Take It Outside, Boys

Why Bush fired his feuding economic advisers--and what he plans to pitch next

It was Dick Cheney, a friend from their days together in the trenches of the Ford Administration, who lured Paul O'Neill from the executive suite at Alcoa and persuaded him to become George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan loved the choice, the Vice President boasted in private two Decembers ago--and surely what made Greenspan happy would tickle the markets too. Except it didn't work out that way. A respected executive whose blunt talk the President at first found refreshing, O'Neill never emerged as a persuasive advocate for the Administration's economic policy--in part because he never accepted its...

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