Taylor Branch

By Susan Page, USA TODAY

BALTIMORE — The call from the White House usually would come in late afternoon. President Clinton had a few hours open in the evening. Could he come over?

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and civil rights historian, would pick up a notepad of questions and two microcassette recorders and drive his truck down Interstate 95 to Washington. Parking on the South Lawn, he would head to the White House family quarters for interviews so secret Clinton stored the tapes of them in his sock drawer.

What followed sometimes seemed like one of the bull sessions the two had two decades earlier when they shared an apartment in Austin, running George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign in Texas.

In these interviews and a new book that has followed, Branch says he tried to capture Clinton’s unvarnished perspective on the events swirling around his presidency, from the consequential to the occasionally comic.

VIDEO

• Monica Lewinsky
• Whitewater
• Hillary Clinton and the special prosecutor
• The president’s reaction
• Multitasking at the extreme
• The Clintons’ relationship
• Where the tapes were stored

Reluctant to discuss the affair with Monica Lewinsky that led to his impeachment, Clinton once lamented that it occurred when he felt sorry for himself and that he “just cracked” under the pressure of personal and political setback.

He also relayed how Boris Yeltsin’s late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident. The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.

The next night, Yeltsin eluded security forces again when he climbed down back stairs to the Blair House basement. A building guard took Yeltsin for a drunken intruder until Russian and U.S. agents arrived on the scene and rescued him.

Then there was Clinton’s take on a heated, two-hour discussion he had with then-Vice President Gore just after Gore had lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush.

The meeting started politely enough, Clinton recalled. Then Clinton, who felt underutilized during the 2000 campaign, told Gore he could have tilted the election to the Democratic side if he had been dispatched to stump in Arkansas or New Hampshire, both states in which Clinton was popular. Either state would have provided the electoral votes Gore needed to win.

Gore replied that Clinton’s scandalous shadow was a “drag” that had plagued Gore at every step of the campaign. The two “exploded” at each other in mutual recrimination.

Clinton may be having some second thoughts about the 79 oral history interviews he gave to Branch during his presidency, their contents not yet released. The transcripts are in binders that fill a long shelf in the office he converted from a garage behind his home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

The former president has been on the phone with Branch for hours since he got page proofs of Branch’s new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (Simon & Schuster), running “hot and cold” about the account based on Branch’s recollections of their conversations.

“I think it’s fair to say he’s nervous,” Branch, 62, said last week at his Victorian house here. Clinton didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The portrait that emerges from the 707-page tome is a president who reveled in policy and delighted in politics but “always thought he was trapped in the personal issues,” Branch says. The description of Clinton’s goals and thinking is more candid and more complex than in Clinton’s 2004 memoir, My Life.

Still, Branch’s book is more of a one-man show than a three-dimensional perspective: The world of the moment as seen through the president’s eyes.

Branch waited until his civil-rights trilogy was done and Clinton’s memoirs were published before turning to this book. Clinton didn’t know Branch was making his own set of contemporaneous tapes, Branch says, “but I don’t think he’d be surprised” that a historian would do so.

As he drove back to Baltimore after each interview, Branch would put a fresh tape in his recorder and recap what the president had just said. If he didn’t finish during the hour-long drive, he would sit in his tree-lined driveway in the pre-dawn quiet, stifling yawns and talking into the recorder until he was done.

Declining to detail Clinton’s concerns, he says: “The only thing I can say is that I didn’t change anything that he asked me to change.”

‘I just cracked’

The president would be voluble on almost any topic, from the willingness of India and Pakistani leaders to threaten the death of millions in their standoff over nuclear arms, to his assessment of the Republican contenders vying to succeed him in 2000.

Texas governor George W. Bush “was unqualified to be president … but he had shrewd campaign instincts,” Clinton told Branch. Arizona Sen. John McCain “might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run.”

Clinton was less forthcoming when the topic turned to Lewinsky, whose affair with Clinton shook his marriage and his presidency. Branch says he felt “squeamish” about asking too much. Branch called the allegations of personal misconduct by public figures “familiar quicksand” from his years of studying the public and private life of Martin Luther King Jr.

When the topic did come up, Clinton usually offered the boilerplate responses he was giving in public. Once a special counsel was investigating first the Whitewater land deal and then the Lewinsky controversy, the two men skirted issues under investigation while the recorder was running to avoid having the tapes subject to subpoena and exposure.

But one night in August 1999, six months after he had survived the Senate impeachment trial, words “spilled out” from an emotional Clinton. He told Branch the Lewinsky affair began because “I cracked; I just cracked.”

Branch said in the interview he believed that Clinton “had once maybe strayed more often than that and made a big resolution not to do it in the White House because there was too much at stake.” Saying he was “speaking out of school,” Branch went on: “From his point of view, he succeeded 99%, but then felt sorry for himself and lapsed.”

The Democrats’ loss of Congress in the November 1994 elections — on top of the death of Clinton’s mother the previous January and the Whitewater investigation — made Clinton feel beleaguered, unappreciated and open to a liaison with Lewinsky, Clinton told Branch. The affair began during the government budget shutdown in November 1995 and resumed briefly a few months after Clinton’s re-election in 1996 — a victory that he felt should have been vindication but didn’t still his critics.

“He said he could have done worse,” Branch writes. “He could have blown something up.”

Behind the headlines

Sitting with Branch on the second floor of the White House, Clinton would rail against the news media and his Republican opposition for what he saw as pursuing the personal and the inconsequential rather than the substantive and important. At times he would admit that his own actions played a part in all that, especially in the Lewinsky affair, stoking the controversies that risked overshadowing everything else.

Branch, who kept a daily account of Clinton’s schedule from news accounts, would set up two small recorders and pose questions he had written on a notepad, probing for details and insights beyond what was on the public record.

They often would meet in the Treaty Room but sometimes sat in the small family kitchen or on the Truman Balcony. In July 2000, during the Middle East peace negotiations, Branch was summoned for a session at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Once done, Branch would rewind the tapes, label them and give them to Clinton. After several years, he learned the president was tucking them behind his socks in a chest of drawers, where they remained until he moved out of the White House.

Branch has never heard the tapes. Besides the president’s scheduler, almost no one on the West Wing staff knew the interviews were taking place.

“I walked in on the two of them talking one night late in the residence and they both acted a little funny,” remembers then-White House press secretary Joe Lockhart. “A year later in the Chappaqua house, after he’d left the White House, I saw a box of tapes sitting out and asked the president what they were, and he told me they were the Taylor conversations.”

There was a roller coaster quality to some of the evenings, Branch recalls. Clinton, often exhausted, was a study in multi-tasking. One interview in 1995 was interrupted by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher calling about air strikes in Bosnia; Clinton had been filling in a crossword puzzle and then began to deal a game of solitaire while continuing both conversations.

