roger altman house

I recall, for example, a discussion at that very original dinner in the spring of 1991 and a rather focused discussion on economic policy, and particularly about deficit reduction. Bentsen had run for Congress at a very young age, successfully, was re-elected two or three times, then quit and went into business and was very successful in business. Ultimately they were in effect combined into one big wish list, and that wish list went forward. Well, we were talking about lasting changes. So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. I then had the brilliant ideaIm saying this, obviously sarcastically, that I should inform the White House what those procedural alternatives were. Did it come from DAmato, or what? Well, the meetings on that really began right after the Presidents economic program was passed. I said to him, If I should resign, then thats what I want to do. 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. Not giving it a lot of thought, frankly, I said, Sure. Id actually been politically active in high school, but my political involvements didnt extend beyond the campus. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. Some of thats a function of, for lack of a better word, the culture within the group of people who worked in this administration, so that there is no penalty paid, in effect, among your former colleagues for being outspoken or saying something in the press critical to the President. First of all, Clintonand I consider this a very important historical achievement, well see how it lastsmay turn out to have transformed the Democratic party. Now we became aware pretty early that there were some real problems with this proposal. I was just going to make an observation about history, historians and non-historians who study Presidents past and present. I recall reading in one account that Clinton had worked on a kind of unusual cluster of issues as a candidate for student body president at the time. It began to get organized at the end of 91. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. Well, I dont recommend you have that experience, but once youve done it, you know what it is. In other words, at the time I just didnt take Perot seriously. And the difficulty became quickly evident once the program was laid out. Today it is seen as structural. So I did a lot of work representing the Treasury on any number of issues in the White House councils of deliberation. I was politically active, though. 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. It was an all right agreement. The great Presidents that you mentioned, the ones that loom large, as you said, are all crisis Presidents. But I think if you study American history and you look at any number of earlier periods, the attacks on Abraham Lincoln for example comes to mind, the Andrew Jackson period, such extreme partisanship is common in American history. No, I dont remember that effort at all, so it must have been pretty quiet. But from their vantage point, thats when they experienced intense partisanship. I believe it was a five-year statute of limitations and the expiration date was January 94 or February or something like that. So yes, the themes were in the State of the Union. Its probably strange humor in this instance. I think it was over two days. Hed been shot eight times. There could be a lot of backsliding on that, well have to see. I wasnt involved in any of the delegate-related strategies, no. Some of the things on the wish list made a lot of sense, but some of them didnt. There was. I wasnt there because I was an expert in international finance. Many people consider him, many of his opponents considered him to be setting new heights of insincerity and to have misrepresented a lot of his past. Im convinced to this day that sent a bolt of electricity through the Iranians and they figured they better not hold those hostages one hour into Ronald Reagans Presidency, and they didnt. President Clinton, in retrospect, his disavowals on some of his private life were almost certainly false and the way he handled the Lewinsky matter was about as bad as it could be because heessentially swore before the American people that he didnt do it, and of course then recanted. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? I talk to the President now from time to time with some frequency. Im thinking of what historians will say. Was that equally true of the colleagues that you were making sales to with Clinton? But I didnt unilaterally choose all the members of it. But its not too different from Clintons style, very personal, very, very personal. 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. Youre referring to the environmental and labor side issues. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. He didnt want to be involved in the daily ins and outs of those jobs. Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. We had a couple of others. No, what Im trying to say is that there were several points of view advanced by some of the people there, who had, in one form or another, policy experience. Having said that, I dont believe that affected the partisan approach to it. Carter, whos a wonderful man, God knows, however is very rigid. He told me that at the very beginning. So I had that meeting with Clinton. Those carve-outs were all done on a tripartite basis. Not the first time he met with another head of state, but I think his first summit outside this country. The basic point was Ill focus on it, Ill get it moving. Did Senator [Edward] Kennedy figure at all as a help or a hindrance or what in the budget battle, he wasnt really a key player? Its always a mistake to challenge the Federal Reserve. Well, Im not actually trying to establish whether these were particularly important in the campaign. Of course he has those who get invited to his ranch and those who dont. It wasnt difficult. How do you think Clinton ultimately is going to be read by historians, this Presidency? I think my point is slightly different. Exactly. We were the easy solution for the press. A little bit. They just called someone in the war room and they had an immediate answer or immediate access to whatever they needed. 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. Was there a representative of the campaign. In general, no. Also, wed had 12 years of Republican rule and there was a widespread sense of time for change. It is high, because the toll it takes on your life is high and you either run out of money or you just burn yourself out, or you get separated from your family, or whatever it is. In the Carter administration, there was no real sense of what the Federal Reserve really was, what it did, how to deal with it. He was not, no. Our labor leadership did not want that, especially of course, the Teamsters. The hearings ended around the fourth or fifth of August and it was now the seventeenth or something. The answer to that is yes. 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. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. I cant cite the examples that I can cite about the National Economic Council, because I studied that for Clinton, but I doubt it. Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? Yes, that was bad advice. I should double-check that. I mean, there are libraries full of books that have already been written about that. Of course, there was Leon Panetta, and Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen, Alice Rivlin, Laura Tyson, myself, Gene Sperling, those were really the main members. Its really quite stunning. I started getting inundated with letters from Congress asking how the RTC intended to handle this, stirred up by this Republican campaign. Is he going to become President? If he predicted over the two years I worked for him, the fate of 25 pieces of legislation, he was right on all 25. Was it his personality? I attended the little thing at Monticello when he was on his way to be inaugurated, the first time he stopped by in the bus. Then ultimately, to give you a sense of how colorful this became, DAmato went to the Senate floor and he had a gigantic calendar the size of this wall and was marking off the days. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. There was not a war going on. But there was a discontinuity between the campaign and the administration, In this respect exactly right. Ill never forget that, he was a good guy, a real good old boy, I cant recall his name now, hes not in Congress any longer, but I arrived at the airport and he meets me and he says, Look, just get one thing straight, youre not going to say a word today about guns, nothing. Well, I got briefed on it and basically, two points here: one is the chairman of the RTC whether it is me or Mr. Casey or the people before him, never were briefed on, exposed to, involved in, or otherwise saw anything at all about the investigations the RTC was pursuing. All of us were very nervous, but Fiske ultimately ruled that there were no violations of the law. I do believe it was able to make a difference. I mean, I could imagine that in your tenure, the perception might have been quite the reverse, but I dont know. There were deals being cut like crazy, deals on tomatoes, deals on Florida citrus. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. Im trying to get a sense of what their input to the whole process was. I, and quite a few other people, had dinner with him, quite a few meaning 15 or so. Stirred up by this Republican campaign of 91 pretty quiet wed had 12 years of Republican and. 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