O’Neill says he was thankful that he was fired as treasury secretary.
O’Neill served as the Republican Bush’s first Treasury secretary, from January 2001 to December 2002, during a period of in-fighting within the administration and tough economic times worsened by the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the US. He also earned a reputation as a loose cannon as Treasury secretary with comments that at various times infuriated members of Bush’s inner circle, fellow Republicans in Congress, Wall Street, Latin American governments and others.
Regarding Iraq, O’Neill said Bush’s team had decided on a course of war which it then tried to justify by touting the threat posed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.“From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country,” O’Neill said in the 2004 book “The Price of Loyalty” by journalist Ron Suskind.
He dismissed stock, bond and currency traders as “people who sit in front of flickering green screens” whose jobs he could master in “a couple of weeks.” His comment that the administration was not interested in pursuing a strong-dollar policy rattled global currency markets.After college, he began his career in government in 1961, working for the Veterans Administration.