Taylor Branch

October 5, 2009
by Ted Widmer

Former Clinton speechwriter Ted Widmer says there’s never been a presidential portrait as intimate as Taylor Branch’s new book—and we’ll never get a download like this about the second Bush administration.

Political-literary friendships go back a long way in our history. Alexander Hamilton prettied up George Washington’s public messages. Nathaniel Hawthorne penned the campaign biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce—perhaps the only boring thing he ever wrote. A young and unknown William Dean Howells wrote Lincoln’s 1860 bio, a job he managed to pull off without ever actually meeting him—a sure sign of a novelist in training.

p>The friendship between Taylor Branch and Bill Clinton is, in other words, the latest manifestation of an old trend. But the tangled history of Clinton and Branch is unusually compelling, full of the great themes and some of the dysfunctions of an ambitious generation. Both were talented Southerners exposed to racial injustice at a young age, and determined to fight it. They lived together in the same apartment in Austin in the summer of 1972, as co-organizers of the Texas McGovern campaign (Branch drew the straw that allowed him to visit an ailing LBJ—a fact that still annoys Clinton).

For all these reasons, it made sense that a newly elected President Clinton would ask his friend to become a conversational partner, knowing that the cyclotron of events was about to reach a speed at which it would be difficult to recall everything. They did not want to make secret recordings of Oval Office conversations, though that is a very exact way of remembering. Instead, these two Southerners wanted to talk out what was happening—almost literally using the front porch, or the closest thing to it (the Truman Balcony) for their ruminations. And so the wrestling—Branch’s word—began. Over eight years, Branch made 79 visits to Clinton’s White House, and they chatted about everything under the sun. The result, predictably, is a long book that has received mixed reviews for its garrulousness and perhaps for the simple fact that it is about Bill Clinton, who still awakens strong feelings on the left as well as the right. But most of those reviews fail to appreciate how important it is that this book exists at all. It would have been the easiest thing on earth for a distracted president to avoid the hard work of history. It’s certain we will never get a download like this about the second Bush administration. The result is a long narrative that can ramble, as conversations do, but is an essential contribution all the same.

It’s quite true, as many critics have pointed out, that there is something suspect about a book based on Branch’s memories of conversations rather than the original tapes themselves. It may even have been an act of deception, or at least nondisclosure—it’s unclear whether anyone knew that Branch was compiling his own tapes on his long rides back to Baltimore in the middle of the night, after handing the originals to President Clinton. Listening to the real conversations would have been more historically honest. But thanks to this book, the public now knows that those tapes exist, liberated from the sock drawer where he kept them, and someday historians will have access to them. They will make a hell of an audio book.

Branch is not disinterested—he wears his support for Clinton on his sleeve, though he expresses strong disapproval at times, particularly over the Lewinsky scandal. But it is hard to imagine a president allowing such intimate access to an ordinary reporter, and that access pays off—there has never been a presidential portrait like this. Edmund Morris wrote himself into his Reagan biography, but that was an act of pure invention. Ben Bradlee gave us Conversations with Kennedy—a book, ironically, that Branch trashed when it came out. But no one has ever done so much interviewing in a president’s home—the upper floors of the White House—and described those private surroundings so well. No one has ever asked a president so many questions over so many years, and received such unflinching answers. No one has ever brought quite the same sense of impassioned advocacy—reminding President Clinton of their shared reverence for the civil rights movement and the idealism of their youth, while witnessing the daily toll taken by politics at the highest level.

The result is quite a ride, at least for this passenger. I have zero objectivity, as a former Clinton speechwriter, and an admirer of both men. At some point, I knew that these tapes existed, though I never spoke of them to outsiders. But to read them in their entirety is something else. There are many moments of inside knowledge that were unavailable even to those working in the administration. Students of the Middle East peace process will find much new material to hash over, including Clinton’s reflections on all of the major players, and the personal relationships that often moved events forward, and just as often thwarted them (there is a very good joke about Yasser Arafat and Tom Cruise that Arafat’s own aides were telling at the time of the Camp David summit). Clinton was driving the peace plan forward until nearly the last day of his administration, and it is still heartbreaking to read of its narrow failure.

With China and Russia, there are also interesting insights into how Clinton got along with his counterparts at a crucial time in the U.S. relationship with both countries. The early reviews have focused on the sitcom moments—like Yeltsin in his underwear, hailing a cab in search of pizza. But there is a great deal more than that (another surprise: Yeltsin wanted U.S. permission to carve out a zone of special influence for Russia, which he called “the Monroesky Doctrine). In conversation, at least, Clinton was exploring creative ways to lift the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which would have been a blockbuster. Surprises also trail out of the sequences describing Clinton’s meetings with President-elect George W. Bush, who urged him to go to North Korea to negotiate directly with Kim Jong-Il—after swearing that he never would. Even before leaving office, Clinton suspected that his successor wanted to take out Iraq, and that it would be a disaster.

Over eight years, there are many human moments, and it is arresting to see the strain of the job on a president known for his perpetual ebullience (after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia, Clinton wondered aloud “whether anyone could be sure God favored this cause”). Branch records personal revelations of a kind I do not think I have ever read before in a White House book—members of the first family acting, well, like a real family, puttering around in bathrobes and slippers and worrying about homework assignments and distant friends in addition to everything else (hilariously, Hillary Clinton confesses a dream about Henry Kissinger). Readers get a lot of the flavor of living in close proximity to a president—the motorcade-empowered ability to be in all places at all times, combined with the five-events-in-a-day strangeness of it all; random encounters with Nobel laureates, championship sports teams, ululating Bedouins, and at the epicenter of this hurricane, a tired man and his friend talking to each other in the wee hours.

