Michael Froman Oral History, interview 1

All right, this is the Michael Froman oral history. It’s part of our [Barack] Obama Oral History Project, and we’re in Charlottesville [Virginia], thanks to your willingness to travel, Mike. We appreciate it.

My pleasure.

We’ve just gone over the ground rules before, but I always like to repeat for the record that this is being conducted under a veil of confidentiality, so we hope you’ll agree to speak candidly to history about your experiences. We always like to get some biographical background, because it typically isn’t recorded much anyplace else, and the sociology of these administrations is really important—who’s attracted to a particular person, and who are the people who populate this universe of folks that we call singularly the “White House”? So tell us a little bit about your upbringing. Did you come from a politically active family, [laughter] or are you an outlier in this?

I think it’s fair to say I’m an outlier, although there are some roots back there. I grew up in Northern California. My father ran a local furniture store. My mother had been a schoolteacher, and then, when she had kids, a full-time housewife/den mother/PTA [parent-teacher association] participant. I grew up in Marin County, which is just north of San Francisco, and came east to go to college because I always thought I would move back and spend the rest of my life in California. But somehow I took a left turn and never quite got back. I came to college at Princeton, and then did a doctorate at Oxford, and then finished with a law degree at Harvard.

Before we get to your education, though, something that I flagged: was it when you were in high school you became the national leader of B’nai B’rith youth organization?

So I was involved in that in high school, and then I became the international president of—

International president?

Yes, and therefore took a year off, took a gap year, and spent the year traveling around the U.S. [United States]—

Between high school and—

And college.

—college.

Spent a year traveling around the U.S., largely, but also Canada, the U.K. [United Kingdom], Israel, South Africa, on behalf of the organization. And that’s what really got me involved in politics. I was all set to go from high school to UC [University of California] Berkeley and be premed. Then I spent a year doing this travel on behalf of this youth organization and decided to reapply to colleges. I ended up going to Princeton because of the Woodrow Wilson School, and my interest then in politics and public affairs, and took a very different turn from there.

In addition to learning what you wanted to do from that year, what did you learn about the world?

Well, it was a great opportunity—This was 1980, ’81, so it was also in the midst of a Presidential election. And B’nai B’rith is a fairly established Jewish organization, so it was a group that all the Presidential candidates came to speak at. It was [Ronald] Reagan; it was Jimmy Carter; John Anderson, at the time, was the independent candidate. There was a lot of talk about all of those issues. And it gave me an opportunity—First, it forced me, personally, to be involved in talking to the press, giving speeches, having an outward focus, going to a local city and meeting with local politicians and civic leaders, and it really just sort of turned me on to politics and international relations.

Had your family been in California for a long time?

My mother was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Northern California. My father’s an immigrant, and if I have any family link to politics, it’s through him, in that he was a refugee from Germany, moved in 1935 from Berlin to what was then Palestine; grew up there until 1950; fought in the 1948 War of Independence. Actually, in high school he was—I always tease him, because whatever trouble I got in in high school, when he was a high school student, his teachers would organize the students to do sabotage and graffiti against the British troops. [laughter] The teachers would write home to the parents saying, “Abe [Froman] needs to do a school project this weekend, and he’ll be working with us this weekend,” and then they would go out and be sort of junior members of what was then called the Haganah. My father grew up in Israel; came to the U.S. to go to college; went to Berkeley, where he met my mom, who was also a student there; and then decided to settle. Because of his background, the politics, the international relations, my interest in the Middle East certainly comes from him, although he’d never been directly involved in anything.

But your point was in high school no matter what you got up to, it never rose to the level of sabotage. [laughter]

Yes, I wasn’t spraying graffiti on British barracks. [laughter]

And did your parents have a take on Reagan and Carter?

So I grew up in a pretty Democratic family, so they were very much Jimmy Carter supporters.

And with your mom having grown up in LA [Los Angeles], your dad having come to college—probably during Reagan’s time as Governor, roughly?

They’d been there, yes, absolutely. It was in the ’60s, so that’s right.

Did they have a take on him as a person?

To the degree that they did, it was sort of incredulity that he had gone from being an actor to Governor to—There wasn’t any great affection there, but they were not particularly politically active, neither of them, as I was growing up.

And they obviously didn’t make the leap, as some Jewish Americans did, against Carter.

No.

They’d been Democrats and then became neocons.

No, that’s right. That’s right. They were still sort of very much of a traditional liberal social policy, civil rights, things of that sort, not particularly active, but that was where their sympathies were.

Siblings?

A brother and sister, both older, both much more musical than I am. My sister’s a professional violinist; my brother’s an aspiring professional jazz musician. One still lives in the Bay Area, and the other lives in Colorado.

Yes. And your musical—?

I played the drums, [laughter] which gives you some indication of—I got the short end of the gene pool.

You have rhythm.

I have rhythm but very little else, so I left the musical talents to my older siblings.

And your son.

And my son. It skipped a generation. My son is a decent musician, so—

And what is his instrument?

He plays electric guitar. As Bill knows, he’s been in a band since he was eight years old. They’re still together—They’re now 17—and they write their own songs. They just put on a great gig at a club in D.C. [District of Columbia], played to a sold-out crowd.

That’s awesome.

I’ll send you the link. It’s really terrific.

It’s true.

They’ve really grown up, and it’s been fascinating—four boys—to watch them, and their voices change [laughter] over the course of their videos and their—It’s been quite—

Sometimes in the middle of a video.

Yes, in the middle of the video, right!

And the name is 2020?

2020, which is the—Back in third grade that seemed like a very quaint name: that’s the year they graduate from high school. Of course now we’re on the verge of it, but in third grade it seemed quite far into the distance.

Creative and forward looking.

Yes, exactly.

What about Princeton? Were your political interests honed at Princeton?

Absolutely, and particularly the interest in public service and public policy, and I found it a great place to explore those interests. You go there, and then, at least back then, you apply to be part of the Wilson School [of Public and International Affairs] for junior and senior year. I had a great experience there. I had great professors, and some terrific mentors, Dick Ullman among them, who was a lifelong friend. And it supported me during summers to get internships. I thought the academic program was great. I loved the teachers. It was great. It was perfect.

You did an honors thesis on—

I did. Well, everybody does a thesis, and, actually, in college I began to develop this interest in negotiations, and so first I developed a course—at the Wilson School they have these policy conferences where you get 20 students and a professor and you explore some area in depth. I designed one on negotiations and got Dick Ullman to be the faculty advisor, and then I ended up writing on negotiations, and particularly arms control negotiations. Then when I went and did my DPhil [doctor of philosophy degree], it was also on détente and on negotiations.

I ultimately went to Harvard Law School because of the negotiation program, which I ended up not doing very much with once I got there, but I chose that in part because of Roger Fisher and Bill Ury and the work that was being done there on negotiations. I came at it from the security and arms control point of view, and then we had the end of the Cold War, and I made a transition to becoming a trade negotiator in the [William J.] Clinton administration, started working on trade and then stayed in that more or less ever since.

Great story.

Anything on that?

Nothing on that, unless you wanted to ask Mike a little bit about his time in the Clinton administration, because I think it’s an important connection.

Well, actually, I don’t want to skip Harvard.

Yes, right.

So keep going. [laughter]

Seems relevant to you.

Right. Let me back up and ask a predicate question: any particular contacts from Princeton that were to become important professionally as you move on?

Right. Dick Ullman. We did this course together. He was my thesis advisor; he supervised my junior papers. He was a wonderful man. He passed away a few years ago. He was one of those professors—I remember writing my first junior paper for him, which is a 25-page paper, and he gave it back with a paperclip over the first 21 pages, and then three pages of notes. And he said, “The first 21 pages can go. You can now rewrite it. I think the last few pages are OK.” [laughter] So I rewrote it. I was devastated by this, right, and I rewrote it, gave it back to him. And he gave back another set of comments. He said, “This version is much clearer than your previous version. I can now clearly see all the problems you have.” [laughter]

This was the beginning of a long, lifelong friendship when I was a junior, and then we worked closely when I was a senior. Then he was really a mentor who helped all throughout my career. When we did that senior policy conference on negotiations, we had guest speakers come, and he was very well plugged into the foreign policy community, so we had—Well, Jimmy Carter was there. We didn’t see [Henry] Kissinger then, but we saw a number of former National Security Advisors, diplomats, others. [Stephen] Steve Bosworth came to—Steve Bosworth was, at the time, head of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department, and Dick arranged for me to drive him back to the train station, at which point I asked him for an internship, which allowed me to go work at the State Department the next summer. He was very supportive all through my life.

Terrific. But you stuck with it. I can imagine—

Yes.

—that some might have been intimidated by that and run off and done something else, maybe played the drums.

Premed. [laughter]

No, even before that. Even before that. Freshman year I took my first international relations survey class, great professor named Ken Oye, who’s up at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], I believe.

Oh, yes.

And Ken gave me I think it was a C+ for the midterm, and I went to him thinking, This is what I intend to spend my life on, and clearly I have no talent for it—[laughter] And we had this discussion, and he certainly—He didn’t change the grade at all, but he gave me encouragement to keep going. And, again, he’s been a good advisor.

And a certain resilience on your part.

Yes, a certain resilience. [laughs] Stubbornness, resilience, something like that.

Yes, and a commitment to a particular area. Hostage negotiations? The hostages crisis would have happened—

Yes, that was happening—That’s right, that was ’79, ’80.

Was that something that you were taking an interest in, or—?

Not directly. It was more arms control at the time.

Arms control, OK, all right.

Yes, which was also going on at the time.

Of course.

Yes.

All right, so you go to Harvard.

So I go to Oxford.

Are we missing anything? Oxford, of course.

Oxford.

OK.

I go to Oxford on a one-year Fulbright scholarship. Quickly came to the conclusion that I wanted to spend more than one year there, so applied for various other fellowships, and the one that I got required me to do a doctorate, so I said, “I guess I’ll do a doctorate,” and I stayed there for—well, for three years: two years in residence; and then a year going back and forth, working with a great don there, [Sir] Michael Howard, who was the Regius Professor of Modern History, and—

I didn’t realize that he was your doctorate advisor.

Yes, yes, absolutely. He was terrific. He was—Actually, Dick Ullman helped me arrange that. He wrote to Michael Howard and said, “I’ve got this student coming over and he wants to work with you.”

This very resilient student that you can beat up—

[laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, I went in as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and—

The American way.

Absolutely, and I said, “I think I should work on this and this and this, and then I was thinking of writing on this and this and this.” And he listened very politely, and he said, “This term you shall row. [laughter] You shall go into London and take in the theater. You shall explore the pubs of Oxford.” He said, “I’m sick and tired of Americans coming over here, getting distracted, and never finishing their degree. Get it out of your system and I’ll see you next term.” And he was absolutely right. I had a wonderful time. I got my doctorate in basically three years, which was relatively quick.

That’s awesome. I love that.

It was a great piece of advice.

But you had an interesting first term, then.

It was a great term, and it continued even beyond the first term. Yes, it was a good term.

I’m looking to my Oxford expert here.

Right, there you go.

Do you have any probing on—?

Only that I wished my don told me the same.

You wish your don had said the same, right.

I was a little distracted [laughs] for my two years.

Right, yes.

So what did you write on there?

I wrote on the history of détente in American political discourse, 1955–85, so the Cold War was still going on. This was ’85–’88. You had [Mikhail] Gorbachev and [Boris] Yeltsin, but it was before the [Berlin] Wall had fallen, before the changes had happened. And it was really about the concept of détente, and how it evolved from [Dwight] Eisenhower forward, and to what degree it was based on the notion that you engage to change the other party, and to what degree it was based on the notion you had to engage because you had common interests, particularly security interests, that otherwise would be seriously put at jeopardy. That balance and back-and-forth between whether we were engaging to change or engaging because we had to, and when we failed to change, or we only changed a bit, how did the credibility of the détente strategy evolve over time.

OK. Did you do interviews for this project?

No. I designed it to be able to be done completely by reading speeches and writings of all the Presidents, so I read every speech, every foreign policy speech, from ’55 to ’85, and any reference to anything related to the U.S./Soviet and détente as part of that, and then also the memoirs and other books of other people. And I remember the first time I met Kissinger, which was after this, I told him, “Oh, by the way, I wrote a book on détente.” He had no interest in reading it or anything of that sort. The only question he had was, “Were you kind to me?,” which I thought was—[laughter] Yes. This was at a time when—I guess it would have been the end of the ’80s, early ’90s, when a lot of other books were being written about him, and things of that sort, so—

What were your conclusions in the dissertation?

I have to go back and reread it, [laughter] but I think—It actually did come out as a book, by—

And it doesn’t show up in our briefing materials.

—St. Martin’s [Press]. St. Martin’s had a series of books that they published coming out of Oxford. I can’t remember the exact press, the name of it. I think it was that there was an irreconcilable tension between the two notions, and that a lot of the political debate over détente was because it was never clear what the purpose of détente was. Some people liked it because they thought it was going to change the Soviet Union, and other people thought of it as because we were stuck in a mad world where we could destroy each other and we just needed it to create—and we didn’t need to change the Soviet Union in order to do that. But it’s relevant even now, I think—I’ve thought about it, at times—to some of our discussion around China, and how much we engage to change other countries, and how much we engage because it’s in our interest to do so, regardless of whether they change.

That was a discussion last night—[Condoleezza] Condi Rice and Phil Zelikow.

Is that right?

They talked about that, yes, with respect to China, but not with respect to Russia, which is its own question right now, right?

Right. Now we’re back to the future.

Yes.

So we get you to Harvard—

Yes.

—and you’re going to focus on negotiation. You get a law degree because—

I get a law degree. I am going to focus on—My interest is international law, not surprisingly, and I thought I was going to do work with the Negotiation Project. I did TA [teaching assistant] a course there and enjoyed doing that, but I ended up moving more toward international law, working with a professor there named Abram Chayes, who became another great mentor of mine, he and his wife, [Antonia] Toni Chayes. They did a lot of work on negotiations, mediation, conflict resolution, so to the degree that I could delve into that, I did that there.

How come not into the academic world? After doing a PhD and a dissertation that’s published, you could have gone anywhere to teach.

I did, later in life, after law school—I always knew I was going to go to law school, and I kept on deferring it, because initially the Oxford thing was going to be one year, and then it became three, and Harvard was kind enough to let me defer three years. At a point during the Clinton administration I actually thought about teaching law, and went on one job talk, actually at Harvard, sort of a pre–job talk. They did something for alums, which was kind of a prescreening, not a formal job talk. It was great. It was with a lot of my former professors, people I’d had, and this was 1995. And over the course of the lunch the nature of the questions were such where I thought, You know what? This is a very insular world, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being a law professor. I was really glad that I went on the job talk; I had a great time that day, but that got it out of my system.

Gosh, you learned in an hour what it takes [laughter] some people years to discover, so you are a very quick study. All right, so at Harvard you happened to encounter a fellow student—

Yes.

—who will become important to our story later.

Indeed.

Can you remember your first encounter with this person?

So we met as newcomers on the [Harvard] Law Review, I guess at the end of the summer between the first and second year of—

You were in the same entering class.

We were in the same entering class. We were not in the same section, which means we didn’t have any classes together the first year.

OK. And there was no buzz—

[shakes head no]

OK.

I was not aware of him, but then we both joined Law Review, and so we spent a lot of time together the second and third year of law school. And at Harvard the Law Review’s in this little white house, the Gannett House. It becomes a bit of a place to hang out, kind of a clubhouse. You spend an inordinate amount of time there doing footnoting and a variety of other things that are required to edit a law review. At ten o’clock every night everyone puts down their work and somebody’s tasked with bringing in snacks, so you have this half hour or so of hanging out with your fellow editors and watching TV [television], talking about the news, whatever’s going on for the day. And that was really my main interaction with him over the course of those two years. We had some classes together second and third year, as well; I think we had Constitutional Law together, and we had a class taught by a Brazilian professor, a Roberto [Mangabeira] Unger, who was brilliant, spoke in complete paragraphs without notes, had in his mind the outline for the whole semester, and when the bell went off he would just stop midsentence and pick up the next class [laughter] exactly right there. I don’t think I had any idea what was going on in the class. It was the most convoluted, complicated—

It was [Karl] Marxist, right? Roberto—

I don’t even know. [laughter] It was so complicated.

I remember reading a lot about him—

But I remember that Barack [Obama] did. It was one of those classes—We had Larry Tribe for Constitutional Law together; we had Unger for I can’t remember what the name of the class was. I was completely clueless in the Unger class, and Obama seemed to actually get it, and understand where the outline was going, and engaged with Unger in a much more meaningful way than I think the other students did, and it’s where I first saw—there and in the Constitutional Law class, which were both the same year, I think—where I saw his raw intelligence and capacity to engage on those issues.

So it was just raw intelligence.

Well, yes. He was really—He had a real knack for the law, and philosophy, and drawing connections, kind of a penetrating intellect. And you saw that. You saw that in class, and then you saw it at Law Review as he became president of the Law Review, and was editing, and his comments on articles were all very good, and there you also, of course, saw his political and management capability, as well.

Well, I want to come back to that, but I’m interested in the raw intellect. I mean, this is a universe—I didn’t go to Harvard Law School, so I don’t know, but the impression that you get from the outside is this is a universe where the norms are extraordinary, that virtually everybody there has got something very much on the ball, right? So I’m curious how one goes about distinguishing oneself in an environment where everybody is exceptional.

You know, I think he was—Take Constitutional Law as an example, where at least I had some idea what was going on, so I could compare his insights to my own.

Dr. Froman is keeping up with Con Law. [laughter]

Yes, keeping up with Con Law and completely obliterated by the other course. I think it was the capacity, really, to not—When you’re studying Con Law, and you’re learning cases, and you’re being asked questions by Professor Tribe in Socratic method, you’re sort of teasing out the facts, the substance, the legal principles, and the like, and that’s the goal of it. And where I thought Obama had greater capacity was not just doing that, but then to put it in a much broader philosophical context, and to link it to things that we were not necessarily studying in class. So when he and Larry would go at it, I think we all benefited from it, because it was taking the dialogue to a higher level.

Sure.

We were all working hard to make sure we understood the facts of the case, and how they fit together, and how the precedent was evolving, and that’s what you needed to do to get an A, right? But Obama was, I think, taking it to a whole different level.

So it was sort of an ability to synthesize—

Synthesize, go beyond, see beyond the horizon, link it to other disciplines that I think not all of us were doing.

And is that—? Part of this could be a function of an extraordinary memory, but I think I’m hearing something different from you. It’s not just—

So I think—I mean, he and I were similar in that we didn’t go directly to law school, so we were a little older, right? And I think him being older and having a few years of experience as a community organizer gave him a different perspective on the law. But I think he was also extraordinarily well read, and he was drawing on other traditions, and I think it was just that he saw things in a broader frame.

I see.

And could you discern what that frame was, or what his worldview was, or his context? Was there an ideological—?

No, that was what was interesting: it wasn’t that he was coming in with an ideological or political perspective; it was more that I think on one hand he was linking some of the things we were talking about to dynamics around progressive social movements in the early 20th century, or what was going on in philosophical circles in Europe, or—He was just making those linkages. It wasn’t with a political agenda. It wasn’t that he was coming in and saying, “Well, I’ve been on the ground as a community organizer, and here’s what it really means to have your property taken from you by a lender,” or something of that sort. It was at an intellectual level, I thought.

Yes, which is really interesting because you’re suggesting a level of intellectual agility that built on his experience as a community organizer, but wasn’t necessarily the root of his ability to take it into a different dimension.

Yes, I think he had the capacity to stand back and link what we were learning about in the textbooks to his experience on the ground, his other intellectual interests, his historical perspective, and make those kinds of connections. And I think that kind of agility, as you said, is something that continued and we saw much later, as well.

And were you developing a friendship, as well, along this time?

We weren’t close buddies. I viewed him as a friend, but we saw each other mostly at Gannett House or in class. I didn’t play basketball. I know that will surprise you, [laughter] but I was not one of his basketball buddies. I didn’t smoke cigarettes; I wasn’t one of the people he went out for a smoke with. We were more professional or academic colleagues, rather than close buddies, but friendly. But friendly. And you just spend so much time together, both in the classes but also at Law Review. You’re sitting around. There’s a big table like this, and you’ve got four or five people sitting around with these massive documents of articles and mind-numbingly correcting footnotes and things of that sort. You just end up spending a lot of time together.

But in the slightly more social ten o’clock hour of the snacks and TV—

Yes.

—anything about his personality stand out?

Well, I remember one of the things that happened when we were there was the first—I guess it was—yes, the first Iraq War, right? And that was on the news every night. We were watching that, and we were talking a bit about the war, and about the Middle East, and I think it was just one of the subjects of discussion, and I don’t recall precisely what points he made—My memory’s not that good—but I do remember sitting around the table, watching what was going on, on TV, with the war, and talking about what was going on in the world.

Do I remember correctly—I don’t think this is in the briefing book, but—that he garnered a lot of press coverage because—? Was he the first African American president—

He was the first African American president.

—of the Harvard Law Review.

Yes, absolutely.

And there were national press stories on him.

There were.

So did people say, “Let’s certainly keep our eye on this fellow because he must be going places; we’ve seen it; now the national media see it”?

Right. There are those who say, “Oh, I always knew since law school he was going to be President of the United States,” and I have to admit I don’t think that idea crossed my mind. I think we all thought he was going to do something in politics. Maybe someday he’d be a Congressman, [laughter] or, wow, a Senator, right? None of us knew any Members of Congress or Senators; it seemed like that was a pretty big deal. It was clear he was going to do something interesting, special, different, even before, I think, all the national attention, but certainly in that context.

Were there—? I can imagine this is a very competitive environment. Were there resentments that you detected, whispers or—?

The interesting thing that was going on then was law schools were quite divided politically. You had the critical legal studies movement, which was a few years before we got there, but now you had the emergence of the Federalist Society, which was the conservative movement, and the law school, the faculty, the Law Review, these were all battlefields for some of this. And one of the ways in which Obama stood out was that he was determined, and this was evident later in life, but even then he was determined to manage the Law Review in a way that cut across lines and brought people together.

After he became president of the Law Review, he got to a point where the masthead—who was the managing director, the notes editors, the articles editors, who took those positions—and he scrupulously created a balance on the masthead between some from the left, some from the right. And some of the progressives among the students were critical of him for being so balanced, [laughter] for trying to cut across the politics, as opposed to saying, OK, now we’ve got the first African American president of the Law Review; he’s clearly progressive in his heart of hearts; this is an opportunity to really move that agenda forward through the Law Review. He was about managing the conservatives and the more liberal editors together as one group, and being coherent about it. And I think some of his closest people on the Law Review, and people who continue to this day to view him as a friend, come from the conservative side of things.

Some of those people in that context, have they gone on to big things that we should know about, and—?

There were—Yes, let’s see. The person I’m thinking of in particular was a colleague named [Bradford A.] Brad Berenson, who’s a great lawyer. He went, I think, to work in the Justice Department during one of the Bush administrations, but then—I guess the second [George W.] Bush administration. And now he’s, I think, a private equity lawyer. But there were people who came out of that who became judges, became—[Paul] Clement, who’s, I think, either Solicitor General or Deputy Solicitor General—

Paul Clement.

Paul, Paul Clement, thank you.

Yes.

Paul Clement was at law school at the time.

He was Solicitor General.

Right. Now, he may have been a year—I’ll have to check—older or younger. He was somewhere involved in—

And very conservative.

Very conservative. And there were a number of people like that who went on, most likely in the Bush Justice Department. I can’t remember who else became a judge.

Forty-three.

Forty-three.

Bush 43, because we graduated in ’91. Went on to play a significant role in conservative judicial circles.

So you were at the Law Review ’90, ’91. There are two Supreme Court appointments. Anybody talk about those? [William] Brennan [Jr.] leaves; [Thurgood] Marshall leaves. Clarence Thomas—

Right. I remember the—

And David Souter.

Right. I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings being on the TV all the time, like they were around the country, but I don’t recall what the debate was about it. I don’t recall the nature of the debate within there.

And you don’t recall anything related to Obama?

Specifically to Obama, I don’t. I don’t.

OK. It’s a good question.

It’s a good question. I hadn’t thought about what was going on then.

Barbara is, among other things, our Supreme Court wonk here, so—

OK, good. Excellent, excellent.

One of the things that was interesting, of course, is that Obama did not go on to do clerkships.

That’s right.

The standard path would have been—particularly for the president of the Law Review, but really the rest of our Law Review colleagues all wanted to do district, appellate court, Supreme Court clerkships. Many of them did that, and he didn’t. He returned to Chicago, back to the community.

And you didn’t clerk, either.

No, because my interest was more in international law, and I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with that, but while I was at Harvard, the Ford Foundation created a fellowship in international law that Abe Chayes was sort of a patron of, and I took that fellowship and went to Europe and worked for the European Commission, and then worked in Albania on legal reform.

Mike, you started law school, if I do the math right, in the fall of ’88.

Correct.

Did you do anything on the [Michael] Dukakis campaign? Did you know—? Because a lot of those folks would become colleagues in the Clinton years.

Yes, that’s a good question. Not really—

And you’re in Boston.

I was determined to finish my dissertation before law school started, and I had my viva, where you defend your dissertation, in July of ’88. In retrospect it was kind of foolhardy because—I mean, I passed, but, as you know, that’s not always the case. [laughter] They can either fail you or they can send you back to do a major rewrite, and I had no more time to rewrite; I was starting law school in a month, so I was not involved in the Dukakis campaign. A lot of our colleagues were, but I was not.

So you went to Brussels?

I went to Brussels for six months.

For six months. And what were you doing with the—

Can I pause? One other question that does come to mind—

By all means.

—thinking about the Dukakis cohort, which becomes a Clinton cohort—

Yes.

—which becomes an Obama cohort.

Yes.

A number of them were Rhodes Scholars, were in Oxford. Did you know any of those folks? Sylvia Mathews Burwell? Susan Rice? There are a couple of them.

I had met Sylvia and Susan. They were a year behind me at Oxford, but we had common friends there. It was quite a crew, right?

Yes.

Sylvia, Susan. You had Gene [Sperling], Larry [Summers], Todd [Stern]. Yes, you had a lot of the people who—

Yes, it’s quite a little power group.

Just for our transcription purposes—

For Dukakis.

—Gene—

Gene Sperling. Todd Stern.

Larry.

Larry Summers. The linkage back to the law school was really through Chris Edley [Jr.], who was, I think, policy director of the campaign, and was also a professor at the law school. So there was linkage, and people were talking about the campaign, but I was not directly involved.

That being the Dukakis—

The Dukakis campaign.

Yes, OK.

And, of course, it was based in Boston, so there were a lot of people going back and forth to campaign headquarters, writing memos.

One of the reasons this is all very much in my mind is I was in grad school at New Haven at the time, but had several friends, either [Stephen] Steve Grand in the PhD program, [Christopher] Chris Lu in law school at the same time, so I would be up there, and there was a little bit of a—

A swirl around that.

Yes, there was a revolving door that went back and forth from Cambridge to the campaign.

That’s right.

Was there anybody else in your class who becomes important for you later on, other than Obama?

