Robert Reich wrote and directed his first play in the ninth grade, and since then he has seldom strayed from the footlights: as a 26-year-old lawyer arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court; as a popular lecturer in political economy at Harvard; as a best-selling and prolific author and essayist, television commentator and corporate consultant. Built like a jockey (4 ft. 10 in. and wiry) and bursting with humor and energy, Reich could always attract and hold an audience, even when playing honky-tonk piano for friends on weekends. And for the past 24 years, he has won some of his loudest applause from a friend named Bill Clinton, who campaigned for the White House on an economic plan framed around Reich's ideas for creating good American jobs in the new global economy.
Clinton's election to the presidency offers Reich the biggest stage yet on which to audition both his ideas and his clever showmanship. The President- elect last week summoned Reich from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Little Rock, Arkansas, to lead the transition team that will help him choose his economic personnel, organization and policies. In an interview Reich insisted that it would be "wrong to presume" that he would have any position in the new Administration. But other Clinton advisers fully expect that the new President will want Reich -- probably as domestic-policy adviser or head of a new Economic Security Council.
Clinton and Reich met on an ocean liner in 1968, when they were on their way to study at Oxford University as Rhodes scholars. They grew closer after Reich, miserably seasick, opened his stateroom door to find Clinton standing there with chicken soup and crackers, determined to nurse him back to health. Ever since, the two, along with mutual friends from Oxford, have participated in an on-and-off, two-decade "conversation" about how America and its economy should be governed. "Bill has had all of my books inflicted on him," Reich says, "and has done me the honor of actually reading and commenting on them."
Reich's latest book, The Work of Nations, published last year, was particularly influential on Clinton and other Democrats who wanted not only to divide the economic pie more equitably but also to get the pie growing again. In a reversal from his earlier writings, which favored federal aid to emerging industries, Reich now writes that in the new global economy -- where capital, factories and technology move freely across international borders -- it makes little sense for Washington to aid particular industries or to shower tax breaks on wealthy investors. Businesses only take their government favors and use them in countries where labor is cheaper or where stock-market returns are more attractive.