I left the Treasury about a month later when my successor Frank Newman, who was then Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, was nominated and had been confirmed. Lets hold off if we can just a couple of minutes before getting into the transition period and let me ask you a couple of questions about the campaign itself. Ive never either been attracted to that approach nor felt that it was an effective one. Now, theyre sometimes minor changes that dont require that, but any meaningful change in the later stages required the Presidents approval. Of course, any situation like that always has its humor. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. But all Im trying to say is if you look at Lloyd Bentsens background, Rob Rubins background, and even to a much lesser extent my background, we knew about monetary policy and we knew about the role of the Fed. We had had recent experience in which the President of the United States took very strong actions against the Japanese, with these agreed-upon quotas for U.S. exports, exports in autos to the U.S., I dont quite remember how longThat was negotiated certainly over the wishes of the Japanese but less than ten years. The process was really quite intense and they were taking on a task that was utterly immense, a much bigger one really than the economic program, and came forth with a plan that was revolutionary, but whose revolutionariness doomed it. I think John Kennedys famous line about Jefferson applies because he had nine simultaneous careers, and the Presidency was only one. She wasnt a participant in those. By that time we were all being treated very well by the campaign because we were seen as the guys who were there at the beginning. 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. 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. At the time we were working on it there was a sense on the Japanese side that it was a zero-sum game. 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. I mean, after all, Whitewater ultimately amounted to nothing. She may have had a lot of influence on it, but I didnt see her. 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. They all came to the same conclusions. 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. This would have been before you were in the transition office? Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. 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. So I served in that job for give or take a year, and I never had a single meeting on an investigation nor did any of my predecessors, just wasnt done, wasnt necessary, and so forth. 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 would actually like to hear you answer that question too. We then embarked on a search for a candidate and give or take three or four months later found one who, ironically, was a Republican. Concessions involving individual members of Congress could often be done at a lower level, depending on the magnitude of the concession. Bentsen was just a legend and Clinton had never served in Washington and Lloyd Bentsen was a king of Washington. 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. Let me give you an example that is appropriate to the present. You couldnt do that. Well, you know that whole thing turned out to be quite an astonishing fiasco with the ultimate FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] raid and the immolation of 80 Branch Davidians. In 1987, Mr. Altman joined The Blackstone Group as vice chairman, head of advisory business, and investment committee member. I called him and said Id be interested in helping him in some form if there was a way to do that, and then one thing let to another and I got involved, not long thereafter, in his campaign, both from a fundraising point of view and from the point of view of economic policy and issue development. Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? The number of possible votes at that stage had dwindled down to a tiny number, votes that were undecided. Because Clinton very shrewdly realized the respective strengths of Bentsen and Rubin and put each in the right job. So the question in part was: Are you going to really drive forward with an aggressive trade agenda for this administration or not? Hundreds of meetings over many months, also similar to those original meetings, too many people, too long, too many people talking and so forth. After all, thered been only two Democratic Presidents in the last 25 or 30 years and theyd both been southern Governors. 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. I mean, the worst recession since the Great Depression occurred in 1981 and 1982 and in the fall of 82, in early August, Reagan was being described as Herbert Hoover, politically dead, gone, might as well already make his reservations back to Santa Barbara and so forth. Im thinking of what historians will say. 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. 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. Am I misremembering, did the President invite Mr. Greenspan, to sit in the gallery next to his wife when he delivered his economic policy. Roger Altman, Evercore senior chairman and founder, joins Squawk on the Street to share his thoughts on Bidens infrastructure plan and the corporate tax debate. 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. Now I did not attend that, but the issue of the Presidents economic plan and whatever adjustments were going to be made and the efforts to push it forward were discussed, perhaps in most cases the number one item, at the senior staff meeting each day. I mean, theyre all just issuing healthcare plans right now and there are some important differences among them, but 99 percent of the primary voters will not know those differences. Id met Bentsen a few times. 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. So actually I didnt have any concerns. Its possible that President Clinton rues the fact that 9/11 didnt occur on his watch, because it was a transforming crisis and did transform, at least to date, the present President. 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. One of the many stunning things about it is the fact that none of those Republicans paid a price of any kind for that. Bentsen really respected Dole. [ALTMAN - comments on the message as to I thought of the RTC as the agency that was closing failed thrifts, assuming control of their assets, and disposing of those assets. I dont really think Bentsen knew me at all. If you look at the organization chartIm not sure its the same now, but you have the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Deputy Secretary is part of the office. Most of the people whod been involved in the economic plan or NAFTA for example, werent part of that. But the main argument was economic. Then, that sent the ball in motion so to speak, in terms of that being the focus of discussion, although the senior members of that group were pretty united on the fact that we should make a real effort on the deficit. There were no violations of ethical guidelines, there was certainly no legal violation, and that proved to be pretty meaningless in the context of the uproar. So its also part of the Treasury tradition to do it that way. Yes, but Mack was entirely averse to confrontation and played a completely backstage role in these things, which is not really what a President needs. But the key revelation was the most stimulative thing we could do for this economy is to induce a monetary response. Whatever was going on on the deck of the Titanic was comparable, but it was absolutely frantic and incredibly dramatic and tense. Can you walk us through that? A lot of the talk was about the public credit markets responding, not so much the Fed. I was defeated in my effort to become student body president, as, interestingly, was Clinton. Ira Magaziner himself, whom I had known for some time, was a gigantic intellect. Roger C. Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, which has become the most active independent investment bank in the world. And I dont have any different set of reactions than anyone else watching the thing at the time. We talked for about 12 seconds about any role that I might play. That was his answer. We just discussed one of them, which is the up cycle in partisanship, as I call it. Today it is seen as structural. My own view on that is that American history is filled with examples of severe and indeed brutal partisanship. So my average day was spent a few blocks from here, working full-tilt on the business responsibilities I had. If you take the transition as one chunk of time, rather than chopping it up into chapters, I did a lot of work on personnelwe all did a lot of work on policy development, what was the economic policy going to be, and getting right down to very specific potential decisions. That was in July or June or something. It was a successful fundraiser. Is he somebody who, from your perception, makes close friends at all? No. How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. Oh sure, sure, well have another major Presidential uproar. Then maybe half of them we discussed about this person, that person. He is a trustee of MIT and serves on its Governance Committee. Then there was the other dynamic, which istheir personalities could not have been more different. Which did he bond most closely with and were there instances where there were tough nuts for him to crack? 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