Book Tour Video & Audio Highlights

Published on 25 November 2009 by in

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VIDEO

The National Constitution Center
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Charlie Rose
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Zocolo
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Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics
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Miami Book Fair International
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Kepler’s Books and Magazines
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AUDIO

9.28.09: Fresh Air with Terry Gross
Sharing Secrets In ‘The Clinton Tapes’

Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Taylor Branch: Journalism allowed trivialization of public debate
Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy

Journalism allowed trivialism of public debate

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Where the News Comes From

Published on 25 November 2009 by in

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Walking back a single day’s top stories.

By Jeff VanDam
October 18, 2009

Walking back a single day's top stories

Walking back a single day's top stories

Over the past year, there has been much talk about the future of traditional news organizations. While the Internet has made disseminating, discussing, and riffing on news much less costly, the reporting of news—the bringing of new facts to bear on a story—remains very expensive, and it’s not clear that a financial model still exists to support it. Faced with evaporating advertising revenues, the Tribune Company (owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) filed for bankruptcy in late 2008, followed by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s parent, and the Journal Register Company, which at the time owned twenty daily papers and 159 non-daily papers in the northeast. In January, the New York Times negotiated a $250 million loan—at unfavorable terms—from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in order to shore up its cash flow.

The question being hashed out on journalism blogs and over power lunches at Michael’s is how much this matters. Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, has spent considerable energy justifying his employer’s existence to a contrarian chorus of “new media” bloggers—and even some longtime print journalists. In The Atlantic in January, Michael Hirschorn concluded his article on the possible death of the Times by saying it would be “a severe blow to American journalism” but perhaps not a disaster. The writer Jeff Jarvis has argued that newspapers could be replaced, at no substantial cost to society, by “an ecosystem made up of many players” including hyperlocal blogs and nonprofit newsrooms. This summer, a couple of news junkies deprived themselves of newspapers for three days and blogged about the experience on Slate. They survived.

“Society doesn’t need newspapers,” wrote Clay Shirky in a widely read blog post this March. “What we need is journalism.” Shirky was trying to shift the conversation from the fate of particular institutions to the project of original reporting. But who does in fact break news? Where do previously unknown twists to a story come from? Rather than exploring the question rhetorically, we decided to conduct a little experiment. We took a random Monday— September 21, 2009—and gathered all the news that was reported that day from 84 news sources across the spectrum, including sixteen major papers; thirteen magazines; many prominent network, cable, and radio news shows; and eighteen news-focused websites. Then we chose seven stories and set out to determine who was responsible for the individual pieces of original reporting that advanced each one.

Much of that day’s news cycle was spent digesting events that happened in plain sight. Obama had just been on a record five Sunday talk shows. The Emmys had aired the night before. The Dallas Cowboys had debuted their new stadium. Somewhere (everywhere?) a press conference was taking place about something. And, of course, much of the commentary had to do with new ideas or opinions rather than new facts; Obama’s criticism of cable television’s “rude and outrageous” rhetoric on the talk shows, for instance, prompted hundreds of responses that day on whether impertinence was on the rise. But the biggest news of the day was, it turns out, driven by a classic big-paper scoop: Bob Woodward had gotten his hands on General Stanley McChrystal’s confidential assessment of possible “mission failure” in Afghanistan and had written about it in the Washington Post. Politics junkies, meanwhile, were focused on a Times scoop from the weekend—that the White House was trying to push David Paterson out of the New York governor’s race.

The day was filled with slight revelations and rolling chatter in ongoing stories—the cause of Michael Jackson’s death, the disputed gender of South African runner Caster Semenya—and many of the stories we traced back relied on a wide variety of newsgathering sources. The ACORN videotape scandal was not only driven by online news and radio troublemakers, it was created by one, as the filmmaker James O’Keefe teamed up with Andrew Breitbart, a Drudge Report protégé who launched a site where the film would be hosted. In the case of the murder of Yale student Annie Le, details of the crime and its investigation were picked up by national media after local sources (including the Yale Daily News) uncovered them. The question of whether John Edwards fathered a child with Rielle Hunter had been pursued relentlessly by the National Enquirer, hardly the most Establishment title that comes to mind, but it was the exhaustive article the Times ran the day before that legitimized the story and drove the coverage on September 21. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day: It took fourteen years—and the upcoming publication of a book on the Clinton presidency—to report the fact that Boris Yeltsin had roamed Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear looking for pizza.

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A behind-the-scenes anecdote from 2000 helps explain how the cynical media got everything wrong about the Clintons

Joan Walsh, Salon.com
Oct. 24, 2009

Salon.comAfter a week of traveling, I finally finished “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch’s book of interviews with Bill Clinton. So better late than never, I hope, I’m going to wrap up my experiment with the blog-review. Tell me if it worked in comments, below.

I had a nagging question about whether I should write about the book again, though, and it wasn’t laziness; it’s that most everything I found remarkable in the second half of the book closely matched my first two blog posts. But that’s a story in itself. “The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever — and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000.

But I did find a nugget from the second half of the book that perfectly captures the whole poisonous, deluded, clubby Beltway mentality of the mainstream media circa 2000. It stars the late Tim Russert.

Branch recounts being the lone Clinton defender on one of the last “Meet the Press” shows of Clinton’s term, when all the other guests were still obsessed with the president’s sex life. It was bad enough on camera, but during commercial breaks Russert and his friends gossiped about alleged new Clinton girlfriends and sang the 2000 one-hit wonder “Who let the dogs out?” tapping their pencil along to the woof-woof chorus. (I don’t believe in hell, but I think Russert spent some time in a way station in Purgatory being grilled on his poor political judgment during the Clinton-Gore years, before being welcomed to heaven by a God more forgiving than the Beltway mediocrities who sat in judgment on Clinton.)

It’s always seemed to me no accident that the mainstream media began to lose its market share, its revenues and its respect in those years, when they slighted an embattled president’s worthy if controversial initiatives on Middle East peace, Bosnia, welfare reform, making work pay and building a U.S. social democracy, in favor of gossip about his character, his marriage, his taste in women and even the distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis.

Against this historical backdrop of childish media snickering, the sharp, accomplished Branch comes off as a naif and even a rube in some of his stories, consistently flummoxed by the enmity among Washington media players, some of them his friends, as they savaged Clinton beyond proportion. He writes, bewildered, about a spate of vicious headlines at the end of 1996: The Times’ Abe Rosenthal accused the Clintons of “giving militant Islam its first beachhead in Bosnia,” while Maureen Dowd dubbed Clinton the trivia-obsessed “President Pothole” and the “Limbo President,” sinking ever lower. For good measure she added: “We pretty much know the Clintons did something wrong in Whitewater,” when in fact, 12 years later, we know no such thing. Wen Ho Lee at least got an apology from the Times; the Clintons are still waiting. (Clark Hoyt, is it too late to take that factual error up with Dowd?)

