Any particular memories from that successful trip? But was it a battle? 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. So what I actually spent my time on ranged all over the lot. We didnt spend a tremendous amount of time talking about, If we do this, Greenspan will do that. Okay, the election occurred and, for reasons Ive never fully understood, Alice Rivlin and I were the first two to go down to see Clinton, of those he was looking at for appointment purposes. We sat there, the two of us, watching it on television, mostly in silence. 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. And the reason he wasntnothing to do with Senator Kennedy himself. So by the time I had to do it again I wasnt particularly concerned. But I really could never figure that out. So actually I didnt have any concerns. Japan accepted a series of goals that we wanted them to accept, but the teeth, in terms of enforcement, werent there. The Times, which is typically, of course, a Democratic-leaning paper, was Clintons severest clinic throughout his whole Presidency, and on Whitewater went crazy. Yes, but the independent counsel is not a Clinton-era novelty. So hes the one who asked you to serve in that position, not Clinton. I remembered him of course, but I dont think he knew me. Is this time for patriotism? It just depended on the size of the concession. Then about three weeks later I was testifying as a regular matter on the RTC, I guess it was semiannual oversight hearings on the RTC, and Senator Gramm or Senator [Chris] Bond, Senator Gramm I think, asked me if Id had any contact with the White House about this whole matter. He loved policy. As I recall, Al Gore wanted it, cared a great deal about it, to some considerable degree got his way on it. My role was also shaped by the fact that Bentsen picked his spots very carefully and not only didnt want to be involved in everything, only wanted to be involved in a very few things. So if you want to call it the politics of the economy, The labor unions were overwhelmingly opposed. some of these were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but he was quite an impressive speaker, I thought. Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. But my role was shaped largely by two things: one, Bentsen and what Bentsen wanted; and two, the fact that I had a reasonably close relationship with the White House. 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. I wasnt there because I was an expert in international finance. There may have been, but I know I didnt feel it. That was quite a bit later. I mean one of the oldest rules of Presidential management is, take your pain up front. 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. I think its a combination of several things. Why? Yes, but typically you wouldnt resort to that with relative stability in the exchange markets, and we did have relative stability. Each day hed give a speech and mark off a day, counting down the days to the expiration of the statute of limitations and saying these people at the RTC damn well better be sure that justice is served, the Clintons arent off the hook. Hed been shot eight times. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. The answer to that is yes. Definitely working on personnel. You had three candidates on the stage during the debates and so forth. He was not, no. Bob Rubin talked with great credibility about the bond market responding, and James Carville was so amusing for so long afterwards saying he wanted to come back in his next life and be the bond market because everybody paid such fealty to it. I dont know how many people would have the political courage to do that, but I know I wouldnt have. Richard Nixon resigned from office. Alan Greenspan was on it; Simon was chair of it. He said he wanted to tell me that the President had decided to appoint Bentsen to be Secretary of the Treasury and Rubin to be head of the National Economic Council. So a group of us at the deputy level, Joan Spero, Charlene Barshefsky, Bo Cutter, me, who were the four senior members of that group, started entering into discussions with our Japanese counterparts. The basic point was Ill focus on it, Ill get it moving. For example, Putting People First was reissued, I believe in June of 92. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. We might have a thousand independent counsels operating under the freedom of the press, investigations. You didnt need to be a management consultant to see they werent well organized. I never heard of them. So Mack played relatively little role in this. Andrew Garfield presented the Robert Altman Award at the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Awards to his old friend, Fran Kranz, for his film Mass. Kerrey made a quite dramatic speech, rather excoriating Clinton, urged Clinton to get back on the high road and so forth and then cast the vote and Gore cast the tie-breaking vote and thats how it happened. Bentsen advised him to take it. I did have the impression from the beginning that he was politically gifted and ambitious. Im not sure he would have known me really at all. Well, when we actually re-did Putting People First, we went to Little Rock and worked on it for a few days. from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. Until there had been hearings and so forth you dont get much of a sense of that. Was that true of Georgetown at the time that you were there? The only reason I think it worked was Bob Rubin, who had the skill and the temperament to make it work. 