Not all of it was a joy ride. Clearly, Bill Clinton would just as often have liked to be left alone, and who could blame him? His eyelids occasionally flutter as he wards off sleep, and one night he was so exhausted that one he fell asleep in his barber’s chair, leaving the ushers powerless to wake him. For Branch, too, this was a protracted labor, leaving his family to make the round trip from Baltimore in his pickup truck, often stumbling out of the White House after 1 a.m. One night, feeling pummeled by the conversation, he began his recording, “It was not fun.” But they stuck with it—which may be the motto of the Clinton White House. Even after the rise of Gingrich and the attack dogs he unleashed (Branch describes the bullets fired into the residence by angry passers-by), and serious setbacks caused by Clinton’s enemies and his own mistakes, they ground out every inch of this conversational campaign.

Among other lessons, reading a book this long and detailed is a reminder of just how much government happened during Clinton’s eight years—the economy improved, jobs were created, foreign policy predicaments were solved, alliances were strengthened, and so on. We may not have needed every single piece of information in this book; for example, it can now be revealed that in 1995 Clinton’s blood pressure was 113/78. But Branch conveys a vivid sense of the give and take of politics and the fact that all of us, even presidents, have good and bad days. At times, those years feel very far away; Branch once muses on a newfangled “cellular” phone in 1994. At other times, as Branch describes the travails of an optimistic new president trying to persuade a cynical Congress to pass health-care legislation, the book seems frighteningly contemporary.

After the dust settles, I have a feeling that historians will be sifting these rich mineralogical excavations for years to come. It is not quite the definitive statement-as-uttered, but still, there is something refreshing and unguarded about The Clinton Tapes. Americans will continue to think what they want to about the 42nd president, but to hear these conversational tidbits from the boiler room of the ship of state is to know that the government was working overtime.

Asked to supply a line for Clinton’s first inaugural, Branch dipped into his vast reservoir of knowledge about Martin Luther King Jr. and came up with a passage about mountaintops and valleys. Like all journeys on a biblical scale, we get a fair amount of both in The Clinton Tapes. But the arc of history eventually bends toward justice, as King almost said, and it also bends toward accuracy. In striking out for “truth over myth,” and recording the great adventure exactly as he heard it, Taylor Branch has helped Americans to understand an important presidency, and bequeathed an important legacy of his own.

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The president and the historian provide a candid, intimate look at how the GOP became a nasty party of obstruction

October 01, 2009
By Joan Walsh

I need a break from the rhetorical outrage beat. I was going to write about the Newsmax columnist who all but advocated a military coup to bring down Obama, then I was pondering a post about Rep. Alan Grayson’s claim that the GOP health reform plan amounts to if you get sick, “die quickly.” But I’m tired of overheated rhetoric right now, (plus the indefatiguable Alex Koppelman got to both stories first!) so I took refuge in Taylor Branch’s new book, “The Clinton Tapes.” I had planned to review it, but it’s almost 700 pages, and I have a day job. If I took the time to read it and then write about the whole thing, it would be weeks before I’d get it done — and I think the book has insights that are supremely relevant to today.

So I thought I’d try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you’re reading the book. Every few days I’ll write about what I am learning, and anyone who’s reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with “Going Rogue” next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

I have to start by saying Taylor Branch’s trilogy, “America in the King Years,” is my favorite work of history. He brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive for me. And to see my favorite civil rights historian — so far, there are some up-and-comers that deserve a look, too! — grappling with the president who, until Obama, thought and did more about civil rights than any president before him, well, it’s a thrilling combination. The book opens with the pair believing they are fulfilling the movement they’d worked for as young men, convinced Clinton can do so much to advance King’s goals, though we know that eventually politics got in the way. Still, it’s important to remember that civil rights was the mission that animated Clinton’s, and Branch’s, passion for politics.

One hundred pages in, here’s what’s fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush’s life, so W. wouldn’t have to start a war!); the disappointment of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on healthcare reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that’s the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework), well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic senators to tell Clinton why they’ll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don’t dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!). Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines: “I couldn’t tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window” as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors.

But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn’t tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horse-trader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped policy, or even the silly idea of what’s right or what’s best for the country, in every single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama’s battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama (after compromising) won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma’s Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan. (Hello, Max Baucus!) The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They’ve been the party of no for 16 years, even switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they’re suddenly worried about deficit spending (after eight years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and healthcare, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton’s strange passivity with the press — he just accepted that they’re against him, and he put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American (who’d apparenty been in Clinton’s “Faces of Hope” campaign materials), and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won’t compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? [In fact, the R.S. interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: “Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on.”]

Clinton “kind of went off on him,” he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for … He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn’t really care about results in the world … He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don’t mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness.”

Clinton took a breath. “I did everything but take a fart in his face.”

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory (although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it). You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It’s fun.

Here’s Clinton’s retort, verbatim, with some narration from R.S.:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke — an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

“But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

“I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, ‘Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?’ So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

“Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

“But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill.”

[At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell.]

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

“That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here.”

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration’s dilemma in 2009:

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.”

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it’s just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson (whose rant maybe went over the top,) even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic healthcare plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson’s string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on the rhetoric war. I tried. It’s going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.