On the mentoring side, it was really Abe, Abe Chayes. In our law school class, people like Julius Genachowski was another editor of the Law Review, close with Obama, worked with him during, well, during the campaign, during the transition. He becomes FCC [Federal Communications Commission] Chair during the Obama campaign. There were some others there—Cassandra [Quin] Butts, Chris Lu, of course. I guess of all those I was probably closest to Julius, because he was on Law Review and we knew each other well from there.

OK. Anything else?

That’s great. Sorry.

OK, so what are you doing in Brussels?

So they called them stagiaires, sort of interns, six-month interns, and they let a few Americans participate, so my wife and I go over. She works in the Competition Directorate. I work in this—only the European Commission could do this—it’s called the—

It’s kind of like “forward.”

—Cellule de Prospective, the forward studies unit. It’s sort of like a policy planning staff, but it’s comprised of a theologian—this sounds like a bad joke [laughter]—a theologian, an economist, a diplomat—

Walk into a bar.

—walk into a bar, with an American intern, right? [laughter] And it’s attached to the Office of the Commission President, who was Jacques Delors at the time. It’s there to do thought pieces and long-term thinking, and we wrote papers on—I mean, at the time a lot of the dynamic of the European Union, in some people’s minds, really breaks down between the battle between Catholics and Protestants, between Catholic continental Europe on one hand and the Anglo-Saxons on the other hand. Of course, Delors, being a French Catholic—strong perspective there. So we’re writing papers about federalism based on old Catholic Church documents from the 13th century or something, and serving them up for discussion by the European Commission, which is why we have a theologian there. It was run by a Frenchman named Jérôme Vignon, who’s sort of a French public intellectual. And I haven’t seen anything quite like it in any other government, but it really was quite an interesting place to get a perspective.

The primary language of discourse in the office was—?

It was a mix. A lot was done in French, which I struggled with, but there were enough people who spoke English to make it tolerable.

OK, so you were there, and then you went to—

And this was during Maastricht. Maastricht happens during this time, so it’s a really high time for Europe, right? This is European integration at its best, lots of hope and aspiration about the future, Delors, of course, being a great driver of this. And this is ’91, ’92. Then we go to Albania together. With the end of the Cold War, USAID [United States Agency for International Development] and others have a number of programs to help promote legal reform across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And my wife and I decided—We got married at the end of law school—let’s go off and do something interesting.

So we let it be known we’d like to do something like this, and there was evidently some committee in Washington of the various organizations that were getting support from USAID, and they talked about us, and they made us three offers: Russia, Lithuania, or Albania. Our view was Russia is a serious country, and to send two recent graduates from law school there is kind of like malpractice. [laughter] They should get real lawyers, right? We don’t know anything. We just graduated from law school. Lithuania didn’t hold much interest for us. And Albania—I’d traveled extensively through Eastern Europe when I was at Oxford, but, of course, I’d never been to Albania, because it was closed to foreigners, so I was quite intrigued. My wife was game, and so we moved to Albania for six months. We worked for the American Bar Association that was getting a grant from USAID to do training of judges and lawyers and help them write laws and be available.

That was a major move. You’re part of the new world order, and this is a major movement to sweep democracy across the old—behind the Iron Curtain, the old Iron Curtain.

Absolutely. Exactly. And Albania had been very successful at eradicating religion and lawyers under the Enver Hoxha regime, so they had no legal tradition left, really, and very basic things about property, about contracts, about rights all needed to be reestablished, because lawyers had been eliminated under—

Had they redone a constitution?

Not yet. We arrived one week after the first democratic election. Enver Hoxha had died a few years before, but it went through a couple of other Communist leaders, and then finally they sort of had a democratic election. So we helped them with the constitution. We helped them with various civil codes, constitutional codes, and various commercial codes, and things of that sort.

One of my favorite ones is about two weeks after we got there, there was a double murder. And that part of the world, Albania in particular, has a long tradition of blood feuds—where somebody gets killed in your family, then you have an obligation—there’s a whole oral tradition that’s now been written down about it—and there are all sorts of rules. You have to kill the person in the other family between dawn and dusk. You have to shoot them from the front, not from the back. You have to hang the bloody shirt outside your house for a certain number of days. There’s a whole set of rules. And the new democratic government wanted to try and put an end to blood feuds, and wanted to try and convince the family of the victims that if the state found the murderer and executed him, that their obligation had been extinguished.

So they went to the European Union, which was much more prominent there than the Americans. Of course, the European Union’s against the death penalty, so they wouldn’t help them. They thought it’s better to—[laughter] So we were the only American lawyers in the country, my wife and I, and they found us, and they said, “Will you help us explain the tradition of the death penalty, and go to the families, and—?” So my wife and I—Both of us are opposed to the death penalty, but we were happy to, as opposed to encouraging generations of blood feuds [laughter] that would wipe out a hundred people in each family, we thought it was the lesser of two evils.

Which was the Albanian tradition.

Yes, exactly! So we did the work, and we went, and we helped convince the families that their obligation would be extinguished, and, not surprisingly, the government found, tried, did the appeal, and executed the murderer all in a month—It was a very efficient judicial system—and that was it.

And stopped it.

That was it. Now, it didn’t completely end blood feuds, and we had some that actually broke out in the little apartment complex that we were living in, but—

Bloody shirts in the hallways?

Yes, right, exactly, both in Kosovo and in Albania—Kosovo, of course, having a large Albanian populace, they both—This generation of leaders at the time were trying very hard to try and put that tradition behind them, and we were part of that.

So for someone who had done his dissertation on, and thought very deeply and philosophically about, cultures and clash of cultures and détente, this new world order, as we all thought, in the post–Cold War world made us so optimistic.

Absolutely.

And did you think not that it necessarily was the end of history, but that this had great promise?

Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. No, the sense of optimism—And Albania then went through a really—It was a fascinating place. We were there in the spring, and on TV they showed the 1950-something film Jesus of Nazareth around Easter. And we’d have these people we had met come up to us on the street and say, “Have you heard about this guy named Jesus?” [laughter] And I said, “Yes, I’ve heard of him.” Because they had been completely isolated. There were no working churches in the country. They had no access to outside information.

But it also became a bit of a Wild West, and you had the pyramid schemes, and the collapse of the economy. It became a center for drug running and smuggling and a variety of other things. And then with the Kosovo War, it became a major conduit for the U.S., and that’s where the U.S. really poured a lot of money into it to bring in arms and other support for the Kosovars. And now it’s on a—Somebody just sent me a link that it’s now listed as one of the 20 best tourist destinations in the world or something, so who knew? Who knew?

Well done, Mike.

Yes. I could tell stories about Albania for hours.

This is maybe a lunchtime question but it is striking, never having been there, but having seen it from across the way in Corfu, how close it is to everything, right?

Oh, yes.

You’re an hour by boat from Italy, Croatia’s just up the coast—

Yes.

—Greece is right next door. Did you use that as a point of travel? Had you traveled in that part of the world before?

We went once to Corfu, but we were in Albania the whole time, and we traveled around Albania. I’ve got great stories for you.

OK. We’ll do that another time, but—

Another time.

When we initiate our Albanian oral history—

Yes, yes. And in many respects I still think it’s my favorite job I’ve ever had.

Oh, yes?

Part of it was my wife and I were newlyweds, and were working together. We lived totally on the economy. All the other Americans lived in villas that had been sort of set up for foreigners and for Communist Party officials. We rented an apartment, like anybody else. We had water one hour a day. We had all sorts of stories about the landlord who never really fully moved out, because they were so intrigued just to—They’d never met a foreigner before, so they just watched us all the time.

In a good way.

In a good way.

The question that I had, going back to politics, and given your dad’s background as a refugee from Europe to Israel and then back to the States, that’s your first time really living and seeing Europe. Did it deepen your connection to Europe? Did it feel exotic and different still?

I have to say, after living in Oxford and traveling around Western Europe—

Oh, right, of course.

—and the rest of Eastern Europe, that certainly strengthened my ties to Europe. Albania was such an unusual island. You didn’t necessarily feel like you were part of Europe there. It just felt like—

More like North Korea, less of Europe?

Yes, like you had just entered a new dimension. It was a fascinating place.

So you come back, and you go straight into the Clinton administration?

Yes. Into, actually, the [George H. W.] Bush administration.

Bush administration.

Yes, because I come back as a White House Fellow, and it starts in September 1992, so I come into the White House two months before the election—

OK.

—working for Roger Porter, who had been a White House Fellow.

Yes. I saw Roger a week ago.

Is that right?

Yes.

And it was great. So Roger is very active in the White House Fellows program, and he picked me to be his fellow, but then he looked at me and said, “Let’s see, you’re a Democrat working in a Republican White House in the midst of a hard election. I think the only thing I can trust you with is trade.” [laughter] Right? It’s like, “I can’t put you on social policy; I can’t put you on economic policy; but trade is OK.” So that was my first exposure to trade, and I was the junior guy in the office, so they sent me to meetings that nobody else wanted to go to. And that lasted for two months.

Then the election came, and the transition began, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell came in with [Bowman] Bo Cutter to meet with Roger to understand how the economic policy making was being done, and to set up what became the National Economic Council. Roger tells them, “I’m leaving you two things. I’m leaving you a packet of my articles on economic decision making and Presidential administrations,” which he is a renowned expert in, “and I’m leaving you my White House Fellow, this guy named Froman. You tell me which one proves to be more useful to you.” [laughter] And January 20th comes around, the building empties out, people begin trickling in: me, some of the professional secretaries, the security people, and people trying to figure out where the bathrooms are, where the Xerox machines are.

And you already know.

I’m an expert. And so I’m sitting in my office at the OEOB [Old Executive Office Building], and there are a number of trade issues that just work on certain calendars. You have to get a report in to Congress by a certain date, or you’re in the midst of an investigation with I guess it was the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] at the time; you have to do something within 30 days, or 60 days. And these things were just continuing on, regardless of the transition. So I was there.

What I would do is just write two or three memos a day to my various bosses, [William Anthony] Tony Lake and [Samuel] Sandy Berger on the NSC [National Security Council], and Bob Rubin and Bo Cutter on the NEC [National Economic Council], and just tell them what was going on, and what I was doing, and these issues that were happening, and anything that needed decisions made. About two weeks into it, Bob Rubin shows up at my door in the Old Executive Office Building and says, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t remember hiring you. What are you doing here?” [laughter] And I went through the whole story. He said, “Hmm.” He said, “Well, the memos are kind of interesting, so I guess keep writing them and we’ll figure out what to do with you later.” And that became—

The beginning of a lifelong partnership and friendship. [laughter]

The beginning of a lifelong—

Were there other White House Fellows who were in the same boat? Do you know?

Everyone was going through the transition, but I’ll have to remember—I think I was the only one in—I certainly was the only one in the White House.

The White House.

There might have been one at OMB [Office of Management and Budget].

The one that started was Lael [Brainard], but did she start—

Who is that?

Lael started as a White House Fellow. She was after you?

That was a year or two after me.

Got it, OK.

So there were fellows strewn around the government in the various departments. Kurt Campbell was at Treasury, as an example, and became Larry Summers’s special assistant.

He was your class of White House Fellows?

Yes. I don’t recall whether there was anybody else at the White House.

OK, all right. Now, here’s the question I want to pose to you about this, and that is that you just sort of glossed over the reality that the National Economic Council was a new thing.

Yes.

And I guess what I want to hear from you is do we read too much into it to say it was a new thing. In other words—

No.

—you seem to indicate I was going to do this, but one might expect that—and from the outside, as scholars, we’re sort of aware of the fact that there’s this new thing, and we think—

Yes.

—Well, therefore it must have some importance, because it’s lasted, so you would sort of think, OK, at the dawn of a new experiment there would be something notable going on that we should pay attention to.

Yes. No, it was a very important innovation, because, as you recall, the Clinton campaign, “It’s about the economy, stupid,” right? There was a perspective that economic policy was not being given the prominence and the importance in the national agenda that it needed to. And, as Roger’s various articles point out, the economic policy coordination was sometimes coordinated by the Treasury Department, and the Treasury Secretary; sometimes it was a White House staffer, but sort of working for the Treasury Secretary. Roger himself was head of economic and domestic policy, but by the end of the Bush administration, I think that function had been quite a bit weakened.

And there was a desire by President Clinton, as I understand it, and certainly by Bob Rubin, to create something that was much more meaningful, much more like the National Security Council in its structure and in its function. Now, it’s always been and continues to be much smaller than the National Security Council, and still not as institutionalized, in terms of record keeping, support staff, permanent civil service staff that’s assigned to it between administrations, but there was a very conscious effort to say we’re going to be doing economic policy differently going forward than it’s been done in the past, and the NEC was the embodiment of that. And that’s why Bob Rubin was chosen to head it up.

Within that, there was a group of us doing international economic policy that reported jointly to the NEC and the NSC. That was partly driven by substance, that we wanted to make sure there was coherence between domestic and international economics, and between international economics and foreign policy. And, to be frank, it was partially driven by resources. I think President Clinton had come in saying, “We’re going to cut the White House staff by 5 percent,” or something, and so Bob Rubin and Tony Lake were saying, “How can we—? We can’t both have a staff doing economic activity. Let’s figure out how to share it.” And that was an innovation. So the person who came in a few weeks later as my boss, Bob Kyle—a trade lawyer who used to work for Sandy Berger at his law firm—reported jointly to Sandy and Bo, and I reported to Bob, so we were part of both organizations.

OK, so you were one level away from—

I was a youngster. In fact, I corrected your timeline here: “Director” was my title, not “Deputy”—

Let us know that and we’ll pass that on, because we put these up, as well.

Oh, is that right? OK.

The parts that aren’t copyrighted material will go up with your interview someday—

Got it. I’ll go through it in more detail, then.

—so anything you see like that, pass it on.

Yes.

So it turns out you’re at the genesis of what would become your position in the Obama administration.

Correct, and it changed. Bob was a Special Assistant to the President, reported jointly. In the Bush administration, they did two further developments that I thought were quite important.

Bush 43.

Bush 43. They, first of all, raised it to be a deputy level, and, in addition to having this group within the NSC that did international economics jointly, they also tried to put people who were economically literate into each of the regional bureaus. So in the Asia Bureau, Latin America Bureau, Europe Bureau, you’d have not just security experts but you’d have people who could keep an eye out for the economics, and I thought that helped strengthen the overall functioning of the institution, as well. When I came back in—I mean, I joked: I think in 16 years I moved 16 feet [laughter] down the hallway from my old office.

Did you have the big one at the end of the T that looked out onto 17th Street?

No. In fact I ended up moving. No, I had—It was Bob Kyle’s office, and then they moved the whole function up near where they’ve built the secondary Sit [Situation] Room—

Oh, right.

—on the third floor, on the White House side of things rather than the 17th [Street] side of things. But by the time I came back in, the portfolio had expanded to include climate and energy. We further expanded it to include development and democracy. It then evolved, and then I came in as a Deputy, and then it became Assistant to the President.

At this point, have you lost touch with Barack Obama, or is he somebody you get Christmas cards from, or—?

So after law school I came to Washington, via Albania and Brussels—It was a long way around; he went back to Chicago—and we were not in touch. Occasionally I’d hear messages about him, or updates on him from people who are mutual friends, but we were not directly in touch. When he started running for Senate we got back in touch. I think I went to a fundraiser for him in New York. It was a fundraiser that was for five Senate candidates—I can visualize it—and he was one of the five Democratic Senate candidates. So we reconnected then, and I remember saying to him at the time, “You’ve got a million friends who have Washington experience, but if I can help you, let me know.” By that time I was living in New York. I was working for Citigroup. And, somewhat to my surprise, he took me up on it, and we talked—This was, I believe—I’m pretty sure it was before the [Democratic] Convention speech.

So, yes, spring ’04.

I could be wrong, but I think it was spring of ’04 was the fundraiser. And then, of course, I saw him at the Convention speech, and then in the fall—I guess it was the fall—he got back in contact, and I had him come in and introduced him to Bob Rubin, and then I organized—There was then a group of us—Julius Genachowski, Don Gips, Broderick Johnson, Cassandra Butts—who began to form a little bit of a kitchen cabinet for him. He would convene us, and we helped him hire staff, hire Pete Rouse and others. Once Pete got on board, everything was taken care of, but—And we also began to introduce him to people in Washington.

All right, if I can I want to pick this thread up, but I inadvertently jumped eight years of experience in the Clinton administration. And I guess I defer to my colleagues if there are things in this period that you want to delve into.

The one piece that may become relevant is the two big financial crises that the Clinton administration has to deal with, so the Mexico peso crisis and the Asia financial crisis.

Right.

And talk about your role in that, because I think it becomes relevant to the stuff that you end up working on in the financial crisis in ’08, probably, on the international side—

Yes, yes.

—because it’s where you would have gotten any G7 [Group of 7] experience and introduction to that world—

Yes, that’s right.

—what the Rubin/Summers experience was like then, because it carries over.

I moved over to Treasury in 1995; Rubin moved over in 1994. He takes over for Lloyd Bentsen [Jr.] as Secretary, and I stay behind and work with Laura [D’Andrea] Tyson and—

You spent a single year as a White House Fellow, or—

I stayed on.

OK.

They hired me on at the end of that, so I ended up being at the White House for three years—

Basically with the same portfolio?

Basically—

OK.

—and then Treasury for four years. The Mexico crisis happened while I was still at the White House, and I did not play a terribly significant role in that. It was really Treasury coming over—We did do some things related to the adjacent issues. I can’t remember what the issues were now. We were negotiating with the Mexicans various things other than the financial package that were to be done—

And that’s in the years when—

That was ninety—

—Bush has finished the negotiation of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], that gets passed during Clinton—

NAFTA’s gone—

—as does WTO [World Trade Organization]—

Correct.

—or you’re working on that stuff—

The two junior—The two worker bees in the office were me and Michael Punke. Michael goes on to become our Ambassador to the WTO in the Obama administration. Michael focused mostly on NAFTA; I focused mostly on WTO/Uruguay Round. That was our division of labor. I supported him and helped him on some of the Mexico stuff around the crisis that he and Bob Kyle were involved in, but I was one step removed from that. By the time I get over to Treasury, I spend the first year as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Eurasia and the Middle East, going to Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, very importantly. I spent a lot of time in the Balkans, so built on my Albania experience. [laughter] This was the implementation of the economic parts of the Dayton Accords.

Then, at the end of ’96, there’s the reelection. Sylvia Mathews, who’s Bob Rubin’s chief of staff, is asked to come over to the White House to be Erskine Bowles’s deputy. Rubin says, “You can only go if you find a suitable replacement.” Sylvia comes to my office one Sunday and says, “You have to go see Bob right now.” And Bob and I have this very nice conversation, but he doesn’t offer me a job. It’s just a very nice conversation. At some point Sylvia comes back to my office and says, “So what do you think? Are you going to take the job?” I said, “What job?” [laughter] I since learned this is a Goldman Sachs thing: you never offer somebody a job until you are absolutely sure they’re going to take it, because you don’t ever want to say you were turned down. I didn’t realize that at the time, so I was just delighted to have a nice conversation with the Secretary I was very fond of. But I then became chief of staff after a year, and spent the last two and a half years that I was there as his chief of staff.

And it was during that time that you have the Asia financial crisis, leading to the Russia financial crisis, the Brazilian financial crisis, which was just basically an effort of constant crisis process management of—My role was really trying to help Bob, and, to a certain extent, Larry Summers, make sure they had all that they needed from the rest of Treasury, and Tim Geithner—

The so-called Committee to Save the World.

That’s right. Tim Geithner was the Under Secretary at that—No, I guess David Lipton and then Tim Geithner. So David was the Under Secretary; Tim was the Assistant Secretary—Jeff Shafer had left, I guess—and we worked our way through those crises. To your point, it was my first exposure to dealing with the IMF [International Monetary Fund]—beyond the East European and Russian part—dealing with the G7 finance ministries.

And the creation of the G20 [Group of 20] finance ministers happens in that context, right?

That’s right. That’s right. And figuring out who should be there, and Argentina becomes important, which, in retrospect—

That was my next question, which is the role of big, emerging, developing countries, not China quite yet—China’s still off the radar screen as a big deal—but your having lived in—OK, so it was its own weird developing country, but—Albania. Just tell us a little bit about that, because that ends up being a big part of the story in the financial crisis, too.

Yes, this was a true emerging markets crisis of sorts, and so you needed all the G7 and its capacity and its role, but you also needed the broader community there, which is why you ended up, as you said, creating the G20 with Saudi Arabia, with Argentina, with South Africa getting some representation. And it could’ve become 24 or 28, could’ve been 18, but they settled on that 20. And later, for the next crisis, rather than inventing a new forum, they reached for the G20. Even though it was really quite a different set of circumstances, it was still largely the right group of countries to have around the table to deal with a big financial crisis.

And it would have been a good name for a band if they had decided not to do 20. [laughter]

Absolutely. I should have suggested that.

OK, let me ask a generic question, and then sort of put a notion in your mind to keep as we go forward. The generic question is what, from your Clinton experience, if anything, proved to be particularly useful or relevant beyond the financial crises when we steer ahead to the main event, which is the experience in Obama? And then the cue is, as we get into the Obama stuff, you’re uniquely positioned to help us understand the Presidency, and the executive branch, because you’ve had relevant experience in two administrations, so it would be very useful for us for you to think back persistently about what was going on in the earlier time, as a point of contrast or comparison in relation to what actually is going on. So with that mouthful out—

Yes, I guess I’d say a couple things. One, I’d go back to the creation and the management of the NEC. NEC could have been, I think, taken in any number of directions. There was no precedent. The only analogue was the NSC, and even that has been managed in different ways by different National Security Advisors. I think Bob Rubin brought to the NEC a particular commitment that it be a place of honest brokers, making sure all points of view were put on the table, that it be a disciplined process, and he had the commitment of President Clinton that they wouldn’t allow Cabinet officers to circumvent the process and go directly to him. Clinton made everything go through the funnel of the NEC, and Bob made sure that everybody was at the table when those issues were discussed. I learned a lot about process, good process, through the creation and management of the NEC, which then informed later on the way we developed the role in the Obama administration, as well, not just the NEC but the deputies process and the like.

Now, each head of the NEC did things differently. Laura Tyson did it differently from Bob; Gene Sperling did it differently from Laura. Those were three heads of the NEC just during the Clinton administration. But it started with this notion that it should be the disciplined place where good process is done. And Bob went out of his way; if a perspective on an issue wasn’t being presented, he would present it, even if he disagreed with it, just to make sure that it was part of the discussion. And he was very good at that kind of process, coming out of managing a partnership in the private sector. Those were important lessons to carry forward. And, of course, as Bill said, many of us who cut our teeth in the Clinton administration later showed up in the Obama administration. That was in our DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid].

Right.

And we sort of took it for granted that there’s good process, and it turns out there’s not always good process in administrations, but—

Or a process at all.

So I’m told, so I read. But it was an opportunity—I think we all learned a lot from the way that that was done.

In a shorthand version, you just said that Sperling ran it differently from Tyson, ran it differently from Rubin. Can you refine that for us a little bit? What were the distinguishing characteristics of those differences? And were the—

And the other thing we talked about in the car; you can always redact this later. [laughter]

Yes.

Yes, and are they meaningful differences or trivial differences?

Yes. Well, I think Bob—At the time he was being aided by Sylvia as his chief of staff—I guess Bo Cutter and Gene as his deputies—everything was new. He had to create new process, new procedures, and make sure that they were disseminated through their interagency process. I think Bob has a deep, substantive agenda in his own mind—He’s got strong views on every issue—but he was very much committed to not using the process to impose his own views, but to make sure that the best articulation of multiple views were teed up for the President to consider.

Laura is a very serious and distinguished academic. Gene also has very strong views around economic policy. I think both of them were a little less focused on the process versus the NEC being an opportunity to drive what they might have preferred as their own agenda. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; it’s more of a matter of emphasis. Bob, too, had a substantive agenda, but he was adept at pursuing it indirectly, oftentimes getting other people to argue the point of view, or making sure that all the criticisms were out there but that ultimately the view—for example, on fiscal conservatism—prevailed at the end of the day, knowing that there were other Cabinet members who fundamentally disagreed with him. So it was really just more of a matter of emphasis, I think, between the two of them.

And one of the concerns at the outset of this new invention of the NEC was that it might have existed to the detriment of the National Security Council because of its presence in the universe. Was there ever a sense on your part that that was a justified worry, or did it prove to work?

I can see why people who have a strong national security focus, who might believe that those are the only issues that we should be focused on when it’s dealing with another country, for example, would view the advent of the NEC, and our little group in particular that worked for both of them, as injecting itself into foreign policy issues. But that was precisely why President Clinton was elected, right? It was the notion that economics did need to be part of this, and we couldn’t—

Take trade policy: Japan, at the time, which was an overwhelming focus of our trade attention—We can’t treat Japan just as a military ally. They’re also a strong, at the time, strong economic competitor that’s having an effect on our economy and our jobs and our manufacturing base, so those issues are equally important. I think there was some adjustment by the foreign policy community to the fact that you had a new administration that cared more about economics and making sure economics had a seat at the table when dealing with other countries than prior administrations might have had.

The way that was managed most adeptly was in the person of Sandy Berger, who had been a trade lawyer, and who had been involved in domestic politics. He and Clinton met on the [Eugene] McCarthy campaign, right? He understood very well you’re not going to have public support for a foreign policy if we’re not also defending U.S. economic interests, so I think he played a very important role in being a bridge between the two worlds.

OK.

I could ask questions endlessly here, so I’m going to excuse myself from the conversation.

[laughter] We’re not going to get beyond the Clinton administration.

Are you OK? We’re supposed to break in about half an hour, but I wanted to make sure. You’re all right to keep going?

I think I’m good for a half hour, yes.

OK.

Go ahead.

I think I’ll need a break then.

All right, so we got you—I’m trying to think if there’s anything else—

Actually, I will ask one quick question, since you mentioned Sandy. It is interesting, Mike, since you end up not going into, in the Obama administration, a pure NSC job, but rather the NEC variant, or the one that’s shared. You mentioned Bob Kyle, Bo Cutter. People like Dan Tarullo also held that position.

That’s right.

During those years, do you remember looking at the other people who were also suspended between the two bodies, the NEC and the NSC, where you would be—not suspended, elevated—in the Obama years, and thinking that some did it well and some didn’t do it as well? I’m not asking you to dish on the people who didn’t do well, but what was the nature of what made the job work?

Yes.

Because it would then inform you when you were in the Obama position for what would make the job work.

So I knew well two of the people who did that job in Bush 43: David McCormick and Dan Price. I didn’t know well—I sort of met—a third, Faryar Shirzad Ali [Shahzad] from Goldman Sachs. As far as I could tell, I think they did a very good job. Partly, it was the way, I think, the Bush administration built on the Clinton model by elevating it, expanding it, and putting these economic resources into other parts of the NSC, which I think helped create some greater connectivity. A lot of what the NSC does, a lot of the power of the NSC, is the writing of the talking points for the phone call with a foreign leader, or for the bilateral meeting with the foreign leader. Those really reside in the regional offices, who are then asked to coordinate the different parts of—They might reach out to the political military office or the arms control office or the climate change office, whatever it is, or the economic office. And having people in those offices who appreciated economics and were keeping an eye out for it, and made sure that those things were always included, I think helped strengthen the institution.

