roger altman house

Did you ever get the sense that there were some people who mystified him? 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. Well, health insurance reform was going to be very complicated, no matter how you cut it, because 85 percent of the people are already insured and only 15 percent are not, but welfare reform is something where huge numbers of people have opinions, even though they dont collect welfare. And it turned around and by November 84 as you remember, it was Morning in America and he won 49 states. 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. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. For example, keeping its currency weak, not taking some of the steps to improve domestic demand such that Japan could become a stronger force for imports into Japan, ironically some of the same issues that are just as present today. Those characteristics I thought were rather evident upon meeting him just a few times. Was it Mickey Kantor? She herself has expressed regret over them. Today it is seen as structural. So were in a partisan phase. How do you think Clinton ultimately is going to be read by historians, this Presidency? 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. So no, Bentsen did not go over to the White House, hang around, talk about legislative strategy. My assumption is that you must have been doing that from two perches, your first perch being in the Treasury Department and then eventually the war room was opened up, and then you at some point were moved into the war room. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. Mr. Altman returned to Washington in 1993 to serve as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for two years. But the tax increasesand there were two main ones, the energy tax and the upper bracket increasewere seen by the Republicans, every last one of them, as unacceptable and became their rallying cry. Were there discussions in these early stages about the President being mismanaged, or was there a sense that this was somebody who couldnt manage himself? The social side of it had almost nothing to do with it. There were so many exceptions and carve-outs and so forth from the final bill that you couldnt count them. Youre working on prospective personnel issues? Some of them, yes. These cookies do not store any information that directly identifies you. Bentsen was just a legend and Clinton had never served in Washington and Lloyd Bentsen was a king of Washington. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. Phil Gramm, Ill never forget, predicted that it would usher in a new depressionI mean depression, not recession. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. There were not pitched battles. The contrast between Chicago, which was in an uproar at the time, and Georgetown couldnt have been more vivid. Dont ever talk down your currency; dont ever quarrel with the Federal Reserve Board. It wasnt a process where people were maneuvering furiously to see who could get the last word in to the President or something. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. I want to come back to something that we had touched upon earlier, and that was this question about the administrations prioritizations, because you had suggested that there were some internal discussions, even at the time that NAFTA was taken on, as to what to do next. 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 doubt that youll see that. That was the first time we had an opposition takeover. And we had the same in the Carter administration, but it had been more junior. So I knew early on, but only because Lloyd Bentsen was in effect telling me. But, no, they couldnt have been more cooperative. Erskine Bowles had to testify and so forth. Remember, youre playing for four years, youre not playing for one year. So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. At the time we were working on it there was a sense on the Japanese side that it was a zero-sum game. Once he decided he was for it, he really got into it. Im Gary Burtless. 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. Carter had the famous $50 rebate, which became the object of much derision ultimately. Oh sure. Did you think that they took those claims seriously, or was this pure politics? No, he doesnt, not in terms of the way I would define close friends, genuine friends. We didnt spend a tremendous amount of time talking about, If we do this, Greenspan will do that. Yes, and also there was considerable uncertainty as to whether Cuomo was indeed a candidate, which, as we all know, he proved not to be. Im just saying that Im a little too close to it because I recall so many of those battles, and I recall so many people feeling that, as you remember, the administration, in some form or other, lost three times, and each time came back with a more conservative version. I would say that had probably as much to do with the onset of a partisan period as did the Andrews Air Force Base summit, but Im just playing amateur historian here. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. I just didnt; it wasnt my style. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. That was the logical place because I served there before. Today, we serve a prominent and diverse set of clients and investors, including leading multinational corporations, large institutional investors and financial sponsors, and high net worth individuals. Hed been in office a month or two, defeated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, and that was many months before the fateful votes on the economic plan. I did too. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. I can recall that we had a fundraiser. Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett) tells off her sister-in-law (Peggy Ann Garner) in Robert Altman's "A Wedding." You sit down with the leaders of your own party in the Congress, ultimately with the entire leadership, and then you learn a little bit about the realities that you face from the legislative point of view. Its a famous meeting in the sense that Woodward wrote a lot about it, other people have written about it. I started getting inundated with letters from Congress asking how the RTC intended to handle this, stirred up by this Republican campaign. Yes, but the independent counsel is not a Clinton-era novelty. You had been asked to be a part of that enterprise. Theres a time lag between taking painful steps to do something with the deficit and getting some response in the. I think our administration tried, as hard as it was possible to try, to change the dynamic of the U.S.