On the night of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the topics between Clinton and Branch included not only that catastrophe but also then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s appeal to win delivery of more F-16 fighter jets and the legislative strategy of the new GOP House speaker, Newt Gingrich.

Then Chelsea, the Clintons’ daughter, hovered at the door. She was writing a paper for her sophomore English class to describe the best and worst qualities of Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, but she couldn’t make her points fit on a single page, as assigned.

“He’s reading it, and then he asked me to read it and what did I think? And where could it be shortened?” Branch recalls. “I’ve got the tapes going and I’m wondering, ‘Am I going to be able to get back to the stuff I’m supposed to be doing? And will historians of the future think I’m an idiot for getting sidetracked off of these things with the president of the United States to be critiquing this homework assignment on … Dr. Frankenstein?’ ”

From the beginning, the interviews were designed to provide Clinton’s perspective on his presidency as it was happening.

There have been White House recordings of one sort or another since Franklin Roosevelt, but the secret systems that taped phone conversations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Oval Office meetings of Richard Nixon have been dismantled. A fear of investigations and subpoenas means presidents worry about being able to keep a diary private.

“The records preserved in presidential libraries are getting more voluminous but less personal,” Branch says. “There’s a mountain of paper, but it’s really hard to tell what happened.”

After the 1972 campaign, Clinton and Branch didn’t speak to one another for 20 years. Clinton was building a political career in Arkansas; Branch was researching and writing a history of the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1968.

Clinton had read Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63— even the footnotes, many of them crediting records from presidential libraries. As president-elect, he asked Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham to put Branch and his wife, Christy Macy, on the guest list for a glittering dinner party Graham hosted. There, Clinton pulled Branch aside for a brief conversation.

His question: How could he be sure his presidency had records that would give historians a similar window into what was going on behind the scenes?

Dictating a diary

Branch says the two conferred several times about it during the administration’s opening months. Clinton proposed Branch fill the role Arthur Schlesinger Jr. played in the Kennedy administration, a sort of court historian on the White House staff. Branch declined. Clinton tried dictating a diary but found it unwieldy; he said he needed to be interacting with someone.

In September 1993, Branch agreed to do oral history interviews with Clinton until the president could train someone on his staff for that role. No one else was ever trained, and their sessions continued until Clinton left office in 2001.

The president was determined to keep them secret to avoid what he saw as inevitable demands for disclosure.

“I was constantly wrestling with, ‘What is my job?’ ” Branch says. “Basically, my first goal was to say, ‘This is about history. … I want to get as much raw material on the record as possible.’ But it was never that simple.”

Branch was there as a historian but he also was a friend, and Clinton at times would seek his advice. From 1998 to 1999, Branch’s wife worked at the White House as a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton. As Bill Clinton finished his memoirs, he surprised Branch with a $50,000 “bonus” for his help in laying the groundwork for them.

Publication of Branch’s book has underscored the conflicting agendas of friend and historian.

Clinton on several occasions had encouraged Branch to write a book about their sessions, albeit at some undesignated point in the future. The author used the advance he received from the publishing house Simon & Schuster to have his own tapes transcribed; he had stored them in a safe deposit box at a bank.

Those tapes will be available to researchers next year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The former president had planned to use the interviews he had given when he wrote his book, but there is little sign he did. As he neared the deadline to submit his manuscript in 2004, he invited Branch to Chappaqua to read the first 700 pages. Branch was stunned to find that with only a month or two to go until his deadline, Clinton was just beginning to write about his time in the White House.

In one of their few arguments, Branch urged him to delay publication or split the memoir into two volumes — one now, a second later. Clinton refused. In the end, My Life “skims the surface” of his presidency like a hovercraft, Branch says.

For historians wanting to plunge into the Clinton presidency, the unprecedented interviews will be invaluable, says Russell Riley, head of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He calls their existence “a major historical event,” though Clinton hasn’t said when and under what conditions they might be available to scholars.

“There is a poverty of original-source accounts of what truly is happening in the White House (because) people are afraid to put things down on paper,” Riley says. The recordings “hold a great deal of promise for us in getting a better picture of at least what President Clinton’s mentality and understanding were at critical moments of his presidency.”

He likens it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to full-color Oz: “The richness of the portraiture of what you’re seeing around you and the way it engages your senses about history are profoundly enhanced.”

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THE CLINTON TAPES
Wrestling History with the President

Praise for Taylor Branch and THE CLINTON TAPES:

“…absorbing inside account…”
—Publishers Weekly

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters, draws on seventy-nine confidential conversations with President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001 to offer a unique record of the Clinton presidency, as well as one of the most vivid, frank, and intimate glimpses into the mind of a sitting president ever published, in THE CLINTON TAPES: Wrestling History with the President (Simon & Schuster; September 29, 2009; $35.00). Branch, a longtime friend of Clinton’s, served as his secret diarist, tape-recording intense, often wry, occasionally strained late-night conversations about virtually every major event, issue, and personality of Clinton’s two terms – everything the president thought and felt privately but was not able to say in public.

Their primary goals were to preserve uncensored raw material for future historians, and to provide a basis for Clinton’s post-presidential memoir. But in the informal setting of the White House family quarters, Branch soon found himself struggling to balance his roles as friend, counselor, and objective interviewer. Seeking to preserve his own witness for history, Branch dictated his impressions after each session, not only of the topics covered, but of Clinton’s widely varying moods, manner, and highly personal interactions with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. From these recollections, he has crafted an extraordinary blend of history, journalism, and politics, which sheds fresh light on a controversial president, a contentious era, and the nature of the presidency itself.

“I’m up to my ass in alligators”

Clinton approached Branch shortly after his election to the presidency in 1992, asking whether Branch would agree to be his in-house historian, his “Arthur Schlesinger.” Instead, Branch proposed to help Clinton create an unfiltered, verbatim, contemporaneous record that would be under his sole control, in order to encourage maximum candor. In a quickly established pattern, Branch would be periodically summoned from his home in nearby Baltimore, often on short notice, whenever Clinton had an opening in his calendar. To avoid scrutiny in the fishbowl of the West Wing, the sessions were generally scheduled for late in the evening. Branch would be escorted by White House butlers and ushers upstairs to the president’s private office, called the Treaty Room, or to the family kitchen, the Truman Balcony, or perhaps the family parlor next to the president’s bedroom. At the end of every session, which usually lasted about two hours, Branch handed Clinton the only two copies of each tape, which Clinton put in what he called “a good hiding place” – his sock drawer.