And did you take, then, that pattern and continue it forward in the Obama administration? The regional offices—

Yes, generally so. It wasn’t always—Yes, I think generally so. First of all, I think the foreign policy community had evolved a lot in 16 years, right? Economics clearly were more important than they used to be, and these transnational issues, like climate and others, were much higher on the list of traditional foreign policy people. Arms control was lower, right? All these foreign people who grew up, like I started doing, in the arms control world now were dealing with other sets of issues. So it wasn’t as much of a tension between the pure foreign policy and people who cared about other issues, because if you were a foreign policy person or a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] officer or somebody who was being seconded to the White House to work in one of the NSC regional offices, you had likely had some contact with and some appreciation for these other issues, so I think that did continue.

The other thing—Dan Price was my immediate predecessor at the end of the Bush administration. He had a very close relationship with Josh Bolten, and I think that helped strengthen his role in that office, much the same way that me being able to work closely with [Thomas E.] Donilon and [James L.] Jones [Jr.] and with Larry, whom I’d known since the Treasury days, and, of course, with the President, helped that office get institutionalized.

And one of the great things I felt—I thought it was a great position to have, and to do so at the beginning of the administration. There was really no turf battling. I came in and the job had already been broadened. We added a couple more things to it, and because of the relationships and the priorities of the administration, nobody questioned whether we should be focusing on energy and climate or on trade and investment or on development, and these were all—

This is when you come back in under Obama?

When I come back in under Obama.

OK, yes.

And partly that was because of the precedent laid by the Bush administration, and partly it was just what the Obama administration came in wanting to do.

Yes. But wouldn’t you also say it was partly the template that was laid—

By Clinton.

—when Clinton was in office? Right.

Yes, Clinton started it, absolutely. It just kept on evolving and improving.

And it evolved and improved, but it worked.

Absolutely.

If it hadn’t worked, it would have been pretty easy to—

No, and in retrospect this seems obvious, but having those issues in one portfolio, plus the summitry, the Sherpa role, where a lot of those issues are brought up—That’s how you drive climate, or that’s where you engage on energy, or that’s where you push the trade agenda. It created great synergies there. I don’t really have a sense of how it’s being done right now, but I think up through the—

I do. [laughter]

—end of the Obama administration, I think it really was quite a coherent approach, structurally, organizationally, substantively.

Give us a thumbnail sketch of what you were doing when you were out, in the intervening years between Clinton and Obama.

I joined Citigroup, where I had a series of roles. I started off in a staff role, then I did emerging markets strategy. I ran their international insurance business; we ended up selling the insurance business to MetLife. I moved to alternative investments, which were private equity and other investments. And then the last job I had there was creating an infrastructure investment fund to invest in infrastructure around the world and a sustainable development fund. It was great. I loved learning the business. I loved running multiple different businesses. I learned a lot there.

And you were in the private sector, making some money, presumably.

Yes and no. This was Citigroup, so [laughter] when I left, Citigroup had gone from $55 a share to $1.50. So there wasn’t quite as much equity built up the—

You did leave at the depth, the bottom of the—

I left at the bottom. I was required to sell what was left of my shares. My options were worthless. But anyway, it’s all water under the bridge. [laughter]

I stand corrected.

I enjoyed it for the experience.

All right. You said a few minutes ago, before we went back to Clinton, that you had come to know Barack Obama as he was running for the Senate, and you established a kind of kitchen cabinet for him.

Yes.

Tell us what—This would have been in—Again, because we’re so early in Obama, my timeline—

Two thousand four, yes.

Is it ’04? OK.

Right. Two thousand four is when he wins for Senate.

OK. So tell us what the kitchen cabinet is doing.

I think Cassandra was doing it more or less full time. Well, there was what happened prior to his election as a Senator, and there was what happened between his election and being installed as a Senator, and then as a Senator. Prior to being elected, it was mostly just being supportive and contributing to fundraising and things like that.

OK. You were raising money for him in New York mainly, or—?

Yes, and I didn’t do a lot of fundraising at the time. I’m trying to remember where it started—At some point it became clear that he was likely to win, and he came to New York. He came in and we introduced him to Bob Rubin. I think it was after he was elected but before he took office when the kitchen cabinet got together and helped him do some strategic planning, helped him hire some staff, or identified people for him to interview for staff. Cassandra was doing it more or less full time. There’s a little office in the basement of some Senate office building that they gave the Senators-elect to get organized in, and the rest of us came in and out of that.

Then I organized two events—one was a dinner, one was a brunch, maybe—for him. One was on economics, and one was on political people. In retrospect, it’s quite interesting to see who we had there, because they almost all ended up in the administration. He didn’t really know. He didn’t have a whole—Unlike Hillary [Rodham] Clinton, he didn’t have a whole bevy of lifelong advisors in Washington in these various areas, and so the political one, as I recall, was Tom Donilon; it was Tom Nides, Ron Klain—There must have been somebody else. It was four or five people, all of whom ended up in the administration. Of course, Donilon I thought of as a political person, because that’s what his background had been, then he becomes deputy and then National Security Advisor, but at the time I thought Obama should know these people because they’re good political advisors. On the economics side—

How did you know Tom?

From the Clinton administration. He had worked for Warren Christopher. He was chief of staff when I was chief of staff for Rubin, or I guess—maybe not, because Madeleine [Albright] had been chief—

Yes, Madeleine—yes—

Madeleine was the second term, but I’d known him from his work with Christopher. When Christopher left, did Donilon leave?

Donilon left just before Christopher left.

OK.

He left for six—There were six months where—

For Fannie Mae, or for—

Yes, he went to Fannie Mae. There were about six months where [James] Steinberg was both policy planning and chief of staff, and I was Jim’s chief of staff.

That’s right. So I guess I knew Tom from the early Clinton administration, and he had stayed in touch with Rubin, and had come up to New York to go to Citigroup, and I was with Rubin and all that, so that was the political one.

The economic one was Rubin, Gene Sperling, David Lipton, Lael Brainard, I think—maybe not Lael, but she might have been there—and Caroline Atkinson. And I invited Tim Geithner, but he was the New York Fed [Federal Reserve] Chair at the time and he thought he should not participate in a—He couldn’t participate in what was then still viewed as kind of a political thing. But a number of those people became either members of his administration or advisors. It was both an opportunity for them to get to know him—And they were all excited to get to know him; some of them had met him before—Gene Sperling, I think I remember, had met him once before—but most of them hadn’t met him—and for him to begin to develop a network of people. Then I think Susan Rice and Tony Lake organized a similar one on the foreign policy front.

And by that time he had given the speech.

Yes. I’m pretty sure it was between November and January.

The election of 2004 and the January swearing in, in 2005.

I’m pretty sure.

And he had given the speech in the summer of 2004.

In the summer of 2004.

So when you say they were excited to meet him—

Yes.

—people who didn’t know him I’m sure certainly knew him by that speech, as the country did.

Exactly.

We inadvertently just skipped to 2005, and his getting into the Senate, but you said that you were at the Convention—

Yes, in Boston.

—when he gave the speech, so we have to ask you your impressions of that historic speech.

Yes. My wife and I were there, and we sat way up in the last row of the—I can’t remember the name of the arena there [Ed. note: the Fleet Center, now the TD Garden], but the last row of the arena, and—

Is there a reason you sat in the last row of the arena?

First of all, we were not VIPs [very important person] or anything, [laughter] so that’s where we had credentials to go.

Oh, OK.

But I think we just got there late or something, and there weren’t many seats available, so we just sat way up there. We’re watching the reaction of the hall to his speech, and it was—We turned to each other saying, “This is incredible.” First of all, it’s an incredible speech, but the reaction is incredible.

Nancy [Goodman] also knew him from law school.

Nancy knew him from law school. Nancy went to University of Chicago for the first two years of law school and then transferred to Harvard, and the only way she got to see me was to hang out at Gannett House until 2:00 in the morning, so she got to know him from there. And it was just electrifying—again, the speech itself, but also just the reaction. It was like, This is really something else.

So you had not been that much reintroduced to him before that speech?

No. I can’t remember when the fundraiser was. I don’t know if I have an ability to find that, but it was a DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] fundraiser in New York for five candidates, and it was either before or right after the Convention. But either way we reconnected, and then—

OK, so at that point you’re then friends with a sitting United States Senator—

Yes.

—who has a high profile—

Correct.

OK. So track through for us kind of what’s your engagement off the bat.

So our little kitchen cabinet played, I think, a modestly useful role until the end of 2004. At that point he hires Pete Rouse, who is an unbelievable expert on Capitol Hill, well respected, the 101st Senator, that whole thing. [laughter] Pete’s got it all well under control, and so at least I step back, and I think the others step back, too. We were then there for whenever he wanted to pull something together, and I remember at one point he wanted to get together and talk about trade, and we had a session with Lael, Dan Tarullo—It wasn’t Gene—No, it was Mike Wessel, and myself, in his Senate office, organized either by Chris Lu or by Karen Kornbluh, who were both friends who worked for him.

I’d do things like that: come in periodically to meet with him, or to participate in some session. And then, in 2006, after the midterm election, he convened a group at Bob Bauer’s law firm, with those same members of the kitchen cabinet, Valerie [Jarrett], David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Bob Bauer, some of the Senate staff—Alyssa [Mende] Mastromonaco; I’m sure Chris was there, Karen was probably there—So it was some combination of Senate staff, old friends, Chicago, political advisors, legal advisor, to talk about whether he should run for President. It was the first time I met Axelrod and Plouffe, and they were laying out the game plan.

This was, you said, at somebody’s law firm. It’s in New York?

Bob Bauer. No, this is in Washington. Bob became White House counsel. He’s a big elections lawyer. I can’t remember whether it’s Perkins Coie or which law firm it is, but we used a conference room there. Axelrod and Plouffe kind of laid out what a campaign might look like, and what a strategy would be, who you go after, what you do with the caucuses, things like that. And we sort of went around the table to discuss whether he should run for President or not. I remember one theme that kept on coming up—Well, there was a theme of Is it too early? You’ve only been a Senator for two years. You’ve got this profile. Shouldn’t you wait a term or two, get more experience under your belt? That was one theme.

Another theme was Do you realize how hard it is to run for President, and are you prepared to put in that kind of commitment? A number of the outside advisors, like the kitchen cabinet folks, had their doubts on one or both of those elements, but I think he had already made the decision, and he made a very passionate case: “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it. You don’t have to worry about me putting in the time and the energy to do this.”

And he also made the case that it’s great to be Senator, but being Senator for another four years, or another ten years, or whatever it was, wasn’t necessarily going to prepare him any better for the particular, unique challenges of being President, that the job of President is so sui generis that in some ways there is no adequate preparation for it, and if there is, it’s not necessarily refined by more years in the Senate. Maybe it was his combination of being a community organizer, thinking about constitutional law, being a state senator for a period of time, as well as a U.S. Senator for a period of time, but he didn’t see that being in the Senate for another X number of years was going to serve him well. I don’t think he loved the Senate.

That was my next question.

Yes. Look, I think he’s an action-oriented guy, and the Senate is a place where you give speeches, and every once in a while you pass a piece of legislation. I don’t think he really bought into or invested in the whole zeitgeist of the Senate, so for him the idea of spending another X number of years there just to get a credential, a notch in his belt to say he’s been a two-term Senator, he did not think that was a worthy trade-off.

How big a room was this?

It was a big law firm conference room. Not as big a room as this, oh, no, but had one big table. There was food, I remember. It must have been dinner. It was like pizza and stuff. And between the different groups of people there were probably 20 of us.

Twenty, OK. And you spoke.

We all spoke.

And what was your—?

This is the part to be redacted. [laughter] Look, I was one of those who—I think I was one of those who expressed the concern that it was too early.

Even though you had seen this electrifying speech?

Yes, absolutely. But I just couldn’t imagine, at the time, somebody who’d only been in the Senate for two years being President.

But what’s happening at that time—You said this is after the 2006 midterms—

Right.

—so the Republicans lose the Congress—

Yes.

—in part because of the Iraq War. President Bush 43’s approval ratings are tanking. Was there bigger discussion about the political climate, not just Obama’s preparation or experience, but, number one, the climate in which somebody’s going to be nominated to be the third term of George W. Bush, which is not probably going to be very popular, one—

Yes, yes.

—so on the Republican side, is there conversation about that, particularly from the operatives, Plouffe and Axelrod?

Yes.

And, two, within the Democratic Party, is there discussion about the nomination fight, and that it’ll probably be with Hillary Clinton?

It’s a great question. I can’t recall the specifics. I think there was some discussion of that, that you’re not going to be running against an incumbent President. You just don’t know. We can’t plan and say in four years it will also be a propitious time to run, so you have to take your chances when you can. I don’t recall there being a discussion of Hillary. I could be wrong, but I don’t recall there being a big discussion. The nature was not like you shouldn’t run because Hillary’s running, or you shouldn’t run because it’s her chance, it’s her turn. I don’t recall that being the discussion. It was really more is this a good opportunity for him to run, and is he prepared, is he prepared to do it. That was really the nature of the conversation.

I’ll be interested, at some point, whether Chris has a different memory, because I’m sure he was there, but I don’t recall Hillary being a big part of the discussion.

I thought I heard you say that you weren’t sure he was ready. Were you not sure that you thought he could do the job as President of the United States with only two years of Senate experience? That the complexities of the job were just—? I’ll put it in the way that I remember sort of thinking about it at the time: He’s four years older than me; how could he be ready to be President of the United States? [laughter]

Even though I’d worked in the Clinton White House, it wasn’t as though I was in the Oval Office every day. I was rarely in there, and I wasn’t particularly close to President Clinton. I was a junior staffer in the White House, so my view of the Presidency was still pretty darn grand, right? [laughter] And I don’t think it was the age thing, so much, or the fact that we were of the same cohort. I think it was more like, Well, you must have had to do something more than this to be prepared. [laughter] Had he been a Senator or a Governor, had he run for Governor when he got back to Illinois and been a Governor for six years before coming to Washington, I probably would have felt differently about it. I don’t think it was the age thing.

It was more can two years in the Senate—and, of course, it’ll be four years by the time it happens—is that enough? Is that enough? And I think he convinced us it was in two ways. One, we all knew he’s a quick study, right? He learns stuff very quickly. There’s no doubt from an intellectual point of view he could do it. I think he had shown not just at the Convention but in his first couple years in the Senate he was a popular and effective politician. He understood politics. But I think his view was I’m the 99th-ranked Senator, you know? [laughter] And, Boy, if I’m here for another 12 years I might get up to 70, or whatever it is. I think his view was it’s not necessarily a great place to be trained to be President. And I think by the end of the conversation we were all convinced.

And by the way, I think he was right, in retrospect. We’ve seen people have been Senators for years running for President, or being considered. They’re not necessarily—When you look at what they do day to day, and the decisions, the capabilities that are necessary, they’re not necessarily the ones that are honed in a Senate office.

No, and they become more vulnerable over time because of their public record.

Yes, although, interestingly, that was not part of the discussion. It wasn’t like, “I’ll have all this baggage.” It was more, “This will only prepare me so much for a job that is, in some ways, incapable of being prepared for.”

Sure.

Just on that point, though, since we did the [Edward] Ted Kennedy oral history, he says that when he told him—and, of course, he supported him—when he told him, “Go ahead and run now,” that that was the argument that he made, that you will only gather baggage by staying—

Is that right?

Yes.

That’s the argument that Kennedy made?

That’s what he says in his oral history.

Is that right?

So let me then flip it for his views about the Senate. I would love to get into more of the details when we actually get into the Presidency. Did you sense that he was, in a very short period of time, developing a disdain for the workings of Congress that affected his Presidency?

A little bit. Yes. Yes. I think he found it kind of a bizarre institution. It did not surprise that when he became President he decided not to just hang out with Members of Congress or go golfing with them or have them over for a drink, and got criticized, of course, for that. I think he thought—

Familiarity bred contempt. [laughs]

I think he thought it was a pretty dysfunctional institution, and, again, he didn’t see that spending more time there would be to his benefit.

We’ve got a lot to dig into there. You have given us a terrific start.

OK.

Good stopping point.

Yes, I’m having a lot of fun. I hope you are.

I am.

[BREAK]

Good, so we’re ready. All right now, let’s pick up where we left off. We’re going to go until 6:00, and we’ll get as much done as we can. We’ll do our best. We were talking about the meeting where Senator Obama, at that time, was thinking about running for President. My question to you is this: you had very deep connections at that time with the Clinton network, and you said, as I recall, that Hillary didn’t come up in that conversation, but were you being courted, or were you at the time sort of being contacted by the Clinton people?

Again, I was junior in the Clinton administration. At the White House I was a director level, which is sort of the lowest level there, so I knew them, but I wasn’t particularly close to them. I was close to Bob Rubin, and through Bob I knew them. And I was living in New York, where the expectation was if you were a Democrat in New York you were supporting Hillary Clinton, but there was sort of a—So they were not courting me, particularly, and I had not been particularly active in fundraising, or I wasn’t active in the Dukakis campaign, so I had not really served in those campaign roles before. When I did get active with Obama, I think the sense was, and the word that came through the network was, we understand because you knew him from law school. Unlike a few other people who jumped from the Clinton camp to the Obama camp, I was neither so senior as to owe them a great deal for promoting my career, nor so much tied to them versus Obama that it was a problem, so—

Gotcha, OK. But—

There were some people who jumped ship from one to the other who the Clintons were very upset about and critical of, but that was not me.

Anybody in particular you want to—

I think I’ll leave that one off. [laughter]

OK. I had to try. What’s that?

There are some listed in the briefing book, and the one that I remembered, just because I loved him so much—He’s passed on—is Abner Mikva—

Yes, yes.

—of course, who had served in the Clinton administration for Bill Clinton, but was from Illinois—

Right, was close with Barack.

—and so he went with his heart and his home state, I think.

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OK. So after that point, you said you felt like he had pretty much made his mind up by the time that you—

I felt like he probably had made it up before he walked in there, [laughter] but—

Did he get enough information that meeting to affirm what he was inclined to do anyway?

My sense was that he walked out of there pretty sure of what he was going to do. He had already sort of assembled the team. You had Axelrod, you had Plouffe, you had Bob Bauer as the campaign lawyer, and they were pretty well ready to go. And that was November ’06. I remember seeing him again in January ’07, in his office, and he was very much getting ready to make the announcement, which he made, I think, in February, right?

That’s right.

In his office in Washington?

I met him in his Washington office, yes.

OK. Do you remember the purpose of that meeting?

It was really—I was down there and went to go see him, just to say, “I’m happy to be helpful in any way that I can.”

OK.

Well, before you get away from Citi—and you did make reference to what was happening to Citi and its stock, but you’re right there as 2007 is developing, and the subprime mortgage crisis is hitting. What are you thinking from your perch in the corporate world, and the finance world, and what’s going to happen in the campaign? Is that is an issue?

Yes, it certainly became a significant issue there. Citi was a big place, and I’d been moving from unit to unit. I was now in the unit that was investing in infrastructure, so I felt I was quite disconnected from other parts of the business that were closer to the trading operation or the mortgage operation or things of that sort, which were entirely different parts of the business, different locations. We were in our own little office. I wasn’t in the headquarters building, or the headquarters floor at the time, so I felt a little disconnected from what was going on in other places of the business, but I was certainly reading about it, and seeing the news, and understanding that we, like a lot of the other big banks, were very much part of the issue. And it did become a bigger and bigger issue in the campaign. It became a big issue personally, as you may know, because I started at the White House on January 30th, ’09, which was the day after bonuses were paid by Wall Street firms, and I received a bonus. And—You don’t know the story?

I didn’t know that story.

I’m not sure. I don’t think—

Oh, OK. Well, this is one we’ll probably redact, but I’ll tell you. [laughter] This is a fascinating story, because it’s fascinating about the President.

Just hold on to it for—You don’t have to permanently redact.

Well, yes, OK. So I arrived—I’ll have to give you some more context, but let me tell you the part that’s really relevant to the President. I arrive on January 30th, and I’m told there’s going to be a meeting in the Oval, and they want me there. We’re standing outside the Oval, sort of in a waiting area, and Jim Messina pulls me over and says, “There’s an issue, and the issue is you got a bonus. The President’s about to come out and attack all the banks for giving bonuses during the bailout, and we don’t know what to do with the fact that we have a senior White House official who just got a bonus.” So we went into the Oval. We had the meeting on G8 [Group of 8] stuff; the reason I started that day was that there was a G8 Sherpa meeting starting like 48 hours later in Italy, and I had to get there and start planning for the G8.

And the greatest financial crisis since the Depression. [laughter]

Exactly. We have this meeting, and at the end of the meeting the President asked me to stay behind. By now I’ve had 20 minutes or a half hour to think about this, since Jim gave me the heads up. And the President says, “Look, we’ve got this issue. And you’re not the only one. We’ve got [Jacob] Jack Lew, who just started over at the State Department, who also got a bonus from Citigroup before he left. But you’re here at the White House, and that’s not going to be acceptable.” I said, “OK—” So I’m beginning to think. OK, well, maybe there’s something I can do. I can give away the bonus. I can return the bonus. I can do something like that. He’s like, “Work out the details with Rahm [Emanuel]. Work out the details with Rahm.”

I went to Rahm’s office, and Rahm and Axelrod were there, and we started going through it and spitting out ideas. One of their ideas was maybe you should just go sit on a beach for six months, and this will be better in six months. Of course, it wasn’t, right? And for reasons I’ll come back to, personal reasons, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be there. I wanted to start there. I wanted to start at the beginning of the administration. I knew that if I didn’t start at the beginning of the administration it would be much harder to establish the portfolio, the role. All those things get done at the beginning of the administration. And so we went through this thing—“Can you return the bonus?”—and we agreed that I would give away the bonus. And I—

Did you consult with Nancy at this point?

No. [laughter] No. And Nancy’s never cared about money, so—The reason why it was further complicated, as Bill knows, is I had just lost my older son two weeks before, so I’m already kind of going through a lot. I’ve quit Citi. I can’t go back to Citi. I’ve separated myself from them. I didn’t want to go sit on a beach for six months, and—

They knew that.

And so we went through this, and Axelrod and I have had conversations about this since. We’re sitting there. We’re sitting at Rahm’s table in the Chief of Staff’s office, and I’m beginning to kind of tear up, and Rahm’s getting me Kleenex, and Axelrod is very sympathetic, has a disabled daughter, and we talked a lot about raising children with challenges. He’s trying to be sympathetic, but the view is I’ve got to do something here, because we can’t have a story—and there were stories. [Charles] Gasparino was writing something, and various things like that. So we agreed that I’m going to give it away, and Axelrod says, “Well, we think you should give some of the money to people who’ve been displaced by the mortgage crisis.” And I said, “You know what? I’m going to draw the line there. [laughter] I’m going to come in. I’m already going through a certain sacrifice. I’m going through a lot personally right now. I’m going to give away the bonus, but I’m going to give it away to who I want to give it to,” which was going to be cancer groups and things like that. And they were OK with that, and that’s how we resolved it.

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But the other thing that was interesting—and this was true during the transition, which we really haven’t talked about, the personnel piece—Obama insisted on delivering this news himself to me. And one of his very interesting and, in my view, endearing traits is that most politicians, most leaders, most managers want to be the bearers of good news and leave somebody else to deliver the bad news, and Obama was the opposite. And during the transition, in most cases I was the one who called the person and told them they got the job in the Cabinet, where usually it would have been the President calling and saying, “Congratulations, you’re my Secretary of Interior.” But he would say to me, “Go call Ken Salazar and tell him he got the job.” Then when there was bad news to deliver, he insisted on doing it himself, not delegating it. I viewed that as a very important character trait.

It is rare. We can say on the evidence of 30 years of doing Presidential interviews that that’s not a typical Presidential trait.

I think that’s right. And not just Presidents. Think about CEOs [chief executive officers]; think about—Most people like to be the ones who give the bonus, not take it away, [laughter] or give the promotion, give the job, not tell the three people that they didn’t get the job. And in this case, it was the opposite.

I’m going to have to drag you back through the campaign.

Yes.

So he decides to run. He does run. What was your role during the campaign? Just occasionally?

I occasionally participated in some of the policy group calls, and I continued to do fundraising for him throughout. I organized one of his earliest fundraisers in New York in 2007, and I remember it. It was at the Metropolitan Club. It was a big fundraiser. There were probably 150 people there or something.

You’re working yourself or you’re working with a committee?

There was a group of us. I’m trying to remember now. Brian Mathis, maybe. There were a few other people who were early supporters. Brian Mathis. Orin Kramer was a supporter. I’m trying to think who else, but there were a few of us. It was still pretty early on, and New York was still pretty much Clinton dominated, in terms of the major Democratic fundraisers. I was not a major Democratic fundraiser. I was a newcomer to this. But we had this, and I introduced him, and he gave a great set of remarks, and then he took—

Was this a seated event, or—?

Yes, he was on a stage, and then there were tables. I think it was a breakfast, actually. My father happened to be in town, so my father was there. I remember introducing him beforehand to Obama in the side room. The first question comes up, and it’s about Israel, and—

About Israel?

About Israel and the Middle East. And Obama gives an absolutely historically correct, balanced, thoughtful answer. But he did not start the answer with the talismanic phrase “Israel is the only democracy in the region, our closest ally bar none.” And then you can go talk about the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and two-state solutions, and all of that. And so, of course, it began this whole thing that, oh, he’s anti-Israel, because he didn’t use that phrase. And when he got off the stage afterward I said, “The answer on Israel is going to give you a problem.” And he said, “But it was accurate. It was correct.” I said, “You’re absolutely right, but it’s going to give you a problem. You have to say the magic words.” He was like, “I want to give the correct answer.” And ultimately, of course, he evolved to using the magic words and then giving the correct answer, or the thoughtful answer, too.

Had he deliberately not put in the magic words?

It wasn’t so much that, but this was one of his early public events like this. I don’t know how many times he had been asked about it before, so I don’t think it was—I’m not sure whether it was a conscious decision: I’m not going to say the words. It was I got asked a question about the Arab-Israeli conflict; I’m going to give my perspective on it. And it was a totally fine, balanced, correct, supportive perspective, but it came across as he said this differently than politicians are supposed to talk about this, and it contributed to this notion of, oh, he may be anti-Israel.

What was your dad’s reaction?

My dad was fine, because he’s thoughtful about this, and he, I think, saw that he was giving a correct and a balanced approach. But for those who were looking for those magic words, they jumped on it.

What percentage of that audience would have been Jewish?

I don’t know, maybe a third to a half, maybe. Maybe a third. It wasn’t a particularly—It wasn’t organized to be a Jewish event, but I’m just thinking a lot of my friends, colleagues, fellows in the Democratic finance world happen to be Jewish.

And did you hear directly blowback from the people who—

I did hear some afterward.

And did some say, “Not my candidate”?

No, no, but they sort of said, “That’s going to be a problem.” They were all there to be supportive. They all wrote checks. But I think some of them felt like this is going to be an issue. It was interesting that it kept on playing out over the years.

So from there?

So I did a little bit of that. I think my main engagement was really the transition, and there were two transition efforts, right? There was—

Let me interrupt you. I’m sorry. My one other question: did you go out in the field with him? Did you travel with him at all? Did you—?

