roger altman house

For example, during the Lewinsky matter, the airways were filled with former Clinton officials expounding their views of President Clintons foibles and why he might have done this and this and that. 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. I was given an office over in the Treasury. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. It sounds like Bentsens Congressional or legislative savvy was not being availed of in these chaotic meetings, the policy-making meetings. 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. A few questions about that. 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. It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. Those things were at a peak in 94, just at the time healthcare was on the table. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. In the Carter administration, there was no real sense of what the Federal Reserve really was, what it did, how to deal with it. That is foolish because history provides lessons on these matters. You recently saw Secretary John Snow in a very studied fashion talk about, make an effort to ease the dollar down, we saw that on two different occasions, and I know how these things work. Wasnt that a state-chartered institution? The President was in a tough spot because he was hearing from a lot of people that the effort was too ambitious, but on the other hand, Mrs. Clinton was in charge of it. Well, I was thinking of both actually, but in the bill. I was struck from the beginning that Clinton was blessed with a very weak field, which, for example, is not the case today. Bentsen could tell you, within 4 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to every one of these bills. I just didnt; it wasnt my style. So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. We believed our model would attract the most talented senior finance professionals to our firm. There are extremes here. I think thats a very important point because it turned out to be an awfully successful piece of legislation and not a single Republican voted for it. Yes, we could have had that. Somebody was wrong. Yes, he did. He could have been all rhetorical about it. Whether his actual conversation with Dick Morris about the Lewinsky matter is true or not, would the American people accept an apology? If he predicted over the two years I worked for him, the fate of 25 pieces of legislation, he was right on all 25. Did you know him, you said you hadnt known him before then? The independent counsel statute had, if my memory serves, expired during the Clinton first year, then was revived, and then was allowed again to expire. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? I think everybody has a different calculation. So its funny how reality quickly returns. I dont know about developing the convention. But I didnt have any knowledge of this stuff. So I attribute that to just the fact that Woodward talked a lot to Greenspan, but that may be just an incorrect take on it. I stay in touch with him. I did, not before Congress, before the grand jury. Working on the Hill, traveling? But, no, they couldnt have been more cooperative. There were those who feltI would put Bob Reich at the top of the listwho felt the most important thing was to do a big stimulus program involving a lot of spending initiatives. 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. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. Did you go to Little Rock for the election? Clinton had his own style of charm and Bush has a little bit different style, but not very different. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. There were ten or twelve or fourteen or fifteen, big numbers. The feelings of people along the wayside were just very endearing. No, two funny stories, Jim, dont let him off so easily. In other words, at the time I just didnt take Perot seriously. 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. One of the reasons why the ultimate votes on his economic plan were as close as they could possibly be, one vote in the House and tie vote in the Senate, was because he was dealing from weakness. It was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and unforgettable, absolutely unforgettable. We were both quite active in student government. We wanted Japan to commit to rebalance the current account between the two countries, including committing itself to some pro-growth steps at home, and we wanted a specific agreement on autos and certain other things. They werent just opponents, they were angry and intense opponents and vitriolic opponents. Roger Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, the most active independent investment bank in the world today. Education might be something in terms of opening. The bigger gamble then was, as you say, the long term, the response in the long-term credit markets, whats going to happen, and that, I take it, is where Allen Blinders. You raised this issue with respect to the designation of sub-Cabinet officers. That raises the question then of the people he was meeting with here. The type of student attending each school at the time. That was about the last time he didnt listen to Bentsen, but he should have. I think our administration tried, as hard as it was possible to try, to change the dynamic of the U.S.-Japanese trade relationship. I made two trips to Little Rock. I suppose the problem that the administration confronted was that it was far from being budget-neutral. Three-quarters of the people who go into the Cabinet never want to leave it, its great being a Cabinet officer. I spoke to the Oklahoma state legislature. I thought maybe we should step back and let you give us a more organized picture of what it is that you were doing with respect to U.S.-Japanese relations. Can you tell us about that? I had no background for that. I dont think Id ever met her, but we were serving on the same board together and we became acquainted and occasionally talked about getting together some way or other. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. So those two circumstances are important as a starting point, the second one especially, because wed been assuming a certain deficit problem, and upon fresh review, it turned out to be much worse. He is the only person who has declined because of heath reasons and we wont have the opportunity to talk with him. 