Branch’s freewheeling conversations with Clinton had something of the quality of a bull session between old friends, which they had been since they shared an apartment with Hillary while working on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign in Texas. “I’m up to my ass in alligators,” Clinton told Branch one night in December 1993, mostly over North Korea’s nuclear program. But as Branch writes, “Revelations lay hidden everywhere for specialists and regular citizens alike. A U.S. president was framing issues, telling stories, and thinking out loud. Inescapably, he let on what he did and did not notice inside the nation’s central bunker – what penetrated the walls of government and the clatter of opinion, and how he shaped and responded to what penetrated.” (pp. 13-14)

War and peace, Whitewater and Lewinsky, presidents and popes

Topics ranged from still-simmering concerns like North Korea, health care reform, the Middle East, and gays in the military to wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, budget battles with Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress, the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, Whitewater, the Lewinsky scandal, impeachment, and the deadlocked presidential election of 2000. Under instructions from the Clinton’s lawyers, Branch was forbidden to tape comments related to Clinton’s legal troubles. For a time, Branch feared that these problems would put an end to the project entirely, but the president’s attorneys were able to shield the tapes from subpoena. Feeling safer after Clinton’s re-election in 1996, the President allowed Branch to record one oral history session entirely about his memories and opinions of the Whitewater investigation. (pp. 428-30)

Branch’s text puts the reader on his shoulder in the White House, never knowing what to expect from a cerebral, emotional, besieged President of the United States. Each recording sessions covers multiple subjects, with news and nuggets popping up from every direction. A small sample suggests the range of revelation:

• Clinton lamented balky candidates for the Supreme Court: “I felt like Diogenes wandering in Athens, asking, where is an honest man I can give this job to.” (p. 43)
• Clinton complained of a rare inability to make communicate with a fellow political leader, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, after Jiang brusquely dismissed a plea for human rights, saying, “Who is to say your freedom is worth it?” (p. 109)
• Pakistani and Indian leaders foresaw “victory” after a nuclear exchange killing several hundred million people. “They really talk that way,” said a dismayed President Clinton. (p. 137)
• A drunken President Boris Yeltsin tripped security alarms by sneaking out on Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear to hail a taxi for a late-night pizza. (p. 197)
• In a tense session on the night of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Chelsea Clinton sought and received advice for a homework essay on the character Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. (p. 248)
• President Clinton discussed air strikes in Bosnia on the phone with the Secretary of State while chewing a cigar, finishing a crossword, dealing solitaire, and making comments on tape. (p. 268)
• Anticipating budget surpluses three years ahead of his hopes, Clinton predicted two political responses: pressure for highway construction and more diversions into personal scandal. (p. 483)
• Three weeks after NATO stopped bombing Kosovo in a landmark victory, Clinton explored why nearly 80 percent of Americans believed we were still fighting. (p. 555)
• Early in 2000, Clinton saw the leading GOP rivals as mirror opposites. George W. Bush was a gifted campaigner unqualified to be president, whereas John McCain was qualified but had no idea how to run. (p. 588)
• Clinton disclosed specific plots by Osama bin Laden to kill him in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the spring of 2000, saying, “I hope I’m sitting here with you again next month.” (p. 590-95)
• Clinton thought Gore could win the 2000 election with a wild-card selection of Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland as his running mate. (p. 618)
• Clinton replayed an extraordinary two-hour conversation with Vice President Al Gore, airing grievances on both sides over responsibility for losing the 2000 presidential election. (p. 641)

Branch’s recollections provide fascinating new detail about Clinton’s reactions to these matters. When pressed by Branch to explain why he had become sexually involved with Monica Lewinsky, for instance, Clinton repeated over and over, “I think I just cracked.” Reeling, Branch expressed his great sadness that Clinton had handed his enemies a scandal of substance after coming so close to proving that all the others alleged against him were baseless.

In addition, Clinton offered memorable impressions and shrewd analysis of former presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, as well as many of the scores of foreign leaders with whom he dealt, including Tony Blair, Boris Yeltsin, Jiang Zemin, King Hussein, Nelson Mandela, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat, and Pope John Paul II (whom he asked to relax the Catholic Church’s prohibition against birth control in order to help reduce the incidence of abortion).

Clashes with the press

As he began his sessions with Clinton, Branch was struck both by the ease with which they picked up their relationship after a twenty-year hiatus and the gulf that had opened up between them with Clinton’s election to the highest office in the land, with its life-and-death responsibilities. Moreover, he reflected on the divergent paths they had chosen, with Clinton trying to better the world through politics, and Branch seeking integrity through the pursuit of the written word. In their dialogue, Clinton’s tirades against the press were vociferous and frequent. The president mixed tirades with ever-changing theories about a culture of cynicism. In response, Branch urged both Bill and Hillary Clinton to try to cultivate and charm the press, rather than denounce or stonewall it. Nonetheless, to his shock, Branch found Clinton to be less cynical, more reflective, and more intellectually adventurous than many of his fellow writers. “It was hard to fathom,” he writes, “coming from the presumption of my own career. Yet most images of Clinton collapsed into formula and hype, however pervasive. They were myths.” (p. 379)

Challenging perceptions of Clinton and his presidency

Branch concludes: “Clinton’s tapes are a resource yet to be measured, like the telephone recordings still being released from his Cold War predecessors. Future scholars and specialists will find useful – often essential – the president’s exact words on many details that escaped my summary dictation. This book is a preview in close witness. Its format is distinct from a history, which strives to base compelling narrative and balanced judgment on evidence from wide-ranging, comprehensive sources. I did not try to evaluate Clinton’s version of complex events, and this first-person presentation makes me a participant in a memoir, not a history, gathering testimony from one central actor in American politics – Bill Clinton. His stories enjoy the benefits of privacy, immediacy, and control, but not hindsight. They are revealing but not conclusive. If they jar perceptions of Clinton or his presidency, healthy debate among citizens can repair mistakes and dispel even durable myths.” (p. 663)

Filled with surprising revelations, engaging anecdotes, pointed judgments, remarkable subtlety, and rich new detail, THE CLINTON TAPES offers a unique and enlarging perspective on one of our most brilliant, beleaguered, and perplexing presidents, as well as fresh lessons from his presidency.

About the author:

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (which won the Pulitzer Prize); Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68. He is a former staff journalist for The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and Esquire. His website is www.taylorbranch.com.

About the book:

THE CLINTON TAPES: Wrestling History with the President
By Taylor Branch

Published by Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: September 29, 2009, Price: $35.00; Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4333-3; ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4333-6

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Praise for At Canaan’s Edge:

“This is so far the best look at [the Sixties]. It is an essential tool for understanding what happened to and in America across that dizzying span of years.”

—Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books

“Luminous . . . magisterial . . . A sweeping history of protest and politics, bursting with outsize figures…There will be the inevitable comparisons to Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, two other masterworks that use the grand sweep of history to lay bare the nation’s soul.”

