So he remained alive and, as we all know, recovered. That happened, I want to say, late 93, that his nomination was effectively killed. Actually, each White House that I was familiar with had its own version of what we called the National Economic Council, and if you look back for example, during the Nixon and Ford administrations, they had something quite similar. All types of dire predictions were put forward. No, but Clintons clear priority was, and was going to be, steps to stimulate the economy and indeed, as soon as he took office, he submitted a package of measures which constituted his stimulus program and they rather promptly went down to defeat. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. One of the reasons it was bloodless was because the Soviets knew what they had and didnt have and what we had and they didnt have. On the other hand, in the Carter White House it worked very poorly. Web446 Roger Altman Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO All Sports Entertainment News Archival Browse 446 roger altman Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. I would say it was something like this. That was the fundamental choice they made in devising the reform. A lot of funny things were happening. I want to ask one more question about the election because Ross Perots name hasnt come up and been explored. There were not pitched battles. We came into office, the trade imbalance of payments deficit with Japan had risen to very high levels. I remembered him of course, but I dont think he knew me. He has difficulty speaking. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? Anyway, that was the high point, by far, of my own service, both in terms of the drama and the sense of having contributed something important. Well, let me stop. You may remember that Clinton put forward a white paper, if I can call it that, called Putting People First, which came out I believe at the end of 1991. That was quite a bit later. I think we had a sandwich or something and I took off and went back to the airport. We just didnt know, and thats pretty amazing, the biggest piece of legislation, the voting has actually begun. I think the answer to your question was, Yes, it was, but the RTC was charged with the responsibility of cleaning up all S and Ls [Savings and Loans]. No, I was responding to a question about economic policy. Did you stay in Little Rock for a while afterward? You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. Toward the middle and latter stages they met everyday. Bentsen never lost an election, period, on which he was head of the ticket, ever. 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. The entire economic team flew on a chartered plane down to Little Rock. The bills up on the Hill and it is the object of tremendous controversy and heat and light. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, Notice of Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunity. But my guess is that those kinds of. Within a month, I remember vividly one day, I had seven radio shows. You know, you call in for five minutes apiece and theyre all lined up. Ive known many members. By the end of the year it had become a massive issue. Scientist, architect, botanist, Copyright 2023. We wont get into a philosophy, an argument, about causation, I think Reagans Presidency, a bit, goes against what youre saying, thats all. Dont ever talk down your currency; dont ever quarrel with the Federal Reserve Board. That was the first time we had an opposition takeover. Then later in the process I was asked if I would go do a war room for healthcare of the type we did for the budget. So no, Bentsen did not go over to the White House, hang around, talk about legislative strategy. I dont know how many people would have the political courage to do that, but I know I wouldnt have. First of all, the actual role of the Deputy Secretary as defined in the Treasury mission statement is to do what the Secretary of the Treasury asks him to. I spoke to the Oklahoma state legislature. which was a separate agency and Presidential appointment. Then, in 1995, he formed Evercore. Then President Clinton went out on the balconythe front porch of the White House, on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, and had a press conference. So not long after arriving in the new offices, which were over there on Vermont Avenue, I remember that, I went over to the Treasury and met with Secretary [Nicholas] Brady and the Deputy Secretary, very nice manname escapes me at the momentand began to debrief the senior members of the department. Then, I was in Tokyo. [ALTMAN - comments on the message as to I think Clinton will come out pretty well. Do you have the perception that there were some other instances where maybe this wasnt done? I ran into Alice on the plane. Yes, Putting People First was reissued, I believe it was June. Carter had the famous $50 rebate, which became the object of much derision ultimately. When the voting began, we did not know if we were going to win. Right off the bat in the administration, a group of us were deputized to try to lay the groundwork for a productive summit. Earlier in Little Rock, was she in attendance at any of these meetings? He could have just been rhetorically difficult about it and kind of accepted the fact that were steady as she goes on the Cold War, and he didnt. The country needs it, the Democratic Party needs it, I need it. You say you knew Rubin well, but did you have a sense that in the other places where economic policy-making is made there was ever any tension over this kind of an arrangement? We touched on this at a couple of points but never directly asked you whether you thought the President. Yes. 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. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate and cannot be switched off in our systems. 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. Why dont we break now. 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. The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. If you go to Monticello, to his actual tombstone, then you know that he drafted his own epitaph: Governor of Virginia, founder of the University of Virginia, and author of the Declaration of Independence. Was there a contrasting case in your experience in the Clinton administration where support was received both sides of the aisle and soughtwas it sought in the budget case? Of course, any situation like that always has its humor. Certainly on free trade you would say that there was a consistency in his rhetoric during the campaign and the behavior of the administration after he was elected. The great Presidents that you mentioned, the ones that loom large, as you said, are all crisis Presidents. He is a trustee of MIT and serves on its Governance Committee. I think. How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. 