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Newsweek’s Evan Thomas faults Taylor Branch for not pushing Bill Clinton to reveal more — about his sex life. Oy

October 07, 2009
By Joan Walsh

After hailing the possibilities of blogging a book review last week — in my first thoughts on Taylor Branch’s epic “The Clinton Tapes” — I’ve found a good reason not to blog, real-time, about what you’re reading: You don’t have to finish the book to opine about it, and thus (if you’re busy) you might never finish the book.

But I am finishing “The Clinton Tapes,” busy as I’ve been, because I love it, with reservations. My reservations differ hugely from Evan Thomas’ in the Washington Post, which was another prod to blog about the book again, I admit. What a disappointment: Because of his Robert F. Kennedy biography, which I loved, and because his grandfather was Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas (a bit of journalism/history trivia I also love), I always expect Thomas to be smarter than he often is. And he underperformed hugely in his “Clinton Tapes” review.

Thomas’ main point was that Branch’s friendship with Clinton — as young folks working for George McGovern in 1972, revived after 21 years when Clinton became president — skewed his perspective on key political and historical issues. I think Thomas could be right — in my opinion there is too much on Haiti in the book, I’m sad to say, mainly because President Aristide was a friend of Branch’s and Haiti’s evolution toward democracy was one of his passions. There were probably other questionable focuses. But what omission does Thomas question? Branch’s failure to delve into the causes and effects of Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair. Thomas writes, painfully:

“How could Clinton have been so foolish as to take up with a White House intern just as he was turning back the tide of Gingrichism in the fall of 1995? The reader longs for some insight, some Shakespearean narrative to help explain Clinton’s self-destructive recklessness. But Branch does not deliver; he merely reports that Clinton said he “just cracked.” Branch seems almost too embarrassed to try to find out more. Partly because Clinton did not summon him for several months as the Lewinsky scandal was breaking in the winter of 1998, Branch skips past the drama of the darkest days, when Clinton’s presidency seemed to hang in the balance.

“By the time Branch catches up during the impeachment phase, Bill and Hillary have reconciled, sort of … One wishes Branch could have confronted his friend more directly and persistently; he might have more effectively redeemed him.”

Jesus, take me now. We know way too much about the Lewinsky mess; we know not nearly enough about the collapse of healthcare reform, the compromises over Clinton’s crime bill, the strategies of GOP leaders in those years, and yes, certainly, Haiti. Who really thinks we don’t have enough insight into what Clinton thought and felt about the Lewinsky affair? What grown-up journalist who lived through Whitewater, the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment, in the prosperous days before 9/11 and the Bush economic collapse, doesn’t hate themselves in the cold light of (post-Bush) day?

Sadly, most of them don’t. Many are reliving minor Clinton issues through the lens of Branch’s book, at the neglect of the major ones, including my friend Chris Matthews on “Hardball.”

Having said that, I must admit I found the next 130 pages of “The Clinton Tapes,” after the first 80 pages that I loved, a bit of a slog. I think the book suffers from Branch’s bias toward history and away from journalism — as a journalist (but also as a lover of history) I wish he’d made choices to distill his insights, observations and raw interview data into a fixed set of topics that he drilled into. The chronological, “Clinton told me this, and then that” approach isn’t totally working.

Still there’s a wealth of insight here, and (my biggest passion) much that’s relevant to the travails of President Obama and the Democratic Party as they struggle to change the country while merely possessing both houses of Congress and the presidency. That sounds more cynical than I mean it to. Clinton faced a GOP that was, 15 years ago, already the party of “No,” already convinced that the only way back to power was thwarting a sitting Democratic president, and that’s an important insight. I think they were right. But it’s not clear what the answer was or is.

In my opinion, both Clinton and Obama were hurt by their efforts to regularly pick off a couple of conservative or vulnerable Democrats to help their cause. But we are still waiting for someone to try hardball Democratic populism, the GOP be damned, as a way to hold on to power. We don’t know that that will work, and yet we can look at the troubled Clinton experiment to know that bipartisan groveling and triangulation didn’t keep the wolves at bay.

Specifically, Branch’s book is profoundly illuminating about:

• The way a small conservative cadre of Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee blocked Clinton’s efforts at healthcare reform: specifically, current Obama headaches Max Baucus and Kent Conrad, plus former senators John Breaux (a healthcare lobbyist today, no surprise) and the frequently useless Democrat David Boren of Oklahoma. Painful to read.
• Hillary Clinton’s prescient opposition to the appointment of a special counsel on Whitewater issues. Sure, conservatives will say she was saving her ass, but her reasoning was correct: First of all, the deeds in question (which the Clintons denied) didn’t occur while he was president, so the court system could and should handle them after his time in office. Second (and more important), she laid out for Branch the way the House Judiciary Committe, which she worked for, narrowed the specs of the Watergate investigation, in a way her husband never forced Congress to do. “The committee had narrowed its scope to specific allegations that Nixon had abused presidential powers,” Hillary Clinton told Branch, “adopting careful standards to reduce partisan bickering, and, more important, to confine the dangers inherent to the struggle between the branches of government.” She trashes Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his silly advocacy of a special counsel, given his relative smarts (and it’s funny to read, knowing how she kissed his ring to run for his Senate seat). Remarkably, Hillary predicted the moderate bipartisan Robert Fiske would eventually be dumped — and he was, after finding that Vince Foster had killed himself, rather than having been murdered by the Clintons — for Kenneth Starr. Ouch.
• The brilliant Bob Somerby may skewer me (and he won’t not skewer me because I called him brilliant), but I was struck by Clinton’s self-pity as he recounted his belated decision to intervene in Haiti on behalf of democracy and controversial President Jean-Baptiste Aristide. This was a real problem for Clinton; I don’t believe it was fabricated by the MSM. But I was also struck by Clinton’s conviction, in hindsight, that he shouldn’t have stopped the migration of Haitian refugees in 1993, because, in fact, people were concerned about the refugees only “because they were black, and now they don’t care [to intervene] because Haiti is black.” He concluded he could have and maybe should have framed intervention as an anti-crime/national security initiative, and then he might have had national support. Ouch again.