But it wasn’t just the Times: Branch also lays out Washington Post embarrassments; an Op-Ed by Andrew Sullivan headlined “The Clintons: Not a Flicker of Moral Life”; a declaration by liberal book critic Jonathan Yardley — a friend and neighbor of Branch’s — that he wouldn’t vote for Clinton in 1996 because he was a “buffoon” with a monstrous fault “at the core of his being … He is a man who does not believe in anything.” One of my favorite sections of the book features Hillary Clinton sitting in her kitchen explaining why, no, thank you, she is never going to invite the vicious Sally Quinn into her house — and why should she, given Quinn’s multiple treacherous, class-based takedowns of the Clintons as neighbors, leaders, parents, Americans? (The scenes Branch catches of Hillary in the kitchen — not baking cookies, but having a glass of wine, helping Chelsea with homework and savaging their enemies with intelligence are among my favorite in this book.) You find yourself wishing and hoping Branch could find some Washington pooh-bahs who’d realize they’d been played by the Republicans. Nope. None at all.

A few other things are painful. The Clinton-Gore fight much referenced in coverage of the book is hard to read; on some level, they were both right. I’ve had this argument with liberal anti-Clinton friends, reporters and pollsters, who say Gore was perceptibly politically hurt by anti-Clinton animus among independents. On the other hand, my gut always told me he’d lose if he couldn’t run on the Clinton-Gore economic resurgence. I still think Gore could have found a lot of ways, humorous or angry, to distance himself from the president’s mistakes — and Clinton expected him to, and didn’t care if he did. But choosing Joe Lieberman and running like an anti-Clinton change candidate was a huge error.

Clinton also had George W. Bush’s number from the beginning — that the snarly scion was mean, arrogant, incurious, devoted to budget-busting tax cuts and greater state secrecy. Clinton fumed at the way the GOP, abetted by the media, worked the refs when it came to “dirty politics” all throughout the 2000 campaign. If Gore or his surrogates brought up, say, Dick Cheney’s überconservative past, or Bush’s inexperience in foreign affairs, they’d be trashed as practicing “old politics” and “politics as usual” and the typical partisan gridlock that Bush was committed (falsely) to transcending. So genuine policy differences and scandalous omissions and commissions in both Republicans’ backgrounds went mostly unexamined, because at the Republicans’ behest, the media decided that to focus on such issues was just backward-looking and gauche and so … 1998.

It’s painful to read those last months in 2000, as the Supreme Court makes Bush president, to Clinton’s anger but not surprise, and Clinton cleans out his bookshelves. I do think Branch is a little easy on the self-pitying president when it comes to some of the pardons, including Marc Rich. But he reminds us how many anti-Clinton lies the media swallowed whole, in a great final orgy of anti-Clintonism, especially the vandal scandal that wasn’t (Salon debunked it quickly).

I enjoyed the book, even though I think it got bogged down in its commitment to chronology, and depicting what Clinton talked about and thought was important. I’d have loved to read a book Branch organized by the topics he thought were most important, chronologically or not. We dip into too many topics — Bosnia, Russia, terror, the economy, Clinton’s relationships with global leaders, sometimes for no more than a sentence. It captures the sweep of what a president faces, but it was also, sometimes, tedious.

But I appreciated Branch’s honestly about his friendship with Clinton, his struggles to balance being an uncritical sounding board with a friend wanting to give advice (and a political junkie wanting to influence history!). I found his explanation of his different roles endearing; others may find it distracting.

I really liked him for staying close to his original point: Clinton was a man Branch was cynical about, an old friend turned politician whom Branch came to like more upon reacquaintance, a political operator who turned out to have more passion and integrity than many journalists or authors or activists or others who believe they’ve stayed “clean.” As someone who’s criticized Bill Clinton often but who always comes back to a position of (even grudging) respect, I found integrity in Branch’s full-throated defense of Clinton; it’s so rare and maybe long overdue. I still think the book will need the next Taylor Branch to pore over it like a historian, not a partisan or a friend, and help us get more clarity on this talented, ambitious, well-meaning, flawed, persecuted, paranoid merely mortal man. The most compelling story Branch captures is the way the media let us down.

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Did Bubba’s Tapes Break the Law?

Published on 18 October 2009 by in

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October 11, 2009
by Michael Smerconish

The Daily BeastBill Clinton never told Ken Starr about his secret Taylor Branch tapes, a source tells Michael Smerconish. Was that legal? Ex-prosecutors will dig through old records to figure that out.

The lawyer in me had two recurring questions while reading all 668 pages of Taylor Branch’s new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.

How were the many interviews that gave rise to this tome able to be kept secret from all but a few Clinton confidants, and were the tapes of those interviews made known to the many investigators who looked into the Clinton presidency? The first of those questions is a matter of personal fascination over the ability to keep secrets in a fishbowl environment. The second raises a more serious legal question.

Having promulgated more than my fair share of subpoenas while in private practice, I find it hard to believe that no inquiry from an outside lawyer to President Clinton triggered a requirement to reveal the tapes.

Recall that President Clinton didn’t have an exemplary record for veracity when responding to legal discovery. His impeachment, suspension from the Arkansas bar and resignation from bar of the U.S. Supreme Court each arose from false testimony he offered in the Paula Jones case. And now comes the question of whether he again failed to fulfill an obligation to produce information.

The Clinton Tapes is fascinating for its context. Branch knew Bill Clinton when they worked together on George McGovern’s 1972 campaign before going their separate ways. Clinton pursued elective office; Branch earned a Pulitzer Prize. They reunited in the days before the president’s inauguration, when Clinton sought Branch’s advice on how best to preserve a record of his impending presidency.

A new chapter in their relationship thus ensued wherein Branch would travel, mostly on short notice, from his home in Baltimore to the White House. There he would set up two tape recorders in the residential quarter and interview President Clinton on all aspects of his presidency. Branch would then surrender the tapes to the president, who would store them in his sock drawer. The author, meanwhile, would record his own observations while en route home to Baltimore. This went on for 79 occasions covering the duration of both Clinton terms. Branch’s tapes are the source of his new book—Clinton maintained possession of the tapes they produced together and Branch did not hear them.

In The Clinton Tapes, we find Bill Clinton—sometimes eating dinner, doing a crossword puzzle, watching a ballgame, helping Chelsea with homework, responding to Hillary, and fielding calls from Congress—all while answering Branch’s questions about every issue of importance.

Those issues included the controversy over the White House travel office, Vince Foster’s death, Whitewater, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky. Each of those matters was investigated. Subpoenas were a staple of the Clinton years.

Sporadically in The Clinton Tapes, Branch addresses the conundrum posed by recording the sitting president and the need to avoid certain subjects because of investigations. Still, their conversation continued, and one suspects that the likes of Ken Starr would have salivated upon knowledge of their occurrence.

Typical is the passage on page 143:

“‘By the way,’ said [Lloyd] Cutler, ‘are you the president’s diarist?’ His question struck me dumb. He was nodding already, as though I need not bother to lie. Cutler said the Whitewater special prosecutor had subpoenaed a broad range of materials on specified topics, and he had a professional duty to seek disclosure of all responsive items in the president’s knowledge or possession. This plunged me into nightmares of imminent exposure and ruin for the project. The president and I did talk from time to time, I replied evasively. Cutler should direct his specific question to Clinton himself, I said, but it would be a great loss to history if legal threats precluded any compilation of presidential notes.”

