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. You didnt have to spend a lot of time with Lloyd Bentsen to know that he wasnt going to be shunted aside. He was a classic, in my book, excellent chief executive. It was a voluntary choice. I long ago decided that trying to figure out how these election contests are going to ultimately resolve themselves is impossible; so I just recalled fondly the time wed known each other back more then 20 years earlier, I liked him, and in my case it was as simple as that. It was going to be a different kind of animal. No, I just remember the meeting in Little Rock quite vividly, and I think one of the first presentations was given by Allen Blinder about the economic outlook and the extent to which certain amounts of interest rate response would produce likely amounts of growth response. The following MondayI was out West actuallyI flew back to Washington and I believe I resigned on Wednesday. As I remember, we gave that one to labor as a way to try to ease the pain, even though NAFTA called for that to happen. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. So there wasnt all that much time, maybe ten days, twelve days, between opening the office, showing up down there and then having the Treasury Secretary and the rest of the members of the economic team chosen. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. Arthur Burns was the chairman of the Fed. 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. 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. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. You had made your choice to support him before it was clear that he was going to wow a lot of people in New York. Mr. Altman began his investment banking career at Did you do any traveling with Clinton on the campaign around New York or outside of New York? But my guess is that those kinds of. 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. Any particular memories from that successful trip? That process had been going on. I just know from prior experience that thats the way to do it. I dont really think Whitewater, at least this part of it, was terribly different from some of the other such situations that weve all seen, whether its the John Tower hearings or its Bert Lance or whatever it is. I dont think its wholly right becauseand this may sound strange coming from mePresident Reagan I think will be seen very favorably by historians, mostly because hell be seen as the man who ended the Cold War, and Reagan didnt have to take the position of aggressive anti-Soviet behavior, but he did. 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? There could be a lot of backsliding on that, well have to see. Presidents should be presented with options that have been carefully developed, really carefully vetted, and those options should be written down in the usual way, and that wasnt the case here. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. So I would get, from Mike Levy, typically, what my assignments were. We talked a little bit about the fundraising elements. Was this your first opportunity? The politics of Oklahoma. I think at the Pond House meetings there were also some of the Congressional leaders, werent there? We had a good discussion and I went back to the airport and flew home. Bentsen had told me from the first moment this thing was going nowhere. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. 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 didnt, no. 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. I think he saw the political opportunity presented by that in addition to the basic merits of NAFTA. Well, I dont think theyd like it. Help us understand why he would elect to move NAFTA at this point? It wasnt how he said it, it was what he said. 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 managed to remain viable through New Hampshire. Lets take five minutes and well come back for the rest of the morning session. Lets step back and just recall who the members of the senior economic team were because there was an entire team of people doing this. No, I was responding to a question about economic policy. But I was to be sure, no matter what they asked me, guns? 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. 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? I think Clinton authentically saw healthcare as more important, believed it was a bigger national problem, and thought he was tackling the bigger of the two. That was just how all Presidents should act. So, to some extent, the President had put himself in a tough spot. I think John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had nine simultaneous careers, and the Presidency was only one. If Whitewater occurred today or there was some like set of issues surrounding President Bush and his past, I dont think thered be a single hearing about it. I have to tell my most famous Bentsen story because it really illustrates what an extraordinary person Bentsen was. 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. Is that a fair assessment? So I knew we had a problem. 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? Oh sure, sure, well have another major Presidential uproar. First of all, one has to put it into broad context, including that a number of the more established would-be candidates, if I can put it that way, chose not to run, led by Cuomo, but there were others. Are we missing anything in terms of your responsibilities? Disrespecting the President. It was not as big a change as it was advertised to be, or has been seen historically. 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. Lets recast the question a bit. As everybody knows, ultimately there was not a single Republican vote cast for it, neither in the House nor the Senate. 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. I also think it is wrong politically. Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? Somebody was wrong. Once again, were grateful for your time. 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. So I wasnt sure what was going to happen, but there was no one in the field that was suddenly squashing everyone else including Clinton. What did you mean when you said, I knew how not to do it? You look at the turnover that she hador in her case did not haveon her staff, and the turnover that he had. Those would be the main points Id mention. He just knew how it worked. It was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and unforgettable, absolutely unforgettable. Did you have to retestify when Starr took this over? Were you privy to the conversations that he had? It wasnt between the political people and the policy people, it was among the policy people and involving some of the political people. 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. Can you tell us about his decision-making process on this? Carter had chosen, as you remember, to somehow find a diplomatic solution to that crisis. I wasnt there because I was an expert in tax policy. She wears her heart on her sleeve much more than he does. His view was, I want to pick good people and let them do their jobs. By the end of the year it had become a massive issue. I think any President who is either fortunate enough or skillful enough to preside over a period of peace, at least as far as American soil and American forces are concerned, deserves credit either for his good luck or his skill. Why does the government want to take over the healthcare system? Did you ever get the sense that there were some people who mystified him? Unfortunately, during the Clinton era ultimately there were four, five, or six independent counsels chosen to look into Bruce Babbitt and Ron Brown and some of the other people. 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. 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? I want to ask one more question about the election because Ross Perots name hasnt come up and been explored. 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. It wasnt going to be a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. 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. I thought that was pretty funny. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. We went back to square one. One of the many stunning things about it is the fact that none of those Republicans paid a price of any kind for that. Keeping in mind that with the exception of labor, which is a heck of a big exception, all of the powerful economic groups in the United States were for it and Clinton had just gone through a bruising battle where many of them were on the other side of him. I had really not fully ever grasped from my Wall Street days, that there was a great big regulatory side to it including enforcement side, where the RTC was also charged with pursuing investigations against former thrift officials and ultimately prosecuting them if circumstances warranted. Because if you decided not to go on NAFTA you really couldnt ever go back and say, Im a pro-trade President. He demonstrated his phenomenal grasp of policy issues, just through sitting there for many hours a day. At best I had an input, and in some cases it was just obvious that some of these other folks had to be in it. We had an autos task force with certain members of the Clinton administration and certain Japanese counterparts on that. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. That was a period during which [Boris] Yeltsin was just coming onto the stage. He had good relations with certain members of Congress, and we needed that. I mean, not one encounter, until the early to mid 80s when I was quite involved in various aspects of the Democratic Party and there were a few forums at various places that I would attend and I would occasionally run into him. But a very useful one. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. It had a very different constituency than the economic plan. Was it his personality? How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. 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. 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