[laughs] I did not travel with him, no. I went out to Iowa. One of my good friends in New York organized a trip for eight of us to go out to Iowa and knock on doors, and I’m smiling because I took my older son, and he was in a wheelchair, and it was in the snow, in January, in Iowa, and we knocked on doors.

Oh-eight?

Oh-eight. And then Obama was doing an event there that night, and so we knocked on doors in I guess it was Des Moines, and then went to the event, and then flew home. So it was just a great day.

Terrific. Yes, all right. So—

Transition.

Transition.

So there were two transition efforts. There was one that started in May or June of ’08, with Jim Johnson.

Oh.

We met in Chicago. There was a small group of us. And then Jim Johnson sort of blew up, right? Because it was about the Fannie Mae stuff.

Right in the middle of the Vice President search, right? He was responsible for the VP search.

Yes. Correct.

And it all melted down.

Right. And so that effort—

Countrywide.

—got put on hold, and got restarted in August, I believe, with [John] Podesta [Jr.]. And John then became the head of it. Jim was no longer involved.

Right.

I think at the beginning it was Jim Johnson. I think Bill Daley was there. Valerie was there. I’m trying to remember who else. Myself. And then by August it was Podesta, and then it was beginning to get a broader effort. Obviously Valerie, but it was also—Pete was involved, Janet Napolitano, Kathleen Sebelius, Peña—Federico. It became a broader effort, and that was what became institutionalized as the transition effort.

Right. And you were engaged in that latter effort. Now, how much of your time did that take?

You know, it was a ridiculous time in my life because my son was sick; I was at Citigroup, which was going through its troubles; and I was doing this on the side. And it was probably a quarter of my time or so. I asked Citigroup to put me on half time, and this is probably a quarter to a third of my time. It ramped up more in the fall, and then obviously after the election, when the personnel effort really ramped up. But in August, September, October, probably about a third of my time.

And did you have a particular portfolio in the transition? You just said that you went to—

I’m trying to think of when the personnel stuff really kicked in. It was mostly around personnel.

Yes, that’s what the briefing was.

Yes, I’m trying to think. There was some early discussion about transitions in general, and having conversations about how to structure it and all of that that I was part of, but pretty early on I sort of focused on personnel. And the reason why was that because my son was sick, at that point, I thought, I’m not going to be going into the administration, so I can be objective—I don’t have a dog in this fight. I can help pick people without any sense of conflict of interest. That changed later on as it became clear that Jacob [Froman] was going to die, and I decided I wanted to go into the administration. But at the time it was I’m going to work on this transition because I won’t be going into the administration.

Yes. Just to make a comment on that, that’s one of the terrific values of oral history is the ability to get people to talk about these things, because in reading the material in the briefing book—and I think this was probably in Martha [Joynt] Kumar’s Presidential Studies Quarterly article, which is on the transitions—it mentions the fact that you were doing personnel, and that there were those who said it is normally a good idea to have somebody involved in personnel at the outset who will be either the White House Personnel Director or probably dealing with personnel later on.

Right.

And then the story drops off, and so you’re thinking, All right, they made a conscious decision not to do this in this instance. But there’s a backstory to it, and that’s—

Yes, it’s interesting: I don’t think there was—We never—or at least I was not aware that there was any decision early on of who was going to be doing Presidential personnel. You’re absolutely right: it would have made perfect sense. And it wasn’t as though people thought I was going to do Presidential personnel, because I told them I wasn’t coming in, and if I were coming in, it wasn’t going to be to do that job, but I guess Don Gips started doing Presidential personnel at the beginning.

I think so.

I think that happened quite late in the transition process.

Yes. I think it did, as well.

I think maybe December/January that he decided he wanted to do that, and the President agreed, or Podesta agreed. But you’re right: it would have made perfect sense to have continuity.

Now, when you say that you’re doing personnel, are you—

Are you talking about personnel across the whole administration, or just within a certain set of issues?

It was across the administration, generally at the Cabinet level. I was not doing Vice Presidential stuff. It was how is the President going to pick his Cabinet. And what it involved was—Basically I was a list creator. I created groups of, teams of people to focus on particular clusters, rather than around particular jobs. We had somebody doing the economic cluster, because you knew that you wanted the people who would be eligible for Treasury, Commerce, USTR [United States Trade Representative], NEC, Labor, and you just wanted to know what that world looked like, and then you can figure out where to put them. We had somebody else doing some domestic policy, some social policy, some energy, climate, things like that.

Our job was first and foremost just to collect names and biographies, and do outreach to stakeholders to get a sense of who they’d like to see, or who they’d recommend be considered to do some kind of initial vetting, at least sort of internal discussions. And then to begin to think through, well, what would a team around the economics look like? What would a team around national security look like? And then to tee those up after the election for the President-elect and Vice President-elect to make decisions on. And we had a process underway. That was the main function.

There was also a function around—I don’t know exactly how or why I got involved in this, but there was a function around the personnel system, and creating the website—There was a desire to throw open—to make clear that the government was open for business, and anybody in the country who wanted to apply for a job in the new administration should be able to find a way to do so. And so creating this website and this portal where people could apply, and load up their résumé, and be channeled into one or another bucket, I was also somehow involved in that, including meeting with some technology companies that were building this for us, once the money kicked in for the transition from the federal government and the like.

But the main function was the creation of these lists, these slates, having conversations with people about the teams and what the slates might look like, bringing them in to see the President-elect, mostly in Chicago, and then being part of the decision-making process, where he and the Vice President, and then others as they got appointed, like Rahm as Chief of Staff, made decisions about who they wanted to offer the jobs to. Then being the bearer of good news, and letting the people know that they were a member of the President’s Cabinet.

So, Mike, this is in the fall. The financial system is melting down. Is that affecting who you’re thinking might be good in these jobs, or might not be good in these jobs? Are you presenting that as part of the context of talking about different people? Just put the overlay on there, because in the world of transparency slides dropping that overlay becomes a big cloudy mess. [laughs]

Yes. Absolutely. Given what was going on, there was, I think, a strong view that you needed an economic team that was capable of managing through crises, that had experience in managing through crises. And that led to, inevitably, a certain list of people, like Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner. Peter Orszag had been around. Jason Furman had been around. We wanted people who had been around crises before, and particularly those top—really the Larry/Tim thing. That was a big issue. I did not think the President was going to be able—I thought the President was going to have to choose between Larry and Tim, and he refused to choose and was able to get both. I did not think Larry would come in if Tim were Treasury Secretary, and I thought Tim made the better Treasury Secretary for Obama. I thought they were so similar in many ways, really kindred spirits, same sort of intellect, and I facilitated their introduction to each other in New York, because we had to be careful. He was New York Fed Chair, so couldn’t be political. He’d never been political, had always been—

And was that before or after Election Day?

I think it was after. They met at a diner in New York City, I think.

Were you in the meeting?

No, I just facilitated it. I really was a list maker, a slate maker, and a travel agent. [laughter]

We have to bore down because if you’re self-effacing—

I don’t want to overstate my role. I really was there to make the trains run on time.

Since you knew so many of these people, and in this network you’re the one that the President knows, or the President-elect knows, at some point did he ask your advice for—?

Yes. And there was a room in the Chicago office—I guess it was primarily for security reasons. It had no windows. It was kind of round. It had a big, round table, which seemed to be where most of these decisions got made. And he would hear from me, he would hear from Rahm, obviously hear from the Vice President-elect. There might be others. Axelrod might be in the room, or Pete Rouse might be in the room. There were other voices to be heard, and he would ask advice. And precisely because I knew them, and had worked with them, at least on the economic side, I was able to at least offer a perspective.

Now, how do you facilitate a meeting between a President-elect and a New York Fed Chair in a diner in New York?

Well, it was literally calling up Tim at the time and saying, “This guy would like to meet you. I think it’s about time you did. I think you would enjoy doing so. I think you have a lot to talk about.” I think it was after the election. I’m pretty sure it was after the election. Did Tim—? You’ve interviewed Tim, right?

We did interview Tim.

But we haven’t finished.

Oh, OK.

We did get through the transition, but I can’t remember.

It was in the fall, and I can’t remember—

And we can’t tell you. [laughter]

You can’t tell me anyway. I think it was after the election, but I—The only reason I’m doubting myself about that is after the election he was in touch with Tim regularly, like he was in touch with [Henry] Paulson [Jr.].

And much harder to meet in a diner, I’m guessing, [laughter] after the election.

Yes, it might have been before. You’re right. Actually, it might have been September, October, now that you’re saying—

Was it just the two of them, or—?

Yes.

Three o’clock in the morning? [laughter]

I don’t recall. But it was just me reaching out to Tim, Tim agreeing that it did seem appropriate to do it now, and putting his scheduler and Obama’s scheduler in touch with each other.

And then did Tim call you to say how it went?

I don’t recall that. I don’t think so. I can’t remember. Now you’re saying it, he may have called just to say, “Thanks, that was interesting.” I think there was a call like, “Thanks, that was interesting,” but that was it. I didn’t ask for a readout or anything of that sort.

And any other reflections on the broader team? The Larry/Tim thing obviously looms large, but it was a big, complicated—I mean, it’s a big team, as a general matter.

Yes.

As you said, it became quite elaborate. It became quite elaborate. The connections with the NSC, as you said, had matured through the Bush administration. You end up getting pulled into this position. We’re not quite there yet, but what do you remember about how the rest of those pieces came together?

So the economic team was probably the most important thing to get in place, given the crisis. On the foreign policy side, we certainly teed up a lot of people, or slates of people. The fundamental issue for him was whether he was going to offer and succeed in getting Hillary, right? And that was totally him. It’s not like I suggested that or anything. That was all being done by him, behind closed doors, at a much higher level of paygrade. So then it became more things like, OK, well, what are the options for Secretary of Defense, for National Security Advisor, for Director of CIA, things of that sort. And he had some preexisting views on that. He had known Jim Jones. He had met Jim Jones, and Jim Jones had been involved a bit in some of his earlier travels, as I recall, and had advised him a bit. At that point, of course, Donilon was very much involved on the foreign policy side.

And were you providing advice on those issues?

Less. I was more gathering information, gathering perspectives. Sometimes he would say, “Can you go talk to the following people and get their views on these people?” I would go do that and bring it back.

I want to stick with Jones for a second because I’m guessing it’s going to impact your job as the year goes forward. I know through other sources that during the transition, after the Jones decision was made, there was a rethink. Were you connected to or aware of that?

Not really. The foreign policy stuff was handled more by Denis McDonough, who had served as Foreign Policy Advisor, and I didn’t know Jones before. I met him, I guess, during the transition. But I was not intimately involved in that.

We can take that one offline afterward. [laughs] I’m just curious if that impacted your story in that transition period.

No. And then the rest—It was interesting. Obama wanted to see people for jobs that weren’t necessarily the most critical jobs. He really wanted to see the scientists—the guy who was going to be the Science Advisor, and the head of NIH [National Institutes of Health], and I can’t remember; I don’t think NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] was on the list, but we had a bunch of others—because he really enjoyed talking to scientists, and he wanted to see them during the transition. Now, those could have waited until—I mean, as we’ve seen more recently they can wait for months or years, right? [laughter] But—

Sometimes it’s like acting.

Yes, but he wanted to deal with it there. And we worked through most of the rest of the Cabinet, too, so he picked Education and Transportation. He picked all the other Cabinet officials going through this process where we’d serve up these slates, we’d get them narrowed down, we’d get some feedback. He would sit and discuss them. He’d decide who he wanted to see for the job. It might be one person, or it might be three, and then he’d get back together—usually with that group of Vice President, Rahm, others, Podesta, Pete, et cetera—and make a decision.

I have to ask: was it a heavy lift getting Larry Summers to take that job?

I didn’t talk to Larry directly about taking it. I thought he wouldn’t take it, because it’s not a step down but it’s certainly—I’m not sure what you do after you’re Treasury Secretary that is a step up, and it’s only the fact that they were in the midst of the worst financial crisis in 80 years that made it interesting and challenging for him. I didn’t think he would agree to do it, but the President put on his charms and got him to do it.

So you think the President did that?

Oh, the President did that. Oh, yes.

And it was—

The President took care of—The President did that. The President did Hillary.

Right.

Those ones were sort of one-on-one, proactive pursuits. A lot of the other things were that we’re taking up things and he’s reacting to it, but those were ones where we showed him the economic slates, and he’s like, “Well, I don’t want to have to choose between Larry and Tim. I want both.” REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

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Well, and [Paul] Volcker [Jr.] took a—

Well, yes, again, but was it for a formal role? Maybe it was. I don’t recall that during the transition—

—period by assignment.

Yes, during the transition, because of the crisis—While this was going on with personnel, there were these series of economic policy meetings down the hall, where all these guys were flying in—Larry, Tim, Volcker; they were all there to try and help the President-elect get his head around the crisis.

So at what point, then, are you approached about staying?

Let me tell you one more funny story about personnel, and that has to do with my good friend and predecessor Ron Kirk. Ron is the former mayor of Dallas. Obama knows him. He’s on several slates. He’s been a mayor. We thought of him for Transportation because he had done something in Dallas that was particularly viewed as innovative in the transportation sector, and he’d done the big arena. He knew how to raise money for big infrastructure projects and the rest. Ron is scheduled to fly into Chicago. Takes off from Dallas. While he’s in the plane, Rahm convinces the President to appoint Ray LaHood Secretary of Transportation. Ray LaHood’s a Congressman, Republican, good friend of Rahm’s from Illinois. So Ron lands in Chicago, and I’m urgently trying to get him on the phone to say, “How would you like to be U.S. Trade Representative?” [laughter] And Ron comes in and interviews with Obama for U.S. Trade Representative.

So you do catch him?

Yes, but I want to get him at the airport in case he was like, “Hell no, [laughter] I’m here to be Secretary of Transportation.”

And why did you choose that slot?

Well, we were—You’re doing party planning, right? You’re moving all the nametags and making sure, OK, does this person get along with this person? What’s their expertise? Who can—? And Ron had been a pro-trade Democrat. He’d been very active in the NAFTA debate, was sort of a devotee of Lloyd Bentsen and Ann [Willis] Richards and the rest. And he was very happy to be U.S. Trade Representative. [laughter]

That’s great.

So then we come back to your—

My role. It didn’t quite work that way. So in late November, early December, I was in Chicago, and I went in and talked to Valerie, and maybe Axelrod was there, too, but it was at least Valerie. It was Valerie, just Valerie at that point. And she was asking how things were going, and I was telling her that Jacob was dying, and I was thinking that I really was going to need to be in the administration, for me, you know?

You were going to need—At this point you—

Yes, I’d switched.

You had switched. Got it.

My switch was I thought he was going to be sick for a long time, and that I wouldn’t be able to go into the administration. Now it was clear he was dying, and I thought, I’m going to be destroyed by that. I’m going to be depressed, and if I’m sitting on the outside of the administration that I wish I were part of, it’s just going to compound it. I felt I needed to focus on service for my own mental health. Now, that may not actually have been a correct psychological perspective, by the way, we won’t need to go through here, but that was my perspective. And I remember it was a terrible day in Chicago. It was sleeting and dark, and I was sort of—

It sounds like 182 days in Chicago. [laughter]

Yes, exactly. Again, I was in her office, and I was sort of tearing up a bit, and she disappeared for a few minutes into the office where Obama was, and Obama came out and called me into his office and said, “Hey, if you want to be in the administration, we’ll make sure there’s a role for you.” And I thanked him, and I started thinking about what that role might be, and it became the deputy role there.

Going back to what you’d said before, Mike, about—I was quite struck, and it really resonated with me—about the lack of “turfy-ness.” I do think that some of that reflects on you and the trust that people have in you. When you played out the position, did you also play out the role? So did you know it would be Sherpa? Did you know it would be a wider range of issues? Had you been paying attention to some of the structural issues that would make the job work for you?

A little. Once that was done, once I had had that conversation—Actually, at that point a lot of the transition work shifted to Washington. I can’t remember when the President actually—But the President began to spend more time in Washington. Podesta, everyone spent more time in Washington. And I remember sitting down with Donilon at that point, who was figuring out the org chart for the NSC, and he showed me what they were thinking of, and it looked pretty good to me. I think we made a few adjustments, but we agreed that if Jim Jones was OK with this and Larry was OK with this, that this is what would make sense.

He was the deputy? Tom was—

He was going to be the deputy. I think they’d already agreed that he would be deputy. They’d agreed that Jim would be the National Security Advisor. Larry had already agreed to be NEC. And so we made—I can’t remember what the adjustments were. It had broadened somewhat, including democracy and development that I had never really thought of as part of it, and they decided—and I don’t think that was part of it in the Bush administration, but the way that Donilon had sort of structured it, he put that in there. And we agreed that that was a job that made sense for me, and Donilon was supportive of that. I had breakfast with Jim Jones at the Hay-Adams a few days later, and it was really the first time we sat down to talk. And Jim said, “I’d be delighted to have you there.” We met with Larry at that point, and I’d worked with Larry in the previous administration, so he knew me well, and he was totally comfortable with it, and that’s how it got decided.

So you’re deputy National Economic Council, deputy National Security Council for the Econ portfolio, Assistant to the President, though.

Deputy Assistant.

Deputy Assistant, right.

Deputy, at that point. Later on I got promoted to Assistant to the President. I can’t remember.

And the Sherpa role was—

Part of that.

—thrown into this already.

Correct.

Got it.

That was baked in as probably—

Because the previous—In the Bush administration, Dan Price was Sherpa, and Deputy, did trade, did climate, did energy. I don’t think he did development and democracy, so that was the part that was added. But it was basically built on what the Bush administration had done.

But the Sherpa role was the one—

That was already there.

And that was perceived to be probably the major piece of your portfolio?

It’s one of them. Certainly around the financial crisis, and it turned out to be probably more important than expected at the time, because it took so long for Lael to get confirmed, and—

This is Lael Brainard, Under Secretary of the Treasury for International—

So normally the Under Secretary of the Treasury would play a very active role in the G8, G20—particularly the G20—finance function. She wasn’t able to join the administration for about six months, I think, so certainly London and then on the way to Pittsburgh I probably played a little bit more of a role than I normally would have on these crises.

OK.

So this is a question about the transition itself, and your transitioning into this role, because the Kumar article uses the term that the Obama transition style was “corporate.” And then the other major theme that she has was how smoothly the outgoing Bush 43 administration—

Yes.

—wanted to make the transition. So specifically in your role—because you weren’t a major part of the transition itself in terms of walking into the White House, but you obviously transition into your role—how did you perceive what was happening in the changeover from administration to administration, particularly in the midst of this huge crisis?

Look, I think, as has been reported, the Bush administration did a terrific job in terms of managing the transition from their end. Very professional about it, really set a very high standard. And the importance of that was only compounded because of the crisis that was going on at the time, so I was not in with Josh or Joel Kaplan or the other people managing from the Bush administration side, but I knew Dan Price from before. Once it became clear I was going to take this role, we had several conversations. We’re good friends right to this day. And it was a seamless sort of transition.

What did he offer to you that was helpful?

First of all, he had a team of people there, most of whom stayed for a while. I guess they were mostly career, but some number of them stayed initially. He offered certainly briefings, both reading but also verbal briefings, on the whole range of issues he was covering, the workings of the Major Economies Forum, the status of where things were on the G20, which he had helped organize, the leaders’ meeting that he had helped organize in October, and the ongoing G8 and G20 discussions, where we were on Doha and the trade agenda, so it was comprehensive.

When you come in, is the financial crisis a major part of your portfolio, too, although in a fairly limited way?

Yes. It’s a major area of focus, particularly to the degree that it relates to and informs these summits. So we come in. As I said, the first Sherpa meeting was 48 hours after I arrived. That was the G8, which was less important to the financial crisis, probably, at that point than the G20. We were heading toward a G20 conference in April in London, which is pretty quick, three and a half months or two and a half months, really, to get going and get organized, with still a skeleton staff at the White House and at the Treasury Department, so that did become a major focus.

OK. Did you go to the inauguration?

No. No, I was home in New York.

OK. Your son passed away when?

He passed away just a few days before. He passed away on the 16th.

On the 16th of January.

Yes.

And did that slow, in any way, your arrival into the job?

A bit. A bit. I wasn’t there on the 20th, and I remember getting this call from Larry, which at the time I thought was rather insensitive. He was basically saying, “I can’t hold this job forever for you, so you’d better get down here.” It was two weeks later, [laughter] but I started on the 30th.

OK, started on the 30th of January. And then you say within 48 hours you were where?

I was in Naples. [laughter]

How was that?

[Two pages redacted]

Oh, the Italians are fantastic at planning these summits. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT We had the most spectacular Sherpa meetings, all over the country.

It is a big part of what you did in the first term. Tell us a little bit about what you learned about Sherpa-ness.

Yes. Describe it for us.

So these summits are important in some respects. One is action-forcing events. They force the bureaucracy in each of the countries to get its act together, to move things to conclusion, to take a position, and that’s useful. They’re most important if you can achieve it, which is hard, as they don’t get to do an informal dialogue among leaders very often, right? An unstructured give-and-take, small table, that kind of thing. If you can really create the environment for that, it’s very valuable. It’s, unfortunately, hard to do. They tend to focus on a document, on the communique, which is probably the least important part of the whole process, but that tends to be where you spend most of your time: negotiating language of a communique that very few, if anybody, will read, right? But at the time it seems really critical, what the verb is and what the adjective is, and how to get it there, and so you spend a huge amount of time on the document.

The Sherpa meetings are largely around what’s the agenda, what are the leaders going to actually try and talk about and get done, and how do we reflect that in the communique, which will then become the basis of a work program in each of our governments for the next year or longer. And so the crisis, of course, creates a context for that, because that’s obviously the thing that the leaders have to focus the most on, but climate is another big issue of the time. Trade and the Doha Round that had just run aground eight months before is a pretty big issue at the time. Then the G8 always has some element around development where they invite big emerging economies and African countries to come and present. The G20 was really more about the financial crisis and the related issues at the time: financial regulation, tax havens, things of that sort. It’s become more like the G8 in terms of more and more working groups and communiques and reports on broader sets of issues, but at the time it was really about crisis management.

That first Sherpa meeting I was there, really, just to learn what the heck I’m supposed to do, and watch the other Sherpas in action, and figure out what the agenda is and what questions I need to take back to Washington to get answers for. Part of it was just coming back and talking with Larry and Tim and whoever else was in government at the time about, OK, what is our perspective on this or that, or how do we want to shape this issue, and how do we want to push it, what do we want to get done through the—And the U.S., even though we’re not the chair of it every year, we wield a disproportionate amount of influence, so people want to know, particularly with a new administration—All the other countries were terribly eager to know what does the President think about A, B, or C, and what do you want to get done in these areas, and the G8 and the G20 became a mechanism, and the MEF, the Major Economies Forum, became a mechanism for that.

Which is the same group used for climate change. The Major Economies Forum was—

That you talked to Todd about probably, right?

Yes, we did.

Does the Sherpa have a Sherpa? Is there a—

The Sherpa has a yak. [laughter]

The Sherpa has a yak, OK.

Bill was a yak. And by the way—

I was the yak-in-chief.

And sometimes the yaks have a stick.

Have a what?

Stick.

Stick.

Right, because you need—you know, the yaks—

Are there literally—?

There are yaks.

Is that a term of art, or are you jerking me around a little bit? [laughs]

No, no, there—

No, it’s a term of art.

There’s a group of yaks.

OK.

And were you called a yak at the time?

No, we were not. This is a term of art that’s developed.

I think this was part of our evolution of the global architecture [laughter] is that we introduced the term “yak.” The yaks would get together on their own, right? And they were an incredibly useful channel of communication and negotiation, to resolve issues. So yes, we each had a yak who did a lot of the work in the other room, in between meetings, and were—

Who was your yak?

My first yak was Matt Goodman.

Matt the Yak.

Matt the Yak. And then I had another Matt: Matt Vogel became my yak. [laughter] So I had several Matt yaks.

And David Kaden, was he—?

David Kaden was a stick. [laughter] He worked for Matt Vogel.

Got it.

And what’s the role of a—

He never graduated.

Yes, he never graduated to yak. He was always—

I think he may have, after you left and under Caroline. He may have been a yak under Caroline.

He may have. That’s right, he may have, because Matt Vogel came over with me to—

My question, though, more fundamentally, is about the level of bureaucratic continuity, if any, in these kinds of meetings, or is it the case that when the new administration comes in you just clean house and then everybody is—?

If you take the G20—The G20’s got two tracks, the leader track and the finance track. The leader track, there’s an awful lot of cleaning house because it’s—Now, every country’s different, by the way. The Japanese Prime Minister, his Sherpa usually is a foreign affairs ministry bureaucrat, so there’s a lot of continuity there. In the U.S., I think it’s always been a White House official. There’s been a fair amount of cleaning house from one administration to the next. The finance track, you have a new Treasury Secretary, but the Central Bank Governor remains the same. The Central Bank Governor’s staff remains the same. And even though you may have a political Under Secretary of Treasury who’s the Finance Deputy, the people who support that effort, like Mark Sobel, who sort of ran the G7 IMF Office at the Treasury Department for years—there’s a lot of continuity there.

OK. Now, what percentage of your time in the course of a year is devoted to preparation for attending follow-up from these meetings?

It’s hard to say. First of all, as you know, your time expands, so it’s now 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and I think probably—It was an intense period for summitry because that year, for example, we had three summits: we had the G20, the G8, and another G20. The next year we had two G20s and a G8, so for a couple years there we had three summits a year, plus APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation], plus the other leaders’ meetings we were working on, so I probably spent a third of my time on summitry.

But that would seem small to me—The basis of the question is that, as somebody who’s not expert in this area—obviously we’ve interviewed a lot of White House people and know certain aspects of it, but not so much in this. In going through the timeline, I was just struck by how repetitive it seems: you’re meeting here; meeting there; meeting there. And so in conducting the interview there’s a challenge: do we start from the beginning and go to each one of these summits to get your—

Yes, many of which sort of meld into each other. [laughter]

I thought that was going to be the answer, but I appreciate your confirming.

Yes.

And then the second way is to say, all right, we’ve got all of these meetings. Tell us about the ones that really matter historically. Which of these, for people looking back during the Obama administration, are notable for whatever reason, even personal reasons—you know, if you fell off a boat someplace—or what were the ones that were consequential in terms of outcomes, particularly at the Presidential level?

So at some point one of my staff calculated this, and I think I might be the Sherpa who’s done more summits than anybody else in the U.S. government. The Japanese may have more, because they have longevity, but just because of the time that we had, between ’09 and ’13, it was just such an intense period of summitry, and most people sort of rolled off.

All right, now why was it an intense period of summitry?

Mostly because of the crisis.

OK.

But then you also throw the climate work on top of it, with the desire to get—

Well, that’s right.

—something done.

That didn’t create more meetings, but it did—There were already summits, and that became a new agenda item, or a higher agenda item, but it didn’t create new meetings. For example, in London, when President Obama declared, “We’re going to host another one of these in the United States in October”—much to my dismay [laughter]—there had been no plan to do that, but the view was we’re in the middle of a crisis; we can’t wait a year to get back together. And then, having had two that year, I guess it was Korea and—No, it was France and—Yes, Korea and France the next year? But suddenly France decided, well, we’re going to throw on an extra one, too, because we just need to keep up this momentum. And then it got back to one a year after that, but for a while there it was like every few months there was one of these major summits.