And this, from page 156:

“Then he [Clinton] said [David] Kendall had found out somehow about our history tapes—probably from Lloyd Cutler—and would be calling me about the special prosecutor’s subpoena. Did my notes indicate which tapes had ‘substantive’ remarks about Whitewater or the death of Vince Foster? He said Kendall may insist on listening to some of them. We sagged into a dozen ominous questions. If leaks from a legal submission revealed the existence of his diary, Clinton feared that Congress would demand all the tapes.”

On page 172:

“Only a few nights earlier, Clinton explained, he had taken David Kendall down to the Lincoln Bedroom so the lawyer could listen to selected tapes. Kendall worked there alone, making his own little transcripts, which he was incorporating into Clinton’s response to the subpoena from Special Prosecutor Fiske. The exposure would be nerve-racking, but we agree that Kendall’s punctilious compliance was wise. Without it, the tapes would become legally tainted. He would never have been able to open them for historical research without inviting charges that he should have surrendered the Whitewater comments under subpoena. Evasion or suppression would defeat our whole purpose. Instead we had to take our chances with disclosure.”

And, on page 511: “Gingerly I asked if he [Clinton] wanted to discuss Lewinsky on tape. He said yes.”

The reader of The Clinton Tapes is left believing that the tapes themselves were never produced, something Branch himself believes.

“I’m virtually certain that they were not. I don’t know, but what I’m saying is that David Kendall answered some subpoenas for material in the president’s possession and he listened to the tapes and I’m sure responded,” he told me when we spoke last week.

“But my guess is that he did it in a way that he didn’t tip off that these were from this larger enterprise, didn’t say this is from a tape recording, that he did it in a way that didn’t telegraph where it came from and maybe concealed it with a lot of other information, things that Clinton told him or whatever, so that the special counsel’s office never filed a subpoena saying, ‘Is there a tape project there involving Taylor Branch talking? Give us all the tapes, we want to listen.’ That was our dread.”

Having promulgated more than my fair share of subpoenas while in private practice, I find it hard to believe that no inquiry from an outside lawyer to President Clinton triggered a requirement to reveal the tapes. Subpoenas cast a very wide net for information that might be relevant to an investigation. And if their existence had been revealed, common sense dictates that there would have been a very public legal battle regarding their production.

Ken Starr won’t speak on the subject, at least not to me. His office said he was finished speaking about Clinton investigations. When I reached Robert Fiske, special prosecutor before Starr was appointed, he said he’d have to go back to his files before determining if the tapes should have been produced. David Kendall didn’t respond to my requests for comment.

But a source of mine—nobody named here—with knowledge of several aspects of the Starr investigation confirmed that the tapes were never provided, nor did investigators know of their existence.

Joseph diGenova, himself a former independent counsel and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, told me the tapes contain “precisely the types of pieces of information that would be covered ordinarily by the language of a subpoena.” Moreover, they weren’t covered by attorney-client privilege, since Branch is a journalist. Nor could Branch claim any reportorial privilege since he was never asked about them. DiGenova also notes that the president—not Branch—was in possession of the tapes.

“One of the first things I thought of was, who had these tapes and were they ever produced to any of the investigations?” diGenova told me. “And I can only conclude at this point that they were not, because there appears to be no record of them in any of the investigations that I’m aware of.”

There is no way for an outside observer to know whether President Clinton was required to produce information that instead stayed in his sock drawer, but my legal instincts tell me that any number of attorneys who investigated the former president are requesting old files from storage to see how they worded their subpoenas.

Michael Smerconish is a nationally syndicated radio host. His latest book, Instinct: The Man Who Stopped the 20th Hijacker, was published last month.

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Q&A with Taylor Branch

Published on 18 October 2009 by in

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Gerard Matthews
Published 10/15/2009

Arkansas TimesWhen Taylor Branch’s new book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President,” was released, it set off an instant firestorm of beltway conversations and ruminations about the same old stuff — the affair with Monica, his relationship with Al Gore, the Whitewater investigations. The book is about all those things, but underneath is the somewhat simple story of two men, at the pinnacle of their chosen paths, talking.

Branch will speak about the book Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Clinton School of Public Service at 6 p.m.

You knew the president before you took on this project. When you met him, was there something that immediately drew you to him?

Well, we got sent to Texas together [in 1972 for the McGovern campaign] and had a bonding experience there. We got shellacked. And when you get shellacked together you do a lot of soul-searching together.

We weren’t thinking about who might be president because we had just lost by 30 points. We were losers, and I was just disgusted by politics. With all the great stakes in the world, with Vietnam and Watergate and the optimism of the Civil Rights era coming apart, it seemed to me that we had spent most of our time refereeing fights over who was going to sit where at campaign dinners. So, I went back into journalism and to some degree criticized him for sticking with politics. Years later, he reminded me of what he had said at the time, and I had dismissed it, but it was true. He said if you want to work on big problems in the world, like the Vietnam War, then you have to build up your patience and your ability to deal with squabbles over who sits where at a dinner.

How do you think being from the South shaped his worldview?

We both grew up in the segregated 1960s, and both of us slowly became obsessed with politics because of the race issues during the segregationist era. That had an enormous effect on him, and it certainly did on me. To us, politics had accomplished miracles because it had gotten rid of segregation and poverty in the South and the stigma in the South that we had grown up with.

I think his motive was really to rescue politics to the nobility that we felt it had earned in our lifetime. That’s why he was so frustrated that so much of the political talk during his presidency amounted to spitballs about politics being worthless and liberals and conservatives saying they didn’t have any common agenda. He thought politics had been reduced to a student body election where it was just a big argument about nothing of substance.

There’s a stereotype about him being a very calculating politician, but you’ve described a much more idealistic person.

Well, he is calculating, but what I’m saying is that I think he’s calculating with a purpose. A selfish person wouldn’t have invaded Haiti with eight percent public support or taken on the National Rifle Association. It did amaze me how people could say he didn’t believe in anything when he was so consistently getting beaten to death for doing things that he did believe in.

There are a lot of people who really dislike the Clintons — maybe more so in Arkansas than anywhere else — and most probably can’t even tell you why. Why do you think that is?

Clinton says in the book that if you think, on balance, that the ’60s were good for America, you’re going to feel one way about him, and if you feel that they were a terrible thing for America, then you’re going to feel the opposite. You’re going to resent him. Those simple attitudes will explain a lot of the voting patterns. So to some degree, “culture war” is an accurate phrase, in that we’re still divided by our basic attitudes about the 1960s, which boil down to race and war. And in that sense, wrestling history is really wrestling our attitudes about what politics can and cannot do. I chose that subtitle, in part, for that reason. But also, I was wrestling history because I wasn’t sure what my role was, whether I was his friend or advisor, or what.