—Kevin Boyle, Chicago Tribune

“A moving and panoramic view of America during the last three years of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . . Interviews and archival sources add gripping detail. . . . A deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America’s civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.”

—James T. Patterson, Washington Post Book World

Visit the author’s website at http://www.taylorbranch.com

For author photo or jacket photo, visit http://www.simonandschuster.net

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It has been nearly forty years since three young Democratic activists named Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and Taylor Branch moved into a small apartment together in Austin, Texas, to wage a presidential campaign for George McGovern. In the decades since, the Clintons have taken that political fire to the center of American political life, while Branch has chosen a quieter course, writing three definitive volumes on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Yet at the height of Bill Clinton’s ascent—for the full eight years of the presidency—the historian and the politician reunited for a secret project, hidden from even Clinton’s closest aides. Meeting late at night and sometimes through the night, Clinton and Branch embarked on a series of seventy-nine conversations about politics, the presidents, the Whitewater investigation, and yes, even Monica—recording every word for posterity. Acutely aware that their tapes could be subpoenaed at any moment and desperate to avoid making them public, Clinton squirreled away the cassettes in his sock drawer and has never spoken of them nor made them public. But this month, Branch releases a 670-page mammoth tome, The Clinton Tapes, that mines those conversations and delves into Clinton’s presidency and state of mind through a tumultuous and historic eight years. Branch sat down on the sprawling porch of his Victorian home in Baltimore to discuss the project, the experience, and the book.—WIL S. HYLTON

Let’s start in the fall of 1992. Out of nowhere, the president-elect calls you up and invites you to a dinner party at Katherine Graham’s house. What happened?

It was bizarre. When we were kids, we were buddies down in Texas, trying to get McGovern elected. We lived together, but I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, and I had no idea why he asked me to dinner. I had kind of reprocessed him out of my friendship, into being a politician. This is a guy who’s run off to run for Congress in Arkansas, when all the rest of us were very alienated, and had this pile-driver political career, and so I had reprogrammed him away from somebody that you could know as a regular person. This is a president of the United States! He may just be all greed and selfishness. I was definitely tamping down my expectations.

Had you been a supporter in the campaign?

No! I thought his “forgotten middle class” sounded like Nixon’s “silent majority.” It was a formula—part of being a member of this species called “politician.” But within twenty seconds, I completely reconnected with him. He just knocked me over intellectually. He comes up and out of the blue asks me all these questions about historic preservation, saying, “I read your footnotes, and I want to make sure there are things like that for historians in fifty years.” Even if I hadn’t known him, even if it had been Richard Nixon or George W. Bush, I would have been floored that he was thinking about that already. This guy who hadn’t even taken office yet is thinking about raw material for historians fifty years later.

Within weeks, you were swept up in a whirlwind with him—staying up all night to write the inaugural address, being onstage during the ceremony, and then actually entering the White House for the first time with Bill and Hillary.

The day before, I thought I was going down to hear a final reading of the inaugural and wound up working all night, then being onstage with no seat or anything, just crouched down. And after the parade, he said, “Come on, let’s go to the White House!” So it was just the three of us walking in, he and Hillary and me! I mean, he literally didn’t know where the Lincoln Bedroom was. We were wandering around, poking in closets.

How did you decide to begin recording interviews for history?

He was angling to get me to move into the White House as house historian. But I responded more to the notion of preserving his thoughts. I only realized later on what a tremendous commitment that meant for him. Because the only time he could fit me in was when he was tired. There were stunning moments; I would be talking to him late at night and his eyes would go up, just roll back in his head. He would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence.

At the end of each session, sometimes late at night or even early the next morning, you would drive home to Baltimore and talk into a tape recorder the whole time. It must have been exhausting for you as well.

I would do those dictations until I dropped. I would sit here outside the house and dictate notes until I fell asleep in the truck. Because I felt that it was a significant experience that I should preserve. But on the tapes, there are a few times where it’s amazing: I would yawn involuntarily four times a minute! Because my workday on the King books always started at five in the morning, and sometimes I wouldn’t know I was going to go down to the White House until six at night. They would call up and say, “Can you come down at eight?” And I’d scramble and go down there, have this session with him, and it’d be two o’clock in the morning, and I’d be driving and dictating, then wake up the next morning again. But having that drive home to Baltimore for dictation was a forced habit that turned out to be very good.

The level of detail in your conversations is overwhelming. You discuss the most minute foreign-policy details, political calculations. Did you need to expand your reading habits to keep up with him?

Not really, because I actually didn’t know a lot of that stuff! I would just set a subject out there and say, “This seems to be a significant topic.” I didn’t know the background and the parameters; he would explain those. And sometimes I would set a subject out there and he would give me what was already in The New York Times. Sometimes he would say, “We’re going to appeal. End of story.” And we’d move on.

The Bill Clinton in this book is very different than the version we came to know in the press. You describe a guy who was steadfast and idealistic, very different from the wishy-washy, flip-flopping caricature who let Dick Morris tell him what to do.

It was almost like a credential for old liberals to look down on Clinton, because if you looked down on Clinton, you could say, “He’s betrayed liberalism,” but you didn’t have to uphold anything yourself. All you had to do was talk about what a shit he was or what a sellout he was and you could get this cheap credential.

Meanwhile, you’re seeing this guy whose face is red with allergies, he’s so tired that his eyes are rolling back in his head.… He’s the last fighting baby boomer.

Well, yeah. For example, I admire Obama greatly, but if you compare Clinton and Obama on the National Rifle Association, Obama said, “It’s not worth it.” Right from the get-go. “You can’t win.” And Clinton was going after the NRA and assault weapons and cop-killer bullets the whole time. And he paid for it, and maybe it was a mistake, because it certainly hurt him in the 1994 congressional elections. But he did stick to his guns, as it were. He took risks. On Haiti—restoring Aristide. I would hear him say it: “This is going to hurt my presidency.” Or, “I could go down the tubes for this.”

In all the Kennedy and Johnson tapes you’ve listened to, do you hear the same resolve?

In some ways, Kennedy was just the opposite. People would idealize him, but then on the tapes, you hear him trying to kill Castro and all this other stuff. It’s disillusioning. And Johnson does the Civil Rights bill, but then he does the Vietnam War—and you hear them saying essentially, “We know this is not going to work, but we’re going to do it anyway.” Then Nixon promises to end the war, and four years later the war is still going. Then you have Watergate. So it was kind of like we had this post–World War II optimism about politics that was yanked out of our generation by hard experience. In some ways, Hillary and I were more typical of our generation than Bill. We were bruised and disillusioned with politics. We had more in common with each other politically than either of us had with Bill. He seemed to be on automatic pilot: “I’m going to run for office!” At the time, I didn’t connect that to idealism. I connected it to ambition. The notion that it came from a sense of idealism didn’t rear up for me until I was able to watch him in the White House, seeing why he would do things.