OK. So I’ve asked exactly the right person, [laughter] of all the people I could ask—

It just means that more of them meld together. So, look, I think London was absolutely critical from the point of view of crisis management.

OK, and London was when?

April 2009.

OK, right after—

It was the first one. First of all, it was Obama’s first international meeting, outside the—I guess he had a bilateral tour, but his first summit of any sort, so it was his debut. And it was important substantively, because it’s where we got agreement to expand the resources of the IMF, and to restructure the governance of the IMF, to give China and the other emerging economies a bit more voice there. There was this famous moment where Obama’s mediating between [Nicolas] Sarközy and Hu Jintao over tax havens, because Sarközy was big on trying to go after tax havens, and we were having trouble reaching consensus, and the two of them couldn’t reach agreement. We’re in the summit in London and things are dragging on, and the President turned to me and said, “What are we still doing here? Isn’t this supposed to be over?” And I said, “Well, those two can’t agree on the last piece.” So he called them over into the corner and got them to agree, so that we could leave. [laughter] So London was important in that regard, and it was also his debut on the international stage, which was important, and he did very well.

July, we’re in Italy. We’re supposed to be on the island of Santa Magdalena, but they never finished the hotel, and in the meantime there’s an earthquake in L’Aquila. [Silvio] Berlusconi decides to show solidarity with the people of L’Aquila—we’re going to move the summit to this campus. It was fantastic. It was a campus to train tax inspectors. And so we all stayed in dorms. The President, Prime Minister, everybody stayed in a dorm. They spruced them up as best they could, but it was a dorm. It was basically a university campus in the middle of nowhere in Italy.

That was the G8, but the G8 had evolved so that there was a G8 meeting, and then they invited the five emerging economies, so it was the G8+5. Then they invited African leaders for some part of it to talk about development. And then we decided, since you had almost all the members of the Major Economies Forum there, we would host a Major Economies Forum at the leader level there, as well. It was a circus, including [Muammar] Gaddafi being there, with his tent, setting up in the campus, [laughter] and going on at great length about how he and Obama were great African leaders, and Obama cutting him off finally and saying—I mean, Obama had no tolerance for Gaddafi. When [Hugo] Chávez did the same thing—I wasn’t there in the room for that one—but when Chávez tried to do the “You and I are brethren of the dispossessed and we’re finally going to overthrow the imperialism of the United States together,” he would cut him off and move on to more productive discussions. So that was July.

I think July was important because of the MEF, and a leaders check-in prior to Copenhagen that I thought was important. And it was also important, I thought, on the development side—It’s where we launched Food Security, and we launched this development agenda. It became—What did Hillary call it? Not Food For Peace—Feed the Future. So we launched it. The State Department took it over. She rebranded it a bit, but it became the Feed the Future initiative.

What was interesting there is we started introducing into the G8 the notion of accountability for pledges. Countries had been coming to these meetings for years pledging big numbers and then not delivering anything, so we started a process where we were going to report on how people did against their pledges. I went around the room, literally pen in hand, to each of the Sherpas to get their pledges, and then gave it to the President, and it was like $25 billion. It was a big deal. Then we started this reporting process, which continued in Canada and elsewhere, of holding countries’ feet to the fire on this kind of stuff. So it was important for that purpose.

I think Pittsburgh, which was the next G20, October I think—That was important in part because it was U.S. leadership, so the President was in the chair. It was his first time of leading one of these international conferences, and I watched him at work with the various leaders on various issues. Climate was important there—a lot of interaction with China on that—and trade was very important there, because at the April conference, the London conference, one of the things the leaders wanted to know from Obama is “What are you going to do about the Doha Round?” Obama said, “I don’t know. We’re going to go study it and we’ll come back to you and report.” And we all went off to study it, and in July he reported back to the G8—It was the G20 who asked him, but he reported back to the G8—“I’ve looked at this. I don’t think it’s going to get done on the path that it’s on. I think we need a new approach.”

And in October, at the G20, there’s always a session on trade. All of the leaders started going around the table, saying, “We commit to getting the Doha Round done this year.” And Obama had started off the discussion and did the same thing, saying, “I don’t believe it’s going to happen. We need a new approach.” The other leaders all repeated their traditional talking points, and Obama did something that was quite unusual: he intervened again and said, “You guys aren’t listening. This isn’t happening, and if you care about the WTO we need a new approach.” And that was an important—I remember the Indian Sherpa, Montek [Singh] Ahluwalia, came up to me afterward, saying, “We heard you. We get it. You guys are serious.” And that began a process that lasted several years now to begin to disengage ourselves from the Doha Round and figure out how to push the multilateral trading system in a new direction, so that was important for that reason.

You get to 2010—and I should really look at this; I believe it’s France and Korea, right? Are those the two summits? There’s Canada, there’s France, there’s Korea, and then there’s Mexico.

In 2010, you said?

Major Economies, [Benjamin] Bernanke—G8 is in Canada, oh, and then the G20 is in Toronto. So it’s Canada, and then October—

June of 2010, page seven.

—there’s another one. October—November, there’s another one in Korea. The one in Canada is important, a little bit in a negative way, in that [Stephen] Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada—We’re still in the crisis, and he’s insisting on austerity. And it’s politically important to him to reinforce austerity. The President is trying to create room, not just for the U.S. but for other countries to stimulate the economy, to get out of the crisis, so we sort of threaded the needle.

That became part of the dynamic of the G20, this question between growth and austerity, with Harper, with [Angela] Merkel—It was sort of an ongoing—with, later, [François] Hollande, trying to get the U.S. to weigh in on behalf of France in favor of less austerity within the European Union. It spills over to the euro crisis, where within Europe they’re fighting with each other over how much austerity to have. It’s still evident today, with Germany insisting on zero percent deficits and things of that sort. That was one of the important dynamics of the G20, this debate over austerity versus growth.

The Korea one in November was a very difficult one, and I take personal responsibility for this one. We were not as organized as we should have been for this, and part of it is we were trying to renegotiate the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement and prepare for the summit at the same time, and we failed to renegotiate—We didn’t get what we needed in Korea for the free trade agreement. They thought if we were coming to Korea they would be able to hold us up, give us very little, and we would feel compelled to say yes, and the President said no, quite to the surprise of the Koreans.

About six weeks later we actually got what we needed and we signed it, but at the time it was a bit of a front-page story: “U.S. fails to reach agreement in Korea.” At the same time, there was a lot of acrimony in the G20 again over this—I believe it was over the austerity/growth debate—where it was making us look like we were being fiscally irresponsible. We were being portrayed that way, and we didn’t manage it as well as we could. I remember it was one of those times where the President felt like we had not served him well.

And how did he communicate that?

Look, I remember we were in a conference room at one point, David Lipton and me, and we sort of divided and conquered, because I ended up focusing more on the Korea free trade agreement, and David focused more on the G20. And we at the NSC were not—This led to a change in how we prepared for summits at the NSC. We were not well organized for these foreign trips in a way that David and I—and I guess it was probably either Matt Vogel or Matt Goodman at the time—We were up all night printing out cards for the President, and punching holes, and making binders. There was nobody there to help us. The NSC staff had disappeared. And afterward, we realized, and Donilon realized, we’ve got to staff up differently when we go on these trips.

You needed a yak and a stick.

We needed a yak. We needed a stick. No, what we needed was the NSC infrastructure—this goes a little bit to your earlier question—maybe because it was economics, it was just—There weren’t people there to support us, or they’d gone to sleep, [laughter] or whatever it was. Perfectly human things, but the result was we just didn’t serve the President as well as we could have.

Interesting.

And the press was bad on both fronts, G20 and Korea. The President was kind of pissed. It was the end of a long trip. This was a trip that started, I think, in India. He went from India to someplace else to Korea. I was with him in India and then I jumped to Korea to work on the free trade agreement. So he had been out of the country for eight or nine days, and was tired, and we didn’t perform well.

In 2009, you’re coming in. In the transition you’re doing a lot of personnel-related stuff. You’re putting the team together. You get appointed to your position. From the outside, transitions look like people are writing the briefing papers that are going to serve in the administration. From the inside, worrying about personnel really is a lot of it. Do you remember during that period, and at the beginning of your service, knowing you had three or four goals, or that you thought that there were three or four—? Obviously the economy’s melting down, but there were three or four things that one could accomplish in a year, and where those ideas were coming from, other than your own watching things? What are you reading? Who are you talking to? What is the system producing?

Yes. Look, the overwhelming agenda item was the crisis, and I don’t think—None of us knew how long it was going to take to get out of that, so there wasn’t a lot of—That was our number one focus, and everything else derived from there. I had a trade focus, but a lot of it was, OK, what have we inherited? We’ve inherited three trade agreements that the Bush administration negotiated but have not yet gone through Congress, and which the President said we were going to renegotiate, so that was part of our agenda: renegotiating Korea, Colombia, Panama, and getting them through Congress. Not necessarily a one-year activity, but that was an inherited and a campaign agenda item that we needed to deliver on.

There was the whole climate area, which the Bush administration had been engaged in. There was a precursor to the MEF, also called the MEF, but it stood for Major Emitters Forum, [laughter] rather than Major Economies Forum, so completely different. There was that, and there were a series of COP [Conference of the Parties] conferences coming up that we were going to have to prepare for and respond to.

Some of it was coming from that, and the fact that Todd had been appointed, and Podesta was involved, and there was going to be a focus on all that kind of stuff. There was climate; there was trade; there was the crisis. And then there was the agenda, like development, where we said we want to take a fresh look at our development policies. We launched a Presidential effort to do that. That took some time; it took about a year, I think, to get that done, and some new ideas came out of that.

And on two of those, the economy and on climate, on the economy right out of the block there’s domestic legislation, which is the Recovery Act; on climate, a climate bill is processing.

[Edward] Markey.

Are you involved in any of that stuff?

I did not come into the administration with any real knowledge of climate or energy, so when you’re asking who am I talking to and how am I getting briefed up, Todd was a great partner in this. And we structured it the same way the Bush administration did with regard to the Major Economies Forum: Todd was the chief of the U.S. delegation, and I was the chair of the Forum, the same way, I think, Dan Price and—

Yes, I know him.

The other Republican guy was the chief negotiator there. So Todd and his team, and people at the White House who were involved with climate—so Carol Browner, Joe Aldy, Jonathan Pershing, that whole crew—educated me and prepared me for those.

Was Brian Deese already in this group at this point?

Brian hadn’t been deeply involved. He was doing just pure economic stuff at that point, so that came from there. Energy was more, again, reactive at the start. We tracked energy prices. We were looking at natural gas. We were looking at exports of natural gas. And that was, again, some combination of people like Jason Bordoff and Dan Poneman and folks like that who were bringing issues forward to our attention, and then over time we’re driving them forward ourselves at the White House. But some of it came from either the bureaucracy or the senior levels, the political levels, at these institutions, or the young people that we were bringing in, like Jason Bordoff, smart young folks who were working with us on that.

And on the Recovery Act, a lot of that happened during the transition, but you get in—

I wasn’t so much involved. Yes, it was sort of domestic policy. It was sort of domestic economics and legislative policy, so Larry was deeply involved, and obviously everybody at the Treasury Department. He had some people on the NEC that he worked with, but our group was not deeply involved in that.

So you were essentially getting briefed on that stuff for the purpose of the summit.

That’s right.

And the philosophical—Let’s go to one of these, since you flagged the European dimension of it, which is an important part of the story for the whole four years you’re at the White House and even beyond. We have an approach that’s stimulus plus easing; Europeans have an approach that, in total, is austerity with easing, but with a lot of debate going on. Just give us more of the flavor of that, and particularly what you guys are doing to affect that—

Right.

—since we’ve taken our approach.

In the midst of the crisis, the view was everybody should be doing everything necessary to get out of this, and for us that meant the stimulus package, it meant TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program], it meant recapitalizing the IMF, and all of that. In Europe, there was some of that—There was easing; there was some stimulus—but there was this debate within Europe, particularly between Germany and the other countries, around austerity versus stimulus, which then became greatly exacerbated by the euro crisis. Remember, chapter two of the financial crisis is the euro crisis, and then that becomes a preoccupation not just for the Europeans, but our role in helping them try and manage their crisis, and try and resolve these differences between the different member states, just goes on and on.

One of the reasons I ask is I am really curious to know how much is the President taken with that. I’ll just say, having watched a lot of the euro crisis, both at Brookings [Institution], but also because of connections in places in Europe, people were really paying attention to the President and what he did, and what he would say or not say, publicly and privately. I’m just curious to know, again, as—

Well, it evolved.

I think I heard Russell saying Greece, but [laughter] Greece was such an important part of the crisis, and I’m going there most summers, and people are asking—

Right. It evolved over time. He was very much involved in Europe’s internal discussions, and was drafted by the different European leaders, to ally themselves with them vis-à-vis somebody else, oftentimes—usually, probably—allying themselves against Merkel, or to balance Merkel, but not always. Sometimes it was him calling the Greek Prime Minister, saying, “You’ve actually got to really do this stuff. She’s right.” You know? And it happened over and over again. It was one country after another, one group of countries after another.

All these issues around banking union, deposit insurance, how much stimulus to have, whether to bail them out, whether the IMF—And, of course, our role—where we had the leverage, not just because we were the United States and it was seen as a leader—was we get to veto the IMF decisions. So the Europeans want the IMF to play a role, and we’re saying, “Well, if you want the IMF to play a role, which is partly our money—disproportionately our money—we want to make sure that you’re playing an appropriate role, and that you’re doing what’s necessary, not just offloading your problem on us.”

It was an area of ongoing involvement and preoccupation, and there were calls with leaders. The President would get on a call with Merkel, and I’m sure there’s partly a language issue, but I remember a couple of calls where Merkel’s first words would be “What are you calling to tell me now, Barack?” They were very good friends, and very close, but she was viewing him as calling to lecture her, or to pressure her to do something. There’s the famous meeting in Cannes, the G20, where she breaks down in tears. He’s in a room with Merkel, Sarközy, I guess Berlusconi—It was all about Italy at this point. It’s setting the groundwork for Berlusconi’s removal as part of solving the crisis, but there’s a lot of pressure on Merkel, and she’s in tears. He’s comforting her, but she’s under that much pressure from her fellow European leaders, and he’s sort of weighing in, trying to mediate.

Are they lobbying him to lobby one another? In other words, is the EU [European Union]—

Oftentimes, yes. Hollande, and then—I’ll give you another example: G8 in Camp David, which was an unbelievable experience, to have it up there and organize it there, but—

Summit on the mountain.

Summit on the mountain, exactly, the summit at the summit. But there’s a late-night meeting in his house with Merkel and, at that point, Hollande, and I guess it was Berlus—No, it wasn’t Berlusconi. Who was the Italian at that point? I can’t remember now. [Ed. note: Mario Monti]—but with the relevant European leaders, where he’s, again, mediating between them, and being used by Hollande to put pressure on Merkel to be a little more flexible on some of this stuff. I can remember one call; it was round two or three of the crisis. I think it was Greece again. What was the third round of Greece? Was it second term, or first term?

I can’t remember if it was ’12 or ’13, but—

By ’12 or ’13—

—’15 is the total meltdown. It was ’12 or ’13.

Maybe it was ’15, though. It was sometime late in the administration where it was happening again, and we were on a call with Merkel or somebody, and he basically said, “I’m not getting involved. This is your frickin’ problem. Just deal with it.” And they did. But it was one of those things where he had to say, “I’ve got other things I’ve got to worry about.”

That’s interesting. Fifteen was the year—

I think it was pretty late. I wasn’t at the White House anymore, but I remember being on a call, because it was probably about TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] or something. TTIP was part of the agenda or something, and it was in the midst of another crisis, and he basically said, “You guys have got to manage this yourself. I’m out.”

Mike, does it ever occur to you—? I’m thinking back to the meeting of Senator Obama saying, “I’m considering running; what do you think?” People on the outside are wondering Does he have enough experience to be President, and by the time he becomes President he’s been Senator four years, but he goes from being a community organizer and a Senator for four years to the leader of the free world in the midst of an utter financial collapse in this country that threatens to go completely global, and is happening from country to country. You’ve given us anecdotal information about his leadership qualities, and we know he’s a brilliant person and a quick study and is widely read, but how did he do that? What did you see from your concerns, not about him per se, but just experience and résumé, to four years after being a Senator he’s on this world stage at a most critical time and leading? What is that leadership? What is his style, and how did he do it?

I found him to be a great manager, in that he would—First of all, he learns everything. You give him a briefing book; he takes it home at night; next morning he comes down, you’re briefing him for a meeting and he’s like, “I already read that.” He’s memorized the briefing book. The briefings for bilateral meetings with leaders in the Oval Office, he’s like, “I’ve already read that. Is there anything that’s not in the briefing that I need to know?” So he’s got a photographic memory. He is disciplined about reading his stuff. He’s prepared for the meetings.

Do you think he literally has a photographic memory, or was he just—

Yes, I do.

OK, go ahead.

I don’t know that you’ve asked him or whether anybody’s asked him, but yes, because he’ll come down the next morning and he’ll know everything that’s in the book.

Gotcha. Forgive me, I interrupted your response. Go ahead.

So one is that he does his homework and gets up to speed, and he listens to people in a meeting, and you can debate things in front of him. You don’t have to have a consensus view. He’s happy to hear differences. And then he gives direction, and he gives broad direction and the autonomy and the support to get it done. He’s not always—We compare him to Bill Clinton, and I didn’t see a lot of this myself, but I’m told he’d sit through 12-hour budget meetings and get into the details, the minor details of each line. That’s not Obama. Obama would be like, “I’m giving you general direction. Come back to me with anything you need, any specific things you want me to opine on, but I trust you to figure it out within this general direction.” Being from the corporate world, to me that’s pretty good management.

I found that certainly on the trade side. Trade is a perfect example of this, because we’d have these discussions. He’d give the general direction. Sometimes I would need to go back to him with incredibly specific, niggly stuff, like sitting down with [Shinzō] Abe to negotiate a dairy quota. He had to mention the word “whey.” [laughter] Right. I told him he had to say the word “whey.”

W-H-E-Y?

W-H-E-Y, right. And he was willing to do that, but he was also perfectly willing to say, “I’ll give you all the support and the autonomy. You go off and do this. Let me know when you need me.” I say that because when you look at—Take the challenges, the financial crisis. Which multiterm Senator would have been better at managing the financial crisis? [Maxwell] Max Baucus, Chairman of the Finance Committee? REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

That’s not what you do as a chairman, right? You don’t actually know what a balance sheet looks like. You don’t know how to do a stress test, so that’s why I ultimately came to agree with his assessment that those challenges—the trade challenges, climate—OK, I guess you could have appointed John Kerry, or Markey, but would John Kerry or Markey have been more successful on climate as a President? I don’t know. Obama learned it awfully quickly. He did pretty well at Copenhagen. Todd and I talk about this: in my view, Copenhagen’s a great success. That’s not the conventional wisdom, but it is a great success.

Let’s come back and do the full story on that.

Yes, but I just use that as an example, that when you look at the others in the Senate who had years more experience, would they have made a better President? Would they have been a better global leader? I don’t think so. And when you saw Obama in the room with fellow leaders at the G20, at the G8—

Go there. And add that to what you just said.

—he was incredibly effective. He knew how to talk to other leaders. He knew politically how to connect with them, even the hard stuff. I sat in multiple bilats between him and President Xi [Jinping] or President Hu, where we’re talking about cyberattacks, or security issues, and he was able to convey in very firm terms our perspective, and what it is we expected China to do. And I look at the other Senators, or Governors, I’m not sure—

You could pick out a more experienced person on one issue or another. Had he served 20 years in the military and was sitting down talking with Hu Jintao about the South China Sea, maybe he would have had a different degree of credibility, but would that person who had 20 years in the military then be able to talk about climate, or be able to connect with folks on labor issues in various countries? I think the role of the President is to be an agile generalist, not to be a deep specialist in anything in particular, because that’s not the nature of the job. And if you’re a good manager, you surround your people with those specialists. You know how to get the most out of them, and you know how to manage them, how to support them, how to give them guidance, how to hold them accountable.

My mind’s eye immediately jumped when you had this discussion to the preelection meeting in the Bush White House when he was there and John McCain [III] was there, this famous meeting. I guess you would not have been involved in that—

No.

—famous meeting where McCain evidently was completely overmatched by this young Senator who had strategically thought things through and was ready to take a strong position.

And then all the Democratic leaders of the Congress deferred to him, and obviously they had planned that out, but he—

Oh, this was during the—

During the campaign. McCain called for the summit.

That’s right, when they all came in. That’s right, that’s right, I remember that. Yes.

And then when they turned to McCain, he had nothing to say.

Nothing to say. Yes, that’s a good proof point, a good data point there.

I’m connecting it, too, with your experiences with him at Harvard, from both classes that you talked about, the Unger class and the Larry Tribe class. It sounds like this is what you saw. You saw this person who had this capacious mind, broadly read, quick study—

Yes.

—could grasp all the details, but see big pictures.

The big picture. What I didn’t see there, and what I think people had a lot of questions about, because he had been a law professor, he had been a state legislator—I imagine your staff as a state legislator is not very large. Even as a Senator you don’t manage a big staff, right? So I think one of the big questions was can he manage? It turned out he had a pretty natural talent to manage. He hadn’t managed large groups of people before, or complex organizations before, but he figured that out.

What about decisiveness? That’s something else that as a Senator you can waffle and find a compromise, but—

Yes. Look, I saw him on a certain range of issues. On the range of issues I saw him, I found him very decisive. I did find—and I saw this with other leaders, too—sometimes you’d be in a meeting in the Sit [Situation] Room; he’d be discussing something that was—There’d be 20 people in the room. He’d take it all in, and he wouldn’t want to announce a decision right there, particularly in front of 20 people. He might want to go pull his Vice President, his National Security Advisor into the Oval Office and say, “This is what I want to do.” But I didn’t view that as indecisive; I viewed that as managing the flow of information, and being careful about leaks, and things of that sort, or figuring out how to, particularly when these were hard decisions, manage the people who were going to be on the wrong end of the decision, on the opposite end of the decision, and to manage them appropriately.

I’m going to give you a break here in just a second, but let me pose this last question before. You mentioned Clinton a few minutes ago. You said you hadn’t had the same exposure to him, I think.

Yes.

Could you say a bit more about that particular comparison, what it is that you saw of the two, or what you know from the close periphery on Clinton? How might one go about comparing their operational styles and their leadership styles?

I don’t have a lot of great wisdom there beyond stuff that I read, but I think the penchant for Clinton to get into the details of certain things—I don’t know that he did on every issue, but certainly certain things he got into great detail—was a little different, the budget in particular.

Clinton being more—

More into the detail.

—willing or more prone to get down into the weeds.

Yes. I do remember hearing when I was in the Clinton White House of 12-hour meetings, going line by line through budget items, which I don’t think ever existed in the Obama White House. I think he gave—

My sense is, from the interviews, that that was certainly true—

Maybe it’s just the beginning.

—the first year, and got—

Yes.

He realized, particularly when [Leon] Panetta came in, that he couldn’t do it. But still, it was his nature—

Yes, but that sort of thing.

Right.

The big difference, which has been written about broadly, is the glad-handing, the relationship to people, the golfing with Members of Congress. All of that’s true. All of that’s different. Obama had breakfast with his family in the morning, started work at 9:30. He was a late-night person. He’d spend hours up at night watching sports and reading his briefing book. And on the weekends, when he played basketball or he golfed, he wanted to be with people that he could relax around—Marvin [Nicholson], his advance guy; Joe Paulsen, his trip director—not [Addison Mitchell] McConnell [Jr.], [laughter] not Lindsey Graham, not Dick Durbin, or whoever else you might golf with. He generally just wanted—Particularly as a friend, my view was he’s got the most stressful job in the world, and whatever it takes for him to get through the day, get through the week, is not only acceptable but should be fully supported. If, for him, playing golf with the same four staffers every week is what gets him through, fantastic. And he shouldn’t be criticized for it, because none of us can be in his shoes.

Exactly. All right, let’s take a break. Let’s give you a chance to catch your breath, and we’ll come back and continue. Thank you.

[BREAK]

You ready?

I’m ready.

All right. Again, if you need a break at some point, let us know. We’ll just keep plowing ahead.

OK.

Oh, I had a follow-up question just at the end of the break—

All right, go ahead.

I completely understand sympathy with President Obama wanting to relax when he could, and you mentioned the criticism, though, that he would get for not being with Members of Congress more. It didn’t have to be golfing, but also you had mentioned, even prior to that, that you didn’t think he was all that keen on many of the colleagues he encountered in Congress. But how should a President deal with that? When we get a little bit farther along in the timeline, when you’re really into the thick of the trade issues, issues with Congress, both in his own party and the opposite party, become key, so that is a criticism that will linger about him and around him for history purposes. So he didn’t have to play golf with them, but should he have done something different?

It’s a good question, and there’s sort of the Lyndon Johnson approach to managing Members of Congress. [laughter] There’s the Bill Clinton approach. I’m not sure there is a right approach. To step back, I’m not sure had he socialized more and had them over for beer and gone golfing with them—As we know, there were some Members of Congress who were determined that he was to be a one-term President and were not willing to work with him or compromise with him or get anything done with him regardless. It wasn’t an issue that they didn’t go golfing with him; it was that they didn’t want him to be President. Now, that wasn’t all of them, and maybe in his own party he could have spent more time with Members of Congress and colleagues there, but I think certainly most, or many, members of the Republican Party had determined that he was to be eliminated as President. And what’s the incentive to go spend your limited downtime hanging out with folks like that if it’s not going to produce greater cooperation?

But there’s a really interesting question in what Barbara’s asking, and that is that most Presidents have—There’s a sort of fundamental affinity for other political animals. And it’s not universally true; I wouldn’t say Jimmy Carter necessarily possessed that. But Clinton loved politicos, and George W. Bush, George [H. W.] Bush, Ronald Reagan—You know, it’s hard to find—The ones who don’t have an affinity for political animals tend to sort themselves out before they become President. Did Obama have a disaffection for political animals, or was it only a particular kind of political animal that he liked?

I don’t know about that. A psychologist the other day was telling me that I was using the word “introvert” and “extrovert” incorrectly, and—

Oh, really?

Yes. They were saying that actually what it refers to is how you process information. Do you process it internally, or is it through some talking process, that by expressing yourself constantly and being outgoing in that way, is that how you are—?

Interesting.

In that regard, it’s not so much whether you’re garrulous or friendly, it’s how you actually process information. I don’t know whether that’s a common view of those definitions or not, but if that’s right, I think he’s an introvert. Right? He processes information. He reads. He talks to people. He internalizes. He analyzes. All the things that people say about him about being intellectual, aloof, or—It’s all two sides of the same coin in terms of how he processes information. Clinton, to the degree that I saw him in action, was out there constantly processing information, with his arm around one person, [laughter] and glad-handing another. That’s how he engaged the world. And I think Obama did so in a much more intellectual, internalized way. It doesn’t mean he had disdain for politicos or for the political system—I don’t think that’s the case—but it’s really just in terms of what his first-choice way of engagement was.

Your story about him, though, on the world stage, comforting a tearful Angela Merkel, says to me he certainly was empathetic and warm and caring.

Oh, absolutely.

