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people in the country on these issues. We decided how to help a president make priorities and how to help a president evaluate programs, and I found that really stimulating and fun. I never considered what I did to be work, even though it took most of my life for that period of time; the days were long and often it was seven days a week. I think, the last two years I was there, I was off both Christmas Days, and that was about it; the rest of the time I was on the line. I was really close to President Ford, and had gotten to know him when he was in the House and then when he became vice president. He loved using the budget as a policy - making tool almost as much as I loved working with him on it. It was really a fondness for the person and a great respect for his intellect about issues of priority setting the budget that made me really close to President Ford.

Q: What presidents have you served under?

Paul O ’ Neill: When I fi rst came to Washington, John Kennedy was the president, and honestly part of the reason I came here is that I really liked the idea of doing something that ’ s bigger than an individual person. But when I came I was a management intern —

I was so far out in the woods that the only time I ever got to see John Kennedy was when I was a prop and came to stand in the Rotary Drive in front of the White House when they had foreign visitors and they needed people to fi ll up the driveway. Then when I moved to the Offi ce of Management and Budget (which was still the Bureau of the Budget) Lyndon Johnson was president. I got to see the president on a fairly regular basis; I was still far away from him, but a lot closer than I had been as a management intern.

When Richard Nixon became president, I was in the upper reaches of civil service. Richard Nathan, who was recruited to be c16.indd 206

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a political overseer for the human resources part of the Offi ce of Management and Budget, selected me early on in the Nixon administration to be the point person on a lot of important Nixon initiatives, including a welfare reform. So I would go to all of the cabinet - level meetings and take endless copious notes and learn what Arthur Burns and George Shultz and Pat Moynihan and people like that thought about issues and how they expressed themselves . . . which I really found enormously valuable. It was during that time I got to really know the higher levels of a White House staff, including Nixon. I was really involved in the policy analysis and recommendations of the president about virtually everything in the government.

When Nixon left and Ford became president, he viewed the budget as a principal tool for making all kinds of policy, and myself, and the other people who were in the upper reaches of the Offi ce of Management and Budget, spent enormous amounts of time with the president in his offi ce or in the Cabinet room, going through every option for every program in the federal government, national defense, intelligence, every aspect of human resources and community development, and every aspect of how we raised money to pay for the things that we want. It was a time of great closeness, and he loved the idea that I knew a lot about the budget; in fact, he was fond of telling people that the only person who knew more about the budget than he did was me, which was a great fl attery.

Q: Would you say that President Ford was more closely involved in budgetary matters than any other president?

Paul O ’ Neill: The way to compare President Ford ’ s involvement in the budget is to look back over the years. At OMB, we had people who ’ d been around for a long time, and we believed that the only person in modern history who knew more about the programs and policies that are incorporated in the federal budget at a level on par with President Ford was Harry Truman. They were the only two presidents who were capable of holding a press conference with hundreds of people from the media and basically answering c16.indd 207

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