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Fri Oct 16, 2009 9:55am EDT
By Matthew Bigg

ReutersATLANTA (Reuters Life!) - During his presidency, Bill Clinton met prize-winning historian Taylor Branch 79 times in the White House to record a secret diary of his time in office.

The result is “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President“, a new book that presents a fresh view of key events such as Clinton’s handling of the economy and deficit, the rise of al Qaeda and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Since the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon presidents have been wary about making tapes in the White House.

But Branch and Clinton had worked together in their twenties and Clinton proposed the tapes as a historical record of his presidency. In the event, Clinton kept the tapes and Branch’s book is based on the contemporaneous notes he took.

Branch, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for “Parting the Waters: America in the King years 1954-63“, spoke to Reuters about Clinton project and his book.

Q: What was your overriding impression of Clinton?

A: “I was amazed that he was so constantly engaged with issues from all over the world in spite of distractions of every kind …. I expected more fussing about what it was like to be a president. He was always worrying about what he was going to do next.”

Q: What view did you gain of the presidency?

A: “It was a vast complex pressure machine that all came down on the president with tremendous loads of pressure. You couldn’t really control your schedule. I had this image that presidents only deal with things as you were prepared to deal with them. With him there were constant pressures and opportunities from every corner.”

Q: How did Clinton make decisions?

A: “It was the first time I had ever experienced what you hear other presidents doing. He loved hearing arguments (from advisors). Lots of times he would take apart and put together his rationale and explain why he went one way or another. This was true for sending cruise missiles after bin Laden, why he would overrule his defense chiefs …. He confirmed the historians view that the really hard decisions that go up to presidents have multiple facets.”

Q: What did you see of the pressures on Clinton?

A: “I was stunned by how tired he would be at times. There are several passages where his eyes rolled up under his eyelids while he was talking. He would snap back in focus …. Several times during the impeachment he actually did contortions (as he spoke). He would pull his knee up next to his ear. He seemed to get some relief from stress points …. There was a tremendous physical strain that was quite evident.”

Q: What did he say about the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the impeachment process?

A: “He was talking about it more from the standpoint of regret and defending his presidency in the extreme. He was over his strain with (First Lady) Hillary because they were fighting impeachment together.

“He said that the problem of Monica Lewinsky was a terrible failure that grew out of self-pity.”

Q: What does Clinton think of the book?

A: “He fretted that it was so personal that some of the personal stuff would be distorted. He had anticipated that it would just be about policy.”

Q: Is this book history?

A: “I don’t claim to be objective. I don’t call this book a historical book like my books on (civil rights leader Martin Luther) King. In the Clinton book I am trying to present more of a primary record.”

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Biography Reveals Bill Clinton the Father

Published on 18 October 2009 by in

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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
By Robert Franklin, Esq.

Mens' News DailyI’ve never been a fan of Bill Clinton. And it always seemed that the more I knew the less I liked him. A highly intelligent man, often possessed of what I thought to be impulses toward the good, he confounded himself and us at every turn by his self-involvement.

To me, Clinton could never transcend his childhood as the son of a mostly-absent, alcoholic father. Always driven to please, Clinton reportedly could convince anyone in a 15-minute conversation that he understood them completely and was on their side, only to forget all about them the instant they were out of the room. What we the American people got for our votes was less a man than a personality, a walking set of symptoms. And he just couldn’t seem to keep his pants zipped.

But now there’s a biography of Clinton by historian Taylor Branch that this article says gives an entirely different view of the former president - Clinton the father (Time, 10/5/09). It’s made me rethink my understanding of Bill Clinton.

From Branch’s work we see a Clinton who was totally devoted to his daughter Chelsea. During his eight years in office, Clinton apparently always put Chelsea first, not only listening to her renditions of show tunes and helping with math homework, but even putting off important diplomatic missions to the Far East so that he could be with his daughter during her mid-year exams.

Tellingly, and perhaps more important, Clinton was both smart enough and generous enough of spirit to learn from Chelsea. As she grew up, he came to understand that she had qualities he didn’t. As the Time article says,

Any father can be proud of his daughter, but Branch’s account suggests something more: that Bill looks up to Chelsea and finds the self he never managed to become. She was a source of hope when he was bitter, of perspective when he was self-pitying. Clinton liked doing what he was good at but marvels over Chelsea’s devotion to ballet, how her feet bled after practice, how she worked hard at it because she loved it regardless of how good she was at it. “I’ve always admired that,” Clinton says. “I’ve wondered whether I could ever stick with something for its own sake.” He was one to gather laurels; she preferred to share them. Clinton suggests that she chose Stanford over Harvard partly because Harvard seemed too eager to recruit a President’s daughter; she declined to apply for a Rhodes scholarship, after being nominated by Stanford, because “she decided to leave such possibility for someone else.”

“…the self he never managed to become.” That would be the self who never had a father. But Chelsea, to her everlasting benefit, did have a father and, contrary to what I would have thought, a passionately involved one, despite carrying the massive weight of the presidency year after year. In a relationship of mutual benefit that should instruct us all, the flawed president gave, out of the emptiness of his soul, that which he never had himself - a father. And the young woman that he helped raise, gave back to him what he couldn’t get any other way, the vision of a fully-made human being. And perhaps from that very vision, the man was himself fulfilled, completed and at last able to accept the gift.

Bill Clinton the driven man, the achiever, the governor, the president was, in the end brought to his best self by fatherhood.

It’s a moving story. It’s the story of what adults can do for children and what children can do for adults. It’s the story of a father and his daughter.

Thanks to Don for the heads-up.

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The Confessions of Bill

Published on 18 October 2009 by in

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By David Bromwich
Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009

The New York Review of Books

In the fall of 1993, Taylor Branch agreed with Bill Clinton to conduct occasional interviews on tapes that would be turned into an oral chronicle of the Clinton presidency. The two had been friends more than twenty years earlier in Texas on the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972. Branch, in more recent years, had published the first volume of his trilogy on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and was in the middle of writing the second; the tapes, for him, would be an interruption of planned work, whereas for Clinton they promised to be a flattering record of work in progress. This inequality was balanced by the fact that Branch liked the idea of seeing the President close-up. The two resumed their friendship with ease, and, between October 1993 and March 2001, produced the seventy-nine interviews of which the present book offers a digest.

The arrangement was peculiar in one respect. Clinton kept the tapes, while Branch had to dictate impressions on tapes of his own as he drove back to Baltimore from each visit to the White House. Clinton used the originals to assist in the writing of his memoirs; at some future date, they will probably be open to scholars. This set-up means that Branch’s chronicle has not a single extended quotation of Bill Clinton. A sentence every two or three pages is what we get, surrounded by dutiful and often undistinguished paragraphs of summary. Still, Branch has eyes and ears. When he can pause long enough to violate a self-denying ordinance, he also has considerable powers of analysis. Yet an unsuspecting confidence is the pervasive tone—a trust that appears to have continued beyond recorded conversations. Branch sent proofs of the book to Clinton and invited him to suggest nonsubstantive revisions.