I stopped reading tonight at the end of “Yeltsin and the Gingrich Revolution.” It culminates in the stinging rebuke of the 1994 midterm elections. Once again Branch captures Clinton’s “gallows humor” — Thomas would call it “self-pity” — that he’d accomplished the creation of “five million new jobs, peace intiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction,” and yet his party had lost control of Congress. Clinton blamed “too many little scandals. Health reform had failed … [H]e had pushed change too rapidly for voters to digest.” He predicted House Speaker Newt Gingrich “was power mad, and would make many mistakes,” and concluded “he would have to counterpunch from the center.” I think history will show he was wrong about that, but I’m looking forward to Branch’s take on it.

I’m still reading, and will pick up this thread as soon as I am able. For now I am mainly struck by the consistency of the GOP’s “Just say no” strategy, and the importance of the Obama White House knowing the lessons of history. If anyone else out there is reading the book, please share your thoughts in comments! 

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Reviews

12.17.09
London Review of Books , David Runciman

One of the many striking things to come out of this book is how little interested Clinton seems in the comings and goings of his political staff. The Clinton Tapes gives a view of the presidency as seen from the private quarters (where most of the recordings took place) rather than the West Wing, and it turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Read full review >

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Articles

10.05.09
The Other Bill Clinton
TIME

A daughter seeking her father’s attention faces steep competition when he’s also the leader of the free world. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice smoked on the White House roof, buried a voodoo doll of the incoming First Lady under the White House lawn, jumped fully clothed into a cruise-ship pool — and persuaded a Congressman to follow. “I can either run the country or I can control Alice,” Roosevelt once said. “I cannot possibly do both.” Read full article >

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Blogs

10.07.09
Our dumb media: Do we need to know more about Lewinsky?
Salon.com

…there’s a wealth of insight here, and (my biggest passion) much that’s relevant to the travails of President Obama and the Democratic Party as they struggle to change the country while merely possessing both houses of Congress and the presidency. That sounds more cynical than I mean it to. Clinton faced a GOP that was, 15 years ago, already the party of “No,” already convinced that the only way back to power was thwarting a sitting Democratic president, and that’s an important insight. Read full review >

Read more blogs >

Radio & TV

10.8.09: “Greater Boston”, WGBH

More radio & TV >

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I really liked him [Branch] 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. Read full blog article >

10.22.09
A Historian Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is
KPCC | Southern California Public Radio

Can you beat that moment? A few moments after I wrapped up my interview with historian Taylor Branch about his book ”The Clinton Tapes,” Molly Peterson and David Lazarus were making their pitch to listeners to pitch in to contribute to KPCC, and the award-winning writer opened his wallet right there in the studio and slapped down a double sawbuck — twenty bucks, and the newest KPCC member! Read full blog article >

10.11.09
Did Bubba’s Tapes Break the Law?
The Daily Beast, by Michael Smerconish

Bill 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. Read full blog article >

…there’s a wealth of insight here, and (my biggest passion) much that’s relevant to the travails of President Obama and the Democratic Party as they struggle to change the country while merely possessing both houses of Congress and the presidency. That sounds more cynical than I mean it to. Clinton faced a GOP that was, 15 years ago, already the party of “No,” already convinced that the only way back to power was thwarting a sitting Democratic president, and that’s an important insight. Read full blog article >

10.05.09
The Unguarded Bill Clinton
The Daily Beast

Former Clinton speechwriter Ted Widmer says there’s never been a presidential portrait as intimate as Taylor Branch’s new book—and we’ll never get a download like this about the second Bush administration. Read full blog article >

10.01.09
Reading “The Clinton Tapes,” thinking about Obama
Salon.com

…here’s what’s fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq… Read full blog article >

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September 28, 2009

Bloomberg News review by Craig Seligman

Every page of “The Clinton Tapes,” the book based on recordings that historian Taylor Branch secretly made with Bill Clinton during his White House years, has a new plum.

Examples: a report of the First Couple “smooching in a doorway”; the name of a body part we all share applied by the First Lady to House minority leader Richard Gephardt. (“‘Well, he is,’ she insisted.”)

Whatever such ephemera lack in historical weight, they suggest the remarkable intimacy of this book; and they help humanize a couple the press got a lot of mileage out of demonizing.

During the partisan frenzy of his impeachment trial, Clinton told Branch, “I’m the only one doing any of the country’s business.” Branch lays out the full range of that business in this fat volume.

His friendship with Clinton dates back to their days as Texas coordinators of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. When Clinton became president, he asked Branch — by then the much-honored biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. — to help him record his impressions. It had to be done in secret, often late at night, since the Nixon tapes that came to light during the Watergate scandal had created obvious hurdles to such a project.

