roger altman house

WebCornerstone Recovering Community (11001 South Wentworth Avenue) located at 11001 South Wentworth Avenue, Chicago, IL 60628, United States is a drug rehab facility I think its a wonderfully illuminating story because it picks up on a strain Jim was asking about earlier with respect to Republican opposition. The office on Vermont Avenue probably opened between two and three weeks thereafter, lets say, picking a time, the 25th of November, just guessing, 20th to 25th. It was a good-sized ballroom here in New York. I have a very old-fashioned view about that. But Clinton went for it, Clinton listened, Clinton deserves tremendous credit. Some time around 1989 or so, Hillary Clinton went on the board. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. To make a long story short, of course we all hired lawyers and so forth and we were brought before a grand jury. Of course, by November 94, many of the benefits of this program had not yet evolved. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. Then, of course, he became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is the most powerful single position in the Congress other than Majority Leader, and some would say it is more powerful, and ran the committee with an iron hand. No, two funny stories, Jim, dont let him off so easily. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. So I dont think my reactions to that were really any different than anybody else following the campaign. So its clear that the idea about deficit reduction and fiscal policy takes root really during this transition. It may have struck people on the outside as unusual, but not if youd been around. So there was a lot of humor like that. How do you think Clinton ultimately is going to be read by historians, this Presidency? I suppose everyone has his own definition of intimate, but by any standard Im familiar with, I was not an intimate of Clintons. He gave the best speech I, at least to that point, had ever heard him give, and I think almost everyone in the administration who was in the room felt the same way. I was very pleased that he decided not to run because I thought it would just mean the Democrats might well lose again. Can you tell us about his decision-making process on this? I was elected twice vice president of my class. I think well probably want to pick up there and find out about that experience. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. Im a little too close to this, because Im not sure how history will view it. Somehow it came off successfully in Miami with all these heads of state and everybody was very happy with it. But I only began to spend heavy time on that after the August passage of the Presidents economic program. 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. Could be. I follow it pretty closely, and I have a hard time figuring it out. But, no, they couldnt have been more cooperative. So it was a very interesting dynamic. 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. By and large Bentsen talked to Clinton when Clinton called him.That was the way it worked. Talking out of turn you mean? Some people thought they were misguided. And deficit reduction was his top priority, a focus at the top? It just depended on the size of the concession. Were there other international issues that occupied your time at Treasury, significant slices of your time? Disrespecting the President. Yes, actually there was a big debate about healthcare, welfare reform, and NAFTA. I was to call Bentsen promptly. The Japanese economy was relatively weak at that time although it was in perhaps the first third of its now 12-year, or 14-year slump after the Nikkei peaked at 39,000. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. 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. There were some enormous differences. You said earlier you were involved raising some money, but also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy. There was. I think Clinton recognized that, by virtue of his being an outsider in Washingtonhe never served in Washingtonhe needed a link to the Congress, a really superb link, of the type that Bentsen afforded, especially since Clintons first priorities were economics.The Senate Finance Committee was going to be, more than any other single place, where the action was. I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that anyone who makes either of those mistakes, and I can think of others, will ultimately rue the day that he made them. A few questions about that. Thats just the way history works. I should have said Larry Summers was an important part of that too. The Times, which is typically, of course, a Democratic-leaning paper, was Clintons severest clinic throughout his whole Presidency, and on Whitewater went crazy. If you think about his history, Bentsen had been a highly decorated war hero. I think that had to do with the actual signing of the treaty. [laughter]. Mostly the latter. Well, it was difficult in the beginning. I think part of him saw an embrace of NAFTA as an opportunity to reestablish that he was a person of conviction, that he wasnt just in the pocket of the old traditional Democratic constituencies, wasnt just a tax-raiser and spender. Was the center of gravity in the White House, with you, or was it none? The first thing that we typically do is a quick voice identification so that the transcriptionist will know whos talking at any given time.Im Russell Riley, the project leader for the Clinton Presidential History Project. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of Evercore's cookies. I have always liked Mrs. Clinton and I had a lot of respect for her and do have a lot of respect for her. Any particular memories from that successful trip? But of course Republican support was sought. Wed have these meetings; they became eventually more organized than that first set of meetings. @ 34.032138, -118.722249. Bentsen had known the then head of it, Albert Casey, whod been chairman of American Airlines, and didnt have a high regard for him. Weve all seen this happen often in Washington. Not at the outside, but eventually, I came into the second camp because I began to understand the scope of the issue. Web446 Roger Altman Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO All Sports Entertainment News Archival Browse 446 roger altman There were so many exceptions and carve-outs and so forth from the final bill that you couldnt count them. You couldnt do that. Mr. Clinton became aware of that. They just didnt do it. 