The sprawling summary that makes up The Clinton Tapes follows Clinton’s train of associations. One conse-quence of Branch’s starting well into Clinton’s first year in office is a foreshortened view of the defeat of the President’s first project, the legalization of gays in the military, and a minimal treatment of the launching of his second, the initiative to convert the country to a plan of universal health care. The choice of the gay issue as the first of this presidency was improbable in a way Branch does not quite seem to grasp. Though an obvious next step in toleration, it was sure to be controversial, and remote from the centrist spirit in which Clinton had run his campaign. It could be relied on to bring back the acrimonious battles of the 1980s.

David Mixner and other leaders of the gay community had advised him against taking up the cause so early. Clinton drove ahead in spite of their advice, and gave a taste of victory to enemies who would prove relentless. There would be other casualties from this early defeat. Clinton thought of appointing Senator Sam Nunn as secretary of defense in 1996, but the memory of photographs of Nunn touring a navy ship and shivering at the prospect of gay sailors in such close quarters assured a veto of his nomination by the liberal wing of the party.

On universal health care, Branch misses the drama of attrition and anti-climax by which the President’s soaring commitments were abridged week by week until the concept expired. This series of capitulations was the source of many people’s later suspicion that Bill Clinton was fond of the language of principle but would finally compromise on almost anything. Again, the character of his performance on health care, and his handing it to his wife to add to her luster, seemed to confirm the rumors that the President’s conduct was shaded by cronyism and his demeanor slack and self-indulgent. He was said to run policymaking at the White House as a series of inspired bull sessions: an impression successfully planted by Bob Woodward in The Agenda. Branch faithfully registers Clinton’s irritation at that partial portrait and, without exactly refuting it, convinces us that the reality was far more intricate. He quotes Clinton saying later that he should have “started with a small piece of health reform” and been content to profit from whatever public good might follow.

About the time Branch settled into his irregular White House routine, the President was considering the appointment of a politician to the Supreme Court. He wanted to break the solid streak of lawyers and judges. Mario Cuomo, Bruce Babbitt, and, in the following year, George Mitchell were all seriously considered, but Cuomo turned it down; Babbitt, after a tantalizing pause, was told that his regional influence was needed at the Department of the Interior; and Mitchell withdrew his name out of loyalty to the President’s need for Democratic numbers in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Clinton already found himself dogged by old enemies from Arkansas. He was sure the Whitewater controversy would die down since there was nothing to the charges. But Cliff Jackson and Sheffield Nelson, “both of whom,” Branch says, had “turned from Democrats to failed Republican candidates” in Arkansas, had time on their hands and a shot at getting their names in the papers. “They don’t have anything else going in their lives,” said Clinton, “but trying to bring me down.” He surrendered early to the demand for an independent prosecutor because he felt so secure about the innocuousness of the case. This was a large misjudgment. He had underestimated the malice, the wildness, and the persistence of his enemies. These portents coincided with the emergence of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America—a gimmick whose crude appeal to an old anti- federalism brought a midterm Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in November 1994.

That Clinton was able to ride out that storm was the first convincing show of his mastery. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, also served as a reminder to the more genteel of his accusers that the pleasure of hating Clinton made for a sport that could go over the edge. The virulence of the anti-government forces of that time is brought out by Branch’s recollections here: even Clinton’s statements after Oklahoma City on the importance of respect for government were widely taken to be one more piece of opportunism. And once the grimness of the event was absorbed, the Republicans in Congress held hearings not on Oklahoma City but on the abuse of federal power in the FBI assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco.

Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton’s point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicans at Clinton’s theft of their “small is better” programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argumentative resource. The climactic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and the substitution of work requirements: a decision on which Branch comments too briefly. The rejection of welfare precipitated, as Clinton knew it would, a break with veterans of the civil rights movement, such as Marion Wright Edelman, who had been his friends for two decades. When Clinton reversed his liberal commitments, he found high-sounding reasons to do so, as well as one good party reason: it would take the issue away from the Republicans forever. But no one doubted at the time that he did it to buy insurance for the 1996 election, which he was already favored to win. This fact Branch does not omit but plays down.

Of Russia in the early years of his presidency, as of Bosnia and Kosovo in the later years, little is heard in Branch’s summary of the tapes. It is rare to see a show of passion from the President away from domestic policy. Yet Clinton flares with anger when he thinks about Saddam Hussein—a puzzling contrast (as Branch portrays it) with his almost genial acceptance of the tyranny of Suharto. The leader of Iraq is the only person in these pages whom Clinton will be heard to say he hates. He hates him, Clinton says, for what he has done to his people. Yet there is something heartless in Clinton’s own remarks about the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the botched American missile attack of June 26, 1993. He had ordered the bombing of Iraqi intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a supposed plot against the life of George H.W. Bush; three of twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles went astray and killed Iraqis who lived nearby. “I regret the loss of life,” Clinton tells Branch for the record. “His tone was wooden and mechanical,” Branch comments, “with barely a trace of feeling, but he repeated the phrase several times.” A similar tone of calculation is audible as Clinton considers the politics of an American operation to restore the govern- ment of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. “When the first soldier dies, I’m a dead duck.”

Clinton was baffled by the press coverage that made his smallest move appear drenched in cynicism and his remotest associations corrupt or devious. Reports like those by Jeff Gerth in The New York Times on Whitewater and later on Wen Ho Lee, the alleged smuggler of nuclear secrets—sensational exposures that would come to be largely discredited—were damaging to the minimal reputation for probity without which a politician cannot be trusted to act. Clinton saw the Times and The Washington Post as the heart of the problem. By their pursuit of scandals, they gave permission to the tabloids lower down the ladder, and he said with some justice: “I think these papers have corrupted themselves over Whitewater.” The reporters and columnists alike made the most of any hint of purposeful alliance between the President and his wife. They were no less satisfied to transmit the slightest suggestion of marital discord.

Branch’s record suggests that the political intelligence shared by Bill and Hillary Clinton was perhaps more interesting and flexible than either separately commands. The American press lacked the wit for a single reporter to discover this; yet it comes out unmistakably in several interludes of The Clinton Tapes. Consider Hillary’s account (on her way to bed) of a day’s business in the health care debate, where a surgeon has testified that government does nothing to assist Medicare. “She and the president,” writes Branch, “completed each other’s sentences in a chortling spoof of doctrinaire contradictions in medical policy.” One of them trots out the slogan that “no American could be denied quality health care,” and the other adds, “but no one was required to pay.” The Clintons enjoyed each other’s quickness and shared a familiar scorn for time-wasters.

The establishment press ended by finding Bill Clinton not so much elusive as empty. His wife’s political ambition, as shown by her run for the Senate in 2000, and the sympathy with which he worked to advance it were taken as proof of a quality somehow worse than ambition in himself. What could that be? At this distance, it is barely possible to reconstruct the grounds for the continuous heat of jeering sarcasm that issued from Howell Raines, William Safire, and Maureen Dowd at the Times, and from Len Downie, Sally Quinn, and David Broder at the Post. The lightheaded meanness of the attitude carried over to their disdain for Gore in 2000, and influenced a jocular acceptance of Bush. This was true not only of the credulity toward the Whitewater charges and Paula Jones, but regarding smaller scandals as well, from the firing of agents at the White House travel office to the false rumor of vandalism by the Clinton staff on their departure in 2001.