How did you contain that for eight years, listening to people say the opposite about him?

I couldn’t communicate with people, because I felt like I was in a different galaxy. I just dropped out. I didn’t see a way of fighting it that didn’t endanger the project. I couldn’t challenge my friend [Washington Post critic] Jon Yardley, who would sit around and bitch and moan about Clinton: “He’s no good, he doesn’t care about anything, he doesn’t believe in anything.” I couldn’t say, “Jon, I know that’s not true.” I couldn’t start that conversation, because the only way I could combat it would be to say, “I’ve been around Clinton a lot, and my experience is totally different.” And then some story would come out that he had these tapes, and they would get subpoenaed. So I just basically had to be quiet and not talk to people.

There are several parallels between Clinton and Martin Luther King—both are southern, same generation, men of faith, orators. But then there’s adultery. How did you process that?

Very painfully. I can’t say I’ve got any great answers. I think King got something good out of it, in a perverse way. He was driven to seek penance by public sacrifice for private failings. He would preach about the mystery of evil: Why could we not cast out this demon? But you know, with Clinton, I just had this assumption that when you hear all this, some of it’s true. I assumed that he had resolved to make it true no longer. Which is pretty much what King did. He resolved openly to his aides, “There’s too much at stake here. I’ve got to stop this.” And some of the greatest regret in King’s life was that he couldn’t do it. With Clinton, what he said was that it was a real lapse of feeling sorry for himself. He said it had to do with politics. Now, most people think that these compulsions have to do with more fundamental human things. I don’t know whether that’s true. All I know is that he said it happened when he thought he was doing a good job and got sucker punched. I didn’t read the Lewinsky stuff until I was working on the book. It was so tawdry. It was depressing to me. It’s fervid and tormented and brief. There were two bookends to it: He had these trysts with her during the shutdown and then banished her to the Pentagon or wherever the hell she went, and then she came back in that period right after the ’96 election, when he thought [the Whitewater investigation] was going to go away and it didn’t. He says he was feeling sorry for himself because of what was going on in politics, and that he just lost it. That’s what he said.

Was he a Lothario in 1972?

No, and I was sharing an apartment with he and Hillary. I had just separated from my wife, had virtually no social life, and they were all over each other. The only story was that we were having a hard time getting this woman politician to endorse McGovern, and the McGovern campaign sent in a guy who had worked for Jack Kennedy. So he met her, and came back and said, “She just needs to get laid. I know just the guy.” We were stunned. And then we realized he was serious! He went to the phone to call this guy in Boston and bring him down to Texas! And Clinton took the phone from him and said, “We’re not gonna do that, and if you do that, we’re leaving.” I didn’t do anything. I was paralyzed. And in retrospect, if Clinton was cynical about women, I would think he would have been more like that guy. Now, maybe he developed it later. I really don’t know.

It was interesting to read your descriptions of Bill and Hillary. Halfway through the impeachment trial, the doorman at the White House refused to let you in because they were making out in a hallway.

Well, that only happened once. I don’t know if their relationship is romantic, but it’s not cold. Sometimes when I tell people that they finish each other’s sentences, people say, “That’s because it’s a power alliance.” Like a medieval marriage between the prince of Spain and the queen of Austria. But there’s warmth there. There’s communion. They would hold hands. How much eroticism is in there, I have no idea. But it was striking.

Have you shown them the book?

I just took two copies up to Chappaqua last week. Hillary has it in Africa now, and he’s been off on this North Korea thing. But he did call. He’s called a couple of times to fuss about things. But he has enormous tolerance for honest criticism. I think he can take it raw, as long as he doesn’t detect that it’s done for malice. I was trying to show him the way he really is, and I think he respects that.

WIL S. HYLTON is a GQ correspondent.

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12.12.09
The Clinton Tapes have been included in two Bloomberg.com “Best of” Lists:
Bloomberg.com

Clintons Canoodle, Market Deity Rand in Year’s Top Nonfiction

Top Five Nonfiction Books, Marc Rich to Ayn Rand: The Muse List

10.18.09
Where the News Comes From: Walking back a single day’s top stories
New York

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. Read full article >

10.16.09
Secret White House tapes provide new Clinton book
Reuters

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…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. Read full article >

10.15.09
Q&A with Taylor Branch
Arkansas Times

When 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. Read full article >

10.15.09
Biography Reveals Bill Clinton the Father
Mens’ News Daily

I’ve never been a fan of Bill Clinton…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. Read full article >

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 >

9.28.09
The Clinton Years, in Clinton’s Words. Sort Of.
The Washington Post

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. Read full article >

9.27.09

VIDEO – Clinton Confidential
The Baltimore Sun

9.23.09
UNC-CH gets Clinton-era papers
News & Observer

On Jan. 4, a new window into Bill Clinton’s presidency will open at UNC-Chapel Hill.

That’s when a trove of source material Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch used for his new book on the Clinton presidency will become publicly available at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-CH. Read full article >

9.21.09

VIDEO – Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch discusses his new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.
USA Today

• Monica Lewinsky
• Whitewater
• Hillary Clinton and the special prosecutor
• The president’s reaction
• Multitasking at the extreme
• The Clintons’ relationship
• Where the tapes were stored

9.21.09

Secret interviews add insight to Clinton presidency
USA Today, Susan Page

BALTIMORE — The call from the White House usually would come in late afternoon. President Clinton had a few hours open in the evening. Could he come over? Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and civil rights historian, would pick up a notepad of questions and two microcassette recorders and drive his truck down Interstate 95 to Washington. Read full article >

9.18.09
The Bill Clinton Tapes: A Q&A with Taylor Branch, author of The Clinton Tapes
GQ.com, Wil S. Hylton

It has been nearly forty years since three young Democratic activists named Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, and Taylor Branch moved into a small apartment together in Austin, Texas, to wage a presidential campaign for George McGovern. In the decades since, the Clintons have taken that political fire to the center of American political life, while Branch has chosen a quieter course, writing three definitive volumes on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Read full article >

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At Canaan’s Edge

“A thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. . . . Amazing.”

– Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“With this final volume, “America in the King Years” becomes unsurpassed in the last 50 years of American biography. . . . A book that gradually reveals a large-scale vision of democracy as an act of hope thrown down like a gauntlet.”

– Charles Taylor, Salon.com

“Stunning. . . . It is the most difficult and downbeat of the three volumes . . . it also might be the best.”

– Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly

“Of all the books on all the ‘best’ lists, this is the one sure to be important 100 years from now.”

– Anne Stephenson, The Arizona Republic

“A worthy capstone to a remarkable series of historical works. . . . The King that Branch gives us is a hero indeed, but one of the best kind: a man who is deeply flawed yet dedicates his life to bettering himself and others.”

– Erik Spanberg, Christian Science Monitor

“A magnificent account of witness and sacrifice.”

– John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine

“Luminous . . . magisterial . . . There will be the inevitable comparisons to Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, two other masterworks that use the grand sweep of history to lay bare the nation’s soul.

– Kevin Boyle, Chicago Tribune

“Branch’s remarkable talent for amassing details and incorporating them into a swiftly paced narrative makes these books seem fresh, startling, and compelling.”

– Richard Nicholls, American Scholar

“Taylor Branch has become the most important narrator of America’s democratic aspirations. . . . a profound act of citizenship, scholarship, and storytelling as he brings those years to life and lets them speak their truth for the ages.”

– Timothy B. Tyson, The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

“A moving and panoramic view of America during the last three years of the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. . . .At Canaan’s Edge is a deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America’s civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.”

– James T. Patterson, Washington Post Book World

Pillar of Fire

“As he did in Parting the Waters, Branch brings to these events both a passion for their detail and a recognition of their larger historical significance. By giving King such epic treatment, Branch implies that he was an epic hero. Was he? The great merit of Branch’s stunning accomplishment is to prove definitively that he was.”

– Alan Wolfe, The New York Times Book Review

“Pillar of Fire is a magisterial history of one of the most tumultuous periods in postwar America. Branch’s storytelling is strong, his storytelling colorful. Reading Branch, it is easier to see why even the most remarkable revolutions are never complete. ”

– Jon Meacham, Newsweek

“…a powerful, surprising argument, never explicitly stated but implicitly clear, holding that the rebellions against the established order-which took their form in the civil-rights movement, the youth movement, the early stirrings of the women’s movement and the middle class’s changing self-definition through the 1960s-were inextricably linked…. It is Mr. Branch’s achievement to display how the civil-rights pressures and the Cold War pressures were intertwined.”

– David M. Shribman, The Wall Street Journal

“Following Parting the Waters, his magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Civil Rights years 1954-63, Branch’s second volume of a projected trilogy takes the story through the heady years that saw the Southern Freedom Rides, Congressional battles over the Civil Rights acts, the March on Washington, the Birmingham bombing, and the assassinations of John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Once more, Branch’s national epic is knit together by the charismatic figure of Dr. King. We only think we know this story, which in Branch’s masterly version seems freshened and newly impressive, told without cant or cliche.”

– Library Journal

“By the time you have finished [Pillar of Fire], you feel almost as if you have relieved the era, not just read about it.”

– Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

Parting the Waters

“Right out of the pages of our lives… Compelling portraits, placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently.”

– Eleanor Holmes Norton, The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning… commands the attention of all who wish to understand the times in which they live.”

– J. Anthony Lukas
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Common Ground

“Branch has fit together all the pieces – the people, places, events – to show relationships, the larger picture we may have missed or forgotten. With this ordered, sweeping look at the movement and King, we are able to put things into perspective.”

– Patsy Sims, Chicago Sun Times

“Branch gives us a canvas as broad, varied and richly peopled as a medieval religious painting. Should be required reading for every black and white citizen of the state.”

– Garland Reeves, The Birmingham News

“In remarkable, meticulous detail, Branch provides us with the most complex and unsentimental version of King and his times yet produced.”

– Robert C. Maynard, The Washington Post Book World

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From Chapter One

Nearly seven hundred Negro communicants, some wearing white robes, marched together in the exodus of 1867. They followed the white preacher out of the First Baptist Church and north through town to Columbus Street, then east up the muddy hill to Ripley Street. There on that empty site, the congregation declared itself the First Baptist Church (Colored), with appropriate prayers and ceremonies, and a former slave named Nathan Ashby became the first minister of an independent Negro Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Most local whites considered the separation a bargain, given the general state of turmoil and numb destitution after the war. Governor Robert M. Patton and the new legislature, in a wild gamble based on Andrew Johnson’s friendliness toward prominent ex-Confederates, openly repudiated the Fourteenth Amendment’s recognition of Negro citizenship rights, only to have a Union brigadier walk into the Montgomery capitol to declare that he was superseding the state government again until its officials saw fit to reconsider. White spirits fell; Negro spirits soared. The town’s population had swelled to fourteen thousand, with Negroes outnumbering whites three to one. Refugees of both races were fleeing the crop failures and foreclosures in the countryside and streaming into Montgomery, where they often lived in clumps on the streets and entertained themselves by watching the outdoor sheriff’s sales.

Under such conditions, and with the U.S. Congress threatening a new Fifteenth Amendment to establish the right of Negroes to vote and govern, most whites were of no mind to dispute the Negro right to religion. Many were only too happy to clear the throngs from the church basement, even if it meant that their previous items of property would be conducting their own church business at the corner of Columbus and Ripley—offering motions, debating, forming committees, voting, hiring and firing preachers, contributing pennies, bricks, and labor to make pews and windows rise into the first free Negro institution. The Negro church legal in some respects before the Negro family, became more solvent than the local undertaker.

Ten years later, a dissident faction of the First Baptist Church (Colored) marched away in a second exodus that would forever stamp the characters of the two churches. Both sides would do their best to pass off the schism as nothing more than the product of cramped quarters and growing pains, but trusted descendants would hear of the quarrels inevitable among a status-starved people. Undoubtedly some of the tensions were the legacy of slavery’s division between the lowly field hands and the slightly more privileged house servants, the latter more often mulattoes. These tensions culminated when “higher elements” among the membership mounted a campaign to remodel the church to face the drier Ripley Street instead of the sloping Columbus, where they were obliged to muddy their shoes on Sundays after a rain. Their proposed renovation, while expensive, would afford cleaner and more dignified access.

Most members and some deacons considered this an unseemly and even un-Christian preoccupation with personal finery, but a sizable minority felt strongly enough to split off and form the Second Baptist Church (Colored). Although the secessionists shared the poverty of the times and of their race—and held their organizational meeting in the old Harwell Mason slave pen—the world of their immediate vision was one of relative privilege. At the first baptismal services, conducted by a proper British minister, guests included three equally proper white Yankee schoolmistresses from the missionary legions who were still streaming south to educate and Christianize the freedmen. In January 1879, the new church paid $250 for a lot and a building that stood proudly in the center of town on Dexter Avenue, little more than a stone’s throw from the grand entrance of the Alabama state capitol. The all-Negro congregation renamed itself Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Its first minister, a former slave named Charles Octavius Boothe, wrote that the members were “people of money and refinement” and boasted that one of the members, a barber named Billingslea, owned property worth $300,000. This claim, though widely doubted, entered the official church history.