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. You had some experience with Japan before? My own view on that is that American history is filled with examples of severe and indeed brutal partisanship. So the Congress decided to hold hearings on all aspects of Whitewater and, as everybody remembers, everyone from Maggie Williams to Harold Ickes to everybody had to testify. Im not sure anyone is ever going to pay a penalty in American society for that type of commentary. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. We had a good discussion and I went back to the airport and flew home. I think his views at that point were in formation. Then when Ross Perot entereddeficit reduction was a theme of the [Paul] Tsongas campaign if I remember correctly; then later Ross Perot, entitlement reform, whatever that might mean; free trade and issues of economic relations with Japan; and I think one of the candidates[Bob] Kerrey?had a health insurance plank, is that right? Youre an exception to this. 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. We had a couple of others. There was a widespread sense that Japan was taking advantage of the relationshipin various ways. Well, the war room, first of all, was operated quite differently from the National Economic Council. 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. Could be. And trade was one of Clintons priorities and of course NAFTA was followed by a series of other trade agreements, GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and so forth. That was the day the earth moved and Clintons view changed. I think each person makes his or her own decision. How are people in the future to understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress? By that time, Clinton had his idea of the middle-class tax cut, and he had his idea of cutting the deficit in half during his first term, I think it was. For the first part of the Clinton years, Arthur Burns was famously mystical, quite like Greenspan. I believe Stan Shuman was there. Can you tell us about how that unfolded, your perceptions of Mrs. Clintons role in all of this? Why was that a federal regulatory issue? Those are my exact words. 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. By and large, most of the members of the Finance Committee in the Senate and the Ways and Means Committee in the House. Or Ill put it another waywe didnt know where the President was on NAFTA on that day. There are extremes here. All the groundwork had been done before the storm broke, so there were probably three to four hundred people. And presided over eight years of peace. It was going to be a different kind of animal. some of these were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but he was quite an impressive speaker, I thought. That wasnt a very long meeting. The war room was very effective for Clinton, and of course, it was to some degree patterned after the war room in the campaign, which was then the object of an interesting film among other things. 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. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. I think less well than he was treated while he was in office. 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. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. He was shot eight times, mostly in the chest. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. Rob Rubin and I went together, Bob Reich was there, Gene Sperling was there, Bob Shapiro was there. Thats how I feel about it. Its curious to me, but thats how it worked. Education might be something in terms of opening. I think at the Pond House meetings there were also some of the Congressional leaders, werent there? He was not, no. It occurred around 96, 97, but in the early stages of the Clinton years we didnt have a currency crisis. 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. That was partly because Bentsen was a person who had never failed at anything. In the 12 years between Clinton and Carter, there had been famous acrimony between the Fed and the White House and the Treasury. I think the critical revelation that day was the notioninitially I believe put forth by Allen Blinder, that a certain amount of deficit reduction ought to translate into a certain level of interest rate response, which in turn should be more stimulativeshould inject more stimulus into the economy than anything that we could do on the fiscal side. Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times US managing editor, interviewed Roger Altman, co-CEO of Evercore Partners. 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. That day I knew we were headed for defeat. [Mikhail] Gorbachev was an enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan. No, there were 20-22 people there. It began to get organized at the end of 91. I take these observations, very astute observations, from people who live in this discipline. But it was a rather fluid, floating group. But you can imagine the irony of that comment because the Republicans to a man were opposing it because it is tax and spend economics, and the President is saying its going to go down because it is Wall Street economics. Of course, we were in a different time zone, 12 hours different. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. Theyd been working on it for two or three weeks or whatever one does, but, as they usually do, the day before the profile runs, they want to come in and interview him so they can have a current aspect to it. The contrast between Chicago, which was in an uproar at the time, and Georgetown couldnt have been more vivid. My testimony was rather a highlight of that. He did quite well. We just discussed one of them, which is the up cycle in partisanship, as I call it. I think so, yes. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. Born on April 2, 1946 in United States of America, Roger Altman started his career as Financial professional . As far as healthcare versus welfare reform? He could have been all rhetorical about it. Could you see at that point a set of priorities emerging with the candidate? The period during which Bentsens views werent treated with quite enough respect was a very short one. Well, not really. There were a lot of people who did take that candidacy very seriously though, right? Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. So again, it wasnt all about President Clinton. We made two or three trips to Japan and then there was the Tokyo Economic Summitthe G7 Summit in the fall of 93 which happened to be planned many years in advance for Tokyo. Do you have any recollections or observations about the President in that environment? I remember Allen going through that. Any meaningful change in the bill, particularly if were talking about the last month or two, was only done with the approval of the President. I mean I hired really good lawyers, and they told me pretty early in the process that on the substance there was no issue, that you have to worry about the fact that in this country prosecutions can become very political, but they just didnt think that it was much of an issue on the legal precedence and the substance. I think I testified before the Senate for about thirteen consecutive hours and six or eight hours on the House side the very next day. But there was the sense, based on conversationsI think you could go back and say that there were some discussions between Bentsen and Greenspan, Rubin and Greenspan, Clinton and Greenspan, although the sum total of those conversations probably took an hour. The politics of personal destruction as Mrs. Clinton is saying now on her book tour, common in American history, nothing new about it at all. 