The mood of the press was contagious: it was taken up by Louis Freeh at the FBI and led, in the worst miscarriage of all the crowd of accusations, to the indictment by a special prosecutor of Henry Cisneros, secretary of housing and urban development, for eighteen felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The prosecutor there would end by settling for a guilty plea on a single misdemeanor; but the career of Cisneros had been effectively stopped.

As for the Paula Jones civil suit, Judge Susan Wright ruled, as Branch reminds us, on April 1, 1998, that Jones “had no case for sexual harassment even under her version of the facts.” The Republicans went ahead with impeachment, unembarrassed. Once they had Monica Lewinsky in their sights, they calculated that salacious curiosity would stir up energy sufficient to cover the flimsiness of Jones’s legal case. At this late date, Clinton’s friends were still anxious on his behalf about Whitewater, but he was unworried. “If Starr had gleaned even a pea-shooter’s case from those thickets,” Clinton said, “it would have been fired long ago.” His view was hardly disinterested, but his verdict on the investigations is impossible to dispute: “I trusted the press. I trusted the Congress. I trusted the courts. And I was wrong on all counts.”

Yet through all that hunt of obloquy, Bill Clinton was strangely passive. Maybe, in 1997, when Branch reports having found him abstracted and reticent, Clinton was taking the measure of his enemies and wondering whether his lapse with a White House intern would eventually lend the other charges a post facto credibility. But on the whole, it seems fairest to see Clinton’s preference for cunning over aggression as part of a temperamental adaptability. If this was a weakness, it went with his most basic appetite. “He loved politics so much,” Branch sums up, “that he could speak almost fondly of his own defeats.”

This made Clinton sometimes emollient beyond what was required by the occasion. He commiserated, for example, with Yitzhak Rabin, during the Oslo process, about how hard it must be for an Israeli soldier to talk to Yasser Arafat. Rabin had no need for such a show of concern. “After all,” he told Clinton, “we don’t need to make peace with our friends.” Clinton himself was always forgiving when he saw an enemy on the point of becoming a friend. He was tickled by a letter he received, in early days at the White House, from Richard Nixon about Russia. Clinton pronounced it “brilliant” and was moved to praise Nixon extravagantly at his funeral.

Clinton’s Middle Class Bill of Rights—featuring tax deductions for education—was proposed in December 1994 to counter his midterm defeat; it was a step too far in conciliation for Branch. And as he records, Clinton himself expressed contempt for the bright idea even as he wielded it. Mixed with that feeling must have been also a trace of self-contempt. Branch here reports a rare intervention. He told the President that the idea was nothing but pandering—”seducing voters to feel good by running down the government.” Clinton replied bitterly that the voters were sovereign…. They were the boss. He would give them what they wanted, even if it was stupid…. He would imitate Republican salesmanship to give the voters a borrowed gift. To do so, he would make middle-class tax cuts the centerpiece of his legislative program [in 1995].

In this case, as in Clinton’s refusal to hit back against Jesse Helms after Helms said the President would not be safe on any army base in North Carolina, Branch thought that Clinton made a misjudgment in trying to strike an attitude above the battle. Yet Clinton was capable in fact of speaking with affection even about Helms. He enjoyed rapprochements with Robert Dole, Trent Lott, Alan Simpson, and others who “poisoned in jest” as part of everyday politics. They, in turn, marveled at Clinton’s ability to absorb blows, come off the ropes, and win the next round in an unspectacular way.

A certain fatigue with Clinton’s view of things may set in, three of four hundred pages into the Tapes, when one realizes that he estimates half the public persons in the world as politicians. It is hard to imagine another president saying of Pope John Paul II, after seeing him fetch applause from a crowd: “I sure as hell would hate to be running against him for mayor anywhere.” But Clinton simply had an unreserved love of the game of politics. This made it possible for him to respect Fritz Hollings’s mordant attack on his attempt to cook up drum rolls and little fanfares of “bipartisanship” over balancing the budget. As Branch relates Clinton’s own appreciative summary:

We Democrats, Hollings nearly shouted, did all the heavy lifting back in 1993 without a single Republican vote in either chamber of Congress. Fidelity to that measure had eliminated 77 percent of the deficit already, by his calculation, with the remainder soon to be wiped out whether they adopted a five-year agreement or not. So why on earth would Clinton share any credit with Republicans? Did he remember summoning Democrats to walk the plank for this? How could any president spit on their sacrifice and uphold the party cohesion to survive? Was he running a political charity.

It is an earnest voice, and candid, the voice of a fighter who knows that it is honorable to hold a grudge against a scoundrel. It is the very tone that people always missed in Clinton himself.

Branch is scrupulous in noting his worries about whether he may have gotten too close to his subject. He was right to turn down Clinton’s request that he become a friendly in-house historian, much as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been for President Kennedy. True, Branch stepped in from the sidelines to assist Clinton with communications that might lead to the bloodless return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti. Branch was a close friend of Aristide. But this is hardly an impediment to accurate reporting, and the narrative of the resolution of the Haiti crisis in 1994 is memorable for one significant detail: the irritation Clinton felt toward Jimmy Carter, which soon turned to gratitude for Carter’s role in assuring the exiled president’s safe passage home.

In commoner exchanges over Clinton’s work as president, a conventional note of pride of association clouds Branch’s judgment only once. He is greatly concerned in 1997 that Clinton should do more than promise (in a dozen insipid variations) a “bridge to the twenty-first century.” In the end, Branch gets one of his own sentences into the second inaugural: “Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise.” Looking at it now, he must recognize that it could pass for a sentence spoken by Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan.

The last hundred pages are the best of The Clinton Tapes. Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don’t catch it early. “I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer,” Clinton said.

Two subjects dominate the last several interviews: the conclusion of the impeachment and the Camp David negotiations on Palestine between Ehud Barak and Arafat. Clinton seems to have been more optimistic about his chances for acquittal than about the possibility of brokering an honest peace between Israel and Palestine. In July 2000, he is unusually reluctant, for reasons that are obscure, to speak at all about the negotiations. The reason may lie partly in accusations of anti-Semitism suffered a few months earlier by Hillary Clinton in her Senate campaign. Such pressures work in complex ways; and the want of analysis by Branch is disappointing; but he gives enough material for others to work on.

As far back as Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to become prime minister in 1996, Clinton had been fearful of the mixing of the politics of the United States and Israel; in February of that year, he spoke of Netanyahu as someone who opposed the peace alliance on both sides of the Atlantic. While he legitimately attacked Peres in the Israeli campaign—emphasizing the danger of potential concessions to Syria—his Likud agents in the United States joined Republicans eager to stir up suspicions against Clinton’s Middle East diplomacy…. [Clinton] called it scandalous electioneering by and with a foreign political party.