-Japanese trade relationship. But the next day, Monday, I was on a plane to Waco, Texas. People forget that, even today. A little bit. Now streaming on: Powered by 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. He is also a trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, serving on its finance committee. How did the decision-making go about to decide on these different components of the package? I was onboard before then, but at the end of 1991 it would have been Bob Rubin, Ken Brody, me, Stan Shuman. I think it was obvious to Clinton that there were several serious people there in New York whose support he wanted to get who felt strongly about what I would call a centrist economic policy, perhaps right of center economic policy. Nobody said to me, Hes there. Did you keep up with him when your paths parted? Yes, he did. Its really quite stunning. So I spent a lot of time on healthcare. I was given an office over in the Treasury. 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. By that late stage of the budget battle, all the concessions and fine-tuning that could be made to the bill had already been done, so you had a package at that point that wasnt going to be reopened. No I dont. We nominated this guy, thought he was quite capable and in one of the wonderful ironies of Washington, the quixotic ironies of Washington, the Democrats defeated the nomination. Well, that was, in retrospect, the Bill Clinton Show, and he demonstratedit was, I think, very clever in retrospect. 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. But my first point is that that entire team was out there promoting the Presidents economic package, both crisscrossing the country for that purpose, speaking, visiting Congressional districts and so forth, testifying on it of course, visiting one-on-one with members of Congress. We were tough on them on autos. I ran three times for student office while I was there. Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking. 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. Im not an economist, so maybe Im making a bad assumption here, but was there a discussion at this time about when you could start feeling some benefits from this pain that you were asking the President to accept at a fairly early stage in his Presidency? In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. The second point is the nature of the key individuals chosen. Were there different views? Now youre raising a subject that is an entirely different one, which is why was this so partisan and why were the Clinton years so partisan? In some measure. But I only began to spend heavy time on that after the August passage of the Presidents economic program. Is that a fair assessment? Sure. 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. But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. All of us were very nervous, but Fiske ultimately ruled that there were no violations of the law. You ultimately get into a room like this and you say, youd better start to train me, tell me how this happened. No, first of all, it wasnt his focus. It wasnt difficult at all because Cuomo was a polarizing figure. Hed been shot eight times. No, Im sorry, it didnt have the power to do that, but there were ways of achieving that outcome. Yes, we could have had that. He helped me in my efforts and then a year later I helped him in his. I think Clinton recognized that, by virtue of his being an outsider in Washingtonhe never served in Washingtonhe needed a link to the Congress, a really superb link, of the type that Bentsen afforded, especially since Clintons first priorities were economics.The Senate Finance Committee was going to be, more than any other single place, where the action was. Thats something we dont have a lot of information about. Well, there was, like most administrations, kind of a running shakeup. He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. Some of the things on the wish list made a lot of sense, but some of them didnt. They were using very powerful weaponsI think .20 caliber weapons. 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. So its a free vote, ideologically and politically. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? 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. So those ideas were developed during the campaign. I dont believe Yeltsin attended the summit, but there was a lot of focus on Russia and what the G7 could do for Russia at that summit, so it was all kind of nice, uplifting stuff. Of course that depends on the moment in question. Roger Altman, Evercore senior chairman and founder, joins Squawk on the Street to share his thoughts on Bidens infrastructure plan and the corporate tax debate. In other words, at the time I just didnt take Perot seriously. Secondly, the National Economic Council would meet very often for purposes of reviewing where this stood; I was on that as a standing member. So there are the four main elements. But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. 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. Tweet. While most of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself. You say he didnt inspire fierce loyalty amongst a lot of his subordinates, but interestingly, I think a lot of the senior Cabinet members lasted a long time, I mean, they stayed for muchDonna Shalala was Secretary for eight years, Rubin was in for a long time, given the fact that his family didnt move to Washington. 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 recall taking maybe one or two trips with him outside New York, mostly just for my own enjoyment, to see what it was like. I just know from prior experience that thats the way to do it. Sure. Then, of course, he became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is the most powerful single position in the Congress other than Majority Leader, and some would say it is more powerful, and ran the committee with an iron hand. Tickets to the Kennedy Center and things of that nature, or is this too big a matter. The country needs it, the Democratic Party needs it, I need it. As I say, it was sort of a double-barrel summit. But that was about as specific as you can get. 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. 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. Altman donated $41,000 to the Biden Action Fund, a joint fundraising committee, in May, according to Federal Election Commission records. I think at the Pond House meetings there were also some of the Congressional leaders, werent there? Would I have considered moving to Switzerland if he did become President? I was defeated in my effort to become student body president, as, interestingly, was Clinton. Youre an exception to this. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? Theyd been working on it for two or three weeks or whatever one does, but, as they usually do, the day before the profile runs, they want to come in and interview him so they can have a current aspect to it. Im not sure anyone is ever going to pay a penalty in American society for that type of commentary. Mexico was looking for the freedom for its trucks to cross the border and continue to deliver in the United States. The social aspect of it also involved here? To this day, I have a much closer relationship with her than I do with him. So this is the case where basically hes saying, My Presidency and this party are going to rise or fall based on whether we succeed in this or not. Maybe we ought to move to the actual setting up of these priorities and the choices made and that process, from post-election into the actual post-inauguration time. But, in any event, the presentations were very effective and that was, I think, the most important single day in the evolution of that original policy. I raise the issue because I think theres an extraordinary difference in contemporary politics without the existence of that, without the fact of an independent counsel lingering over an administrations head, and you obviously having had some experience with this would be able to testify to infractions. Clinton made an error, didnt take it. So it became effectively a simultaneous multilateral and bilateral summit because it became the setting for Clintons direct discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister. So he remained alive and, as we all know, recovered. In the first two years of the Clinton administration, they had about four Prime Ministers, pretty hard to get anywhere in that circumstance. And presided over eight years of peace. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. Oh yes, sure. You could have something like the Paris agreement in 1985 when there was coordinated strengthening of the European and Japanese currencies and weakening of the dollar. It pains me to recognize that thats 35 years ago, but no, it wasnt the case. Every time they had a new Prime Minister, we had a new set of characters. You can do all kinds of approaches to anything. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. 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. 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? But in any event, the cooperation in both cases was optimal. But, I can tell youa bit of a digression. 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. He was shot eight times, mostly in the chest. The politics of Oklahoma. We had wonderful cooperation, at least in the Treasury. Now John Snow didnt learn that, hed never been there before and so forth and so on, whatever excuse fits him. That ostracism certainly hasnt afflicted the Clinton alumni. You were both involved then in student government. Youd seen him working with domestic policy issues and with members of Congress and support here. I thought, perhaps not at that instant, but quickly thereafter, that what Clinton said to me about Wall Street economics was very funny. It wasnt as simple as that. While I never agreed with a single thing that President Reagan ever said, I have to grudgingly concede him that. 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. We did have goals. You were in Tokyo when the President went over? 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. [Mikhail] Gorbachev was an enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan. Rubin was well known as an economic conservative, and Bentsen, of course, had a very long legislative record, which was in the same direction. We came into office, the trade imbalance of payments deficit with Japan had risen to very high levels. He should have taken it. Well, I dont think theyd like it. It was really quite revealing of Clintons inexperience to do it that way, and, for that matter his style, a poor way to do it. Evercore uses cookies to give you the best experience on our website. But then of course, I went home, my family was away, you walk home, you walk into your house, and its time to watch ESPN [Entertainment and Sports Programming Network] or whatever you do. A lot of people didnt realize and I didnt entirely realize the regulatory responsibilities of the RTC at the time. Not necessarily. I just never took him seriously as a candidate. 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. Clintons that way. For the first part of the Clinton years, Arthur Burns was famously mystical, quite like Greenspan. Once she was put in charge of it, it obviously had tremendous internal focus. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. He was quite in the minority at the time. So there were a couple of weeks of high anxiety, maybe more than that, maybe everybody was in a state of anxiety between the election and yes, it wasnt at all clear who the Secretary of Treasury would be. I want to ask you a general question since youve raised the Carter precedent again here.And that is, we get the perception in talking with some people that there was a conscious effort on the part of senior-most advisors to President Clinton not to reach out and rely on a lot of people that had Carter-era experience in the Presidency. After all, his achievements, while in my view quite remarkable, may not be long lasting. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. It turned out to be the equivalent of walking the plank. Im not quite sure what their input was. This wont help you because its not very original, but theres something about President Clinton that had the effect of rubbing salt on a wound as far as his opponents were concerned. I took it anyway. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. If he predicted over the two years I worked for him, the fate of 25 pieces of legislation, he was right on all 25. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. Of course, I met with the senior ATF guys. What external factors were at work here? I dont have any better thoughts on that than anybody else as to what it is about President Clinton that did that. 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. It was a very unusual evening, because there was a sense, as I say, we were interring the candidate. 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