For the last 25 years or so, Robert E. Rubin, a former co-senior partner at Goldman Sachs when it was a private partnership, has played an inordinately important role in Washington. Some of his extraordinary influence has been overt, as when he served President Clinton as head of the National Economic Council and then as Treasury secretary, and some of it has been subtler but no less significant. For instance, his fingerprints are all over the Obama administration’s cabinet and its economic team: Timothy F. Geithner, Lawrence H. Summers, Peter R. Orszag, Gene B. Sperling, Jason Furman, Jacob J. Lew, Michael Froman and Sylvia Mathews Burwell at one time or another have had — or still have — close ties to Mr. Rubin.
At 76, from his twin perches at the Council on Foreign Relations, of which he is co-chairman, and at the Brookings Institution, where he founded the Hamilton Project, he remains a crucial kingmaker in Democratic policy circles and, as an adviser to the Clintons, Mr. Rubin will play an essential role in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, should she decide to run.
And that, among other reasons, is what makes so important and revealing the recent release of an interview Mr. Rubin gave nine years ago to the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project under the auspices of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The project, an oral history, is a collection of more than 70 interviews with former Clinton cabinet secretaries, White House advisers and others starting in 2001. The interview with Mr. Rubin took place in New York on Nov. 3, 2005, when he was a senior executive at Citigroup, where he went after leaving the Treasury Department. A transcript of the Rubin interview was released at the end of last week.
Mr. Rubin has always been exceedingly cautious about which statements are attributed to him publicly. I know this from interviews I have conducted with him over the years, first for a profile I wrote in Vanity Fair in 2009 about Mr. Summers, his protégé and successor at Treasury, and then for the interviews he gave me — only reluctantly, I might add — for my 2011 book about Goldman. He declined to participate in a cover article I wrote about him in September 2012 for Bloomberg Businessweek. One can only imagine what the ground rules were for Mr. Rubin’s interview with the Miller Center. In any event, two copy editors worked on the transcript; one of them, Jane Rafal Wilson, had responsibility for the “final edit.”
Accordingly, there are no bombshells. But the interview has many interesting insights about Mr. Rubin himself, and about the Clintons, making it required reading for those looking for yet another window into the thoughts of the rich and powerful. For instance, Mr. Rubin confided that in planning meetings after the 1992 election but before the inauguration, Mr. Clinton joked that he was “the leader of the free world,” to which Mr. Rubin responded, “That’s nice, Mr. President.” Mr. Rubin, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, said, “There are very few issues in life I can think of that I would go to the Harvard Business School for advice on.”
He explained how the key to getting the National Economic Council — the new White House organization that Mr. Clinton created specifically for Mr. Rubin to lead — to work effectively was “to try to think of each cabinet member as a client. Then what you had to try to do was to function in such a way that they felt they were better off with it than without it.” He touched briefly on how an unidentified Republican congressman from Florida called him “a thief” and how Gerald B. Solomon, a Republican from upstate New York and the chairman of the House Rules Committee, threatened to impeach him when he was Treasury secretary after he borrowed money from civil servant trust funds to continue to pay the federal government’s bills during the 1996 budget showdown with Newt Gingrich, the House speaker.
Mr. Rubin also shared how his predecessor at Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, the former Texas senator, had handpicked Mr. Rubin to succeed him but was afraid Mr. Rubin might leave Washington before him. Mr. Rubin said he found life in Washington “very stressful” and figured he would leave after two years. Mr. Bentsen visited Mr. Rubin at the White House to tell him about his departure before he told Mr. Clinton. “Don’t tell anybody,” Mr. Bentsen told Mr. Rubin, “I haven’t spoken to the president yet. I’m going to leave. I want to tell you now so you don’t decide to leave before I do, because you’re my way out.” (It is worth noting that the interview with Mr. Rubin took place about a year before the onset of the financial crisis, so there were no questions related to that or his role, when he was in the executive suite at Citigroup, in bringing it about.)
Asked why he was a Democrat — he was a former senior partner of Goldman, after all, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars — Mr. Rubin explained that his grandfather ran “the most powerful political club” in Brooklyn, was a delegate to the 1936 Democratic Convention, and then added, “I’m in more of an eclectic position than most folks.”
“I could have been a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, a centrist in either one, except if I look at where I am and then look at the people who are left on the spectrum, I relate to their values and the things that concern them,” he said. “There are a number of areas where I don’t agree with them,” he added, but he does align with “their concern for the poor and their concern for having a society that works for everybody instead of just for a few, the notion that you can’t put people out on their own to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and you have a society that helps people when they need it.”
Mr. Rubin was impressed by how “quick a study” Mr. Clinton was about nearly every subject and about his keen grasp of the capital markets even though he had never worked on Wall Street. “He had a good intellectual understanding of it, an exceptional understanding, but less of a feel than somebody who’d been there and had done it,” Mr. Rubin explained. “I’m not sure that ever mattered, because if you were saying something to him, you would say, ‘Mr. President, I think we can do this to help promote confidence and confidence will help in this respect,’ like the Asian crisis or Mexico, whatever. He would ask questions and would need to understand what it was that we needed to do.”
Mr. Rubin also said Mr. Clinton “had a good feel for people” and recognized who would be able to work well together. He was impressed that Mr. Rubin, even though he had run Goldman, did not always feel the need to bring everything himself to the president’s attention and could work within established lines of authority.
Mr. Rubin said that during the heady days after the 1992 election, Mr. Clinton asked him what he thought about the idea of Hillary Clinton leading the effort to reform health care. He told Mr. Clinton he thought it would be “terrific” and added, “I didn’t know Hillary very well at the time, but she struck me as being smart. The little bit I’d seen of her I liked her. She was very sensible, but I didn’t know her that well. I thought it was a terrific idea. In retrospect, it obviously wasn’t, but I didn’t know enough to know. Two years later I would have given, I think, very different advice.”
At the end of the conversation, Mr. Rubin said that he was unlikely to return to Washington anytime soon. He joked that it was more likely he would end up in Guantánamo, and if he did, he wanted “a water view.” Still, he seemed to relish his time serving Mr. Clinton. “It’s an amazing experience to have, not only because you can do things that you care about, which I did and it was good, but you also see the world in such a different way,” he said.
“You see how our society functions from the intersection point of policy and politics and message and media, all those things together. A lot of it is policy, communication, message, media. I said to Steve Friedman” — his close friend and co-senior partner with him at Goldman, who was the head of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush — “before he went down there, ‘Steve, if you do this, you’ll never read a newspaper article again about an administration or read a book and see it the same way. You’ll see it through a different prism.’ It is a remarkable experience to have, but I wouldn’t do it again. Nobody’s asked me to do it, so it’s academic, but I’m just saying.” Time will tell whether that statement proves to be true.