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. Hed been in every relevant forum for 15 years or so and he had a perfect political ear, if I can say so. [Mikhail] Gorbachev was an enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan. In fact, the exact oppositethe people who voted for it were punished in 94. I went straight down to Washington and moved in, and I was there on the day the office opened, as were many other people. So I think it was quite smart to be done then. So I knew early on, but only because Lloyd Bentsen was in effect telling me. She didnt cast it because of me, but it just became obvious to me in that conversation that she was very reluctant to cast that vote. There werent many people in the administration who fully understood it. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. We did have goals. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. Then President Clinton went out on the balconythe front porch of the White House, on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, and had a press conference. President Bush was very vulnerable, and so Clinton was attacking on the economy and basically saying, if you remember, this rather famous line, he was going to focus like a laser on the economy. Now John Snow didnt learn that, hed never been there before and so forth and so on, whatever excuse fits him. Then we put on our battle armor and went back into battle. I think Bush inspires greater loyalty than Clinton, just does. Id met Bentsen a few times. There is a It was an all right agreement. I thought, perhaps not at that instant, but quickly thereafter, that what Clinton said to me about Wall Street economics was very funny. 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. No, no. But lets talk for a moment about the end of 1991. Yes. Georgetown was the equivalent of a placid, slow-moving river and Chicago was the equivalent of a roaring torrent. But thats what Congress guys wanted. Id met him a few times, but not ever to speak to. 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. So you wouldnt have had any involvement on Capitol Hill or anything like that at the time? So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. I didnt feel it because I had a long relationship with Bob Rubin, which had been ten or 12 or 14 years, and Bentsen and Rubin had had their own long relationship and I saw no real problem with everybody relating successfully to each other. There were not pitched battles. What external factors were at work here? But thats the type of thing the Deputy Secretary sometimes does, or when there are problems with the IRS. Maybe there was, I wasnt privy to that or exposed to that. He does not see that as one of his own great accomplishments. There ensued a quite Byzantine process, as has been so widely written about with multiple task forces and enormous numbers of people involved.There were a lot of these Bill Clinton-style meetings, great big long meetings with far too many people in the room. They just didnt come to the Secretary, to the Chairman of the RTC, no more than investigations being pursued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or the Secret Service or what have you come to the Secretary of the Treasury. I attended Georgetown University and I was a year ahead of him. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. But I dont really think that was the reason that he voted for it, but only an hour before the vote in the Senate did we know we had his vote. But the election result itself was anticlimactic. Bentsen could tell you, within 4 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to every one of these bills. But there were some deputies, Harold Ickes came in maybe six months or soIm trying to remember when that first shakeup with the deputies was. My own view on that is that American history is filled with examples of severe and indeed brutal partisanship. Secretary Bentsen didnt know about it but a lot of other people did, and nobody paid much attention to it. No, I went back the next day. No, it was not at all. 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. Were they talking about what you do with Senator X, with Congressman Y? I ended up doing that over the space of four, five, six weeks. It wasnt funny in the conventional sense, but it was just funny. I really think its just that basic. It sounds like Bentsens Congressional or legislative savvy was not being availed of in these chaotic meetings, the policy-making meetings. At the time we were working on it there was a sense on the Japanese side that it was a zero-sum game. But I interpreted that to mean, Maybe you should, because I felt that if he thought I shouldnt, hed say so. WebBy tlp333 @ 2008-03-23 21:45:51. Im not sure thats true or it isnt. I mean, I could imagine that in your tenure, the perception might have been quite the reverse, but I dont know. Mickey Kantor was in charge of the famous Little Rock Economic Summit. Anything in particular you recall that can flesh out the record? The key players turned out to be the so-called blue dog Democrats. It was the best political speech, with a couple of exceptions, Id ever heard, which prompted a wonderful comment from former President Bush, who then came to the microphone and said, Now I know why Im on the outside looking in. What was going on? So no, Bentsen did not go over to the White House, hang around, talk about legislative strategy. I said I would and we went forward. But there was a discontinuity between the campaign and the administration, In this respect exactly right. Im thinking of what historians will say. 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. Some of the things on the wish list made a lot of sense, but some of them didnt. He moved it to the center, made it the party of fiscal responsibilitywhoever would have believed that?and enabled the party to shed much of its old baggage. Toward the middle and latter stages they met everyday. No, it never got to a vote. We talked a little bit about the fundraising elements. 