But he didn’t massage her shoulders.

He didn’t massage her shoulders. [laughter] Another approach to—

Another approach.

—summitry.

Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s why I don’t think—I mean, he’s a very sympathetic, empathetic individual; I think it’s a question of how you express it.

Right.

Right?

And how often, and with whom.

Yes. There’s quite a bit of difference between being empathetic and sympathetic on one hand and this question of “Are you a political person?” on another. I think politics is really about, in some ways, superficial engagement. President Obama, unfortunately, had a lot of practice being consoler-in-chief, and did it very well, in very sincere, authentic ways, whether it was victims of gun crime, or people who’d gone through terrible circumstances or loss of any sort. He was very good at that, very natural. I don’t view that, though, as a political issue; that’s just part of his personality.

Mike, can I ask about that with your own situation with the President?

Yes. Yes, that’s—

What was that like?

Yes, he was very attentive. He met Jacob during the campaign. The day he died, as soon as he heard, he called. When I got to the White House that day, the 30th, which was the first I had seen him, he was very—I became quite close to the Vice President because of this, as well, and we spent a lot of time talking about it together. So he was very sympathetic in that regard. Yes.

Since we’re talking about these personal traits—I don’t think we’ve said anything about race at all today. From your vantage point, how should we understand race and this President? Was it an up-front feature of the way he experienced the world, from inside out, or was it more outside in?

It’s a very good question, and I don’t know how to fully put myself in his shoes on this, because I think he has a particular perspective on it. I think he was very conscious of the fact of being the first African American President, and one of the things that people describe about him is the fact that he’s pretty unflappable himself: not huge highs, not huge lows, very slow to anger. Part of that is—and I remember having this conversation once with him, where he made it clear that he cannot be an angry black man. That would be unacceptable. That would elicit such a negative reaction. A white man, or a woman, expressing anger would be far more acceptable than to see an angry black man onstage, because it would scare people, scare parts of America.

Do you remember when you had this conversation? Is this when you were in law school? Later?

No, no, no. I think it was when he was President. I can’t remember what the particular circumstance was, but it was something that had happened that was really very disturbing, and maybe it was around gun violence or something, something that would’ve been totally reasonable to express anger around, but his view was he can’t afford to do that. He’s quite restrained in that regard. And that may come off as aloof or something else, but it’s really about not letting himself be seen that way.

It’s very hard even to have this conversation, because in framing my question I’m extremely mindful of how do I go about approaching this issue, which is so sensitive.

Right, and hard to answer it, because obviously I can’t put myself in the shoes of an African American man—

Of course.

—in the United States.

But he’s somebody you’ve known for a long time—

Right, yes.

—and so I guess part of the question is: do you recall instances where this either gets addressed by him, which you just did, and that’s extremely helpful to know; or where maybe expectations were framed by the fact that he was an African American?

Yes, I don’t have much more to add on that. I think it’s one of the reasons he is so self-managed, in that regard.

No drama.

Yes, no drama. No drama. But my sense is you may get a lot more from Eric Holder [Jr.] or Valerie or somebody else who he might have talked more about this in a personal way to than I.

OK.

You did say, Mike—I think you used the term “pissed” [laughs]—that the President was pissed after the Korea negotiations did not work out, at the time, in the meeting in Korea, because you said he had been on the road around the world for nine days; he hadn’t been home. Did that happen very often, and how did that manifest itself, when he was unhappy with the process—

Right.

—or unhappy with an outcome?

I didn’t see it very often. I didn’t see it very often at all. That’s why it sticks out in my memory as this is one time when I felt like I had let him down, so that’s why it sticks out in my memory. And the way he expressed it was entirely within these confines. He’s not a yeller. He’s not a screamer, by any stretch of the imagination. So when he comes in and says, “I’m disappointed that this came out the way it did,” or “I’m disappointed that the coverage was as negative as it was, and I think we’ve got to figure out how to position ourselves better going forward,” that’s the way he expressed being pissed. Not, “You guys screwed up. What the hell are you doing? You’re damaging—” None of that. There were no recriminations or anything, but we got the message. We felt it ourselves, and we got the message from him.

Especially when he’s so generally calm.

Yes, exactly.

Any fluctuation is—

He’s very complimentary; he’s very supportive, so if he says, “I’m disappointed that we’re coming out of this summit in the way that we are,” and you’re responsible for the summit, you feel it.

President Clinton was a bit different on that dimension.

I understand that. That’s what I understand. I didn’t have the pleasure of [laughter] being at the receiving end of that, either.

Fortunately, neither have I. Bill may have, but—

Actually, I wasn’t that close in the Clinton years, although I saw one instance of it, actually at a G7 summit.

Is that right?

The famous line—This actually would be interesting. And it’s funny, Mike, that you didn’t see this, or you were a step or two removed from it, but at the Denver summit, which was the first one where I was a yak, and we were hosting, climate change became a big issue. This was six months before Kyoto. Most Americans didn’t even know Kyoto at this point. We embarrassed the Europeans at our own summit because our economy was roaring and theirs was not, and their payback was to make climate change the issue. As Clinton said to I think it was [Jean] Chrétien afterward in a phone conversation, “They made me look like the skunk at my own garden party.” [laughter]

Wow. OK. Yes.

And he let a few of us know that at the time on the ground. But that’s the only time I’ve ever really seen it.

Yes. Sounds Presidential.

It was very Bill Clinton.

We had been talking about Congress. Does the 2010 shellacking of the Democratic Party, and the President, by his own admission, have any impact on what you’re doing?

Yes and no; not really on a day-to-day basis, although on certain issues like climate change, where the Markey bill had gone through the House but now is never going to get through the Senate. I think the Democrats on trade issues became even more sensitive. Not because they wanted to—You have Harry Reid later coming out against what the President said. That’s a couple of years later, but—Yes, I think Democrats were feeling even more under attack and not comfortable in their position, so there wasn’t a lot of room for anything but politics at that point, I’d say. But most of what we were doing on the crisis, on the trade side, on development, on energy—the negotiations continued. On climate, they continued, but we didn’t have some of the tools available at our disposal.

I want to ask a generic question about the environment you inherited when you come in, at first, because we’ve just come through eight years of the Bush 43 administration, where there was a lot of tension globally. Is that getting registered in a favorable way when you begin your work abroad? Is there—

Yes.

Are there signals of relief that the United States is in different hands now than before?

First of all, Obama is incredibly popular around the world, just by being elected. Of course, you’ve got the Nobel Prize thing in the first year as a reflection of that, of the aspirations, of the hope around his election. It also raises expectations when he goes to these summits that he’s going to be able to solve this problem, he’s going to be able to solve Europe, he’s going to be able to solve climate change, these things that had been lingering for a while. And some of those expectations may have been exaggerated. But yes, I think you feel a palpable sense of an America that can elect Barack Obama President, that’s a great new thing for the rest of the world to embrace.

What was your reaction when he won the Nobel Prize?

I thought it was terrific in terms of embracing the aspiration. Of course, I would have loved for it to have reflected a number of very specific things that we had accomplished at that point, which was still very early. It was in 2009, wasn’t it?

Yes, what was it, April or something?

Sort of halfway through or three-quarters of the way through.

We can find it.

So it was still early days in there.

Yes.

But I viewed it more of a symbolic signal that the world was ready and awaiting U.S. leadership, and from that perspective it was very positive.

I was checking the dates.

Yes, the speech is usually in December, but the decision is usually spring or summer or something like that, right?

Oh, it was that early?

Yes.

[pause] Yes, I don’t see it in the timeline, which is unusual, because I figured—

We all recognized it was a little early. [laughter]

As you said, aspirational.

Yes, it was aspirational, but I think it—Again, it was that signal that U.S. values were being welcomed, U.S. leadership was being welcomed, and that’s the way he treated it. He didn’t treat it as a recognition that he had completed Middle East peace or reset the map in Afghanistan or Iraq, but that the world wanted to see the vision that he had laid out and the values that he had laid out executed on.

Sure, OK. Shifting gears a little bit, on your global summit work, how much resentment was registered abroad, particularly in those early meetings, about the culpability of the American financial system for what was happening to the global economy?

A fair amount. That was a dominant theme. Now, the fact that he was a new President who had come in arguing about the problems of financial regulation and the excesses of the financial system sort of diminished the—It sort of disposed of the criticism, because he wasn’t there to defend the U.S. financial system. He agreed that there needed to be a change, and he was there to be a change agent. Particularly with the Europeans, and then, of course, with Europe’s own crisis, that diminished that whole—It took them off the table, because they were then contributing to the next round of crisis, and seemed incapable of dealing with it. The interesting part of it was China, and China’s perspective on what this meant for the United States, for the U.S.-led global financial system, what they were supposed to learn from this or copy from it or distance themselves from, and I think it changed the nature of our dialogue with China quite a bit.

Was that the biggest kind of structural difference between your first tour of duty in the White House and the second tour of duty in the White House?

Yes, certainly one of the big things was the emergence of China, and the other major emerging economies, but particularly China. We had the beginnings of that at the end of the Clinton administration with the WTO accession talks, but where they were between 2000 and 2009 was fundamentally different.

Did you have to relearn parts of the job based on that, or—?

I certainly had to learn, relearn, or learn more on the China file: what had really happened with WTO accession; how had China been developing since; what impact did that have on our economy; what else was going on in that relationship—climate, military concerns, cybersecurity concerns, the human rights portfolio. So, yes, I think that had become a much more complicated relationship.

OK. And were there aspects of changes that had been initiated by the Bush administration that were a priority for you when you came in to try to undo? Every administration has some recoiling from what happened before.

Yes, not so much. During the campaign the President announced that he wanted to renegotiate Korea, Colombia, and Panama. That wasn’t so much recoiling or pulling out of or pulling away from; it was simply saying we want to do better. We want to add more labor to environment; we want to address some of these other issues. On the financial side, given the crisis, there had already been a lot of cooperation between Paulson, Bernanke, Obama, Geithner, so it was an evolving situation, but it wasn’t so much recoiling from what Bush had tried to do as opposed to advancing to the next stage.

I guess the big issue, of course, was Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pivot or the rebalancing toward Asia, and the notion that during the Bush administration the U.S. had become preoccupied with that region of the world while an awful lot was going on in Asia that was of interest to us, like the emergence of China, and we needed to be able to rebalance our focus.

OK. Being critical of my own question, obviously I omitted the terrorism piece of it that was arguably even more important than China, but did that have much of an effect on your portfolio?

No, not really. Not really.

But China certainly did, right?

Absolutely.

Right.

And tell us a little bit about your own relationships with your Chinese counterparts, and the China narrative, larger than that, the other connected pieces there, because you’re dealing with two: the financial crisis—well, three—the financial crisis, the broader financial system, climate, and then there’s all the other stuff—military, cyber—yadda, yadda, yadda.

Yes. Yes, I guess it started really through the G20 channel, and developing relationships with the counterparts and Sherpas through that process. And we ended up using that Sherpa channel for all sorts of things, not just G20 issues but climate issues, energy issues, energy price issues later on, and cooperation around that. It started there, and then, also, on the trade side, and picking up on the Doha Round, but then the bilateral discussions, the evolution of the SED [Strategic Economic Dialogue] to the S&ED, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and beginning to plan for that, as well as the first set of bilateral engagements between the President and Hu Jintao.

It became, as you said, a multifaceted relationship, and I got to know the trade people, the finance people, and the Sherpa channel. It wasn’t until I was USTR that I really delved into the rest of it, the MOFCOM [Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China] and the others, but in the first term really focusing on those others.

I had asked you earlier about the President and race. It strikes me that there’s another dimension of the President’s experience that’s relevant now, and that is his South Pacific—

Yes.

Was it an advantage to have a President who had personal experience?

Absolutely. Yes, no, [laughs] I remember a scene during the transition in Chicago. I’m not sure why he brought me in for this, but he called up whoever it was that was President of Indonesia. All the foreign leaders were calling him to congratulate him, and he spoke a little Bahasa to him, which evidently is like third-grade Bahasa. That’s his level of—[laughter] So he knows “ice cream,” he knows—But it was enough for a five-minute conversation. And he certainly did view himself—

Actually, it goes back to your earlier question about experience. Here you have a guy whose father was Kenyan. He had traveled to Kenya. He had a lot of thoughts about Africa. He had grown up for several years in Indonesia, lived in Hawaii, felt like he was an international person. Would I have preferred somebody who had had three terms being a Senator who never left Kansas? Probably not. He felt—He was more part of the international system than I think most other politicians. And because he had been thinking about it, he’d been writing about it, his biography, all that, his deep memories of his time in Indonesia, and even in Hawaii, feeling as though from Hawaii he was a Pacific-oriented President. That all is experience you can’t get through another term as Senator.

And a mother who was an anthropologist.

Yes, a mother who was an anthropologist, who worked on microfinance issues. Some of this stuff I didn’t know about until much later. As we’re talking about with microfinance, somebody offered to send some papers of hers that she had written for them, some NGO [nongovernmental organization], on microfinance, to give to him. There was just a lot in that.

How do you sense that, in particular, shaped his perception of China and the Chinese?

He certainly had an appreciation for the perspective of Southeast Asia. Now, as an eight-year-old in Jakarta he probably wasn’t thinking about China’s historic role in the region and all of that, but you just pick up a sensitivity. You live in a foreign country, you pick this stuff up, and he’s got a half-sister from Indonesia that he is in touch with, he’s close with, and so you’re talking to people from the region on a regular basis.

When we went to our first APEC meeting in Singapore—November, I think, of ’09—he felt very much at home, surrounded by Asian businessmen and -women. It was kind of a natural place for him to—Well, when we went on some visit to Malaysia at some point, and Najib [bin Abdul Razak], who was the Prime Minster then, brought our durian. You know what durian is? Durian is a fruit that is popular in Southeast Asia. It is the most horrid-smelling [laughter] fruit, and it’s so horrid that when you go into certain hotels they’ll have a sign on the door saying “durian” with a red line through it, or you can’t bring it on certain airplanes. The fruit itself has such a pungent odor, and the only thing worse than its odor is its taste. [laughter] And he grew up on this. And Najib thought this would be a great return to his childhood to have it, and he made the rest of us eat it, to try it, and it was awful.

You kept it down?

Barely. It is so awful.

But he likes it?

He liked it as a kid. He tells me he liked it as a kid; he did not have any at that lunch. [laughter] He made us all have it. He made us all eat it. But he saw the durian, and he was like, Yes, I’m home. This is natural. So I think there’s something there, about the Pacific President, the ties to a Kenyan father, the fact that he had visited family there, that he had had ties to family still in Indonesia, or with Indonesian roots. He is a product of the international system.

So coming back to China, even setting aside his background, tell us a little bit about how he viewed that relationship. Did he have a philosophical take, a psychological take, the personal relationship with Xi? If I remember correctly, the first year starts out with both realism—well, the crisis, realism but some hope for a reset, particularly on things like climate—and by the end of the year things are pretty sour. He has a not-so-great trip. Or am I remembering that wrong?

Yes. I’d say he was sort of unromantic around China, pretty realistic. I think he felt like they had been the dominant party in Asia for 13 of the last 15 centuries, probably likely to be again, and it’s our job to figure out how to work with them in the global system. There’s not much in the way of personal relationships with Chinese leaders, with Hu Jintao, with Wen Jiabao, with Xi; you don’t really bond. Maybe it’s the language, or they’re quite formal, as you know, and they’re reading approved talking points, so I never found that there’s much real bonding at that level. But he was very open, very frank in terms of “This is what we need; this is what we’re concerned about.” Very businesslike. And was not reluctant at all to raise the whole array of issues, whether it’s cyber intrusions, a trade issue, an IPR [intellectual property rights] theft, and obviously stuff around security—

Human rights.

He was prepared to go—

And you’ve got the democracy portfolio, so are you managing on human rights on China stuff?

Yes, a little bit, although we had a separate human rights office that [Samantha] Sam Powers ran at the NSC at the time, so they really did more on the human rights. Our role on the democracy stuff was more related to development funding—what democracy groups do we want to fund, things like that—as opposed to human rights policy. But yes, he would raise human rights. He would raise individual cases, as well as general issues. So yes, I think he had a pretty realistic view there, but he also had a realistic view of, well, we need them on climate, so let’s find a way to work with them to work on climate. And whatever progress we made in 2009 came to a head at Copenhagen. It was really between then and Paris, or then and—What was right before Paris? Durban? No.

No, there’s the other C—There was a Cancun.

There was Cancun. It was after that, but where the U.S.-China agreement was announced, that laid the groundwork for then workings toward Paris. It was a year, I think, before Paris. And Podesta and Brian Deese and others, did a lot of really good work—and Todd, obviously, later on in the term—to get there. But, a little bit like the question about Larry Tribe’s class, he connected historical points; he connected trends. I think he had a view that China was going to be a—This was our most important relationship going forward; we had not tended to it as well as we could. There were going to be conflictual elements, competitive elements, cooperative needs, and we needed to find ways of managing all of them. And he was quite pragmatic about it.

He was willing to be tough?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And he did stuff that was quite undiplomatic. I remember in one meeting he raised cyber intrusion—Was it Hu or Xi at that time? It may have been Xi who basically denied it, and Obama said, “No, no, we have evidence. We know you did it.” And I don’t think Xi knew that he did it. That ultimately led to the agreement on reducing cyber intrusion for economic espionage, so he was willing to go back at it. It wasn’t just reading his points; he was serious about it.

You said something about that there was really no bonding with the Chinese, which leads me to ask the question: were there particular foreign leaders that he did especially bond with? Were there those that he seemed to personally enjoy meeting and spending time with, apart from whatever difficult issues he may have had to deal with globally?

Yes, some were just easier. He always really liked Merkel. He said Merkel was like his Kansas grandmother. I’m not sure she appreciated that, [laughter] but—

We might want to hold that until she passes.

Yes, but she was like a midwestern—

Hausfrau.

Hausfrau, exactly. And he felt very warm toward her in that regard, totally understood where she was coming from. I’m not sure he bonded with [James] Gordon Brown. It was OK. [David] Cameron I think was OK. But those were easy relationships. He and Cameron could work out together. They could go play ping pong with kids in London together. That was kind of easy. I’m trying to think of the others. Canadians—Harper was not an easy man to bond with, and [Justin Pierre] Trudeau is, but he’s just a little light, and I think he found him a little light. I don’t know; you’d have to ask him, I guess. Who else?

On the Chinese, on the one hand you don’t bond with them, but we have seen a real noticeable difference in China in the transition from Hu to Xi. I mean, Xi is just a very different player in the system. Did you get a sense of that early?

I did not.

Was the personality different between the two?

I have to say, people talked about that, and I was at Sunnylands, which was their first—

The Winnie the Pooh/Tigger walk. Have you seen it?

No.

There’s a great cartoon that shows Xi and Obama walking, and it looks just like Winnie the Pooh and Tigger walking. [laughter]

Oh, jeez.

I’ll pull it up and show it to you.

Good. And I think there was great hope that, OK, we’re going to do this informal thing in a special location, and we’re not going to wear ties, and it’s going to be lots of give-and-take. I thought he just read his talking points—Xi. I didn’t see a lot of informality. Now, they did do some time completely on their own, just the two of them, and maybe he got a lot more out of him there, but certainly in these other meetings, which were small, maybe half a dozen people on both sides, I did not see a lot of bonding.

[shows cartoon image on phone] That was the famous Sunnylands summit. [laughter]

I love it. I love it. I love that.

Turn that around to the camera so we can—

There you go, Mike. Evidently Winnie the Pooh is now banned on Chinese Twitter or searches.

Is this why?

That’s why.

OK, because I knew Winnie the Pooh was banned, but I didn’t know why. [laughter]

Because of that.

Also, evidently Peppa Pig is considered subversive in China. I don’t know why, but—

All right, so we’ve got that up.

You got that in there.

But you were there. You were behind the scenes, right there.

Yes, I was there. I did not—Yes.

You were there as Eeyore, or as—?

I felt like Eeyore. Yes, maybe so.

I was getting you to go through the roster. African leaders? Any African leaders in particular, or—?

Yes, interesting. In Copenhagen, and maybe he’d seen him before, he and Meles [Zenawi] sort of bonded, from Ethiopia. Meles was sort of representing all the developing countries. There may have been others. I’m trying to think of others there.

Mexico? Latin America?

Mexico, you had [Felipe] Calderón, and then [Enrique] Peña Nieto. He got along well with both. I’m trying to think of who he bonded with. I don’t know. I’m not sure there. Peru, Chile—

[Manmohan] Singh and [Narendra] Modi?

Look, the problem with Singh—He had huge respect for Singh. Singh is a serious economist, serious leader, been around, but he’s quite elderly and reserved, so he doesn’t talk a lot, so it’s a little hard to bond. I think he felt almost like Singh was a fatherly figure there. But, again, if you’re looking for who he calls up late at night to commiserate about being a world leader with, I’m not sure. I’m not sure.

All right.

I am curious on the Modi side, and then I know you were used to—

Modi—He got along with him, but, again, Modi’s not a guy you go have a beer with either, right? Modi came to the Oval Office and talked to him about doing yoga. [laughter] National—

Did they do it?

National Yoga Day.

That’s a big deal.

That’s a big deal in India.

Yes, and for Modi.

And for Modi, in particular.

It’s very spiritual with respect to all the Hinduism stuff.

Exactly. Yes.

And particularly there—

And then they played basketball. [laughter]

I was going to say, and Barack said, “Let’s play basketball.”

No, I think the Brits played basketball. I’m trying to think—I think Cameron did. Who else?

I wanted to stick with Modi for one second because we’d touched on race before. Of all of these leaders, Modi was suspected, and then some, of some pretty heinous racial—

Yes.

—ethnic, religious persecution, massacre, slaughter, all of that stuff. I know that was second term, but do you remember a conversation around that? Was that something—

Well, it was a big question, because the question was, Is he going to get a visa; is he going to be invited? The decision was made to be quite pragmatic, which is not to condone what he had done, but this was the leader of the largest democracy in the world, and we weren’t going to keep him out of the country. So right after he was elected, he was invited. He did come soon thereafter, I think. And he didn’t pull any punches when it came to talking about issues, but he didn’t write off the leader of a large country because of his past.

I’m curious—and, again, I promise you we’re going to get to Copenhagen in a minute—Africa—Given the discussion we had earlier about race, did the President take a particular interest in Africa, or is that just one among X number of continents he’s there to deal with? Did he feel any special obligation as the first President of African descent to spend extra attention on it?

I think he understood that there were certain expectations around Africa, given the fact that he was the first African American, his father was from Kenya, et cetera, and so when he did go there, he was very conscious of what his role should be there, including going and talking about the scourge of corruption. He was going to go, and he had a particular ability to deliver a tough-love message that wouldn’t come across as colonial, because of who he was. So in that regard I think he felt like he had a particular role to play in Africa. He did it in East Africa, when he was there. He did it in South Africa. He gave some really important speeches, and conveyed some very important messages, which were sort of in the realm of tough love. I don’t think, though, he wanted to feel like he’s the African President, right?

Sure.

So it actually took a while for him to go to Africa. He didn’t go to Africa for the first two years, maybe. Is that right?

I think that’s right.

It wasn’t at the top of the list of places to go.

I’m trying to remember—[Nelson] Mandela was still alive after he was elected, or not?

Yes.

OK. Did he meet Mandela?

Yes. Now, he was, I think, aging at the time, but he was there. I think he took his family to meet Mandela. He took a trip with the girls. They were very careful: they really tried hard not to take their girls out of school, even for these unbelievable opportunities to go to Africa or things like that, but, as I recall, they organized—One of the trips they had to Africa was done during a school vacation or something, and I believe they had a chance to meet with Mandela.

Mrs. [Michelle Robinson] Obama—We haven’t spoken about her, but so popular and so well-known through the world—Did you ever see her in action, in terms of these summitry trips, or did she typically go on the summit trips?

She tended not to go, no. And, interestingly, we were in the same class of college, but we didn’t know each other.

Oh, of course. Princeton.

Yes. I met her during the campaign. I didn’t know her before, and didn’t have much contact with her during the administration. A little bit here and there, mostly around meeting with her in her office when she was planning on doing a foreign trip or something in the development sphere, where we could be helpful and supportive there. She did not tend to go to these G8, G20s. There were rarely spouses there. I can’t remember if there were any, actually.

G7 summits I remember they used to. Do they do that for these?

I don’t think so.

And you didn’t accompany her on her foreign travels?

Never did, no.

Ben [Froman] went to Sidwell, right?

Yes.

So was a class or two behind one of his daughters?

Sasha [Obama], one class behind.

And did you see them in that context?

Every once in a while, at a back-to-school-night sort of thing, or assembly, but it was a different class, and most of the stuff—We didn’t come across each other very much there.

OK. Copenhagen! [laughter]

Copenhagen.

Tell us about the run-up to Copenhagen, and what we should know about it, and then give us your account.

On Copenhagen?

Yes. You need coffee? Are you all right?

I’m OK.

Excellent.

So we started the MEF in March or April of 2009, something like that.

I think it’s in April—

Yes. And had it in Washington. The MEF was these 25, 30 countries, sort of a mix of developed and developing, climate negotiators, usually, interesting crew of people. Many of them had been working with each other for years, all these UN [United Nations] COP processes, and the previous MEF, the Major Emitters Forum, that the Bush administration had launched. They were obviously very eager to embrace the Obama administration. Todd was a great Envoy to them and with them, had some great ideas about how to use the MEF to get things done.

But one thing we did in that April MEF is we brought them all to the White House to meet the President, and we had a little reception in the Blue Room, I think—one of the formal rooms—where they each got to take a picture with the President, and they were so thrilled. And these were people who had spent all day dumping on us, [laughter] criticizing us—You guys are horrible, and it’s all your fault that the climate is warming, and you’re not doing enough, and you’re against a legally binding agreement—all the criticism, but they melted into puddles when they met the President. And the thing they cared about most was how soon can I get that photo [laughter] sent to me so I have it back home on my desk. And it was a great use of soft power. You asked me about the expectations around the international community: they were very excited to meet Obama.

So that began that process, and we had MEFs really quite frequently, like every couple of months it seemed like. We had a couple of them in Washington. Then, in L’Aquila, we brought the leaders in the MEF format together to talk about what should happen at Copenhagen and in the COP process. Got a mandate to go back, did more of this in the fall. And the whole idea of the MEF was not to substitute for the UN process but just to be a nonbinding political forum where the major countries could float ideas, kind of a safe space to explore options that, if promising, would then get fed into the UN negotiating process. That was a big function of it.

Early on there was also this idea, which never really materialized, that it could be a forum for international cooperation among the countries around green technology itself, and maybe there would be projects, countries would get together and take on particular projects—carbon sequestration and storage, or other big projects like that. Those continued, and we used those.

We used the G20, including in Pittsburgh, where we had a lot of the same parties there, to try and advance the climate agenda, and what could get done this year, in 2009. And then there was this whole UN process with this—Bill knows much more about this than I do—this kind of odd combination of a UN Secretariat, a country—in this case Denmark—that was hosting it, a UN Envoy, a Secretary General’s Office, just a whole variety of different players. We got to Copenhagen and it was just a complete kind of car crash. There was just no agreement. There was no progress. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Todd and I were there, and the broader delegation. Hillary arrived, and we used her presence, her arrival, to try and jump-start the final stage of the negotiations. She created this announcement around providing $100 billion a year for climate finance, and that was a calculation. It was not going to be foreign assistance or hard dollars; it was a calculation of if you could really have a market for carbon, if—Is it [Henry A.]Waxman-[Edward J.] Markey? Is that the name of the bill?