The 79 tapes remained in Clinton’s hands; he drew on them for his memoirs, and they’ll eventually be made public. Branch wrote his book in the first person, using tapes of his own that he made immediately following each session (usually on the drive home to Baltimore), regurgitating everything he could remember.

Sharif v. Musharraf

There’s high drama, like Clinton’s 1999 confrontation with the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, after Pakistani troops invaded Kashmir. Clinton was livid: “Your brinkmanship can set off nuclear exchanges” with India, he rebuked Sharif, who blamed the invasion on the army’s chief of staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Surrender would be “worse than war” to Sharif, who warned that he was probably looking at “a choice between ordering a nuclear attack as a patriot or being overthrown as a traitor” by Musharraf — which was what ultimately happened. Clinton called their face-off “his most ferocious encounter in politics — bar none.”

There’s a great deal on brokering the peace in Northern Ireland (Clinton compares Protestant hardliners to “the once universal segregationists who ran the South”), and even more on the bitter failure to produce a similar triumph in the Middle East.

Yeltsin’s Nightmare

There’s comedy: “a major predawn security alarm when Secret Service agents discovered (Boris) Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi.” Clinton did not consider the Russian president a buffoon; he respected him and recognized the political nightmare that communist reactionaries were putting him through.

Perhaps most riveting, there’s an angry two-hour confrontation between Clinton and Vice President Al Gore after the 2000 presidential election. Clinton was convinced that had he been allowed onto the campaign trail he could have delivered Arkansas, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and/or Missouri to Gore and turned around the election.

Gore was raw from his loss and made it clear that he was still seething over Monica Lewinsky. “Clinton exploded … By God, Hillary had a helluva lot more reason to resent Clinton than Gore did.”

Branch Is Flattered

Branch acts as a thoughtful, diffident, amiable guide; he’s extremely flattered to be in on the project but constantly frets as to whether he should be steering the conversation or just recording it. To his credit, he doesn’t maul the often amorphous material by trying to give it too much shape; what he sacrifices in form he more than gains back in immediacy.

Anyone who isn’t a diehard Clinton hater will feel tugs of nostalgia. I experienced a big one when Branch recalled the State of the Union address that Clinton coolly delivered amid the heat of the Lewinsky scandal:

“Every indicator was at a 30-year best — from the lowest unemployment, crime, inflation, and welfare to unrivaled technology and world leadership. The first big applause greeted his announcement that the federal deficit, once bearing an incomprehensibly large 11 zeroes, was now, literally, zero.”

That was a millennium ago — at least.

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October 4, 2009

The Dallas Morning News By Philip Seib

Most American presidencies spawn a wide range of interpretive histories, many of which differ greatly from how the president saw events. Presidential memoirs, meanwhile, tend to be self-serving, as their authors try to reshape the historical record in ways that will make them look best.

Among the most valuable tools for scholars and others interested in a specific presidency is a contemporaneous record: letters or a diary that captures the president’s real-time reactions to crucial moments. The Clinton Tapes presents a version of this.

Historian Taylor Branch, author of three splendid volumes about the Martin Luther King Jr. years, and Bill Clinton were co-coordinators of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign in Texas. They lost touch but reunited after Clinton’s election 20 years later. At the new president’s suggestion, he and Branch conducted private conversations, 79 in all, throughout Clinton’s White House tenure. The tapes remained in the president’s possession, but Branch took notes and dictated his own recollections of their conversations, which he calls “paraphrase resting on memory.”

The Clinton Tapes are partisan history. Branch makes no secret of his fondness and respect for Clinton. The conversations usually took place late at night in the White House family quarters, sometimes with a televised college basketball game in the background. Branch notes, “Our compressed focus must delve erratically, mimicking his job.”

Nevertheless, the book will be valuable to anyone seeking to understand the Clinton presidency. Clinton comes across as a remarkably intelligent master of detail and the mechanics of government. His 1998 State of the Union address underscored his abilities, as he recited an array of economic indicators that were the best in 30 years. But this speech came just days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, which illustrated the problems, many self-induced, that compromised his effectiveness.

Despite Branch’s friendly perspective, Clinton comes across as something of a whiner. He frequently complained about “distorted press coverage” of “bogus scandals” and flailed at Republican opponents who sometimes frankly admitted that undermining him personally was part of their job.

Clinton’s persistent political frustration points to one of his chief weaknesses: his lack of a discernible guiding philosophy, something Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan possessed. This made him susceptible to being overly distracted by political squabbles.

It should be remembered, however, that despite constant scandal, Clinton’s approval ratings remained high at the end of his presidency. Branch observes, “Something about Clinton provoked an antagonism spread broadly across the press, yet still unpersuasive to most voters.”

The book offers plenty of anecdotes, some of which are about Chelsea Clinton, who comes across as the brightest member of the family. Others describe Clinton’s fury about Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh being too helpful to his Republican tormentors. Many are more benign, such as his comment after a political discussion with Pope John Paul II: “I sure as hell would hate to be running against him for mayor anywhere.”

Whatever one’s opinion about Clinton and his presidency, The Clinton Tapes is fascinating reading primarily because it makes clear the breadth and intensity of a president’s tasks. Critics of any president should keep this in mind.

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October 4, 2009

Los Angeles Times review by Douglas Brinkley

Vice President Al Gore had just lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton was hopping mad. During the frenetic last weeks of the dead-heat campaign, Gore, following bad advice from pollster Stan Greenberg, gave Clinton the pariah treatment. Greenberg was convinced that the name Clinton had become synonymous with sex scandals and impeachment woes. During the October home stretch, Team Gore brutally sidelined Clinton from the Main Game.