From the beginning, Dexter Avenue operated as a “deacons’ church,” meaning that the lay officers took advantage of the full sovereignty claimed by each Baptist congregation. They were free to hire any preacher they wanted—trained or untrained, fit or unfit—without regard to bishops or other church hierarchy. The Baptists had no such hierarchy at all, nor any educational requirements for the pulpit, and this fact had contributed mightily to the spread of the denomination among unlettered whites and Negroes alike. Anyone with lungs and a claim of faith could become a preacher. And as the ministry was the only white-collar trade open to Negroes during slavery—when it was a crime in all the Southern states to teach Negroes to read or allow them to engage in any business requiring the slightest literacy—preachers and would-be preachers competed fiercely for recognition. Religious oratory became the only safe marketable skill, and a reputation for oratory substituted for diplomas and all other credentials. For most of the next century, a man with a burning desire to be a saint might well find himself competing with another preacher intent only on making a fortune, as all roads converged at the Negro church. It served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court. These and a hundred extra functions further enhanced the importance of the minister, creating opportunities and pressures that forged what amounted to a new creature and caused the learned skeptic W.E.B. Du Bois to declare at the turn of the twentieth century that “the preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

Not surprisingly, these powerful characters sorely tested the ability of congregations to exercise the authority guaranteed them in Baptist doctrine. As a rule, the preachers had no use for church democracy. They considered themselves called by God to the role of Moses, a combination of ruler and prophet, and they believed that the congregation behaved best when its members, like the children of Israel, obeyed as children. The board of deacons at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was one of the few to defend itself effectively against preachers who regularly tried to subdue the membership. Indeed, the board’s very identity seemed rooted in the conviction that the church’s quality lay as much in the membership as in the pastor. And because those same deacons also made it a tradition to choose the best trained, most ambitious ministers, titanic struggles after the fashion of those between European monarchs and nobles became almost a routine of church life at Dexter. Nearly a dozen preachers came and went in the first decade.

By contrast, the First Baptist Church (Colored) remained a “preacher’s church,” with only three pastors during its first fifty-seven years of existence. The exalted preachers tended to reign in a manner that provoked another mass exodus in 1910, not long after the church burned to the ground. The minister at that time, Andrew Stokes, was a great orator and organizer who had baptized an astonishing total of 1,100 new members during his first year in the pulpit. Stokes made First Baptist the largest Negro church in the United States until the great migration of 1917 created larger congregations in Chicago. He was also a money-maker. If white realtors had trouble selling a house, they often advanced Stokes the down payment, letting him keep his “refund” when white buyers mobilized to keep him out of their neighborhood. Stokes would joke with his deacons about the justice of making the whites pay for their prejudice, and he donated a portion of the proceeds to the church. This was fine, but a controversy erupted when Stokes proposed to rebuild the burned church a few hundred feet to the northeast on a corner lot that he owned and to take title to the parsonage in exchange for the property. Many irreparable wounds were inflicted in the debate that followed. Stokes went so far as to promise to make the new church entrance face Ripley Street, as the wealthier members had demanded more than thirty years earlier, but the unmollified elite among the deacons led a fresh secession down to Dexter Avenue Baptist.

It was said that Dexter actually discouraged new members, fearing that additions above the peak of seven hundred would reduce the quality of the whole, and several Dexter deacons predicted in public that Stokes would never be able to rebuild First Baptist without their money and influence. Undaunted, Stokes continued preaching to the impoverished masses who stayed with him, meeting outdoors when he could not borrow a church, and he laid down his law: those who were too poor to meet the demands of the building fund must bring one brick each day to the new site, whether that brick was bought, stolen, or unearthed from Civil War ruins. At the dedication ceremony five years later, Stokes led the great cry of thanks that went up for what became known as the “Bricka-Day Church.”

This excerpt is copywritten and may not be reprinted without the express written consent of Taylor Branch.

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The first volume of the definitive history of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement – a struggle that was to change American forever.

In Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch has created an unparalleled epic of America in the midst of change, poised on the threshold of its most explosive era. Here is a vivid, panoramic portrait of America divided, at war with itself, and finally transformed by a struggle that left no citizen untouched – the civil rights movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., borne by the spirit of a generation of young black leaders determined to seize equality and justice.

In Parting the Waters, Branch chronicles the struggle, from the twilight of the Eisenhower years through King’s fiery political baptism, the ascension of John F. Kennedy, and ultimately, the dawning of the New South. Moving from the black churches where the movement began in anthems, sermons, and prayers to Washington, where the Kennedy brothers weighed the demands of a down-trodden people against the volatile realities of politics, Branch weaves a tapestry of exciting stories: the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the siege of Birmingham, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the church bombings, and – as the movement reached its apex – the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination.

Read an excerpt | Listen to an excerpt

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From the campuses and courthouses where the battles raged to the White House rooms where the President’s men struck deals, Branch brings an astonishing gallery of characters to life. He provides revealing, unsurpassed portraits of King, scion of the black bourgeoisie, gravitating between conscience and temptation; John and Robert Kennedy, pragmatic politicians united by ambition; and J. Edgar Hoover, who harassed the blacks with secret wiretaps and trumped-up charges of communism and manipulated Kennedy with his knowledge of the President’ most intimate secrets.

Monumental in scope and impact, massively researched yet compulsively readable, Parting the Waters is a masterpiece of American history. To be followed by a second volume, Pillar of Fire, spanning the Lyndon B. Johnson years (1963-1969), it will endure for generations as the essential record of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

Awards

• Winner: Pulitzer Prize for History, 1988
• Winner: Book Critics Circle Award, 1988
• Winner: Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1988
• Winner: English-Speaking Union Book Award, 1989
• Finalist: National Book Award, Non-Fiction, 1989

Read reviews of America in the King Years.

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Chapter 6

Tremors: L.A. to Selma

James Bevel was in Birmingham by then, summoned by Martin Luther King. With Diane Nash and their eight-month-old daughter, Bevel arrived from Greenwood just in time to preach at the April 12 mass meeting in place of King, who had submitted to solitary confinement that afternoon. The carefully planned Birmingham campaign was in crisis. Over the next week, Bevel and Nash pitched in behind King’s exacting administrator, Wyatt Walker, who labored to keep pace with chaos on many fronts — lobbying for some hint of public support from the Kennedys, cultivating reporters and distant celebrities, coaxing forward new jail volunteers, weeding out laggards and training the rest in nonviolence for the daily marches toward the forbidden landmarks of segregated commerce.