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. Were you at all involved in the development of the side agreements on environmental issues and. It was very effective because it was a group of roughly 20-25 people, working literally 19-20 hours a day with only one mission, and that mission was to get this bill passed. Because if you decided not to go on NAFTA you really couldnt ever go back and say, Im a pro-trade President. Thats something we dont have a lot of information about. Did Bentsen then become sort of a one-man legislative strategy group? Today you have Governor [Howard] Dean, Congressman [Dick] Gephardt, for instance. 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. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. 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. Carter did the same thing but much lower key. Im not sure thats true or it isnt. Then we put on our battle armor and went back into battle. Mickey Kantor was in charge of the famous Little Rock Economic Summit. Then, I was in Tokyo. Right, but if you take too much pain up front. If you can think of a great President, a President who is seen as really great, who didnt have such a crisis, Id like to hear it, because I dont think there is one. I think thats a wonderful tradition. The two camps were right there sitting in front of the President for six hours at a time. Was it his personality? and I said, I just want to serve.Im not going to give you a speech about why I should be Secretary of the Treasury. Eventually they did, but it wasnt because of this agreement, big macro forces had them do it. But as to whether it was an innovation, I doubt it. I started getting inundated with letters from Congress asking how the RTC intended to handle this, stirred up by this Republican campaign. Yes, Putting People First was reissued, I believe it was June. It turned out that the thing had really been left by the wayside and there was very little of the necessary planning that had gone into it and it was about two months off. Clinton loves meetings like that. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. Whenever the times got tough or after they left or whatever it was, I think a lot of people who left the Clinton administration lowered themselves by their own behavior in terms of lesser loyalty than they should have had. Before we come back to this, I want to pose one question and that is about the Presidents style when he was working the phones with members of the House. We talked a little bit about the fundraising elements. I might have if I had not known Bob Rubin, but I knew him better than anybody else in the administration knew him and I had great confidence in him and knew that he and I would relate well. Well, it was difficult in the beginning. Im not in the Senate. Thats true, yes. We had a bad one against the yen when the dollar touched an all-time low of 80 yen. No, I went back the next day. So he didnt say, I know Im going to lose all these folks, but Im going to do it anyway. Bentsen only talked to about five or six Senators. That was the all-time low for the dollar. So I guess wed like to hear the story about your involvement in both cases, focusing on your relationships with members of Congress, how the division of labor was, your relationships with the. Bentsen and Dole were very close friends, which is a measure of the stature that Bentsen had. Well, you know that whole thing turned out to be quite an astonishing fiasco with the ultimate FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] raid and the immolation of 80 Branch Davidians. I personally thought Rubin was most likely to be Secretary of the Treasury. Speaking out of school? That process had been going on. Georgetown was a semi-serious school. I was on the board of the Childrens Television Workshop, now called the Sesame Workshop, the entity that produces Sesame Street and related childrens programming. Of course, we were in a different time zone, 12 hours different. Tweet. Less and less now that shes her own public figure, but thats her nature. 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. Youre an exception to this. Yes I was asked to be part of that enterprise, but much later in the process. Then I would have discussions with Clinton, usually on the fly, about certain economic issues I thought were important. I know this will sound quite strange, but Clinton was in some awe of Bentsen and a little bit of fear of Bentsen. I just remember that being contemporaneous with the real beginning of an organized effort here. No. But the main argument was economic. That was the fundamental choice they made in devising the reform. Had it always been assumed that Rubin would take that position? Did you think it was a waste of time at that point? But it was not a novel idea at all. 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. But I dont recall encountering him at all. He got Republican ex-Presidents to sign on, though, as I recall. Or should be, not will be, but should be. Can you give us a picture? But as often happens, there is a moment when positions shift. 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. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. As I say, we assembled sometime between the 20th and 25th of November in Washington and then December 5th or 6th or 7th or whatever it was he made his choices. So people should think of it in those very basic terms, and a lot of people havent and I think less of them for that. Did you know him, you said you hadnt known him before then? You can have half of it, or something to that effect. I sat there for two or three hours and he took the measure of me and at the end he said, Would you like to do this? I think at the Pond House meetings there were also some of the Congressional leaders, werent there? He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. One of the many stunning things about it is the fact that none of those Republicans paid a price of any kind for that. I think history will probably record that as the most important achievement of President Clintons overall Presidency, not the vote itself of course, but the ultimate effects of it. But I think he may turn out to have transformed the party, which really is an important historical achievement. But most of my time was spent on legislation. I did not have a crystal ball to the effect that he was going to make it and that the dominos were somehow going to fall in a certain way that enabled him to do so. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. Help us understand why he would elect to move NAFTA at this point? I mean, I could imagine that in your tenure, the perception might have been quite the reverse, but I dont know. I know I didnt and I was very involved in trade policy as a whole because much of our trade policy involved Japan and I was very involved in that. But in any event, there I was, and this guy, as I say, was a master of the game. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. In the spring of 1991, I think it would have been May or June, we had the chance to have a talk here in New York, and I then talked to him by phone. He said, What do you want to do? I got involved in certain aspects of preparing it, editing it, fine-tuning it, I recall that. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. Yes, he did. Altman Thats true, yes. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. That notion took hold at that meeting. She inspired, continues to inspire, fierce loyalty and he doesnt. Ive read a lot of whats been written about the healthcare plan, its all there. Then the President spoke to Kerrey. So most of what you were doing was drawing from the people who would not have been supportive of Cuomo in any event. Web446 Roger Altman Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO All Sports Entertainment News Archival Browse 446 roger altman When it came to responding within the same news cycle to an allegation or some criticism of the program, we were able to respond immediately, and rapid response became a part of the political lexicon. So there are the four main elements. A lot of kids who went to Georgetown were interested in having a good time, and most people who went to Chicago were really serious about their academic pursuits and the world around them. I mean, it was just a morgue. Although the Whitewater event came well before Lewinsky, it came very early. Yes, actually there was a big debate about healthcare, welfare reform, and NAFTA. I can recall that we had a fundraiser. Now, theyre sometimes minor changes that dont require that, but any meaningful change in the later stages required the Presidents approval. We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese. I believe, as I say, it was either the day of or the day after Gennifer Flowers had given her press conference. Altman gave Do you have the perception that there were some other instances where maybe this wasnt done? It was very stirring. Scientist, architect, botanist, Copyright 2023. Well, after the Presidents unveiling and before the war room, this pre-war room effort at selling, how was that coordinated? It will be differences of style, differences of perception. Robert Altman reflects on his college years with President William J. Clinton, 1992 election, Treasury transition, budget plans, Whitewater investigation, and North American Free Trade Agreement. So, looking back on it, the nature and the history of those three men had a lot to do with the eventual outcome. I mean, I have no reservations about when Lloyd Bentsen approached me, I think he thought it was just going to be very brief and wed send some name up and it wouldnt take long to get that name confirmed and I might end up spending two or three months doing this. Clinton had in fact been working on Capitol Hill during this time and I guess I was just trying to get a sense about whether that was unusual. Things like, I cant remember what example we used, but Senator X voted for us because he was afraid hed have to have lunch with the President again, things like that. Thats not particularly my recollection, no. I knew a lot about Perot, having been heavily involved in Wall Street for many years. You know, theres another element of this. I also told him, which was quite a mistake, that I was thinking about recusing myself from the case because I realized that there was such a conflict here between being a member of the administration on one hand and being a Federal regulator on the other. You may not have been conscious of it. We had a couple of others. There was no surprise. So there was not a war of the type that has so often been written about, just not true. Those are my exact words. In a curious way hed compromised his own position. Doing concerted, multilateral action of the type youre referring to is really only appropriate in the midst of a crisis. 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