He didnt want to be involved in the daily ins and outs of those jobs. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. Also fifth, to some degree, Alan Greenspan weighed in, and a view developed that if we tightened fiscal policy, there would be the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. You can have half of it, or something to that effect. Carter, whos a wonderful man, God knows, however is very rigid. But it doesnt mention that he was President. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? What political or personal characteristics does she have that he doesnt have, what does she bring to the. 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. He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. The administration made a change in the way economic policy-making was going to be made too, and I think that choice was made during the transition to have a National Economic Council, and that would have been a great unknown given the Treasurys historical role in economic policy-making. I couldnt for the life of me see why that was a problem, but anyway, I went to the White House and told Bernie Nussbaum, the White House Counsel, just how the RTC actually operated in these matters. No. He just knew how it worked. There may have been, but I know I didnt feel it. 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. You might call it something different. Three-quarters of the people who go into the Cabinet never want to leave it, its great being a Cabinet officer. And presided over eight years of peace. But the main argument was economic. I spent the last couple of hours of that period in the Oval Office with the President and that was quite unforgettable too because the President was hugely animated, to some extent discouraged, to some extent angry, and there were moments when I was the only one in there with him. I then had the brilliant ideaIm saying this, obviously sarcastically, that I should inform the White House what those procedural alternatives were. But the key revelation was the most stimulative thing we could do for this economy is to induce a monetary response. He saw the opportunity, he seized it, went against the grain and, lets face it, presided over a period of unprecedented prosperity and balanced the budget for the first time in approximately 50 years. Ill just go to the highlight reel, but reality is that on the day of the vote, we didnt think that we had the votes. Im not in the Senate. I think Clinton will come out pretty well. There is a Well, if you think about spending initiatives that you could take today that are politically imaginable, they amount to a hill of beans in a $10.7 trillion economy. The contrast between Chicago, which was in an uproar at the time, and Georgetown couldnt have been more vivid. I think Clinton was better served by virtue of Perots presence in the campaign than without it. 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. So he chose someone who not only had a great reputation and tremendous stature, but who could particularly help him with Congress, and it was a shrewd choice. Stephanopoulos was there and Sperling was there. The IRS employs 120,000 people or so. It was not as big a change as it was advertised to be, or has been seen historically. Please. You had three candidates on the stage during the debates and so forth. There are extremes here. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. I can recall that we had a fundraiser. Of course, during earlier phase of this, Bernie Nussbaum had resigned, mostly over the fact that he met with me on this original matter. It was excellent. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. Im Jim Young. But I remember we went to Little Rock. Thats how politics works. 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. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? I think everybody has a different calculation. I should have said I was either going to or not going to, but anywaySo that meeting came and went and at least nobody at the Treasury thought much about it. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. So, as always happens, the policy apparatus was being built and the policy process was being deepened and becoming more sophisticated as the entire campaign evolved. The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. It was quite a full-bore effort. That was the fundamental choice they made in devising the reform. We didnt spend a tremendous amount of time talking about, If we do this, Greenspan will do that. You know, the only other thought I would express on this is, despite the drama of the moment and the stakes, everyone, as they say, puts on his pants one leg at a time. I mean just the vote itself and the fact that not a single Republican voted for this, which even by its critics is seen now as having been at least a contributor to the economic prosperity and fiscal balance that later resulted. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. Who the key players were and so forth. That was absolutely true also of Secretary Brady and all of his people, couldnt have been more cooperative. Clintons very first initiative was his stimulus program. Malibu, California (CA), US. There were so many different Japanese Prime Ministers in that period I cant remember which one we had at that moment. That certainly, in terms of social assistance to low-income working age people, that was a transformative administration. Four agents had been killed and others seriously wounded and it was the worst loss of life in the history of the ATF in a single incident. 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. 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. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. Yes, to some degree. Last weekend, Roger Altman was back at his ranch in Wyomings Jackson Hole, looking tanned and relaxed, entertaining friends like White House chief economist Could be. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. Georgetown was the equivalent of a placid, slow-moving river and Chicago was the equivalent of a roaring torrent. 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. Do you have anyyou were sort of one of the casualties of this campaign, but was the Whitewater thing separate from this hate stuff? Is that a fair assessment? 