Yes.

If Waxman-Markey actually had become law, and you could create a carbon market, and other countries did the same, here’s the kind of finance that could be generated, in addition to some amount of official finance. And it worked in that it got the attention of the developing countries, Meles and others, who said, “OK, well, if you’re putting $100 billion a year down, we’re willing to talk.” There was this—I’m sure Todd has described it for you—this whole green room process of about 35 countries, the MEF plus some others, a little bit more diverse than the MEF.

President Obama arrived, and [laughs] I remember going out to the airport to meet him, him getting in the car, “the beast,” and me being very apologetic, saying, “We’ve got nothing for you. There’s no agreement to sign. There’s nothing to announce.” I think he was going to be there for 14 or 15 hours or something. He arrived early in the morning. I don’t think he spent the night; I think he was slated to leave the end of that day. And I said, “It’s chaos at the moment,” and described the dynamic.

We got back to the conference center and went into a briefing. Were you in Copenhagen? No? There was a bizarre—The conference center was adjacent to a shopping mall, and it’s unclear whether it’s a real shopping mall—Somebody told us it was a shopping mall that had been set up to train people how to work in retail. [laughter] So it was like a faux shopping mall, and there certainly were not people in it. It was just—

Potemkin. [laughter]

—a store. It was a Potemkin shopping mall.

That’s how capitalism works, I guess.

And we had been assigned a Potemkin shop as our room for the U.S. delegation, and we’re all standing around this display case of shirts—Obama, Hillary, Todd, myself, some of the people who came in with Obama; Dennis was there; a variety of others were there—briefing him, and trying to figure out, OK, how do we make the most of this? And he had a meeting with Wen Jiabao, and nothing particularly progressed there. He went and gave a speech at the plenary.

Meanwhile, literally thousands of people are there, doing their own thing. There are these tracks of negotiations with people in there for hours and hours and hours, working on text, but not actually addressing the major issues, which were what countries were going to declare targets, how were those going to be articulated, and how were those going to be monitored and evaluated and assessed as to whether they were being adhered to. And then finance, and how were the rich countries going to pay the poor countries to do some of this. Those were the main issues, none of which had been resolved. The finance issue was somewhat progressed with Hillary’s arrival the day before, but there was still just a long way to go.

And so Obama saw Wen Jiabao. He gave a speech. We went into the green room, and there was this sort of comical thing where at first—So he’s in the green room with leaders, largely, from the other countries, though not China, because China doesn’t send a leader to a forum like that because it’s not sufficiently controlled and constrained, so they send their Sherpa, my counterpart, He Yafei. And that goes on for a while. I mention that because later in the day the room reconvenes. The President is there.

Now the Chinese have sent the First Secretary from the Embassy in Denmark to represent China. And there’s a view that you’ve got the President of the United States sitting across from the First Secretary of China; this probably is not appropriate at this point. And it breaks down, and everybody leaves. But there was progress made in that meeting. There was progress with Meles. Meles is sitting next to him, and I’m sitting there, and Todd is there, and he’s explaining to Meles how the $100 billion is not going to be a check written to Meles and his personal foundation to distribute, but it’s a bunch of market-oriented things. And Meles saw this as a big opportunity to basically just transfer money from the developed countries to the developing countries. So he was trying to manage Meles’s expectations, and Meles was good. Meles was fine. He got it, and he kept the developing countries on track.

But as the day progressed, we weren’t really making any progress. There were rumors that the Chinese were leaving. The President said he wanted to see Wen Jiabao again, and the Chinese were not returning our phone calls. The advance people were reaching out. The Secret Service was reaching out. Everybody was reaching out. I was reaching out to my counterpart. Todd was reaching out to his counterpart. Nobody could find Wen Jiabao, and nobody would set it up, and the hours were continuing to go.

We hear that Wen Jiabao may be leaving soon for the airport, which would lead to a whole breakdown, so we fan out to look for Wen Jiabao. And somewhere in this Potemkin mall we spot the Chinese security guy outside a room; it’s this glass cube, and the curtains are drawn. So people say, “We think we found Wen Jiabao.” And the President says, “Let’s go.” And we just walk up there: him, Hillary, Todd, myself. Dennis was with us. Jeff Bader was with us, who was an Asia guy, a China guy. I’m trying to think who else—That may have been it. There may have been others.

And we think we’re going to meet with Wen Jiabao. We get to the door, and, of course, all the Secret Service is with us. The Chinese security guys freaked out, right, because here comes the President of the United States [laughter] and his entourage. We push our way in. The President pushes his way in. There’s a bit of a scuffle at the door between the Secret Service and the Chinese security guard, because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. And it turns out it’s not Wen Jiabao in the room: it’s Wen Jiabao, and Singh, and [Jacob] Zuma, and [Luiz] Lula [da Silva], from Brazil. It’s all of them. It was like all the key emerging economies, and they’d been having their own caucus, hiding from everybody, because they’re the ones in the crucible at that point, right? The whole question will be are they willing to take on obligations, because it’s the breakdown of the Kyoto wall between developed and developing countries, and you can’t solve climate change without these countries taking on obligations, so are they willing to break down the wall?

Obama and Hillary sit down at the table. They make room for them. They provide chairs for them. It’s a table not much bigger than this. There is room for two or three people per country, so 12, 14, maybe 15 seats around. It’s pretty crowded. The rest of us are standing up around them, behind them. And they start negotiating, and it was fantastic. I don’t know how often, in recent history, this has happened, but Hillary is handing the President language. She’s staffing him with ideas. He’s using it with Wen Jiabao and the others. They get agreement. We think we have agreement. There’s an issue around monitoring and evaluation where we don’t reach agreement, and they send Todd and myself and I think He Yafei and Jairem—

You’re talking about Ramesh.

—Ramesh from India, off into the corner to try and work it out, and then we come back and kind of report back, and they’re going back and forth. We ultimately think we’ve reached an agreement, but Todd and I realize—Are we sure the Chinese have committed to declaring their commitments in the same way that the developed countries are going to do it? That’s one of the fundamental questions. So Todd hands Hillary a note, and Hillary hands Obama a note, saying you need to clarify this with Wen Jiabao. We need to get him to commit that they’re going to—I can’t remember the formulation—list on a particular schedule their commitments on reducing greenhouse gases, or on reaching a peak period, or something of that sort. And the President makes the ask, and Wen Jiabao says yes.

And at that point Xie [Zhenhua], the climate negotiator, the Vice Chairman of the NDRC [National Development and Reform Commission] in China, starts screaming at Wen Jiabao in Chinese, just screaming at him, because that was clearly beyond his mandate. And we’re watching this, and we don’t have a translator with us, because I guess—Why don’t we have a translator with us?

Bader would have been the closest, right?

Bader would have been the closest, but we didn’t have what’s-his-name, because we weren’t going to China; we were going to Copenhagen. [laughter] So we didn’t bring the guy who does all the President’s translation—still does it—in China. I can’t remember his name. [Ed. note: James Brown] So there’s a Chinese translator, and we’re looking at the Chinese translator, and the Chinese is like, “Internal discussion only.”

He said what?

“Internal discussion only.”

Oh. [laughs]

She refuses to translate what they’ve said back and forth. And this goes on—It seemed like five minutes; it was probably a minute, but it was loud. [laughter] And I’ve never seen this before, Chinese officials screaming at each other in front of foreigners, and, by the way, in front of the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans, as well as the Americans.

Well, and the person who’s being screamed at is the—

Is the Premier, not the President but the Premier.

It’s rare enough that world leaders actually sit and roll up their sleeves and negotiate something with one another—

And they’re writing texts.

Yes.

They’re writing texts on each other.

But then you’re seeing the internal deliberations of another country right there at the table.

It was one of the most unusual diplomatic incidents in modern history. I can’t think of another thing like that. But Wen Jiabao kept to it, and the Chinese kept to it. And the significance of it—and Bill knows this much better than I do—is you had had for how many—ten years—When was Kyoto?

Ninety-seven.

So for 12 years you had had a framework by which developed countries had obligations and developing countries didn’t.

Yes, it goes back, actually, to ’95, to the Berlin mandate, right?

And there was the Bali roadmap and all this stuff, right? And this was the crack in the wall, which, by the way, taking one step back—So this was a crack in the wall that said, “These countries, if they want a seat at the table in the international system, they actually have to take on responsibilities, because we can’t solve this problem without them.” It’s that same crack in the wall, or the same change toward these countries, that’s reflected in the development of the G20. The role of China, India, Brazil, South Africa, as major parts of the financial system, having some responsibility, as well as having more voice in the international system. And it’s the same one that we were doing in the trading system, by saying Doha is dead. Right, Doha was a trade framework that said developed countries have obligations, developing countries don’t. When we came in, we said that’s just no longer viable.

Yes, pause on that for a second, Mike, and talk about—because I do want to come back to what happens after that particular meeting—

After that meeting. [laughs]

—in Copenhagen, because there’s more story here—

Yes.

—including Obama, but you were talking about back in law school, about Obama’s ability to rise above conceptually and see a bigger picture. You’re now at the end of his first year in office. Did he see that going into the first year? It feels like he clearly knew what was happening there on the ground conceptually, and probably connected to these other spheres, but coming in—

It might vary subject by subject, and he may have had to connect the dots over time. He didn’t really know anything about Doha when he came in as President. He had not been following it. It was not a high priority for him. But when we explained to him between April and July—We went off to go study it after the first summit and report back for the L’Aquila summit—he sort of got it, that—The way I always described it to him was China is not Chad. We shouldn’t be treating them the same, even though they’re both viewed as developing countries. And he got that, and he got that that applied to climate, and he got that that applied to the G20. It was a little different because in G20 we actually needed them to do certain things; same with climate. In Doha, it was this is only going to move forward if you’re willing to do certain things.

And there is also an interesting thing across all of these, which is, in all of those instances it’s not like the U.S. has done everything that they need to, and yet the Obama administration is pledging to or saying that we’re going to clean up the mess of the U.S. Did he get that balance, that—?

Yes. I mean, he came in not to defend all the policies of the past, but to say, Look, I’m here to actually make progress on these issues. We’re going to fix the financial system, we’re going to take responsibility for climate, and we’re going to do the trade system the right way.

So let’s finish the Copenhagen story, because more happens, right?

Right.

So you get this fight, the Chinese list.

May I ask a question of clarification before we continue the narrative—?

Yes, please.

—because I certainly want to get there. But do you recall how they actually break into—

The room?

No, I heard how they broke in physically; I’ve got the picture. [laughter] What I’m trying to figure out is how one insinuates oneself into a conversation that’s going on that—

Well, it’s like we had caught them. We had caught them hiding from the rest of the conference behind a draped [laughter] glass cube, right? And yes, the President and Secretary Clinton walk in. What are they going to do, walk out?

But what is the President’s—? Do you have any recollection of—

Yes, how did the argument—? You mean the Chinese—

It was a remarkable moment, right? You walk in, and they’re like, “Oh, here you guys are. We’re glad we found you. Let’s sit down and talk.”

Yes, OK. It’s as simple as that, but that’s—[laughter]

Yes, and whatever they were doing—I’m not sure what they were doing before we got in there—

They probably were covering up their notes, “Nothing going on here!” [laughter]

Exactly. But whatever it was, now the conversation became a roundtable negotiation.

OK. Do you remember how long those discussions took place before we hit the Chinese screaming match?

We were probably in there for—I don’t know, I’ll have to ask Todd. I think for an hour or so.

OK.

It was a lengthy thing.

OK.

And there was back-and-forth. The Indians were talking. The Brazilians were talking.

And there are translators there who—

Each leader has his translator, so—Singh doesn’t need one, but you had a Chinese translator, a Portuguese translator—I guess that was it, because you had South Africa and India and ourselves.

Gotcha. And then somebody knew English.

Yes, exactly.

OK. All right, so back to Bill’s question.

Yes, so we get to the Chinese list—

So we leave there—

Right, yes.

We leave there, and then Obama has to go brief the Europeans, because—Of course, the Europeans, their approach to this—They tried to treat us the same way they treat each other, which is to embarrass, embarrass, embarrass, try and paint into a corner, get them to capitulate. And, of course, we weren’t going to do that. They had raised these expectations about it’s got to be a legally binding agreement. The U.S. has to. It will capitulate eventually and agree to a legally binding agreement. And Todd had made clear over and over again that that wasn’t going to happen. Now it’s up to Obama to go back to the Europeans and sell them on the agreement.

We walk into this room, and there are chairs kind of scattered around. It’s a small room. You’ve got Merkel, Sarközy, Gordon Brown. I can’t remember whether Berlusconi’s there; he might be. The Danes are not there. Maybe it’s just those three. And Obama says, “This is the best we can do, and we think it’s significant for the following reasons, but it’s the best we can do.” And the Europeans are distraught. They realize it’s the best we can do. They realize they weren’t even in the room, [laughter] right? It reminds me of the song from Hamilton, right?

“In the Room Where It Happened,” yes. [laughs]

“In the Room,” right? They weren’t part of the negotiation, because they had painted themselves into an impossible negotiating position. We weren’t going to agree to it, let alone the Chinese, so if you don’t have us and the Chinese it’s hard to reach a global agreement on climate. [laughter] But they had this aspiration that we would ultimately just have to agree because they were so right in their perspective. So they’re distraught, but they get it, and we go back into—I think we go back into the green room and announce it. And then soon after that, the President leaves Copenhagen, and—

And are you still there?

Yes. I remember this because I had my—I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I had my bag there, and I thought, Oh, this is good; I’ll get to go home.

On Air Force One maybe.

Yes, exactly. And he’s like, “Oh, no, you’re staying to make sure this gets done tomorrow. We haven’t come this far for you not to stay and make sure—” I’m like, You’re right, I’m staying, so I spent another sleepless night in Copenhagen with Todd.

Right, because it almost all comes apart or something—

It almost comes apart. I’m glad I was there. It almost comes apart the next day when the 194 countries get together to hear what the agreement now is that we’ve crafted with the other four countries and the Europeans have reluctantly acquiesced to. Obama’s now gone. The place—Oh, and there’s a whole issue of the press conference. Obama does a press conference announcing the agreement, which pissed off some of the other countries, because it’s a UN process. You don’t have an agreement until 194 countries acquiesce to it.

I’m assuming you weren’t asked whether having a press conference was a good idea.

I don’t recall, but he’s the President of the United States, so he’s not going to fly all the way to Copenhagen, spend all day there, roll up his sleeves, negotiate an agreement, and then slip off into the night without saying something, right?

OK. So if he says you’ve got an agreement, that puts pressure on everybody to get an agreement.

It not only does that but it sort of makes them feel like their process has been preempted, so it actually creates a little bit of opposition. And the next 24 hours or so were spent managing that feeling of being left out by the Europeans or preempted by the other 185 countries. And it comes down—We’re in this giant room. People are yelling and screaming, and the Danes are losing it. The UN officials are up there, silent. It becomes a yelling match where at one point Todd and myself and Ed Miliband from the U.K.—and there must have been somebody else—rushed the stage to start yelling at—

The whole idea now is for them to gavel to a close. They just gavel to a close. It’s done. And this is not abnormal. It’s not like you’re waiting for everyone to raise their hand and say yes. You get a sense of whether there’s a consensus in the room. You don’t let Cuba and Bolivia obstruct consensus, which is what they were trying to do. You just gavel it to a close. But they were not showing any political backbone to do that, and we were all exhausted. None of us had slept for days. I remember that I could not sit down, because if I sat down I immediately fell asleep, so I just walked constantly around the room, just paced—

Oh, that’s brilliant.

—because I couldn’t. If I stopped walking I fell asleep. And we were all in that state, and we’re up there screaming at them, and I later apologized to Ban Ki-moon, because I was yelling at him and I felt like it was inappropriate in retrospect.

So this is flappable moment number two in the year 2009.

[laughter] Yes, exactly.

You’ve suddenly become flappable.

So much for being unflappable. I’ve lost it twice now. Yes, and they ultimately hammered it closed, and—

You remember who did it?

Well, I think the Danes were in the chair. I can’t remember whether the Prime Minister at that point had returned. I think he had returned at that point. There was a great guy, Bo Lidegaard, who was their climate guy and was very effective, and he was trying to keep his government together.

Mike, we’re at the end of 2009, and the financial crisis—Technically the recession is over, because the economy has turned around and we’re having positive growth in the economy, but during this period there were people saying wait on the climate agenda, it’s a financial crisis, not to mention on health care and other things that are going on in the U.S. on the domestic side. Do you remember those conversations within the administration? Was there ever a thought to hold back, that this was too much to do all at one time?

I don’t recall that, in part because this was a very different sort of thing. This was going to be a multiyear negotiation with a multiyear implementation. The real question was whether there would be legislation or not, and whether Waxman-Markey would make it to the Senate or not, and that, I think, got caught up with a lot of other things, including the change in politics here. But at the time, I think the view was, yes, we’ve just got to go ahead and do this. None of it was going to have immediate effect, positive or negative, in any way; it was building a framework that over time was solving this problem.

And in light of what you said about the changing politics, the rise of the Tea Party movement starts somewhat that summer, extending into the spring, and then in the passage of Obamacare. So you had the stimulus package—

TARP.

TARP, right. Stimulus, TARP, Affordable Care Act, and then climate. Are you yourself watching the rise of domestic opposition? Are you feeling like, Yes, we’ve seen this before; it’s more of the same? Was there a point you realized that it’s actually growing and getting bigger than maybe you thought? I don’t know, tell me your own sense of the domestic politics relating to this stuff.

Yes. Look, I’m not a political expert. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT I do remember—Was it December of ’09? I remember being at Union Station in Washington on a weekend when the Tea Party was having a big convening in Washington, and there were a bunch of people in Union Station leaving Washington, and I was thinking, This actually looks quite serious. This is just anecdotal, but—These people look quite serious. They look quite well organized. They seem to have an agenda, and they’re mobilized. I remember calling Nancy and saying, “There’s something going on here, and I’m not sure what it is, but it looks quite serious.”

I’m contemplating the time and wondering—Are there high points on the climate agenda beyond Copenhagen, before you move on to the next portfolio?

I continued to play a role in chairing the MEF, but I’d say after Copenhagen I played less of a role on climate going forward, in part because I always viewed my job primarily as staffing the President. Anything that he was going to be involved in, I felt responsible for, and the need to be involved, and that was everything leading up to Copenhagen. If he was not going to be involved in it, then I played whatever role was useful for Todd, and for the organization, but a little bit less of a role going forward. There were a bunch more MEF meetings, and I never went to another COP, for example. I didn’t go to Cancun, or Durban, or Paris.

Right, but Paris—

Paris was later.

—at that point you’re USTR.

At that point I was in trade.

OK.

But for the rest of my time at the White House I didn’t go to any more—

That’s because that box was checked, as it relates to the President’s agenda—OK.

Exactly. The President wasn’t going.

Would it come up as an issue in G7 discussions?

Yes.

G20 discussions?

And that’s why I stayed involved and wanted to make sure we were doing it appropriately in those summits, but I played less of a role in the COP stuff going forward.

Do you remember the President’s attention and focus on climate, and through your own eyes his connection to other Cabinet members on the issue? How much did he and Hillary continue to—

Good question.

—engage and talk about it? Steve Chu in the first term, Carol Browner, others? Give us a little bit of a flavor of that.

Yes, it’s a good question. My sense was that later on, when Podesta comes to the White House, when Brian Deese is activated, when there’s work on the China agreement, and then preparation for Paris, the President is really very engaged. And when did Podesta come to the White House? Was it 20—?

I have a feeling it was after 2010.

Yes. Oh, yes.

I think it was after the midterm loss, but I can’t remember exactly. It was in the first term. I remember actually going to some White House function and it was Podesta’s first week.

Is it in the first term, or was it the second term after—?

I can’t remember.

I can’t remember now, but I think the President’s involvement in climate sort of dipped a bit. It was part of all the dialogue with the Chinese, and with others, that came up at the summit, but in terms of driving stuff, it was a little bit less, and it was left more to Todd, to Steve Chu—Carol was involved a bit—folks like that.

Did you have any observations about the functioning of the White House, particularly in your area, with the changes of the Chiefs of Staff?

It didn’t affect me and my area very much, because I was mostly tied into the NEC and the NSC. There was a little bit, I guess, when Bill Daley came in. He was very interested in trade and things, and sometimes I would work directly with him, but mostly it was through the NEC and the NSC.

OK. Do you need a break, or are you OK?

No, I’m good.

OK. Did you have much interaction with Congressional Relations, or did you just leave that job to the CL [Congressional Liaison] shop?

I only started engaging with them when it was time for the Korea, Colombia, Panama trade agreements to be taken up and around TAA [Trade Adjustment Assistance]. First we had to renegotiate them, and then they were taken up in 2011, I believe. We’ll have to look through—

But other than that, most of what I was doing did not really touch Congress.

OK. All right. There was a moment, I think around 2012, where your position is elevated to Assistant to the President.

Yes.

Is there a story behind that?

I don’t recall what it was. Maybe it was when Larry left and Gene came; it was just an opportunity to upgrade a little bit, but there wasn’t anything in particular.

That’s early 2012.

Is that right?

And there was no change in your portfolio. It was just—

Correct.

—probably an acknowledgment of what you were doing all along anyway.

Yes, yes.

I can’t recall whether there had been a kind of wholesale reduction of assistants at the beginning of the Obama Presidency. That was true in—

Was that true in Clinton, maybe?

—H. W. Bush, I think—

Is that right?

—when he came in. He had decided a lot of people who were at the Assistant to the President level didn’t need to be there.

When Gene came in, I think there was just the sense—I can’t remember whether I advocated for it; I think I probably did advocate for it. The view was, sure, you’ve been doing this for three years, and you got a new boss, and we want to keep you happy, and you’re not moving anywhere at the moment, so titles are cheap. Reporting relationships didn’t change; I still reported to Gene.

Is that right?

I reported to Tom Donilon. And so it didn’t really change anything at the end of the day.

OK. Is there anything else we ought to talk about? We never cover everything that we could talk about, but anything that comes to mind in particular?

In that period? I guess the only other—I was thinking about the various categories. I’d say two things, because I assume you’re keeping trade separate at the moment.

Yes, that’s where we’re headed.

It looks like that’ll be next time. [laughter] So I guess two things from the White House job, other than trade. One was development. One thing we did was launch, through the NSC process, a review of our development policy. They called it PSD [President Study Directives], a process to review all of our development strategy, interagency, lots of lookbacks at how we had done things, a debate about what our priorities should be. As I recall, it was the first time an administration had done that, had done a full development policy strategy. The only part that was interesting, which seems quaint in retrospect, is it came out with the conclusion that economic growth was awfully important, which seems kind of obvious, right? [laughter]

But in the development community you’ve got the group of people who say it’s all about education, or it’s all about health, or it’s all about infrastructure, and these things then dictate resource allocation, so we wanted to get back to first principles and say none of this can be done without growth. The significance of that is that you want to support policies that lead to growth, and that will help support health outcomes, development outcomes, education outcomes, infrastructure outcomes, housing outcomes, whatever. It also feeds into trade, because trade was one of the drivers, and globalization was one of the drivers of growth in developing countries and emerging markets. Having a focus of our development policy be what are the things that can help raise the growth rates was, I think, an important step forward.

And that was something that was important to the President himself, is that correct?

It was. He cared a lot about development. He liked it. He didn’t spend a huge amount of time on it, but whenever we went to talk to him about it, it was something that he cared a lot about. His father was a development economist, right? And he had studied development theory and development economics at various times, so he did care a lot about that. As part of that, one of the things I did at the White House—and I can’t remember what year it was—is I got together an interagency team, and this is the only time I got an Air Force plane from Frankfurt, and we hopped around Africa for a couple weeks. Out of that came our Power Africa strategy, which has actually continued now, even under Trump.

It was really about how the Chinese are building roads in Africa; they’re building airports. We’re not going to do that. We don’t have the resources for it, and actually our companies are not particularly good at it or interested in it. But we are good at energy, so we launched this effort that was about leveraging private sector investment in energy, as part of helping to promote growth, and therefore development. And it’s led to tens of billions of dollars of additional investments in energy—some of it clean, some of it natural gas. And that part’s continued. So that was one piece.

And what year was this?

I think it was either 2011 or 2012.

What was that team like? Who did you bring along?

It was Earl Gast from AID [Agency for International Development], who was head of the Africa office; Florie [Florizelle] Liser, from USTR, who was head of the Africa office there; Reuben Brigety [II], the dean of the public policy school at GW [George Washington University], was the DAS [Deputy Assistant Secretary] for Africa at State. Gayle—

Gayle Smith?

Gayle Smith. We had somebody from Energy. We had all the relevant—I think we had somebody from MCC [Millennium Challenge Corporation], as well as AID, and from Treasury we had the Africa—

And did you talk about that with the President before going, or when you were coming back?

It was around coming back, and we came back and said—Because he was trying to think through what could be his PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS {acquired immune deficiency syndrome} Relief]. How could he have a big impact? Some of it goes back to your earlier question about his relationship to Africa. Some of what he thought he could do was be a leader for the region on things like governance and corruption. Some could be this sort of thing, like Power Africa, and the Food Security Initiative. None of them quite took on the same significance of PEPFAR, but—And then some of it was around trade. We did our trade relationships with AGOA [African Growth and Opportunity Act] in Africa, so it was a combination of medium-sized things, not one big thing, but he was very interested.

And President Bush 43 and Clinton both ended up taking an interest in Africa, particularly on trade/economics issues. Do you recall whether he connected with either of those other former Presidents? President Carter had had a long-standing interest in Africa.

I’m not sure how much they connected in talking about it. I remember we were in Tanzania and President Bush 43 was there at the same time, and they did a thing together. It may have been a memorial for the people who died in the bombings of the embassies. He saw him then, but I’m not sure how much they talked about Africa in between, so that was one.

I guess the other one I would mention—and this would involve the President quite a bit—was around energy and energy prices. At one point oil hit $110 or something, and gasoline was up, and people were worrying about the economy, and the President was directly involved, talking to the Saudis: What can you do to lower energy prices? He sent a group of us to the region—I guess we were in UAE [United Arab Emirates], maybe Kuwait—to try and talk to them about that. I engaged with the IEA, International Energy Agency, and I did a lot of this with Dan Poneman at Energy. He was a Deputy Secretary.

We did something that had rarely been done, which was to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in Texas, in Louisiana, to help relieve some of the pressure. Some of this was related to Libya. Some of it was related to other developments going on in the oil markets. But there was a great concern that the rise of oil prices would cut off the recovery, so we engaged—And there was a big diplomatic effort with the G—I went to Italy and the U.K. and France to argue with them about releasing the SPRO, their strategic petroleum reserves. We got China to agree to take action, so it was a big diplomatic effort, and the President was directly engaged in that, both with the leadership in Saudi Arabia but I believe also with the Chinese.