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. We came into office, the trade imbalance of payments deficit with Japan had risen to very high levels. I dont mean that facetiously. We knew each other, but we turned out to be the first two to go down and I dont know why that was. I have a very old-fashioned view about that. He was very disciplined and he went to bed at a certain time and he went home. Bentsen was chosen during the first week of December. I think we made some, but it was grudging and limited. Then about an hour before the vote, thats it, we knew that Kerrey would vote for us and then of course Gore could break the tie. 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. But it was quite obvious that wed lost the battle. The Regency Hotel. So it was a very interesting dynamic. I should be very careful here. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. 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. He was the head of the transition together with Vernon Jordan. Yes, but even more than that, its one thing to say to your Secretary of State, at this time Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright, its another thing to say to your wife, I dont like it. But the main argument was economic. 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? Who the key players were and so forth. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. So in June 91 it wasnt completely unknown, it wasnt below the radar screen, but there was always a group of people who were political junkies and so forth, and Im certainly in that group, who were following it, just like theres a large number of people that are following it today, 17 months beforehand. Then, as the weeks and months went by, it came closer and closer and closer to whip counts. So my average day was spent a few blocks from here, working full-tilt on the business responsibilities I had. But that was about as specific as you can get. That was in July or June or something. He managed himself beautifully and with great self-control, and Clinton had very little self-control. We were all trotted out in Little Rock on the same day. There was no real reason for that, it was just fate, happenstance, just the case that not many of them did. Of course, we were in a different time zone, 12 hours different. I think Clinton was better served by virtue of Perots presence in the campaign than without it. At this point youre working on policy questions primarily? So the question in part was: Are you going to really drive forward with an aggressive trade agenda for this administration or not? It was a bit of a love fest. He never did anything spontaneously, at least professionally speaking. In fact, it was six months before. 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. But I mean, when you were sitting in the Roosevelt Room, where most of those meetings took place, all of the players were there. Then the reality is, it seems to me, that most Presidencies, Im sorry, great Presidencies, are forged in crisis. Will policy differences be the reason that candidate X or candidate Y emerges with the nomination? And the reason he wasntnothing to do with Senator Kennedy himself. Welfare reform is a different issue, though. Why does the government want to take over the healthcare system? Very, very intensive, one of the most intensive things Ive ever been involved in. I mean, youre sent down there, you have no training for it. And we had the same in the Carter administration, but it had been more junior. Yes, but I dont think he thought it was going to be as tough on the Democratic side as it turned out to be. A lot of people didnt realize and I didnt entirely realize the regulatory responsibilities of the RTC at the time. He said, I know this will be hard, but I think I can get those folks. When did the President. 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. I mean, it was a larger package as it was originally conceived and then. Bentsen, of course, didnt know the House as well as he knew the Senate, so it wasnt unusual that he himself wouldnt know in the House. A certain candidate or two will be perceived as the heavyweights in the field, and thats an amorphous thing, but you become anointed that way by the media, and if you have the right set of political skills you can capitalize on it. 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. No, I was responding to a question about economic policy. I think it counts for four, five percent of the spending. 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. On changes in the bill, unless they were truly minor, those were deliberated at the highest level. Did you stay in Little Rock for a while afterward? I remember sitting there, thinking to myself, This guy just did something that I could no more imagine myself capable of doing than I could jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. So it could be revived again tomorrow. Were there different views? Japan accepted a series of goals that we wanted them to accept, but the teeth, in terms of enforcement, werent there. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. 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 recall a large event, right after New Years, the fourth of January I believe, in 92, that I organized at their request, which was just simply to have a large number of people listen to Clinton give a speech. I put the President on the phone with her and of course, she cast the decisive vote. 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. One of the things that you mentioned that was in your portfolio was selling the budget package. It traces to Clintons legendary wonkishness. I guess I probably began to help raise money, its a rough memory now, in the early fall, perhaps September of 91. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. So you can imagine sitting next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. Then it went down to defeat. But Clinton did care quite a bit about it. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. No. There were quite a few members where I had lead day-to-day responsibility. But the election result itself was anticlimactic. Bentsen advised him to take it. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. 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. Its worth asking. In this case it was well coordinated because Howard Paster was really excellent at his job. 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