That was not clear to me. But everybody felt such a part of it because they were sitting right there. He would explain to me the problems with the particular pieces, but, I dont know if you had to be Bentsen, did you? One of the themes they advanced was deficit reduction, not the only one. Was this your first opportunity? I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. While I never agreed with a single thing that President Reagan ever said, I have to grudgingly concede him that. That was a wonderful comment. Ill never forget, it was just a few days after the election and Carter, of course, had been beset by the Iranian hostage crisis and the failure of Desert One and so forth, the rescue effort. You couldnt say to yourself, Well in the end hell be fine. This would have been before you were in the transition office? So its funny how reality quickly returns. But its interesting to put it into perspective. 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. Every imaginable issue arose and Clinton hit all those balls out of the park and it gave the American public a chance to see how astonishingly smart and deep this guy was. If you think about it in the context of today, well see how the primary campaign plays out, but it will be unusual if differences on issues were the decisive factor. I dont really think Bentsen knew me at all. But you think that by January 20th, this basic division of the fundamental economic policy. Yes, it was a help. Its really a bad thing to say to a senior Cabinet officer, Well, your deputy isWe dont want to get off on that, but thats a very bad approach. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. Did you keep up with him when your paths parted? It was a very unusual evening, because there was a sense, as I say, we were interring the candidate. But why was it bloodless? Do you have any recollections or observations about the President in that environment? This had been the thrust of the campaign, so expectations were very high that Clinton would come forward with a real economic program, a comprehensive program, and from the moment that all these folks were chosen the question was, what is that program going to be? Ford actually attended regularly, I dont mean every day, but regularly, and it was just a version of what Clinton did. Every time they had a new Prime Minister, we had a new set of characters. The Federal Government doesnt have much of a role in education. But there sure was a lot of effort going into it. Secretary Bentsen didnt know about it but a lot of other people did, and nobody paid much attention to it. I came to respect Dole a lot through Bentsen. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of making healthcare a priority? We came up with a Btu [British thermal unit] tax. So heres a person who knew how to manage himself. 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. Casey resigned and it was vacant. I think the Japanese have ultimately realized its in their own interests to make a lot of these changes. I think that there wasagain, I dont follow this that closelybut there was a fast reaction in short-term rates when the Federal Reserve Board loosened, early on, in what appeared to be quid pro quoGreenspan offered some assurance to Congress that the Fed would be cognizant of the Federal. He and Kerrey had a very close relationship. Well, I dont think theyd like it. He also had primary responsibility for Blackstones international business. That was pretty damn effective. Theyre going to ask you about it, say nothing. You can see it in real life at 3901 S. Michigan Avenue, about 20 minutes from the So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. I think Clinton will come out pretty well. If you think about his history, Bentsen had been a highly decorated war hero. Was it his personality? Ill give you an answer but Ill preface it by saying Im not sure my memory is quite right here. I should be very careful here. I have to tell my most famous Bentsen story because it really illustrates what an extraordinary person Bentsen was. Im sure there are lots of aspects of the preparation plan. Yes, we could have had that. Was there anything particular in his record in Arkansas that became sticking points with people in the community that you were attempting to raise money from? So there were a couple of weeks of high anxiety, maybe more than that, maybe everybody was in a state of anxiety between the election and yes, it wasnt at all clear who the Secretary of Treasury would be. Today it is seen as structural. The White House decidedwell, there were certain people who were obviously going to be in it. It wasnt difficult. 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. 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. So he didnt say, I know Im going to lose all these folks, but Im going to do it anyway. 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. But it coincided, I think more importantly than that, with the onset of huge political problems for Clinton in the context of Vince Foster, Whitewater, and the entire beginning of that. 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. He did, that was the first State of the Union. Secretary Bentsen took a lot of heat not long after being sworn in saying hed like to see a stronger yen, and that touched off a lot of controversy. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. It was a mixture of people and some of the names I recall of course were George Stephanopoulos and Gene Sperling, Bob Rubin, Bob Reich, Rob Shapiro, myself. Do you have any recollections of seeing anything different in him as a candidate at that point for that position? 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. 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. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. I believe, as I say, it was either the day of or the day after Gennifer Flowers had given her press conference. Hes pointing to the right-hand column of theWall Street Journal. You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. A little bit. It was excellent. My opponent is distracted by international and other matters. Lets face it, NAFTA has worked. 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. I was in Tokyo with President Clinton, the Tokyo Economic Summit and Id made several trips to Tokyo paving the way for that. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. You referred earlier to Garys question that most of the decisions that Clinton made about his priorities came post-election, but the process. Its actually enjoyable, its fun. Did he interact comfortably with the other leaders at the summit? His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. Then Clinton, as I mentioned, this one big event in January of 92Clinton was great on his feet. I moved over to the White House, was given a strange assignment, which was to go run this thing called the Summit of the Americas which occurred in December of 94, which was this meeting of literally 35 heads of state in Miami for three days to talk about why you would have a hemispheric free trade agreement. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so 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. I had a certain background but it didnt include experiences like that. I sat next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. 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. Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking. I just didnt; it wasnt my style. I talk to the President now from time to time with some frequency. Clinton chose in Bentsen, with the possible exception of [Robert] Dole, who obviously wasnt a candidate for this, the most experienced person in the entire United States Congress. He managed to remain viable through New Hampshire. Stephanopoulos was there and Sperling was there. He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. Also, wed had 12 years of Republican rule and there was a widespread sense of time for change. But what actually turned out to happen was that each Cabinet officer, or at least many of them, came up with a list of favorite initiatives they wanted. That was the logical place because I served there before. Thomas Jefferson is under-appreciated as a President. Obviously Sam Rayburn. We had to be sure Mexico could live with it. We assembled Carter and Ford and George H. W. Bush, and various other luminaries, Jim Baker, [Henry] Kissinger and so forth, to project a bipartisan front on NAFTA and Clinton gave the speech of his life. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? You havent told us about your own appointment. And, of course, the ATF agents didnt know what they were going to experience and he found himself exposed to an open line of fire. Now a good deal of it was also formulated pre-election, but if I had to choose between the two, which period played the bigger role, the transition period or the pre-election period, I would say the transition period. Which has become a part of the conventional wisdom about this period now, perhaps based on Woodwards analysis. So in June 91 it wasnt completely unknown, it wasnt below the radar screen, but there was always a group of people who were political junkies and so forth, and Im certainly in that group, who were following it, just like theres a large number of people that are following it today, 17 months beforehand. 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. You said earlier you were involved raising some money, but also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy. Sure, because you always focused on the swing votes. Do you think that making this effort was driven by foreign policy considerations first and foremost, or was it genuinely an economic policy? They were done among the United States, Mexico, and the Congressional parties involved. Some of them, yes. I worked in the White House another three or four months, worked on, for example, the bailout of Washington, D.C., and then the passage of the new control board type legislation and then my kids got out of school in June. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. So, for example, the partisanship in Washington hasnt particularly declined since President Clinton left office. The Office of Government Ethics came to its conclusion and the Treasury Inspector General as you know is an independent party and came to the same conclusions, the White House counsel came to the same conclusion. But that was fairly brief, though. Was there a group of people who were helping him on the policy side respective to economics? How were those dealt with, the decision to make a significant concession in the bill? So in the early period, Id have to go back and look at when the President laid the legislation forward, but I want to say it was first of March or something like that. But thats an example of the type of stuff the Deputy Secretary does. Of course, any situation like that always has its humor. Did you do anything else? For example, the Btu tax and the raising of the highest rate, highest bracket. But in any event, Im sure it wasnt as good as it should have been. Could be. There was no committee per se but he had a few people who were involved at that point and doing something like looking at Putting People First and editing it, and then just these periodic conversations we would have on the fly. Altman made a point to carry shoes as tiny as size 5 and mammoth as size 20, with widths ranging from super skinny AAAA to 6E and kept 23 basement storage We did have goals. Is that a fair assessment? Ira Magaziner himself, whom I had known for some time, was a gigantic intellect. He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. But I think one misunderstood aspect of his embracing NAFTA wasat that point he was being widely criticized for lacking in principle, lacking in conviction, a weathervane all over the place politically. 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. I was just in awe of people like that. But, first, right at the outset, it was a terribly flawed idea to have a full-time member of the administration serving also as the head of an independent regulatory agency and that should have dawned on me in the earliest going, just the inherent conflict there. Toward the middle and latter stages they met everyday. The great Presidents that you mentioned, the ones that loom large, as you said, are all crisis Presidents. , after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing process of making healthcare a priority providing some and! 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