“I think you made a mistake not to use me more in the last 10 days,” Clinton chided him after the election. An understandably bitter Gore was in no mood for a finger-wagging I-told-you-so. He turned the tables on his boss, blaming him for not properly screening donors and flat-out lying during the Lewinsky affair. Later, Clinton privately complained to his secret court historian, Taylor Branch, that poor Gore lived in “Neverland.”

Welcome to “The Clinton Tapes,” a weird memoir in which the 42nd president emerges as a self-absorbed political genius and a dazzling player with cunning pragmatism and spot-on observations. Branch — the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr. — secretly met with Clinton 79 times between 1992 and 2001. Together they conducted a massive oral history aimed at posterity. Amazingly enough, the Beltway grapevine never discovered the collaborative project. Worried about becoming a Clinton lackey, Branch had convinced himself that conducting these taped interviews was surely a gift to future generations. After his 1992 presidential election, Clinton, it seems, had wanted to maintain a periodic White House diary. However, he was too self-conscious about babbling into a hand-held micro-recorder as Richard Nixon did when gin-drunk. And he worried about the tapes being subpoenaed.

So an unusual deal was struck between Clinton and Branch. The historian would periodically drive, usually at night, from his Baltimore home to the White House and be ushered through West Wing corridors to the second-floor Treaty Room. Branch would then interview the president on tape about current events. Each session lasted around 90 minutes. There was, however, a major ground rule. After each therapy-like session, Branch would hand the cassettes over to Clinton, who personally buried the booty in his White House sock drawer. Sadly, in writing “The Clinton Tapes,” Branch could only paraphrase the ex-president and use his own summary dictation. Amazingly, Branch has never even heard the very tapes used in the book’s title.

For a lesser historian, this skewered arrangement would be quite a handicap. Who wants secondhand Clinton when the Arkansan is on national television regularly talking about himself? But “The Clinton Tapes” proves to be a remarkable read, paying out the huge dividends of history that Branch had hoped for. And as a corollary, Clinton’s long-term reputation is bound to take an upward revisionist spike because of this important publication. Love him or hate him, as Branch makes abundantly clear, Clinton was always on the job. Furthermore, with the advantage of hindsight, Clinton’s anti-deficit crusade looks downright heroic — as does his Herculean effort to bring human rights to Haiti and Africa.

Branch also devotes quite a bit of space to Clinton’s stalwart leadership during the Balkan wars (as well he should). Unlike Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life” — which ran flat when it came to his presidency — many of Branch’s White House stories are surreal. When Boris Yeltsin visited Washington, D.C., in 1994, for example, he apparently became a menace on the loose. The Secret Service, in fact, told Clinton that the Russian president had escaped Blair House and was drunk, wandering along Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear searching for pizza. Clearly, Yeltsin had plenty of marbles missing. When Branch asked Clinton what happened, the president simply replied, “He got his pizza.”

The Clinton who emerges here is a kind-hearted finagler, at times even a citadel of fair-mindedness. Not that he didn’t have a devilish side: Branch manages to give Clinton’s shopworn wonkishness a kind of rakish charm. Like a jolly Machiavelli, Clinton realizes that homework and cunning aren’t always enough for history-making stars to align. After the breakdown of summit talks between Syria and Israel in Shepherdstown, W.Va., for example, Clinton matter-of-factly lamented: “The political timing did not fit the diplomatic window.”

Highlights of “The Clinton Tapes” include in-depth analysis of Clinton’s salutary peacekeeping efforts in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, and a riveting account of the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist attack (in “My Life,” Clinton downplayed his adroit handling of this crisis for some peculiar reason). Branch helps fill the void. Clinton’s determination to get the bad guys was wolverine fierce; he was relieved when the FBI determined that Islamic thugs weren’t responsible. “If a terrorist group was involved, the president said carefully, he fervently hoped that it was not one affiliated with a foreign government,” Branch writes. “The hand of a government would make this bomb an act of war, rather than a heinous crime, triggering obligations to retaliate.”

When it turned out that the all-American nut job Timothy McVeigh was responsible, Clinton predicted that right-wingers would somehow blame his administration for capitalizing on the tragedy. Sure enough: The GOP turned the public debate around. Was the right wing really that coldhearted? To Clinton, this was proof positive that the conservative movement would stir up “fearful resentment” toward civilian government in coming years without an iota of shame. “Senior members of the Republican Party,” Clinton lamented, “are terrified of their own base.”

Not all of “The Clinton Tapes” is heavy. There are warm anecdotes about Clinton helping daughter Chelsea with homework and snuggling with Hillary in a foyer. (All that is missing is the mistletoe.) For fun, he plays cards with Steven Spielberg and golfs with O.J. Simpson in San Diego (yikes). He busily does a New York Times crossword puzzle, including one on Elvis Presley. Hollywood also gets into Branch’s mix. At one black-tie affair, Clinton sat at the same table as Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. When the brazen Grande Dame Taylor asked whether he had looked at Loren’s breasts, a startled president said no. The actress nodded off his denial as a fat lie. Everybody was copping glances — Clinton succumbed and admitted that he had. “That’s better,” Taylor said, pleased to put the president’s famed disingenuousness in check.

