but i was chosen by the campaign and the bipartisan commission on presidential debates and i covered clinton and george h. w. bush for eight years and i knew him very well and if they approved of my being fell moderator. it was very scary to me because it was a town hall format and we had not had one of those before. they were panels of reporters asking questions of the candidates. there were no film site could go back to look at to see how you do this. so it was on the job training buy i was seen by 91 million people. i go overseas and people still remember me because they were watching. their bread soup to was sole the director could spot me and a crowd. of buy was in a dark suits and like the candidates that would be hard. i do love red and they asked me. >> host: 1996 was the year that you felt things started to go south that abc tell me about that time. >> guest: do you want to make me cry again? >> host: we have to issue. >> guest: you are trying to make me cry. there were two people at abc that i think began to put the knife into me. one of them was a white woman who was executive pro

themselves from the exercise, the greens and intellectual work are not a letter to become magical but clinton cannot get alzheimer's. but one of the thing about it that is so tragic and when you think the risk of it doubles and a free fight your period over 65 and that half of people who are over 85 have dementia of which alzheimer's is a leading cause. my partner when he was sort of in the middle stages when he could still do some things but not others i remember him turning to me on the crosstown bus and say i feel it somewhere inside me is the person i really am. the person i was before, but he said i can't find. i can't talk to him. if there was ever a definition of what happened in the dying brain of a person with alzheimer's that is it. and you understand what this means and also understand how tragic this false hope is and i have to say one of the things that particularly enrages me for the ads for the so-called memory pills. i won't mention the brand names but you know what they are, helping dad be more like himself, which by the way we also found to be basically to have affected all

president, except for us and clinton, who ran more than one budget surplus. so the fed did not have a lot of deficits to finance and it didn't finance them. >> chairman volcker, in terms of the policies and the 1950s, two aspects, and direction of monetary policy and fiscal policy. that is, the budget surplus makes it easier for a central banker and second, the the transparency or opaqueness of the descriptions of monetary policy by monetary policy may curse. any comments about the 50s? >> let me go back a little earlier than the 1950s because i was an undergraduate in the late 1940s and i wrote my undergraduate thesis on the federal reserve. i kind of forgot everything i should have but i went back and somebody -- in fact i went back to teaching and they quoted something in my final chapter. the federal reserve doesn't do a better job than they been doing recently they have no reason to be independent. and that was back in the days when they were holding interest rates in a fixed pattern at the behest of mr. truman and the treasury and that started in the 19

actually recollected for me how and president clinton spoke he talked about wishing he had done welfare reform prior to doing health care. and i think what we see in both of these examples is both of these presidents thinking and believing that perhaps the more partisan issues would have been easier if they had had a bipartisan base on which to work. >> host: julian zelizer, can senator henry craig, harry reid, bob byrd affect a presidency? >> guest: absolutely. i think, you know, every president learns from the perspective of the white house, capitol hill looks pretty powerful, much more than it does on the campaign trail. i think as senate majority leader speaker and an older year of committee chairs have enormous power. you know, president john f. kennedy, when he came in office, one of the people he was worried about was wilbur mill, was the chairman of the house ways and means committee and before a famous camel control some of the most powerful issues, medicare for 65, social security. before that, taxation. and kennedy said cohen also chairman before he got here. also the chairma