OK. Bill, I had raised a question of what high points existed in his portfolio before he moved on to the trade route, and what we were trying to do was to move beyond that, at least to begin to get into the trade rep stuff, and how he—

Just prior to that—So we’re now in an election year, right, of ’12, 2012, and I’m seeing here in the briefing book there’s a G8 meeting at Camp David in the spring—

Yes.

—of 2012. And just to connect this, the Washington Post says: “Obama’s presiding over two international summits this weekend as he seeks to avert potential crises that could distract his focus on the U.S. economy in an election year.” And it talks about how he’s out on the porch outside Laurel Lodge with Merkel. Anything to talk about there? Are you thinking, Yes, this is a reelection year?

Yes. So the G8 was supposed to be in Chicago, and Rahm got cold feet, worrying that there might be protests and security costs. And Rahm called up the President with what turned out to be a brilliant idea: Why don’t you hold it at Camp David instead, which was fantastic because it’s a very limited space. There’s no room for staff. Each leader basically had a little cabin to themselves. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

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Oh, gosh.

I thought it was quaint. And despite the rule at Camp David that you’re not allowed to take photos, [Dmitry] Medvedev kept on walking around taking selfies of himself in front of various cabins, I’m sure for legitimate purposes—

Of course.

—intelligence gathering and the like. Yes. But that one at Camp David, it was great, and it was very intimate. There were no motorcades, because everyone’s walking, or taking golf carts. They’re all walking with each other. The whole idea of these summits originally was informal interaction. This is as close to it as we got.

Press? Was there press there?

Not onsite. They had to stay at a campsite down the mountain, and they were brought in for particular events, but basically no. There was no press there, and not a lot of staff, either.

You were there.

I was there, yes. My yak was there. Everyone had their—Yes, everyone had their Sherpa and their yak, and that was it.

Did it produce anything?

Yes. The European crisis was on the agenda again. This is one of those where the President, separate from the agenda, was required to convene all the Europeans—so they would talk to each other—and he would mediate between them and put pressure on one or the other to be responsive. We had a big Africa focus, a big focus on development. We had some African leaders come up, and we had some African businesspeople up. It was the first time we’d done that. We brought the Africa private sector to the summit to talk about what it’s going to take to actually get private investment going in Africa. So we tried to, through our leadership, use these summits to do—

Were they just choppered in for a day and then choppered out?

I don’t think they choppered; I think they were driven up there. Yes, it’s only about an hour and a half away. But it was really the atmosphere I thought was really very good, and the President was in good form leading this. A big focus of it was TTIP. This is where the Europeans were pushing us to agree to do a trade agreement with them, and there was a famous side meeting—a lot of it was done in side meetings—between all of the European leaders and the President, where we agreed to enter into the TTIP negotiations.

OK. Is there anything notable about the campaign that year? Your issues get brought to the fore? Are you involved in debate preparation?

No, not really. The energy issues were relevant, because they always worry in a campaign when gasoline ticks up to $4 a gallon. The European crisis was relevant, in that the President was basically saying, “Hey, I’ve got an election; you’ve got to take care of this. Solve your problem. Don’t tube the global economy.” Those were the major intersections. We weren’t doing a lot of trade at that point. That might have been controversial in the election, but we just weren’t doing a lot of it.

At this point are you thinking, if he does get reelected, about what happens next for you? Did you know you wanted to serve in a second term? What were you thinking at this point?

Yes, it’s interesting: I was trying to think back to this. I don’t remember whether when I joined I thought I was going to be there for eight years, or that he was going to get reelected. In retrospect it all seems, of course, natural and inevitable and all the rest, but at the time I hadn’t really thought about what would happen if he didn’t get reelected, and what would I do next.

But you’re also not thinking toward the end of the third or fourth year, I can’t wait for this to be over, I’ll just—

No, no.

—make it through, sprint through the finish; second term or no second term, I’m out of here.

No, no. We were talking, I think.

Your Naples fever dream wasn’t happening? [laughter]

No. You may have been out of the room when we were talking about how I got promoted to Assistant to the President.

Yes, I was out.

I think that was what was going on then, which was, OK, you’re coming to the end of a term. You’re not going anywhere. Gene’s been appointed head of NEC. Ron Kirk is still USTR. There isn’t any natural place for you to do something, so we’ll give you a new title.

I missed that, but I did want to come back to Jim Jones and Donilon, because you do have this reporting relationship up into the NSC.

Yes.

Jones serves the first two years? Did he go out at the midterm? Did he get a full year or two years? I can’t remember which.

I don’t think quite two years.

I think a little short of that.

Yes. Working with Jones, working with Donilon, what were those two years like?

Jones was REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT —very courteous. He’s a really very nice man. He was not very much involved in my stuff at all. The only substantive issue I was involved in that he had an interest in, I think, was energy, but even there he had so many other issues that he was focusing on, I mostly dealt with Donilon on my issues, including on energy. Donilon also had an interest there, so he was the one I really dealt with.

And he becomes National Security Advisor. Are you still dealing with him, or do you end up—? Is Tony his first deputy when he becomes—? Or was Dennis? I can’t remember.

Dennis. I was still dealing mostly with Tom. Yes, I think that’s right. And there weren’t real—Because if you think about it, Dennis is the deputy, he’s running the deputies process, but there weren’t deputy NSC meetings so much on my issues. I was running my own deputies meetings, right? As a deputy; therefore, when I needed guidance or approval I was going mostly to Donilon.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, were there principals meetings and deputies meetings about that stuff?

Yes. Now, those would have been—They wouldn’t have been NSC meetings, though. I think probably they were Larry meetings, NEC meetings.

But you would go to those?

Yes. There weren’t a lot of them, but there were some.

Was there ever an instance in the first term where you might have taken another position someplace else in the administration? Anything ever come up?

Not really, and I felt like I had the best job. It was perfectly designed for me. It was diverse. It was close to the President. It was—I was quite happy with it.

Terrific, OK.

Now, would I have done it for four more years? I probably would have tired of it at some point, but at the time I thought it was quite good.

Got it. And I don’t think the Vice President’s name has come up in our discussions today. Was he a presence at all in your areas?

Somewhat. He would sit in on and participate in principals meetings or briefings with the President. I don’t recall him having a strong role in climate, per se. I don’t recall that. But we used him—He had a lot of involvement in foreign policy generally, and oftentimes he’d be on the phone with the Prime Minister, President of Korea, when we were doing the Korean free trade agreement, and he would deliver messages for us, carry water for us. And he was involved on the domestic side of these things. For example, when we were doing the Korea free trade agreement, he engaged with the auto industry, with labor, as we were negotiating, even before we started sending it up to the Hill, to help bring them along and make sure that they were as comfortable as they could be with what we were doing.

Gotcha. OK. So you got the sense that there was good teamwork?

Yes.

OK. Is there any useful comparison between his role and what Al Gore was doing earlier?

I didn’t really have that much contact. I didn’t have that much contact with Gore on the stuff that I was involved in.

Interesting. Because you weren’t doing climate?

I wasn’t doing climate back then.

Back then, OK.

Yes, exactly.

Yes, that might have made a difference.

I was doing trade in the first few years, and then I was at Treasury, so I saw him periodically, but didn’t have a close working relationship with him.

One last question on the first term, about the auto bailout in particular. Just thinking back over 30 or so years, 30, 35 years—In trade contexts, autos were always a big deal, right?

Sure.

In Bush 41, particularly with Japan, it was a big deal, but as things moved forward we had this financial crisis. We completely bail out our car companies, right? Two of the three probably would have gone bankrupt, maybe all three. Or we actually forced them into bankruptcy, right, and—

Yes, ultimately, right.

—and bring them out. Did that ever come up in the international context? Did anybody ever say this was unfair, that there was something, from a competitive standpoint—

Well—yes.

—or was it like we were all hanging on to make sure that things didn’t go over the cliff, whatever you’ve got to do, do it?

There was generally that sort of deference and sympathy. There was always a little bit of—When we would criticize China for subsidizing some sector, they would say, [laughter] “Oh, by the way, how are GM [General Motors] and Chrysler doing?” But on the whole their view was please don’t let your economy tank. So I think people digested that pretty well.

All right.

Oh, I had a question about the 2012 election. Any concern on your part that the Republicans put forward a very different candidate from 2008, someone with an MBA [master of business administration degree] and a lot of business background, including family auto—As we’re still coming out of the crash, that that might—? And the President’s approval ratings are not all that high. He’s in the low 40s, I think, as he goes into the election. Did you have any concern about being reelected?

Not really. I just assumed it would happen. You sort of drank the Kool-Aid: of course he’s going to be reelected. It’s interesting, I never thought : Gee, I’d better put my résumé together, or Better go start looking for a job, or anything like that. I just assumed I’d be there on January 20th.

Shows the power of positive thinking.

I guess so, or I was oblivious to it, [laughter] one way or the other, but I never really put much thought into it.

Or confidence in the political people.

Yes, that’s right.

All right, so when does the trade job come up for you?

In the White House job, one of my portfolios was managing the trade portfolio, so that meant I worked very closely with Ron Kirk, the USTR, and his team, and was deeply involved in the renegotiation of the three agreements, and then getting them through Congress. On the renegotiation there was the meeting in Seoul prior to the G20 back then, and Ron and I were there trying to negotiate. Didn’t work.

There was this famous negotiation in Columbia, Maryland, a month later or so when the Koreans came, and we reached a deadlock, and then I was sent to go walk the Korean Minister around the artificial lake to see if we could reach an agreement and break through. We sort of did, and there was this moment when we were negotiating with the Koreans up there; at the same time we were getting calls from [Sander] Sandy Levin; Bob King, who was at the time President of the UAW [United Auto Workers]—God, I’m trying to remember now; there was a Senator—I guess it was Baucus—Baucus; and Alan Mulally, who was CEO of Ford at the time, who were saying, “You’ve got to get X plus, and if you get X plus, we will actually collectively come out and support this.”

We said, “We need to see the President tonight,” and we drove down. We got there about ten o’clock at night. And he came back down in the Residence to meet with us in the Oval, with Ron and myself. We said, “Look, we have the prospect of actually getting a trade agreement that’s got labor support, and Sandy Levin support, but it’s going to take an extraordinary additional step.” And he said, “It’s worth it. Getting a trade agreement with labor support would be groundbreaking, so let’s go for it.” And I said, “Then you need to call the South Korean leader and see if you can get him to move on this.” And he put in a call right then, ten o’clock at night.

Not in South Korea, it’s not.

Yes, exactly. [laughter] He reached him, and said, “Here’s what I need, and here’s why it’s important.” And the argument was—well, just the substance, but—you want this agreement to go through with broad bipartisan support. That will be a show of strength for the U.S.-Korea partnership. And we have the prospects of doing that if you make these extraordinary concessions. I don’t remember the Korean leader’s name at this time; they’ve changed a few times since. He gave this sort of nervous laughter. We weren’t sure whether he was agreeing or disagreeing or whatever it was. And his minister—When we told his minister what we were demanding—who was still up in Columbia, Maryland—he blew his gasket and said he was going to leave and get on the next plane, that this was outrageous. But at the end of the day, they agreed, and we got the agreement, and it was endorsed by labor, or at least some parts of labor, and by the Ford Motor Company, and the other Big Three, and we got 72, I think, Democrats to vote for it, which was, I think, the highest since NAFTA that any trade agreement had gotten in terms of Democratic support.

What’s in Columbia, Maryland?

Columbia, Maryland, is one of those manufactured towns. It’s sort of the—

Oh, OK.

Planned community?

It’s a planned community, and it just happened to be—It was a terrible hotel, and an artificial lake that was being dredged. [laughter] It was an awful place. It was a really awful place, but—

The Italians would never do that.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Or the Danes, who give you a faux mall.

Faux mall, Potemkin mall.

OK. So you had the next—

But that was an example, again, where the President was directly involved. He understood the politics. He understood the substance. He was willing to pick up the phone and negotiate with a foreign leader in the middle of the night. And he pushed us to get it done.

So you had that as a part of your experience in the first position.

Yes, exactly, and then Colombia too—For whatever reason, I ended up negotiating the labor agreement for Colombia—When I say “negotiating,” I was negotiating with Sandy Levin. [laughter] USTR was negotiating with Colombia; I was negotiating with Sandy Levin. It was helping to support the USTR on that. Panama, I was not involved in. And then I worked with Congressional Relations—with USTR and White House Congressional Relations—to get them through Congress. That all happened before I went over to USTR.

But how did you find out that the incumbent was leaving, that Kirk was leaving?

So Ron told me that he was intending to leave in the beginning of the second term, and we went through this process. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the job. There was a debate about whether I should go to USTR or should I wait for Gene Sperling to leave and become NEC Chair, because Gene had also said he wasn’t going to stay forever. And I went back and forth in my own view. The President went back and forth in his view. At one point there was a—Have you met Jeff Zients yet, who was—? OK, so Jeff was—

Ends up being OMB at some point.

He was OMB, but there was some thing where he was acting OMB and he couldn’t be confirmed, and had to leave, had to go back to the private sector, because his period of appointment had expired. I can’t remember what the rules were. It was, I guess, a recess appointment or something. And he was brought back into the government to help with healthcare.gov, when the website crashed. He was a technology—a private sector CEO, knew a lot about health care, so he was brought in to help fix that system.

The President really liked him—Everybody really liked him—and wanted to find a place for him. At one point they float the idea that he should be USTR, and Max Baucus and Sandy Levin weigh in and say—REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT. They felt like Ron was a really nice guy, but was not a trade expert, and they were critical of the Obama administration for not doing enough on trade. They weighed in and said, “We don’t need another non-trade expert.” Max actually wrote an op-ed, I think in the FT [Financial Times], which is a little bit outrageous, that made this comment publicly. So, having gone down the road of bringing Jeff in, or moving him over to USTR, they ended up dropping that, and he then offered it to me.

And by that time, I’m assuming, in the tradition you mentioned earlier, they don’t offer you a job unless they’re sure you’re going to accept it?

We had gone back—Look, after the reelection, the President met with—not everybody, but he met with most of his senior White House staff to basically say, “What do you want to do?”

Individually, or—?

Yes, individually. And to say, “What are you thinking about? Are you staying? What would you like to do?” which, again, was a remarkable, positive management technique. I said, “I’m happy to do anything you want me to do. The obvious jobs seem like USTR or NEC.” He said, “I agree.” And we went back and forth a bit, and I was a little bit ambivalent, but it was also unclear when Gene was going to leave.

And that was not something that was discoverable?

No. With Gene—Gene had been head of the NEC in the Clinton administration. He’s wonderful. He lives for this stuff, right? He only was leaving because he felt under financial pressure and family pressure to leave. It could have been two more months; it could have been another year. At that point, when the President offered USTR, I said sure. I would have been happy in either job. It turned out he left only a few months later, and Jeff came in and served as Chair of NEC, so it all worked out, but it wasn’t quite as smooth.

And there was no consideration of your laterally moving back to the NEC when he left, even though you just got—

No, because I had just been confirmed to USTR a couple months before.

Oh, OK, that’s right. I hadn’t thought about confirmation.

Mike, just before diving into the USTR stuff, just a minute or two on—The anecdote of the President meeting with everybody raises the question about whether you were part of any group in the White House in the fall of ’12, while the campaign’s going on, about what a second term would actually look like. How much of a transition, a formal transition, was there from term one to term two? Was there a plan for the second term? Did you have your own thoughts about that? Say a little bit about that.

That’s a good question. There may have been a formal process. If there was, I wasn’t part of it. I was just continuing to do my job. There were a number of things that we thought—for example, trade—that we would be able to do more of in the second term than we were able to do in the first term, so we had launched TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership]. We had indicated we were going to want to get trade promotion authority. But we knew that all of that was going to have to wait until the second term. And by this time the financial crisis had abated a bit. You still had the recurring European crisis, but we were no longer in crisis mode, so it gave more space to that kind of activity.

And that’s why these things got put off until a second term: because trying to get through the crisis—

That was the priority. Legislatively that was the priority. Yes, I’d say that. I’m trying to remember the sequence here. There was a point at which the President, Rahm, realized, OK, we’re going to rebalance toward Asia. This TPP is part of that. And the realization that there’s no way we could get TPP done if we didn’t finish Korea. Right? There’s no credibility in the region, no credibility with Congress.

I think Rahm had sort of hoped we could do just Korea, and the Republicans made it clear that if you want Korea, you’ve got to do Colombia and Panama. Panama was not controversial; Colombia was more controversial, because of the labor and the violence situation there, so it didn’t get as many Democratic votes. Having seen that, OK, we’re strategically rebalancing toward Asia. We’re focusing more on what this means in terms of our relationship with China. TPP is part of that answer. To move toward TPP, we need to finish off the other trade agreements.

And there wasn’t a fear that sometimes in second terms Presidential capital decreases?

I wasn’t aware of a debate about that. Also, trade is an area where you get a lot of Republican support, so some of the traditional things where you need that Presidential capital, here’s an opportunity for bipartisan cooperation potentially.

And what was driving Republican interests in Colombia and Panama?

Part of it was these were negotiated by the Bush administration, and Nancy Pelosi had stopped them from moving forward, so they wanted to complete that package. Colombia in particular, there had been a close relationship with [Álvaro] Uribe [Vélez], and then with his successor, Plan Colombia and the like, so there was a view that this was an important part of finishing that. The economics are not—The Bush administration did a whole series of FTAs [free trade agreements] that were economically meaningless. They were for strategic purposes, foreign policy purposes: Oman, Morocco, Jordan, Panama, Colombia. Only Korea and, to a lesser extent, Singapore were of economic interest. Australia was a little bit of economic interest. The rest were really for foreign policy reasons.

Did you get through your confirmation OK?

Yes, I got through very quickly. It was seven weeks from nomination to confirmation.

Your bonus didn’t come up?

The bonus—My time at Citi came up.

From one Senator in particular, as I recall?

No, there was more than one. [Charles] Grassley has this staffer who likes to go through everybody’s taxes, as part of the Finance Committee—To be confirmed by the Finance Committee is much more onerous than being confirmed by the State Department or some other place, because, understandably, the Finance Committee believes they write the tax laws, they care about the tax laws; if you have anything in your taxes that is open to question, they’re going to find it, so they have a guy who’s full-time—

That used to be the case. [laughter]

Yes, well, that’s true. I’ve wondered about that, yes. But it was pretty brutal. The guy went through—So first they had a board that showed that when I was at Citigroup I had $100,000 in a private equity fund that was registered in the Cayman Islands. There’s no question that I paid taxes on it—I paid all the taxes on it—but it was registered in the Cayman Islands, and they wanted to talk about why am I investing in something in the Cayman Islands. And they showed a picture of the building, which is a building that holds the registration for several thousand hedge funds. [laughter] “In this building you’re holding—What’s going on in this building?” So there was a little bit of that, right?

There was no accusation that I wasn’t paying adequate taxes or anything of that sort. The guy went through all my taxes, and he actually made me—There was one thing he didn’t like that my accountant had done, in terms of the rate of depreciation of my home, my townhouse in Manhattan that I’m renting out; he disagreed with the rate of depreciation, so he made me refile, I don’t know, ten years’ worth of taxes or something like that, six years’ worth of taxes. The whole idea, of course, is you must have underpaid your taxes, so this is an opportunity to get you—By going through this process, I uncovered all of these charitable contributions I had made that I never took, so I got a refund. [laughter]

After paying my poor accountant—My accountant loved it, being called by the Finance Committee. I just said, “You guys work it out.” He was a New York accountant, you know. He’s never been involved in this before. Suddenly he’s getting calls from the Finance Committee’s senior counsel to go through my taxes. It was the most exciting thing in his whole life. We go through the whole thing, we refile the taxes, and even after paying the accountant I got $20,000 back. [laughter] So—

Helped make up for that bonus.

Yes, well, not quite.

In part.

Government service, I tell you.

Not quite.

And that never made a headline.

That never made a headline. I don’t think I ever told anybody that.

“Froman overpays his taxes.”

Yes, exactly. But besides that, it still went through in seven weeks.

And what was the vote?

Ninety-six to three.

All right. Who’d you lose?

Very interesting question. I lost Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Jeff Merkley. I’m sitting in my office at the White House, and I’m watching C-SPAN [Cable-Satellite Public Affairs network]. I’m watching my vote, right? And not only does Elizabeth Warren vote against me, but she’s in the well of the Senate, trying to buttonhole other Senators to vote against me.

Because of the Citigroup?

It was Citigroup. She didn’t like trade. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT. And a couple of years later—I think it was in Africa—I come across a CODEL [congressional delegation] that Merkley’s on, and we’re talking, and I said, “Oh, by the way, Senator, I just wanted to check in. You voted against my confirmation. Is there anything I can do to allay your concerns?” He said, “I did?” [laughter] I said, “Yes, you and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.” He said, “Oh, yes, she just asked me to do her a favor on this or something. I had no idea who you were at the time.” [laughter]

Did you know her? With her Harvard connections?

I didn’t know her there, and I wasn’t involved in setting up the CFPB [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] or anything like that. So she has a particular area of interest called investor state dispute settlement. I would go up to her office and answer her questions, and she would sort of Socratically interrogate me REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

So I guess you’re not on her—

I don’t think I’m on her shortlist as running mate, no. [laughter]

I guess not. All right, so are you OK to continue through the tape?

So you should know, Mike—I’ve just been thinking as I’ve been watching the clock—for people who serve eight years in an administration—Dick Cheney spent five days with these guys, five hours a day—

Is that right?

—for the 43 project. How much time have you spent with Josh Bolten?

Four interviews.

Probably 15, 16 hours, I would guess, maybe. Something like that.

The recordholder is Bruce Reed, other than—

Well, actually, other than Cheney, Bruce Reed was, I think, 20 hours, something like that, which we’re not contemplating.

And we’re right now at 15 hours with President Clinton himself on his oral history. We’ve just started doing those in the last year, since you left us.

Wow.

We go down to Little Rock and go up to the little office above his place. So would that we could have gotten through your eight years in one day. It’s not going to happen, but that’s only another excuse, as I said, to get you back down here again, and we’ll do it, because I think an entire term in USTR, TTIP, and TPP in particular are worth doing, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff—

And TPA [Trade Promotion Authority].

—I’m sure, that—Yes, TPA. So, I don’t know, Russell, if that’s—

And we may be able to come see you, rather than have you come down here, if that works better.

One way or the other.

Well, we’ve got about 15 minutes, or—How are you doing? Are you OK here?

I’m doing fine. I’m trying to see whether the car is here or not.

Yes, check that. I’m trying to think if there’s anything—Let me look at my suggested topics. OK, I’ve got an easy question for you, if—

OK, go ahead.

And that is: you’re coming into an office that’s been inhabited by somebody that you worked with; are there changes that you decide to make in either structure or staffing, based on your prior knowledge, to accommodate your preferences about how this thing should function?

At USTR?

At USTR.

Generally not. USTR is a great institution, great career staff. I had worked with them not just those four and a half years but some of them I knew back in the ’90s, when I was working on trade before. They were still there. And it’s structured just fine. I brought my own chief of staff, and, not surprisingly, Ron Kirk’s chief of staff left when he left; they were close. But other than that, I didn’t make any major structural changes.

How big is the permanent staff there?

Altogether it’s about 250 people, about maybe 25 political appointees, and the rest are career.

OK, so that upper level you were reasonably satisfied with and didn’t want to make any changes.

Yes, that’s right. Let’s see, I’m trying to think now. There was one deputy who I think was getting ready to leave REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT —That was Miriam Sapiro—but she was leaving of her own volition. She had been there since the beginning. But no, it’s really a very good team there.

And you touched on this a moment ago, but I’ll ask more directly: in your conversations with the President, were there other things that he suggested he would like to see done in a second term on trade that you haven’t already discussed?

No. We went through the agenda of TPP, TTIP, TPA. I mentioned Africa, AGOA, but, again, he set broad direction, and was very happy to let me go off and do my thing. And the way I put it with him—I remember the conversation where I said, with regard to TPP, I felt like I had gotten him into it and that I wanted to make sure that we actually got it done.

Gotcha, OK. And were you able to completely extract yourself from the climate change business when you left, or were there bits and pieces that people would have to come to you occasionally to check in on?

Not really. At that point I had already pulled back, had been going to the COPs. I can’t remember if the Major Economy Forums—They weren’t meeting as regularly by 2012, 2013, I don’t think, less often than they were before. And I had a deputy who stepped into my job, Caroline Atkinson, and she sort of took over that role. Todd was a point of continuity throughout.

Of course, OK.

And he was our lead negotiator there, so no, I didn’t. Ultimately Podesta and Brian Deese stepped in, and they really were driving at the White House.

OK. Did you have conversations with any of your other predecessors about their work as USTR to get a sense about how you might want to style your—?

Yes. It’s a nice group of—There’s a strong alumni group. They have a tradition of getting together for dinner and taking the new ambassador out for dinner, and not everybody was able to make it, but there were half a dozen of them that were there.

In Washington?

In Washington.

You remember where you went?

It was this steakhouse at the W Hotel on 15th Street. I don’t remember what it’s called. But [Robert] Zoellick, Sue Schwab, and Charlene Barshefsky were there—

[Michael] Kantor?

Carla [Anderson Hills]?

Carla was there.

Carla Hills.

Yes.

Mickey Kantor?

They may have organized it around one of his visits to Washington. Mickey was there. [Robert] Portman was not, but Portman was always helpful, giving advice. Bill Brock [III] was getting on in age, and—Oh, shoot, he passed away, the former Ag guy, Clayton Yeutter.

Yes, yes, sure.

Clayton was giving advice.

The first oral history I did when I came back was with him.

Is that right?

Yes.

So, yes, it’s a nice community of people, and it’s quite bipartisan. It’s just an issue that there tends to be a lot of continuity, maybe a little less right now than usual, but—

Actually, the continuity seems to be everybody ganging up on China.

Yes. [laughter] That’s true.

OK. So you gain Ambassador status—

Yes.

—and Cabinet-level status.

Yes.

So therefore do you go to Cabinet meetings?

Yes. There aren’t too many. This is not a Cabinet government, so I think in my three and a half years as USTR I probably went to, I don’t know, eight, ten meetings. That was about it. It was not—

Most of the ones that were called, you went to?

Yes, yes.

There were eight in about three years?

Yes, exactly. It was not a—The President did not manage by Cabinet. The NEC, NSC, but not so much at the Cabinet level. Usually that was more of an opportunity for conveying a message, rather than for resolving any particular issues.

That’s important to know.

Yes.

And is the Cabinet status statutory for USTR, or is this by invitation?

That’s a good question. It is created by statute—I think it might be, unlike—

I guess the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], for example—

UN is often debated back and forth.

UN is debated back and forth.

That’s it.

I don’t think USTR has been debated, so it might be in the statute.

OK. Probably. We should know that—

Yes, that’s a good question.

I think we’ve sort of hit a stopping point.

OK.

Perfect timing.

Often, when we do these interviews, if there’s a leftover portfolio, we break at an odd time and it’s hard to recall where we pick it up, but in this instance I think it works, if you’re amenable. You’re a busy man. You’re making money.

Well, it sounds like you’ve got five years to work it out, is that the—?

I think so. [laughter]

Hopefully we’ll find time within five years.

We’ll do better than that, but we’d love to have you come back down here and do a repeat performance.

When your son is a student.

You never know. You never know.

Parents weekend.

Hopefully before then.

Hopefully.

[END OF INTERVIEW]