We still joke about that today. I mean, maybe Reagan was to some degree briefly an anomaly, although he never had the reputation of being an anomaly, and so I wondered if the President, as Commander-In-Chief, also responsible for foreign policy, viewed this particular policy in that light too. He got Republican ex-Presidents to sign on, though, as I recall. Ive seen it happen so often in business as well as in government. Im not sure thats true or it isnt. Hed been the Governor of New York for quite some time and everyone knew Cuomo and his coterie. Yes, it was a help. He must have had enough of a political antenna to realize this was going to be a tough call in a Democratic constituency in Pennsylvania or Michigan. He didnt say so, but supposedly he never does. Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. I wouldnt necessarily accept that. That was on a Friday evening. 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. He was a classic, in my book, excellent chief executive. The President decided it, but Mack McLarty actually called me. The social side of it had almost nothing to do with it. He was not confronted with a grave crisis, but I think history will treat him very well, because essentially. Finally the famous proposal comes forward and its put before the Congress. The President relied on Bentsen and Altman to take on some of his Administrations toughest tasks. Some of them I think were insincere, but many of them were sincere. I think each person makes his or her own decision. Evercore uses cookies to give you the best experience on our website. We were very explicit. Yes. You get there and then you figure out what your actual sequence of initiatives is going to be. A fairly major effort went into that, which I was part of. Im just saying that Im a little too close to it because I recall so many of those battles, and I recall so many people feeling that, as you remember, the administration, in some form or other, lost three times, and each time came back with a more conservative version. No, no. Everybody gets a nametag, and theres the Secretary of the Treasury, the Deputy Secretary of this and Director of OMB, and youre all sitting around, a very staged setting. Its a strong field. 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. I follow it pretty closely, and I have a hard time figuring it out. Well, not really. You may remember that a few weeks earlier, only two or three weeks earlier, the Clintons had finally caved and agreed to the appointment of a special prosecutor, having opposed that, and Mr. [Robert] Fiske was designated. I was often, or at least periodically, talking to members of the administration but not to the President. 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. Bentsen said, Youre going to ask for this, and youre going to get this, meaning that. Of course, I met with the senior ATF guys. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. Its been a big help to us and again, we know how extremely busy you are. By that late stage of the budget battle, all the concessions and fine-tuning that could be made to the bill had already been done, so you had a package at that point that wasnt going to be reopened. One of the initial ideas was an energy tax. It was just not the way to run the railroad. A lot of the talk was about the public credit markets responding, not so much the Fed. In other words, all the work that goes in before its actually sent to the Hill. I want to be sure that there is a clear picture of that because he cant offer it himself. No, let me just correct the record. There was a concern that wed spill all the rest of our blood on NAFTA and have nothing left. I knew a lot about Perot, having been heavily involved in Wall Street for many years. The political process requires an outcome. I want to ask you, was that a note that had been sounded with some emphasis as early as these very early meetings that you were talking about in 91? 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. Perhaps history will give Clinton credit for having been the man who made welfare reform happen. Roger Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, the most active independent investment bank in the world today. It wasnt difficult at all because Cuomo was a polarizing figure. Was there awareness at that time, I mean, in the perspective of 2003, I recognize the world looks different. There are some people who wouldsome of the George H. W. Bush people date the partisanship from the budget deal. New York, Corporate | Is it okay if we move away from the crisis of getting the big things through to just the more mundane ways that the government ran while you were there? But anyway, in retrospect it was a very bad idea. So the traditional Democratic field has had in it a few candidates who represent that. If anything comes to mind that we havent talked about, that youd like to have included. 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. So theres no reporting responsibility, its treated as one office, a little bit like a corporate office of the chairman which includes the chairman, and the CEO, and the President and chief operating officer, and maybe even one or two others. Yes, Putting People First was reissued, I believe it was June. So my wife and I flew down to Little Rock and I met with Clinton for about two hours. Then, I was in Tokyo. 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. Would I have considered moving to Switzerland if he did become President? Its not clear to me however that history will accord him that credit. Well see whether it lasts or not, but I think Clinton changed the dynamic on worldwide attitudes toward trade opening, and turned trade from an obscure issue that few people in the country paid any attention to, into an important issue and an acceptance of the notion that lowering barriers to trade led to prosperity. Not at the outside, but eventually, I came into the second camp because I began to understand the scope of the issue. 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. Japanese discussions were harder, but the G7 summit was fine, it was easy. Clinton loves meetings like that. I was often at the National Economic Council meetings that deliberated on those. So Im sitting there in his hospital room and hes got every imaginable tube coming out. 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? The second was the evolution of the deficit estimates during that period. This is a bit of an anecdote, but of course Joel Klein served in the Clinton administration. We had lunch. Youd worked in a couple of campaigns before this one, or youd been involved in campaigns. Senior Management, U.S. Investment Banking and Evercore ISI businesses are conducted through Evercore Group L.L.C., a member of. Thats just the way history works. I think it did. Did you ever get the sense that there were some people who mystified him? 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. Clinton had one and in this instance, on the stimulus program, he should have listened to him. Mostly because Clinton put everyone in a room, for endless hours, to the point where most people wanted to drop and everybody was sitting there around the table. 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. To make a long story short, of course we all hired lawyers and so forth and we were brought before a grand jury. But it was really episodic, it wasnt regular. He observed to me right off the bat that this was going to be very complicated and no cakewalk, right off the bat. Some time around 1989 or so, Hillary Clinton went on the board. I think John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had nine simultaneous careers, and the Presidency was only one. It is especially important then for the people who worked with him to give us reflections on his role. The first vote on one of Clintons issues was a defeat, which presaged a lot of the weakness that then afflicted him during 1993. You asked me when the most important policy development occurred and I would say there are several answers to that but number one would be post election, not pre-election. I cant recall what year it was but it was in the late 80s, and now its seven or eight thousand, actually up toward nine, but has more or less slid ever since. A lot of funny things were happening. Senator Kennedy was for it from day one. It was excellent. Or Ill put it another waywe didnt know where the President was on NAFTA on that day. In fact, it was six months before. Altman donated $41,000 to the Biden Action Fund, a joint fundraising committee, in May, according to Federal Election Commission records. But it really was quite effective because one needed a military-like approach with only five or six weeks to go, and that bill was in trouble. 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