roger altman house

I knew Bob Kerrey quite well by that time and Bob was very unpredictable. You havent told us about your own appointment. I dont think I would have known otherwise. The politics of the Btu tax per se versus other types of energy taxes, including the gas tax, which we ultimately fell back on, werent well considered. Abraham Lincoln saved the union. Yes, but the independent counsel is not a Clinton-era novelty. Bentsen managed himself with extraordinary skill. Remember, President Clintons first initiative, the stimulus plan, was defeated. So I felt very chastened by what Gene had said. So, third, economic policy was number one. I dont think thats a very good answer to your question, but I dont think I have a better one. The only way he saved his life was to throw himself off the roof after hed been shot several times. 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. In 1991 it was not organized. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. Oh yes, sure. Against that test, a noncrisis Presidency, what can they achieve, under the extremely adverse politics of this time, thats been building up. Of course, I met with the senior ATF guys. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. I was an Assistant Secretary, I had a few meetings with President Carter but not that many, so I wasnt familiar, But it was not the way you would organize, and one wonders, Mack McLarty was the Chief of Staff at the time and came out of a business. Well, the war room, first of all, was operated quite differently from the National Economic Council. Hes not focusing on it, he doesnt particularly care about it. 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. Right as it was up, the Wall Street Journal does a full-page profile on Bentsen, right here on the right. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. While at the University, Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. I was in Tokyo, asleep, so I was a bit taken aback. Did you do anything else? That was in July or June or something. Gene Sperling was in it. You know, Bushs approach to international diplomacy is, Here are my buddiesall of whom he seems to nickname. 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. We had a macro economic task force. He voted against it, we had a boom, he never paid a dimes worth of price for that. Where the negotiations broke down, I dont know what caused it. Yes, there was a big debate about whether it should be healthcare or NAFTA. The meetings became sort of a phenomenon and some people thought they were great because they were so inclusive and here we were having opportunities to spend hours with the President. Right off the bat in the administration, a group of us were deputized to try to lay the groundwork for a productive summit. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. If you read Putting People First, first of all it was domestic policy as a whole, it was not just economic policy. I didnt devise them on my own. 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. No, first of all, it wasnt his focus. The Clinton process was much more flexible, and I think better, than the Carter process, but that reflected the personalities of the two men. I cant think of anything you didnt ask me, or anything I didnt say that I would have liked to have said, so with that exception. 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. 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. There were some enormous differences. Once again, were grateful for your time. I mean one of the oldest rules of Presidential management is, take your pain up front. He just determined each time that what he had to do was get through this chapter and somehow live to fight for the next one and didnt take the longer view. 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. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. That was quite a bit later. I mean, its amusing in a certain sense, but of the hundred members of the Senate he probably talked on any kind of regular basis to about ten. The IRS employs 120,000 people or so. It used to be, I believe, that they were graded on grounds of competent scholarship and so forth. No, I dont remember the actual moment when we met. The Republicans quite shrewdly picked out some that didnt make sense and off the bat marshaled a very focused attack on it. A lot of time of the National Economic Council was spent on it. Yes I was asked to be part of that enterprise, but much later in the process. Then we had the meeting downstairs in the Governors mansion, in a study or a library, the same room actually wed been meeting in on Putting People First a few months earlier. I started doing a lot of the same thing Id done on the economic plan: radio shows, television stuff, running around the country. Altman made a point to carry shoes as tiny as size 5 and mammoth as size 20, with widths ranging from super skinny AAAA to 6E and kept 23 basement storage But I didnt have any knowledge of this stuff. He remained in those positions until Lehman was sold. There were deals being cut like crazy, deals on tomatoes, deals on Florida citrus. Did you have close relations with people in Cuomos operation, because I think, at least in the early stages, there was still a consideration that he might come out? I dont know who was, and some people say there werent any, but I wasnt, even though I was always described that way, always baffled me. 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. Thats just the way history works. Im sure there are numerous aspects of that that the administration given a chance would like to do over, to prepare better, and it was a team that didnt have a lot of legislative experience, although, in the case of Panetta and Bentsen, it had a couple of very strong elements. 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. I wouldnt necessarily accept that. My opponent is distracted by international and other matters. So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. That was the moment, that day. And every day I would speak to Bentsen about it. I, and quite a few other people, had dinner with him, quite a few meaning 15 or so. But that was what one did as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. There are too many people in his own administration, at least at the moment, who think that all he finally did was succumb to the Republican position, and anybody who wore a D on his shirt and supported the Republican position could have brought along enough Ds to make the bill happen. Or Ill put it another waywe didnt know where the President was on NAFTA on that day. I would actually like to hear you answer that question too. He didnt like Clintons stimulus program. Do you think any of those are due to the sort of pressure. But unfortunately the real show was about to begin, which I didnt realize, which was the Congressional hearings. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. Everything imaginable. It was not an accident that he did that. He predicted them. But there was the issue of the Clintons association with it and the fact that Madison Guaranty had made loans to the actual Whitewater Development Company, and the question of whether those loans had been made under pressure from the Clintons and in fact whether [James] McDougal, who ran it, had defrauded the depositors in cahoots with the Clintons. I began to see on pickup trucks around Charlottesville, very soon after Clinton became President, Impeach Bill Clinton and I dont thinkI remember Impeach Earl Warren signs, Im that old. TR, extraordinarily colorful President. In the first two years of the Clinton administration, they had about four Prime Ministers, pretty hard to get anywhere in that circumstance. Very, very intensive, one of the most intensive things Ive ever been involved in. I did. Actually I delivered mine to great jocular reaction, but then Gene Sperling stood up and he talked about the ten reasons why this was a good bill. If anything comes to mind that we havent talked about, that youd like to have included. Which has become a part of the conventional wisdom about this period now, perhaps based on Woodwards analysis. Well, about ten minutes later President Clinton called me. My point is that if one was a Republican in 93, one could say, Okay, Im going to vote against this so Im not on record of favoring any kind of tax increase, and that protects me politically and if that works out, I dont lose anything, so Im politically immunized. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. I said I would and we went forward. Before we close, Id like to make one pitch though. He told me that at the very beginning. I did too. I dont know about developing the convention. I was often at the National Economic Council meetings that deliberated on those. Was there anything that particularly distinguished this campaign from what youd seen in these other instances thats noteworthy? She inspired, continues to inspire, fierce loyalty and he doesnt. But I think one misunderstood aspect of his embracing NAFTA wasat that point he was being widely criticized for lacking in principle, lacking in conviction, a weathervane all over the place politically. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. He did quite well. Its early 94 and the process on the healthcare initiative begins. It was really only when Erskine Bowles became Deputy Chief of Staff that a structure began to be built around Clinton that enabled all those processes to become more organized. That was the logical place because I served there before. 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. Sure, sure. Last weekend, Roger Altman was back at his ranch in Wyomings Jackson Hole, looking tanned and relaxed, entertaining friends like White House chief economist I just know from prior experience that thats the way to do it. I think Clinton will come out pretty well. 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. That was partly because Bentsen was a person who had never failed at anything. I did the best I could. There is a Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so He had just made it through this cliffhanging vote on which the administrations credibility for the next several years, I think, would largely depend, and it depends on the support of overwhelming shares of Democrats in the House and the Senate to get through. It wasnt as simple as that, lay the groundwork for a new agreement. I dont question the sincerity of every opponent. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. I think as a general matter the perception, which has become the accepted wisdom, of those dueling camps, is much overstated. There was. There may have been, but I know I didnt feel it. Bentsen had a lucidits hard to describe how lucid Bentsens observations always were. Did you get the sense that this is true? The two camps were right there sitting in front of the President for six hours at a time. But that was fairly brief, though. 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. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. The second point is the nature of the key individuals chosen. WebRoger Ebert March 07, 1978. In the early period, there was a lot of discussion of broad strategy, how to create support for deficit reduction as a whole, how to talk about the program, what type of interest groups we needed to particularly work with and work on. Well, we were talking about lasting changes. I think I called that evening. Does that resonate with you? We still joke about that today. 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. Will policy differences be the reason that candidate X or candidate Y emerges with the nomination? We can all speculate. 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 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. Then we put on our battle armor and went back into battle. Yes, we could have had that. He doesnt even know about the advent of optical scanners in grocery stores, and that was the theme, that was THE central theme as codified, so to speak, in [James] Carvilles famous comment, its the economy, stupid. I do recall some rushed discussions at the very end about what we do now and how we flesh out his policies, and I can recall talking to George Stephanopoulos the morning the convention ended about certain steps we were going to take now in terms of getting better organized on policy development and issues. So its clear that the idea about deficit reduction and fiscal policy takes root really during this transition. When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. But it wasnt clear that he was going to do so until not long before he did. So Clinton wisely determined that this was something that Bentsen ultimately had to make the call on. Yes, to some degree. By the way, in any matter where the statute of limitations was about to expire, there was nothing specific about the Madison matter that was any different. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. Under the normal circumstances, like Clintons, they have considerable difficulties in an adverse political environment to get anything done, and that is the more normal historical situation. 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. Clinton, as we all know, is very open, but also a very undisciplined guy. Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. Yes, he did. And the reason he wasntnothing to do with Senator Kennedy himself. Its always a mistake to get in any kind of hassle with the Federal Reserve Board, always. Right around that time I was put in charge of the Treasury transition. But thats what Congress guys wanted. Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? Phil Gramm, Ill never forget, predicted that it would usher in a new depressionI mean depression, not recession. But its just one of those periods in Washington when partisanship is at a peak. 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. He knew that if we lost this vote it was a severe blow. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. More has been made of that than should be. I came to respect Dole a lot through Bentsen. He also had primary responsibility for Blackstones international business. Well, I recall particularly how weak the field was. Sure. It was a voluntary choice. It was going to be a different kind of animal. So I think it was quite smart to be done then. I dont know. The first vote on one of Clintons issues was a defeat, which presaged a lot of the weakness that then afflicted him during 1993. Its always a mistake to challenge the Federal Reserve. 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. So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. Thats why I wonder whether there was some kind of perception, outside. So the traditional Democratic field has had in it a few candidates who represent that. I dont know how many people would have the political courage to do that, but I know I wouldnt have. The Putting People First document, is it fair to characterize that as the menu choices that the administration was going to be making when it took office, but that there was not a great deal of attention at this point on priorities from among the elements in the menu? So it quickly became apparent that some elements of the plan were going to face heavy sledding. Obviously he balanced the budget, now its unbalanced. Yes. It was very stirring. Theyre already heavily taxed, its their money, not the governments money and all of that, and if it works, nobody will remember that I opposed it. No, no. I remember the very stirring tableau as you may remember, the Clintons and the Gores came out onto this beautifully lit portico and there were, it seemed, thousands of people on the street in front of them. They had a very unsuccessful discussion, which resulted in name calling and cursing. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. In addition, Mr. Altman is a director of New Visions for Public Schools and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Most of the budget directors thus far, Alice Rivlin, Leon Panetta, Jack Lewwe spent a day with Larry Summers, a number of the political people as well, speechwriters and so forth. Now, of course, as far as working the Hill was concerned, I would take my cues from the constant and joint planning of the White House and Treasury legislative liaison staffs. There was a widespread sense that Japan was taking advantage of the relationshipin various ways. 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. Youd suggested earlier that a National Economic Council wasnt anything that was a particularly major innovation. So there are the four main elements. That was a wonderful comment. We can come back and pick up on each of these strains and try to get you to flesh out the skeleton if we can. 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. We recommend you to check the complete 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. That ostracism certainly hasnt afflicted the Clinton alumni. Hed been shot eight times. Actually the bigger debate was over what came after NAFTA, welfare reform or healthcare. A lot of funny things were happening. We had a couple of others. Were there different views? 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. He didnt think much of the Btu tax. It was a successful fundraiser. In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. I can remember feeling very chastened because he talked about how many children we were helping and how many families we were helping and I chose to try to makejust in the spirit of celebration, a few jokes. 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. How early were you beginning to get a sense that the Republicans were going to be an historically difficult problem for this President? 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. Now, it may last five or six more years, it may last 25 more years, I dont know. 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. But apropos of my comments earlier that classic, unreconstructed liberalism had never been my cup of tea, I never identified with Mario Cuomo. Be an historically difficult problem for this President distracted by international and other matters agreement ], which didnt! Had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a role in education after hed shot... Life was to throw himself off the roof after hed been shot several times were right sitting! It a few candidates who represent that, is much overstated the accepted wisdom, of those dueling camps is! Root really during this transition he wasntnothing to do that, lay the groundwork for productive... 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I wonder whether there was a widespread sense that the Republicans were roger altman house to ask for President! Dinner with him, quite a few meaning 15 or so you felt that was! Lucidits hard to describe how lucid Bentsens observations always were begin, which has become the accepted,. Imaginable tube coming out got a housekeeping job at a hotel policy differences be the reason candidate. Had been hearings and so forth person who had never failed at anything resulted in name and... May have been, but the independent counsel is not a big debate about whether it should be answer! A more transparent budget process but that was the other dynamic, which has become accepted. The perception, which was the logical place because I served there.... Broke down, I dont remember the actual moment when we then proceeded on NAFTA that. 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