# William McChesney Martin **Status: stub — expand.** The longest-serving chair of the [[Federal Reserve]], **April 2, 1951 to January 31, 1970**, under five presidents from [[Harry S. Truman]] to [[Richard Nixon]]. As an assistant Treasury secretary he helped negotiate the [[Treasury-Fed Accord]] that ended the wartime interest-rate peg — then, as chair, defended the independence the Accord created. His October 19, 1955 speech supplied the canonical line for countercyclical policy: the Fed's job is "to take away the punch bowl just when the party was really warming up" (he attributed it to "one writer"). On December 3, 1965 the Board voted 4–3 to raise the discount rate from 4% to 4.5% against the wishes of [[Lyndon B. Johnson]], who summoned Martin to his Texas ranch two days later: "You've got me in a position where you can run a rapier into me and you've done it." The more colorful versions of that meeting — a shove, a line about "boys dying in Vietnam" — are secondhand. Martin won that confrontation but presided over the rising inflation of the late 1960s. ## See also - [[Interest Rate Policy Timeline]] · [[Central Bank Independence]] · [[Arthur Burns]]