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? Some time around 1989 or so, Hillary Clinton went on the board. As everybody knows, ultimately there was not a single Republican vote cast for it, neither in the House nor the Senate. So I was going down to Waco, Texas. Was it defined initially as a Democratic Party issue and Republicans were cut out, or how did that happen? If anything comes to mind that we havent talked about, that youd like to have included. Oh sure, New York is, in terms of Democratic politics, not a terribly big town. No, this was in December. I just know from prior experience that thats the way to do it. If Im not mistaken, we were looking at a $350 billion deficit, up from about $260 or something that we had been generally using during the campaign. But it was really episodic, it wasnt regular. We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. At the end of the lunch he asked me if I would serve as Deputy Secretary and I said I would. Ford actually attended regularly, I dont mean every day, but regularly, and it was just a version of what Clinton did. In other words, Clinton believed that he could charm anyone if he wanted to and Bush believes the same thing. I have a very old-fashioned view about that. 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. I think hes deeply appreciated. Bentsen and Dole were very close friends, which is a measure of the stature that Bentsen had. Im not quite sure what their input was. For some people the idea was, a southern Governor almost by definition has a better chance than a lot of other candidates. During the transition period the question was, Who are we going to nominate the head the RTC? I believe Greenspan went to Little Rock. By and large Bentsen talked to Clinton when Clinton called him.That was the way it worked. Do you recall in your conversations with Senator Bentsen, were there missed opportunities for developing a more bipartisan atmosphere in Washington at this time, or was it pretty much just a foregone conclusion that because the Republicans were now completely in the minority that they were going to obstruct from the outset? Who was the coordinator, if any, in the first follow up? I had really not fully ever grasped from my Wall Street days, that there was a great big regulatory side to it including enforcement side, where the RTC was also charged with pursuing investigations against former thrift officials and ultimately prosecuting them if circumstances warranted. 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. No, no. He is the only person who has declined because of heath reasons and we wont have the opportunity to talk with him. That was just how all Presidents should act. It turned out to be the equivalent of walking the plank. I doubt that youll see that. As I recall, Al Gore wanted it, cared a great deal about it, to some considerable degree got his way on it. In fact, I went out West for vacation and I was interrupted and came back and went to the first of what became endless healthcare meetings. Casey came to see Bentsen and essentially asked to be reappointed and Bentsen told him, No. 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. If you read Putting People First, first of all it was domestic policy as a whole, it was not just economic policy. I didnt have a background in healthcare of any kind, and I began to see that it was overloading the circuits to try to do as much as some wanted to. I thought Perot was a flake, I think Perot is a flake, so I didnt take him terribly seriously. But absent such a crisis, history tends not to treat you as a great President. But from the outside, one of the notable departures of that administration, and I think it began very early, was the cordial deference paid toward the Federal Reserve Board. Its always a mistake to get in any kind of hassle with the Federal Reserve Board, always. I think its wrong from a policy point of view. But there was a discontinuity between the campaign and the administration, In this respect exactly right. So there was a lot of humor like that. Im not sure thats true or it isnt. Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. In the initial phases it was really broad strategy because we didnt yet know. There were those obviously who felt the most important thing was to get the deficit down. There was no surprise. Everybody was sitting in a room for the endless hours that have been so widely written about, which was quite a chaotic, disorganized process and not particularly Presidential process. Today, Evercore is the fourth-largest investment banking advisory firm in the world, with more than 130 partners and over 2,100 employees. Is the existence of a war room something. I think well probably want to pick up there and find out about that experience. Are we missing anything in terms of your responsibilities? Am I misremembering, did the President invite Mr. Greenspan, to sit in the gallery next to his wife when he delivered his economic policy. I wasnt telling him anything he didnt know, God knows, but that we were going to enter now a different phase in terms of the laser light of press scrutiny on policies and that we had to deepen the entire effort, and there was agreement on that. He created a big expectation with that speech that he gave I think in the fall of 1993. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. I didnt say anything to that. Carter had his famous Pond House meetings, and I went to a couple of those. Toward the end it was all about these four names or these six names and how do we get their votes. We had lunch. Its always a mistake to challenge the Federal Reserve. This was breaking news, CNN [Cable News Network] was interrupting its programming and so forth and President Clinton said, What is this about? It certainly wasnt optimal. And it was very effective because a lot of the people who came were opinion makers and he made a tremendous impression. We believed our model would attract the most talented senior finance professionals to our firm. I dont question the sincerity of every opponent. He had a great time. Healthcare got the nod. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? Bentsen had told me from the first moment this thing was going nowhere. No, I had very little contact with Mr. Clinton for roughly 20 years after leaving. I want to ask one more question about the election because Ross Perots name hasnt come up and been explored. Why does the government want to take over the healthcare system? If nobody else has any more questions about that, the other trade issue that you were greatly involved with that we touched on only once or twice has been Japan. I certainly have every reason to want him to. I hope he does. Were still in the transition period, and now may be the appropriate time to talk about the process by which deficit reduction becomes a clear priority item over some of the other things that were talked about during the course of the campaign. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? They had a very unsuccessful discussion, which resulted in name calling and cursing. So I knew nothing about the substance of the Clinton case. To get the deficit down ATF was, a southern Governor almost by definition has a better than! 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To and Bush believes the same thing one we had at that moment if you read Putting people,!

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