In a helpful “Afterword,” Branch meditates on how the Vietnam era had personally disappointed him about the efficacy of electoral politics. All those ’60s protest rallies, for what? Dead Kennedys and Richard Nixon twice? A disillusioned Branch instead decided to enter journalism, where integrity, he supposed, was easier to come by than in arena politics. Clinton, however, disagreed with Branch’s sideline approach to fixing society. “If you want to solve the world’s big problems,” Clinton told him, “you have to start with fights over who rides first in the motorcade.”

For eight years, Clinton rode first. And even with the distraction of a prolonged impeachment trial, our country benefited from his robust leadership. One of his shrewdest accomplishments, it turns out, was allowing Taylor Branch an Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-like front-row seat at the Washington circus spectacle.

Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University. His most recent book is “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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By Al Kamen
Monday, September 28, 2009

Didn’t get a chance to read Bill Clinton’s 1,000-page autobiography? Not to worry. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch’s new book, “The Clinton Tapes,” based on 79 evening sessions interviewing Clinton during the course of his presidency, goes on sale Tuesday.

Branch, in a multiple role of friend, chronicler, adviser and sounding board, doesn’t have the tapes themselves — Clinton kept those, hiding them in a sock drawer in the White House. Instead, Branch dictated his own recollections and notes into a tape recorder as soon as he left each encounter.

The result is an arresting portrait of the former president and a revealing look at the Clinton years. Branch, an old friend of Clinton’s, focused the interviews — as much as possible — on the events of the day.

Thus we find Clinton holding forth on an extraordinary range of foreign policy issues — Haiti, Bosnia, China and especially the Middle East — and domestic ones — the failed effort at health-care reform, the booming economy, the budget surplus — all the while railing at the news media and hounded by Republican enemies and special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr.

Clinton’s thoughts and stories are revealing and, at times, hilarious. There’s Boris Yeltsin, then the Russian president, staying at Blair House, standing in the predawn hours alone on Pennsylvania Avenue “dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi,” so he could get a pizza, Branch writes. And the next night, Yeltsin, again drunk, slipped away from agents and was eventually discovered in the basement. The alcoholism problem was more serious than most people realized.

Clinton recounted a heated discussion with several Democratic senators over gays in the military. “Suetonius, the Roman historian,” Sen. Robert C. Byrd observed, “lived into the reign of Emperor Hadrian during the 2nd century.” And Suetonius said that Julius Caesar never lived down reports of a youthful affair with King Nicomedes of Bithynia so that people mocked Caesar as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman.” Byrd said homosexuality was a sin and invoked Bible passages in support. The debate continued. “I couldn’t tell,” Clinton said, “whether Teddy Kennedy was going to start giggling or jump out the window.”

The other world leaders — Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein, Jiang Zemin and so on — make their appearances. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad calls after the death of his older son and confides how he “loathed but feared” his exiled brother Rifaat. The ailing Assad was determined to live long enough to train his younger son, Bashar, to run the country.

Then there’s Clinton’s account of his two-hour face-off with his vice president, Al Gore, just after Gore’s 2000 defeat. It was, Clinton said several times, a “surreal” confrontation, and Clinton got “exercised” just recounting it to Branch.

Clinton felt underutilized by the Gore campaign. Gore, Clinton said, felt that Clinton’s scandal-ridden tenure had been an impossible “drag” on his campaign.

“The whole world thinks Gore ran a poor campaign from a strong hand,” Branch writes, summarizing Clinton’s argument. “Yet Gore thinks he had a weak hand because of Clinton, and ran a valiant campaign against impossible odds.” Clinton said he thought Gore “was in Neverland,” perhaps unhinged.

The problem was Gore’s message just didn’t work, Clinton said. Clinton, Branch writes, “cared less how he was portrayed. To gain votes, he would let Gore cut off his ear and mail it to reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, the Monica Lewinsky expert.”

Speaking of Ms. Lewinsky, Clinton didn’t want to talk about the affair, repeating regrets, saying he had “cracked” under pressure. There is, of course, much harsh criticism of some Arkansas state troopers and of Starr.The book is 700 pages long, and Clinton often talks about trade and budget issues and other proven eye-glazers, but Branch, author of “Parting the Waters,” keeps things moving nicely. And with Clinton, who in 1998 compared Osama bin Laden to a transnational James Bond movie villain, it’s hard to have a really dull moment.

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Sunday Book Review

By JOE KLEIN
Published: September 25, 2009

At the beginning of this odd, revealing and often delightful book, we find the newly minted President Bill Clinton in the White House with a group of Democratic senators, debating what to do about gays in the military. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who believes homosexuality is an abomination, launches into a gaseous disquisition on Julius Caesar’s supposed affair with King Nicomedes, which Byrd believes created a perception of weakness that led to the eventual failure of Caesar’s dictatorship. Other senators jump in to disagree, citing all sorts of sexual depravity during the Roman Empire’s long run. The president, rather than refocusing the debate on the executive or legislative options they had, notes that homosexuality had not made God’s “top-10 list of sins,” although bearing false witness and adultery had. This touches off another extensive round of baloney-slinging amongst the senators and their president. “I couldn’t tell,” Clinton later informs Taylor Branch, “whether Teddy Kennedy was going to start giggling or jump out the window.”