Branch’s account of the fraying negotiations between Barak and Arafat contains an unexpected comment by Clinton about his final attempt to get an agreement in December 2000. Clinton put forward his proposal for a deal—accepted by Israel, rejected by Arafat—which would give “94–96” percent of the West Bank to the new Palestinian state. A generous offer, irrationally spurned, it might appear, yet Clinton came to think in retrospect that Barak misplayed it. Who could say for sure, because the signals were so coded and circumscribed on all three sides? Still, those last terms presented by Clinton should have made Barak say no. They were too hard for Israel. They went too far on the territories and Jerusalem. Then perhaps Arafat could say yes to the terms that had made Israel balk. Only then might Barak have closed the deal by changing his mind….

Barak said yes too fast, Clinton feared. He had nothing left to give, and Arafat’s instinct when offered 100 percent was to demand 120…. In all their pirouettes, they should have found a way to let the head of a functioning state make the last concession, or look like it, anyway.

About the aim and object of Clinton’s conduct in the negotiations—at a period that the Gaza onslaught has rendered almost unimaginable—Branch leaves nothing finally clear. It is an exaggeration to say that a map of a country (however autonomous) so checked and split was 100 percent of what Arafat had dared to hope for. Yet Clinton’s perception of the dialectic by which, in a negotiation between unequal powers, the stronger must not be seen either to back off austerely or to jump forward too quickly, shows the acuteness that made his political insight a ponderable force to the end. The unhappy truth is that many of his best thoughts are afterthoughts. It will take a later historian to compare the possible correlations between Clinton’s waning influence as an outgoing president, Hillary Clinton’s campaign in New York, Barak’s late move to rescind his offer of the Golan Heights to Syria, and Arafat’s eventual rejection of the offer of contiguous and substantial territories on the West Bank.

How was Clinton able at once to govern and to observe, with a semblance of detachment, the trial that almost drove him out of the presidency? A mood of oppression may sometimes be detected in the tapes made during the impeachment; but even then his spirits veer upward to gallows humor and a strange sort of exhilaration. “Surreal” is Branch’s word for the fact that the President’s approval ratings stayed above 60 percent even as impeachment was voted and the argument about details of the charges began to build.

Clinton at this time would say for the record: “I am utterly convinced that history will vindicate me, and will record that my opponents have damaged the country.” Truer to the man and his love of the game is an incident that makes the most memorable tableau in the book. Clinton is talking on the phone, hearing that his approval ratings have stayed high, and proclaiming his “merry wish to keep the impeachment trial going another month.” But why? Heavy contributions from small donors are coming to the Democratic Party as never before; Clinton continues on the phone with the DNC chair, Steve Grossman, and remarks on the side to Branch: “I will be very surprised, and crushed, if we do not win the House of Representatives in 2000.”

In his last sessions, Bill Clinton wished that Al Gore had waged a less decorous campaign in 2000, and not run away from Clinton’s record. His view here is self-serving but also canny. Had he been allowed to campaign for Gore, he might indeed have helped him to win New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He also shared the common judgment that Gore was wrong to let his people concentrate on a few disputed jurisdictions in Florida; a recount of the legal votes in the entire state would have carried a surer mark of conviction. Speaking on November 27, 2000, Clinton asserted his view that the US Supreme Court would do anything it could to help Bush. He wasn’t sure how the justices could get a legal foothold, but he said they were political enough to engineer a conservative president in order to perpetuate justices like themselves…. In summary, President Clinton said all the major institutional forces were lined up behind Bush, except for the Florida Supreme Court. He specifically included the media. Therefore, it would be very difficult for Gore to win.

This prediction Branch calls “prophetic.” It was certainly correct in its estimate of the alignment of forces and in its inference of the result.

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By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published Tuesday, September 29, 2009

St. Petersburg TimesWhat happens when historian meets man prodigiously hungry to make history? • In the case of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch and former President Bill Clinton, the result is The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President. • Branch, who will be a featured author at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 24, is best known for his trilogy of books about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan’s Edge. The first of those books won him the Pulitzer for history, and all three are traditional historical works: thoroughly researched, based upon many sources and voices, carefully structured. • The Clinton Tapes is something else entirely, although no less valuable as a contribution to American history. It is essentially one man’s voice, speaking about events as they happen, and the book is almost chaotic in its enormous range of subject matter — a chaos that in the end helps to make it a unique reflection of the experience of the presidency.

Branch came to record the tapes of the title in an unusual fashion. He and Clinton had been idealistic young friends and colleagues in 1972, when they worked together in Texas on George McGovern’s presidential campaign (along with Hillary Rodham, she and Clinton then “fresh sweethearts”). They hadn’t seen each other since, as Clinton pursued his political career and Branch turned to journalism and history.

He was writing one of his King books when Clinton was elected in 1992. Branch was surprised but delighted to be summoned to help the team writing the president’s inaugural address; later, Clinton asked Branch to help him clarify his idea to have a sort of in-house historian for his presidency.

‘I need questions’

Clinton wanted to create a private record to use after his administration, for writing his memoirs and for his presidential library. He told Branch, “I can’t just sit down and talk into a tape recorder. . . . I need questions. I need somebody responding to me.”

The result, beginning nine months into Clinton’s first term, was Branch’s unique role as personal presidential historian. He would be called to the White House from his Maryland home whenever Clinton had time, usually late at night — “My only regret is that I have to sleep so much. . . . I’d like to be awake all the time,” the president tells him at one point. Branch would arrive with a log of recent events gathered from news stories, a notebook with a list of questions, and two tape recorders. The two would talk, often for hours, about an astonishing array of subjects.

They met 79 times between 1993 and 2001. Clinton kept all the tapes (in his sock drawer, Branch reports), but on the drive home Branch would dictate his own notes about their conversation — the material that became this book. “Here by design was raw material for future history, which filled me with excitement to preserve my own fresh but fleeting witness,” he writes in the first chapter.

Branch makes the interesting choice to present the notes in what seems to be something close to that raw state. He could have turned this voluminous mass of material into a shapelier, more focused book (or books) about anything from Clinton’s Middle East peace efforts to his struggle to get more recognition for his administration’s substance than its scandals.

But Branch’s choice to present the sessions in chronological order, in all their multifaceted, sometimes maddening complexity, creates a sense of the headlong rush of events that a president must cope with, like it or not. Just to pick a random example, in a single session on Feb. 16, 1994, Clinton discussed in detail crises in Bosnia and North Korea, trips to Russia and Switzerland, the state of Mideast peace talks and the Japanese economy, the progress (or not) of his balanced budget and health care initiatives, the possibility of invading Haiti and the economic imperatives of college basketball in Arkansas.

Presenting the material this way paints a vivid picture of Clinton’s amazing, in-depth command of a huge number of subjects. Whatever your opinion of his presidency might be, Branch shows us a man of impressive intellect and wide-ranging mastery.

Although Branch describes a few unguarded moments, the Bill Clinton who emerges is not the private man. Even in his jeans and T-shirt, scarfing down bean dip smuggled from the living quarters refrigerator and chatting about his golf game, Clinton knows he is speaking for history when he talks into Branch’s microphones.

