Greenspan speaks frankly about past presidents

NEW YORK – Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman whose every vague word financial markets hung on for decades, finally feels he can be frank. In a new book, he has choice words about his former White House bosses and comes clean about his “Fedspeak.”

Interviewed at a bookseller convention Friday in New York by his wife, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, Greenspan had kind words for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, but described Richard Nixon as being “scary” and having “a split personality.” He also said he was deliberately cryptic when heading the U.S. central bank to keep from jolting markets.

Greenspan, 81, said he wrote “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World” in longhand in the bathtub – an old habit after a back injury years ago. His goal, he said, was “to see if I could figure out why sometimes things turned out exactly the way I expected, sometimes ridiculously wrong.”

The book, to be published in September, focuses on his years at the helm of the Fed. Greenspan said he became eloquent in what he terms “Fedspeak” because he learned that “certain answers – no matter how you phrase them, no matter what you do – have market effects.”

But in response to questions from Mitchell, he offered an uncharacteristically blunt report card on the presidents he knew and worked for: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He didn’t comment on the current President Bush.

In working with Nixon during his candidacy, Greenspan said he realized “I was dealing with a split personality. It was fascinating to watch, but very scary.” And he reveals why he ultimately did not join Nixon’s White House: “I was very uncomfortable with him,” he said.

Of Reagan, who appointed him to the Fed in 1987, Greenspan said, “People thought of him in many respects as a dunce. He wasn’t.” Yet, Greenspan said it was difficult to brief Reagan on the details of monetary policy because the president had a fundamental economic philosophy and wasn’t going to stray from it.

Of interest to the traders who still hang on his every word more than a year after he retired as Fed chairman, Greenspan said his book’s final chapter will use events of the past to frame his outlook for the future.

He told Mitchell that he expects new leaders in France, Germany and Britain to “mold a new Europe, which is going to start to move in a more vibrant way than it has in recent years.” He also briefly touched on interest rates, saying that interest rates are low in the U.S., but they are low all over the world.