makers and he made a tremendous impression. That was my third or fourth trip, in 93. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. I mean, Lloyd Bentsen had been Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for a long time, knew Alan Greenspan very well, knew the Fed very well. Hed been the Governor of New York for quite some time and everyone knew Cuomo and his coterie. Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. There were probably 25 major separate deals negotiated to win the passage. 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. But that was what one did as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. But Clintons worked largely because of the people, and mostly Bob Rubin, but anyway, it worked well. Can you talk about Perots influence on the campaign? Well, I was thinking of both actually, but in the bill. There were not pitched battles. Yes, here in New York. We were all trotted out in Little Rock on the same day. We began to have fundraisers toward the end of 91. 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. Clinton was offered a compromise by Senators [John] Breaux and [David] Boren. In the first two years of the Clinton administration, they had about four Prime Ministers, pretty hard to get anywhere in that circumstance. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. But that battle was resolved in favor of the revolution, the most sweeping alternative, and I dont really have a lot to add beyond whats been written. But really, not until the spring of 1991 when I began to hear rumblings that he was thinking of running. So, third, economic policy was number one. We believed our model would attract the most talented senior finance professionals to our firm. Sure. Its very difficult to do that during a campaign. Before you get into that, can I ask you another question about the arrangements on the 1993 budget? He was named the first week of December. Then Clinton, as I mentioned, this one big event in January of 92Clinton was great on his feet. There was a lot of effort and a lot of meetings. 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. One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. 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. Then, I was in Tokyo. A group of four of us were named at the same time: Bentsen, Rubin, [Leon] Panetta, and myself. So I ended up serving in this job for 12 or 13 months, and I had a very disciplined approach to it. Id met Bentsen a few times. Stay as long as you can figure out how to cling to it. We still joke about that today. Will policy differences be the reason that candidate X or candidate Y emerges with the nomination? During the preparation would you call that an organized group? Bentsen had known the then head of it, Albert Casey, whod been chairman of American Airlines, and didnt have a high regard for him. Well take a break for lunch here in just a minute, but I want to jump track and ask you one set of questions about your own responsibilities within Treasury. I mean, not one encounter, until the early to mid 80s when I was quite involved in various aspects of the Democratic Party and there were a few forums at various places that I would attend and I would occasionally run into him. It was a few votes, not one vote. I started doing a lot of the same thing Id done on the economic plan: radio shows, television stuff, running around the country. The difficulties that you had were primarily generated by Congressional investigators then, rather than the independent counsel. Theres a time lag between taking painful steps to do something with the deficit and getting some response in the. Its very puzzling to me how that could happen when the man had such an obvious gift for feeling peoples pain and a very strong public presence. My view, theres no single answer to that at all, but if I were to list the elements of my response, the first one would be post-election. We sat there, the two of us, watching it on television, mostly in silence. 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. Reagan had a group called the legislative strategy group, the LSG, which was intended, whether this is reality or not, to look at the legislative strategy or legislative implications of the policy as a part of the process, developing very soon after his inauguration. 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. Is it okay if we move away from the crisis of getting the big things through to just the more mundane ways that the government ran while you were there? Now, theyre sometimes minor changes that dont require that, but any meaningful change in the later stages required the Presidents approval. Why was that a federal regulatory issue? The RTC had to choose between allowing the statute of limitationsto expire; filing charges, criminal charges; or, as often happens, entering into a so-called tolling agreement, where if youre the party under investigation, you voluntarily agree that the RTC can circumvent the statute of limitations because you believe that if they have more time theyll ultimately decide to exonerate you and you dont want them to be forced to make a decision about filing or not filing charges. She didnt cast it because of me, but it just became obvious to me in that conversation that she was very reluctant to cast that vote. The second point is the nature of the key individuals chosen. I remember Allen going through that. It may have struck people on the outside as unusual, but not if youd been around. It just depended on the size of the concession. We recommend you to check the complete Mostly the latter. But therein, to some degree, lay the opportunity for Clinton to re-establish his credentials as a man of conviction. Did you ever get the sense that there were some people who mystified him? So is there a lot of policy difference today between the nine candidates running for the Democratic nomination in June 2003? It wasnt between the political people and the policy people, it was among the policy people and involving some of the political people. I did not have a crystal ball to the effect that he was going to make it and that the dominos were somehow going to fall in a certain way that enabled him to do so. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. It was not as big a change as it was advertised to be, or has been seen historically. We had wonderful cooperation, at least in the Treasury. Hed been shot eight times. So again, it wasnt all about President Clinton. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. Having watched very carefully what Bob Carswell, who served for three plus years of the four Carter years as Deputy Secretary, did in that role, and that was actually rather different than my role. Did that debate begin as early as August? Greenspan sat next to Mrs. Clinton. But at the end it was breathtaking. But its interesting to put it into perspective. Im not sure he would have known me really at all. I mean, he seemed to be quite consistent about that, even though the rest of the field was, as I recall, quite a bit more protectionist. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. 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. Im sure there are lots of aspects of the preparation plan. She figured in some bumper stickers also. 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. Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. He managed to remain viable through New Hampshire. Yes, and Im sure that any number of opponents to the Presidents plan were sincere in their expectation that it wouldnt work. I think theres a wonderful tradition in American government where the outgoing administration typically does everything it can to assist the incoming one, and that was certainly true with the [Gerald] Ford administration. I mean, obviously, if it came down to the crunch time, youre going to have the President call. Then we put on our battle armor and went back into battle. Clinton chose in Bentsen, with the possible exception of [Robert] Dole, who obviously wasnt a candidate for this, the most experienced person in the entire United States Congress. One is that it had a very rocky beginning in New Hampshire, and Im wondering if you have recollections about your reaction to the news events that occurred and to the electoral results in New Hampshire and how the President was able to deal with those things. People who liked Cuomo liked him a lot; people who didnt like him didnt like him at all, and it was about half-and-half. 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. 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