Scandal and aftermath

Yes, Branch asks him about the Monica Lewinsky scandal after it breaks; no, Clinton reveals no prurient details. But what is revealed about the scandal’s impact is fascinating: how certain Clinton seemed to be that the attempt to impeach and convict him would fail, both on constitutional grounds and because his approval ratings soared even as Republicans attacked him.

He was right, and the attacks backfired. In the 1998 midterm elections, the Republicans campaigned behind the drumbeat for impeachment — and lost five seats. The only time in the book Branch says Clinton “giggled” was when he played back “pithy, profane” recorded comments from small donors who, during his trial, donated more to the Democratic National Committee in 19 days than in any previous year of Clinton’s terms.

There are some surprises here, small (Clinton’s jarring first conversation with Elizabeth Taylor at a state dinner) and large (a towering argument between Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore in 2001 over why Gore lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush).

Some of the inside stories behind events are entertaining, like Clinton’s account of the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, to seal the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, drilled Rabin and Arafat to place their left hands on each other’s shoulders as they shook — an effort to prevent Arafat from embracing Rabin in “the customary Arab buss and embrace,” and give Rabin a way to stiff-arm him if he tried it.

But some of the oft-recurring subjects in the book are depressingly familiar — Clinton devotes enormous energy to peace in the Mideast, with only the names of the players different from today’s impasse. Others are ominous, Clinton’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden among them.

Branch makes no pretense in The Clinton Tapes of being an objective observer, standing outside history in order to record it. He is partisan, Clinton’s supporter as well as his friend. But his unique record of the Clinton administration, as well as his fresh perspective on how the presidency functions, will be mined by other historians for years to come.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.

Festival author

Taylor Branch will be a featured author at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 24 at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg; www.festivalofreading.com.

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The Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch

Published on 12 October 2009 by in

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Taylor Branch’s account of his secret conversations with the US president raises fascinating questions about how history is made, writes Gaby Wood

Sunday 11 October 2009

The Observer review by Gaby Wood

The Observer

On 14 October 1993, nine months into Bill Clinton’s presidency, roughly where we are now in Obama’s, historian Taylor Branch arrived at the White House and set two tape recorders on a desk that had once belonged to Ulysses S Grant. It was to be the first of 79 secret recordings he would make with the president over the next eight years.

Branch and Clinton had met in 1969 at a reunion of anti-Vietnam activists at Martha’s Vineyard. Three years later, they were brought together to co-ordinate George McGovern’s presidential campaign against Nixon in Texas, where they – and Hillary Clinton – shared an apartment. (In his memoir, Clinton describes Branch as the “tightfisted” one who controlled the campaign budget, while he himself found it difficult to say no to people.)

They were both white Southerners who’d grown up in the civil rights era. Disappointment over McGovern’s defeat led Branch to reject elective politics and become a journalist, seeking, as he writes in The Clinton Tapes, “greater integrity and potential in the written word”. Eventually, he would write a magnificent trilogy of books about the US in the era of Martin Luther King and become one of the country’s most eminent historians. Clinton went the other way, pressing further into what they had begun and arguing that “you must be strong enough to work through human nature, not around it”. Many years later, Clinton told Branch he sometimes wished he’d followed his path instead.

Fast forward 20 years: Clinton has been elected president but not taken office. Branch is invited to a dinner at the home of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, where Clinton, whom he hasn’t seen since their Texas days, takes him aside. He tells Branch he has looked at the footnotes to his book on King and noted that much of the material came from presidential libraries. Clinton asks Branch for two things: some thoughts on “generational change” for his inauguration speech and advice about how to maintain an adequate record of his presidency for future historians.

Branch was astonished that Clinton should be raising such “farsighted questions” about how “politics and history shape each other”. But he felt compromised by Clinton’s offer to make him an in-house historian (years later, Clinton asked Branch to ghost-write his memoirs and Branch, who had ghost-written two already, said no). White House lawyers blenched at the idea of official note-takers. What if the documents or tapes were stolen or subpoenaed?

Branch finally offered to help Clinton with what he calls a “prompted diary”, driving from Baltimore at all hours to encourage him to talk; the president would hide the tapes in a sock drawer for the rest of his time in office. He would then use them for his memoir, before depositing them in his presidential library. On his way home, Branch spoke into a tape recorder, documenting each meeting in detail for his own purposes. These next-to-immediate recollections form the basis of The Clinton Tapes. To this day, Branch has not had access to the recordings or transcripts of their conversations.

This secret, dangerous and unprecedented historiographical project is especially intriguing in relation to Clinton’s presidency. Clinton had a knack for radiating intimacy. Joe Klein, who was inspired by Clinton to write the bestselling roman a clef Primary Colors, later suggested that “there was a physical, almost carnal quality to his public appearances”. His vices and his virtues were two sides of the same coin and a look at such a man can teach us much about the power of appetites in politics.

Branch got all this in close-up: the president sneaking nachos and salsa out of the kitchen after a jog; the president with conjunctivitis; the president playing cards, finishing the crossword, falling asleep mid-sentence. He sees Chelsea fretting over homework and Hillary in a face mask. He is like a hushed-up member of the family. What can such a slanted view offer?

Branch describes himself here as a “participant in a memoir”, someone who wishes to portray the president “candidly in texture”. His acknowledgments offer extensive notes on where his own research will be housed, reinforcing its status as raw material for future historians. The ground they cover – Bosnia, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Haiti, the Middle East, the budget, character sketches of individual politicians – is interesting, but not half as interesting as the proposition the book itself constitutes. Is history what you do or what you record? If there’s no record, how will future generations know what you did and, if you take time out to record it, could you be making it instead?

Nowhere are these questions more acutely raised than in the instances where Branch is what might be described as a participant observer. For instance, he is asked by Life magazine to cover the inauguration, which he is helping to script. The conversations that involve him are off the record, to him. While taping, Clinton asks for his advice: should he fire the head of the CIA? Should he replace his surgeon-general? Branch says yes.

Clinton asks him to call urgently from a roadside payphone because he needs to know how history would regard it if he settled the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Branch acts as a go-between for Clinton and Aristide, the exiled president of Haiti, a role that prompts Clinton to remark that Branch should stick to writing. A chapter about Monica Lewinsky is about her in title only: they halted their recordings for months while Ken Starr ransacked the White House for clues; when they resumed Clinton didn’t want to talk about it. Should Branch, as an objective recorder of facts, have pressed him? And as a friend (Branch wonders), should he have offered to listen more?

When Clinton’s memoir was published, Branch accepted a cheque for $50,000. Clinton knew Branch wanted to write his own book about their meetings and said he hoped he would. But you only get a true sense of why Branch might have been compelled to offer his account when he writes about the time he went to visit the ex-president and spent the night reading a manuscript of his memoir. It was 700 pages long and ended in 1992, during the election campaign.

Where’s the rest? Branch asked. Clinton had left himself just three months to cover everything they had discussed during the eight years of his presidency. Branch looked over at the shelf of bound transcripts of their 79 interviews and thought: “There was lost opportunity in those tapes, but whose loss would it be?”

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