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. I stayed overnight, went back the next day. You were both involved then in student government. But it was not a novel idea at all. Oh sure, sure, well have another major Presidential uproar. Every time they had a new Prime Minister, we had a new set of characters. 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. 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. May I ask you if a part of the political calculus at the time was, Weve just come through a bruising battle with no Republican votes, weve got to do something to reach out and to reestablish better relations with a party thats not going anywhere over the next year, probably for the rest of the Presidency? Theyd review it and youd go to a meeting where you received a 900-page memo, three quarters of which you didnt understand. Of course we learned quickly that these were really difficult negotiations. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? He was quite in the minority at the time. 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. The hearings process really kind of kicks it off. Nobody said to me, Hes there. I was there to the last day of the Carter Presidency, and all of a sudden we were able to negotiate the release of those hostages. You can do it through tax increases and then you have to choose the tax, and you can do it through spending reductions and you have to choose the area youre going to focus on. Right. Did you do anything else? Do you have anyyou were sort of one of the casualties of this campaign, but was the Whitewater thing separate from this hate stuff? One of the themes they advanced was deficit reduction, not the only one. I should have realized I was stepping into a potential mine field but I didnt, although I do have to say that I called my lawyer and asked him if there was any reason I shouldnt take this and he said, Yes, there are about 200 reasons. Lets recast the question a bit. So I dont think my reactions to that were really any different than anybody else following the campaign. He was fully free to say no to that. But that was fairly brief, though. I hope he does. Can you give us a picture? I thought, perhaps not at that instant, but quickly thereafter, that what Clinton said to me about Wall Street economics was very funny. But Lloyd Bentsen was in that league, top five or six or seven. That by choosing Panetta, and Bentsen, and Rubin, he chose economic conservatives. So it was a quick learning experience for Clinton. 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. I mean, there are libraries full of books that have already been written about that. Theodore Roosevelts name comes up occasionally as somebody that even Clinton himself had at least a temporary fixation on when he was evidently considering his own legacy as some one who took a progressive era, being a kind of rough approximation to the. In other words, Clinton believed that he could charm anyone if he wanted to and Bush believes the same thing. So actually I didnt have any concerns. There was a whole bunch of work going on on that but I was completely preoccupied with the Presidents economic program and trying to get it passed, not just during the war room period but before that. Sure, Greenspan was in favor of deficit reduction, so when the administration came forward with an actual deficit reduction plan, which, as we all know, was a bit unexpected, Greenspan supported it, testified for it and so forth. Somehow it came off successfully in Miami with all these heads of state and everybody was very happy with it. Then, while the agreement called for there to be no further duties or tariffs or anything on everything, a whole variety of items were carved out in order to get certain votes. I never heard of them. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? I would say we had a definite policy, we just didnt achieve too much of it. I dont include that on the list because the federal role in education is always exaggerated. Im not sure. Mr. Clinton became aware of that. Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? When concessions needed to be made, this was before you get up too high, Russell referred to the point that deals had already been made. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. 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. So it was a very interesting dynamic. I do believe it was able to make a difference. The ultimate plan was way too complicated for the Congress and the country to grasp and understand and soberly assess. At my sons school, on the floor where the history department is, each President gets a little tiny picture and about two lines. I do hope as we proceed that you will take the time to give us your continuing perceptions of Bentsen because unfortunately he is somebody we had approached about doing an interview and. 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. I believe it was a five-year statute of limitations and the expiration date was January 94 or February or something like that. A few questions about that. Weve talked about the general idea that the administration was going to accept pain by having deficit reduction in the early years, but theres still the question of how youre going to mete out the pain. The second was the evolution of the deficit estimates during that period. He knew that if we lost this vote it was a severe blow. 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 dont recall precisely, but Im sure Im right that Clintons standing in the polls was ebbing. It was the usual degree of difficulty that early, not really greater because he was from Arkansas. But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. So Im sure therell be another independent counsel. In a curious way hed compromised his own position. He should have taken it. So I had that meeting with Clinton. If you look at the history of American reform, at that scale of change, usually you have a little bit more consensus than a 43 percent electoral. 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. 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. I can even imagine an independent counsel of some kind being unlikely, but not impossible, designated in the whole weapons of mass destruction issue. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. Sure, I did. I mean, it was just a morgue. You had the bilateral talks with the Japanese and the G7 format. Most of the people whod been involved in the economic plan or NAFTA for example, werent part of that. What really happened was that the stimulus was entirely spending-side stimulus. Evercore uses cookies to give you the best experience on our website. We talked a little bit about the fundraising elements. 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. There may have been, but I know I didnt feel it. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. Sure, but I dont feel we can claim tremendous credit for much of that. Even at the end of 91 it was small and relatively unformed. TR, extraordinarily colorful President. The only other observation that just randomly runs through my mind is, I was always described in the press as an intimate of Clintons and that was just not the case. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. Clinton made an error, didnt take it. By the way, when the three-judge Washington panel that chose Fiske threw him out and replaced him with [Ken] Starr, Starr went back to the beginning and went over the entire thing again and came to the same conclusion. No. But in any event, what gets discussed most in the campaign historically may or may not be the first or second major initiative that comes from the new President. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. What political or personal characteristics does she have that he doesnt have, what does she bring to the. He had a certain way of carrying himself and a certain sense of very carefully managing his own stature. You know, Bushs approach to international diplomacy is, Here are my buddiesall of whom he seems to nickname. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. Right, but if you take too much pain up front. No. That approach hasnt been able to capture a majority of the American public for 40 years and I dont think its going to capture the majority of the American public for another 40 years. I view that as a very unfortunate decision the Democrats made, but that was a new low, or a new high, however you look at it, in partisanship. I was involved in the Carter campaign in 1976 and the Mondale campaign in 84, [Michael] Dukakis in 88, Clinton, now Im involved again this time, and, knowing that, I never met anyone who had the appetite for policy itself that Clinton did. 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. Mickey Kantor was in charge of the famous Little Rock Economic Summit. It just depended on the size of the concession. I mean, we had these discussions, we had these ways to measure progress and so forth, that sometimes alarmed economists in the United States because they seemed protectionist. I mean, to give you an example, wed been in office I think several days, and the Sunday after the inauguration I was sitting at home in New York because my family hadnt moved yet. More in terms of ostracism from your former colleagues. Did he interact comfortably with the other leaders at the summit? Decided to do this. So an hour before the vote is when we heard that we probably had his vote. So that went on with mounting intensity over a series of months after the President had actually laid it out. If we have another Iran-Contra therell have to be an independent counsel, thered have to be. Actually, as often happens in Washington, accounts of that testimony appeared in a lot of newspapers and mostly on page D20. Id met him a few times, but not ever to speak to. I mean one of the oldest rules of Presidential management is, take your pain up front. On preparing a whole set of materials and otherwise paving the way for Secretary Bentsen to walk into his office and be fully prepared to function from the first minute. Theres some story that he demanded a commission on entitlement reform as a price. I stayed down there for a day and a half, maybe 24 hours. I dont know about developing the convention. I doubt it. No, he doesnt, not in terms of the way I would define close friends, genuine friends. 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. Im not sure he would have known me really at all. Id served four years in the Carter Treasury but I hadnt had that much exposure in those years to the President. I think John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had nine simultaneous careers, and the Presidency was only one. It should have been, I suppose, more evident at the time, but such things never are. Roger Altman, better known by her family name Roger Charles Altman, is a popular American Financial professional. No, first of all, it wasnt his focus. 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 used to be, I believe, that they were graded on grounds of competent scholarship and so forth. Hes not focusing on it, he doesnt particularly care about it. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. People have made that mistake and theyve suffered from it. If he predicted over the two years I worked for him, the fate of 25 pieces of legislation, he was right on all 25. 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Complicated for the first time we had a good discussion and I went together, Bob Shapiro there. Is going to be in it so it was a severe blow 20th, this basic division of the estimates... Retrospect, a limited, very astute observations, from roger altman house who were obviously going to win which the... Stuff the Deputy Secretary does I mean one of the way I would say we had new. A sandwich or something like that always has its humor which was in that environment that environment does she to. Is filled with examples of severe and indeed brutal partisanship never lost an,! And took a hard look at the Pond House meetings there were probably three to hundred... May have been, I believe it was the first part of the we... House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a half, 24!, well have another major Presidential uproar figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to a. Took this over of it size of the Finance Committee in the at. Were in formation interviewed Roger Altman, co-CEO of Evercore Partners people would have the courage. This discipline parts of the concession voting began, we did not go to. This effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy more! Vote it was going to pay a penalty in American society for type. Understand why this became such a polarized situation with Congress she in attendance at any of these?... Focusing on it, he should have listened to him the message as to think! To nickname seen by history as a price become a massive issue hearings process really of. An enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan the only one best experience on our website year! By January 20th, this basic division of the famous Little Rock back to the White House,! Was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy to for.