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. It was a bit of a love fest. 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. Most of us cant name the last President who did balance the budget. Im not sure it makes entire sense, however, to judge or to assess a Presidents contribution by the standard of those who are given, in effect, a free gift of power to deal with a crisis. After all, John Kennedy is seen in the middle by historians. Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. I dont know why we were the earliest on the list. But its there on the record; everybody can read those reports. You can have whatever conversations you want to have in private. So the traditional Democratic field has had in it a few candidates who represent that. I do have one question about the National Economic Council. So obviously by inauguration day hed largely assimilated them. And there were obviously a whole host of people who were against it from day one and you werent going to change anybodys mind in the latter category. Most of the people I mentioned, and Im sure Im forgetting a group of them, in fact, I know I am, but, I can recall getting slightly involved in debate preparationslightly now, not deeplyattending the debates, seeing drafts of speeches before he gave them, again, not all speeches, but certain speeches, that type of role. Somebody was wrong. The number of possible votes at that stage had dwindled down to a tiny number, votes that were undecided. He did, that was the first State of the Union. Howard Paster at the White House, Mike Levy at the Treasury. You dont want to start your Presidency off with a legislative defeat. He did a version of what Carter did earlier, which was end up positioned to the right of most of his opponents in the Democratic primaries. So the fact that if we were sitting here in 2053, that a President 54 years ago balanced the budget wouldnt mean a heck of a lot to us, right? He didnt want to be involved in the daily ins and outs of those jobs. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? Did you know him, you said you hadnt known him before then? 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. I dont think I would have known otherwise. That was pretty damn effective. I consider that another important legacy, since not that many Presidents of the 20th century have it. It begins I think with the economic and fiscal circumstances that the administration faced, and two in particular. 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. Theyre going to ask you about it, say nothing. Who was the coordinator, if any, in the first follow up? But Clintons worked largely because of the people, and mostly Bob Rubin, but anyway, it worked well. You recently saw Secretary John Snow in a very studied fashion talk about, make an effort to ease the dollar down, we saw that on two different occasions, and I know how these things work. 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. So the Carter White House was a bit at seavisvis the Federal Reserve and its role, how to relate to it. I knew Bob Kerrey quite well by that time and Bob was very unpredictable. I was politically active, though. Scientist, architect, botanist, Copyright 2023. He talked about a middle-class tax cut and, of course getting the economy moving. It wasnt difficult at all because Cuomo was a polarizing figure. 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. As a Democratic President however, he could have vetoed the bill and it would have been sustained by Congress. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. Ive never either been attracted to that approach nor felt that it was an effective one. 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 know from prior experience that thats the way to do it. No, not at all. The Treasury has a wonderful history of its own and a great deal of pride suffuses those halls. Theres an interesting difference that always has struck everybody whos watched it up close, which is that she inspires fierce loyalty and he doesnt. That was all part of the same ultimate mix. 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. 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 also learned that when I saw that, it wasnt likely to ultimately succeed. They especially resented the role that Hillary played. So the dynamic between the two was quite an interesting dynamic and quite quicklyto come to your pointafter the stimulus plan went down, Clinton began deferring to Bentsen on everything. She wasnt a participant in those. 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. No voters will cast their votes, even two years from now, even in 94, one year from now, on the basis of my having voted against it. Education might be something in terms of opening. I doubt it. I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. Thats a good point, but thats because there were some people whod been around the track. During the transition period the question was, Who are we going to nominate the head the RTC? So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. In the initial phases it was really broad strategy because we didnt yet know. I never heard of them. So were in a partisan phase. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. Its not as easy. 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. He knew what was possible; he knew what wasnt possible. Were they talking broad strategy, were they keeping whip counts? We believed that by maintaining the highest standards of excellence we could create a firm unlike any other in terms of capabilities to advise on highly complex strategic transactions, dedication to our client and our experience and professionalism. No, but it wasnt just entirely that. In addition, Mr. Altman is a director of New Visions for Public Schools and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was quite an unknown in New York, wasnt he, until he came, appeared, and talked? Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? Do you remember your impressions of Clinton as an undergraduate? He never did anything spontaneously, at least professionally speaking. He knew what the House would do. Ultimately they were in effect combined into one big wish list, and that wish list went forward. 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