By David Harrison 

Transcripts of more than 50 interviews with top Federal Reserve officials and staffers offer an inside view of central bank-operations over the past 50 years, including internal debates and pressures from the White House.

Among the documents released Friday are interviews with former Fed leaders Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Janet Yellen as part of an oral history project in advance of the central bank's centennial in 2013.

The officials talked about their approaches to the job and the challenges they faced as central-bank bosses.

Mr. Greenspan, who led the Fed from 1987 to 2006, described efforts by the Nixon administration in 1971 to get former Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to relax his efforts to temper inflation.

Mr. Greenspan, who considered Mr. Burns his mentor, said he got a call from Charles Colson, a Nixon adviser, telling him the president wanted Mr. Greenspan to urge Mr. Burns to drop his focus on fighting inflation.

"I said, 'Chuck, I understand there is a telephone on the desk of the President and one on the desk of Arthur Burns. I would suggest they might talk to each other.' And Chuck said, 'You don't understand. Nixon will not speak to Burns,'" Mr. Greenspan recalled in a June 2009 interview.

Historians since have written that Mr. Nixon pressured Mr. Burns to adopt looser monetary policy before the 1972 election to help Mr. Nixon's campaign. Mr. Greenspan said he didn't believe Mr. Burns was influenced by Mr. Nixon.

"In fact, it's so alien to my view of what Burns would do that when he said that was not what was happening, I have no question that his view of events was the accurate one," he said.

In July 2008, Mr. Volcker also recalled a White House meeting, outlined in his recent book, with President Reagan and then-White House Chief of Staff James Baker, where Mr. Baker pressured him not to raise interest rates ahead of the 1984 election.

Mr. Volcker, who led the Fed from 1979 to 1987, said he realized the president always supported him -- even if it didn't seem that way at the time.

"It is true that he never criticized me or the Federal Reserve, and, as sure as I'm sitting here, his staff was telling him to criticize us, particularly when things were getting tough in 1981 and 1982," said Mr. Volcker, who raised interest rates into double digits to curb high inflation, contributing to a recession. "He had every reason to criticize us openly, but he never did. There were these anonymous things from the White House. But it never came out from the mouth of the president, which I think was not insignificant."

Laurence Meyer, who served on the Fed board from 1996 to 2002, said in an October 2010 interview that he suspected during his interview with President Clinton that he had been picked to balance Mr. Greenspan. The Fed chairman "was thought to be too hawkish," or supportive of higher interest rates, Mr. Meyer said. "I was supposed to be a counterweight, the person who was more dovish," or supportive of lower rates, he said.

Mr. Clinton didn't explicitly say so, Mr. Meyer recalled, "but it was obvious."

Mr. Meyer's recollection echoes the current debate over President Trump's stated intention to nominate Stephen Moore and Herman Cain to the Fed's board of governors. Trump administration officials have said the picks are intended to balance the views of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Mr. Trump has criticized for raising interest rates.

Despite his reputation as an advocate for easier monetary policy, Mr. Meyer described going to Mr. Greenspan alongside Ms. Yellen in 1996 to urge the chairman to raise interest rates to prevent strong economic growth from fueling excessive inflation.

"Our visit had very little influence on him," he recalled.

Ms. Yellen, recalling the encounter in a 2012 interview, said she eventually decided that she was wrong to call for higher interest rates.

"It turned out that Greenspan was quite right that inflation wasn't going to be a problem and I was wrong, looking back on it," she said. "He recognized that productivity growth had risen and that was working to contain cost pressures."

--Kate Davidson, Harriet Torry and Sarah Chaney contributed to this article.

Write to David Harrison at david.harrison@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 12, 2019 18:01 ET (22:01 GMT)