There are, as Clinton might say, a blue jillion such anecdotes in “The Clinton Tapes.” They range from heavy-duty insights into the relationship between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin to Elizabeth Taylor’s question about whether Clinton has checked out Sophia Loren’s breasts at a state dinner. (Clinton, typically, claims he didn’t inhale, then admits that his gaze had indeed wandered south.) The rowdy, discursive intellectual brilliance of the man is evident on almost every page, and so is the self- indulgence, self-pity and self- destructiveness — the magisterial excessiveness of every sort. Compared with the buttoned-up cool of the Oval Office’s current occupant, Bill Clinton is a one-man carnival — a magician, tightrope walker, juggler, mesmerist, hot-dog-eating contestant and burlesque show. You kind of miss the guy.

Unfortunately, there are some fairly serious structural problems in “The Clinton Tapes” that will dampen the casual reader’s pleasure. The biggest is that every thing in the book is secondhand. We never actually hear Clinton talking, just Branch’s recollections of his eight years of conversations with the president — a secret project that somehow managed to remain secret until now. Clinton controls the tapes. Branch didn’t have the opportunity to listen to them while preparing this book — and Clinton will decide when and if they are made available to the public.

Branch is a historian by trade, and an excellent one, the acclaimed author of a three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. He and Clinton sat down every month or so to record the president’s impressions of what was going on in his presidency; Branch took notes and also recorded his own account of the conversation driving home to Baltimore. Branch scrupulously reminds us about the limitations of this method and will even, at times, include sentences like this one about King Hussein of Jordan’s intervention into the Arab-Israeli peace talks: “Later, in dictation, I regretted my inability to recapture the force of Clinton’s language here.”

This is a frequent, and frustrating, motif. Clinton explodes torrentially over Whitewater or the Republicans in Congress — and Branch is left flailing, summarizing, attempting to recapture the moment. Since these are Branch’s recollections, he tends to dwell on the things he’s interested in — there is far more time spent on Clinton’s policy toward Haiti than on the details of such historic fights as those over Clinton’s 1993 budget plan, or the government shutdown battle of 1995.

Branch is a purposely modest interviewer, allowing the president to set the agenda (and usually letting him off the hook), but he will, at times, interject some sharp analysis. The press, for example, is a constant object of Clintonian tirades — often with good cause, since the news media’s scandal obsession produced a profoundly distorted sense of his presidency. Nothing came of Whitewater. And though the Lewinsky affair is indeed on God’s “top-10 list,” it was surely not an impeachable offense. Clinton sulks about this — Branch finds him wearing a “Trust me, I’m a reporter” T-shirt at Camp David and wonders about the self-pitying passivity: Clinton “treated bad publicity as a scourge to be endured rather than a problem to be dissected, managed, even positively transformed. . . . Unlike President Kennedy, who studiously had charmed reporters, and enjoyed feeding them stories, Clinton usually recoiled.” I wrote about the Clinton administration, favorably and unfavorably, for eight years, and always found this reticence a mystery, especially given the president’s ability to charm.

Branch’s friendship with Clinton does have significant advantages, though. It makes possible a remarkable portrait of White House life. Clinton’s relationship with the first lady seems incredibly strong (Branch even interrupts them when they are smooching, as I did once). And the president is a wildly devoted father, even to the point of having a screaming fight with Al Gore: the vice president wants Clinton to go to Japan to smooth a crisis, but Clinton re fuses because Chelsea needs his help studying for high school midterms. He is often encountered dressed casually, hanging out with his brother-in-law Hugh Rodham, watching college basketball or playing three-dimensional Scrabble. At one point, Clinton crows that he finished a New York Times crossword puzzle with an Elvis theme in nine minutes.

In the end, though, “The Clinton Tapes” will stand as an important work about American political life because of two dominant themes that emerge gradually — one about the man himself and the other about the nature of the current era. Clinton was a president who believed that government could help people live happier, more satisfying lives, and that America could help solve intractable issues like the Middle East crisis. He immersed himself in these issues, worked hard at them. His grasp of details — and his insights into the motivations of others — is breathtaking. As president, he proved a rare combination of fervent politician and devoted policy wonk. Some of my favorite passages in this book describe Clinton’s assessment of other politicians, from Bob Dole to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Early on, the president expresses admiration for David Bonior, one of the leading Democratic opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He expected Bonior’s opposition “to be energetic and effective. Yet he spoke warmly of him. Whatever Nafta’s outcome in Congress, he said, Bonior would move on without rancor to support the president again whenever he could. . . . He lamented that Bonior’s controlled ardor was becoming rare in a political culture given to indulge rather than overcome personal grievances.”

And that is the other great theme of this book: the struggle of a president mostly interested in policy against an opposition party obsessed with regaining power. The Republican efforts to undermine Clinton were rarely substantive and often unscrupulous. The president was impeached not because he committed anything resembling a high crime, but because the effort would cripple him at a moment when he might have gotten something accomplished — his popularity was running at 60 percent or so, the economy was booming. During the Clinton presidency, the Republicans accelerated their slide from a party of responsible conservatives to a party of antigovernment talk-show nihilists. Leaders like Bob Dole were intimidated by bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich.

Despite all this, Clinton managed to make some real headway with the Republican Congress, especially for the working poor. He accomplished it slowly, persistently, year by year, chivying a couple of hundred million bucks for programs like Head Start or health care for children. The Bill Clinton who emerges here is a master practitioner of an art that is routinely derided — foolishly — these days: he’s an unabashed, unapologetic politician. To the extent that Branch’s portrait of the president rescues politics from ignominy, he has done a real public service; that he has done this while vividly portraying an exuberant American original is cause for joy.

Joe Klein, a columnist for Time magazine, is the author of “Primary Colors” and “The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.”

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