One of Walker’s tactical innovations presented an opportunity uniquely suited to Bevel. Walker demanded punctuality in the daily demonstrations until he noticed while fuming through the inevitable delays that news reporters often lumped Negro bystanders together with actual jail marchers in their crowd estimates. After that, Walker went against his nature to hold up the marches with deliberate tardiness, so that daily stories of growing crowds could disguise the dwindling number willing to accept jail. As the delays stretched past school hours, crowds began to fill with Bevel’s preferred recruits — Negro students.

To Bevel, looking past the arrests to the teenagers in the background, the flagging demonstrations already had accomplished the work of many months in the Mississippi Delta, where the bulk of the Negro population was widely dispersed on rural plantations: they had gathered a crowd. With Nash and student volunteers, he distributed handbills advertising a daily youth meeting at five o’clock, two hours before the regular seven o’clock mass meeting. There he preached on the meaning of the primal events downtown. His crowds grew so rapidly that Andrew Young helped run the youth meetings, and Dorothy Cotton, Young’s assistant in the SCLC citizenship program, led the singing. Following his practice in Mississippi, Bevel showed a film — an NBC White Paper on the Nashville student movement of 1960, which featured the stirring, climactic march of four thousand students that had desegregated Nashville’s libraries and lunch counters. By April 20, when King and Abernathy bonded out of the Birmingham jail, the youth meeting already surpassed the adult meeting in numbers. By April 23, when reporters again failed to ask President Kennedy about Birmingham at his press conference, the adult mass meeting first packed St. James Baptist Church because the students in a mass stayed over from their own session. By April 26, when the jail march was reduced to a handful, forcing Fred Shuttlesworth to play for time by announcing a massive new phase to begin on May 2, most of the jail volunteers who rose in the mass meeting came from the youth workshops.

King praised the children for their courage but told them to sit down. The Birmingham jail was no place for them. At the nightly strategy sessions, King and the other leaders flailed among themselves to devise a master stroke for May 2 that might hold off the movement’s extinction — a hunger strike or perhaps a jail march by Negro preachers in robes. No idea promised to crack the reserve of the outside world. Sensing their exhaustion from the other side, Birmingham’s white leaders rallied to the “velvet hammer” policy of firm but nonsensational resistance, and the local newspaper published an article of encouragement entitled “Greenwood Rolled with the Punch — And Won.” King’s sessions grew more rancorous. They were promising their followers and the national press nothing less than “a nonviolent D-Day” on May 2, but all the thunder of preachers and the honey of massed choirs pulled no more than forty or fifty volunteers from the pews, Wyatt Walker admitted. He bristled at Bevel’s claims that the youth meetings were spilling over into another church almost every day. Walker resented Bevel as an upstart, an intruder, and a free spirit who played loose with the chain of command.

Still, Walker was a man of results. Having come into Birmingham with only minority support from the Negro adults of Birmingham, and having delivered mostly suffering and disappointment since then, King and Shuttlesworth already were fending off internal pressures to evacuate gracefully. Backbiters predicted that the outsiders would leave Birmingham Negroes worse off than ever, with segregation hardened by the besieged anger of whites. Worse, Bevel’s proposal would leave the best of the next generation with criminal records, not to mention the psychological scars of wide-eyed children dragged into the inferno of a segregated jail. King’s host family in Birmingham, John and Deenie Drew of a prominent insurance family, resolved to send their children off to boarding school lest they get caught up in the trouble. Like most of King’s strongest supporters, they would have recoiled in horror had they known that Bevel aimed to use not just the older teenagers but also the junior high students on down to “the babies” just out of kindergarten. What dismayed much of the senior staff was not so much that King, smiling and noncommittal, insisted on hearing Bevel out, but that King seemed to respect the “voices” Bevel heard even when they urged him to subvert the damaged authority of Negro Birmingham through its children. “Against your Mama,” Bevel told King, “you have a right to make this witness.”

When the doors of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church opened shortly after one o’clock on Thursday, May 2, a line of fifty teenagers emerged two abreast, singing. The waiting police detail hauled them into jail wagons, as usual, and only the youth of the demonstrators distinguished the day until a second line emerged, then a third and many more. Children as young as six years old held their ground until arrested. Amid mounting confusion, police commanders called in school buses for jail transport and sent reinforcements to intercept stray lines that slipped past them toward the downtown business district. On the first day, nearly a thousand marching children converted first the Negro adults. Not a few of the onlookers in Kelly Ingram Park were dismayed to see their own disobedient offspring in the line, and the conflicting emotions of centuries played out on their faces until some finally gave way. One elderly woman ran alongside the arrest line, shouting, “Sing, children, sing!”

With the jails swamped by nightfall, Bull Connor ordered a massed phalanx of officers to disperse rather than arrest any demonstrators King might send the next day — intimidate them, shoo them away. When more than a thousand new children turned out in high-spirited, nonviolent discipline, giving no ground, frustration and hatred erupted under Connor’s command. Police dogs tore into the march lines, and high-powered fire hoses knocked children along the pavement like tumbleweed. News photographs of the violence seized millions of distant eyes, shattering inner defenses. In Birmingham, the Negro principal of Parker High School desperately locked the gates from the outside to preserve a semblance of order, but students trampled the chain-link fence to join the demonstrations.

King, preaching at night to a serial mass meeting that spilled from one packed church to another, urged crowds to remember the feel of history among them. He cast aside his innate caution along with criticism and worry over the children in jail, shouting, “Now yesterday was D-Day, and tomorrow will be Double-D Day!” From Shuttlesworth’s old pulpit, Bevel cried out in playful hyperbole that they would finish off Birmingham before Tuesday by placing every Negro young and old in jail so that he could be “back in Mississippi, chopping cotton.” Bevel did not make his deadline, but nonviolent Negroes did overflow the jails and flood the forbidden downtown streets within a week. By Monday, May 6, the sudden conversion gushed from child to adult until no fewer than 2,500 demonstrators swamped the Birmingham jail, and King welcomed in awe the tangible sensation of history spilling over at frenzied mass meetings of four times that number.

Something primal welled up the same day in a Los Angeles courtroom. Defense lawyer Earl Broady faltered while cross-examining Officer Lee Logan about the mayhem at the Muslim Temple No. 27 in April of 1962. “Now this ‘male Negro’ business, this is significant to you, isn’t it?” asked Broady in a whisper, his face suddenly clouded. “’Male Negroes,’” he repeated. When Logan replied that the term was merely descriptive of the brawlers that violent night, Broady tried to resume his planned examination but stopped again. “You called them niggers while you were in this fight with them, didn’t you?” he blurted out.

“I did not,” Logan replied.

Broady asked for time to compose himself, but he called for a bench conference as soon as Logan testified that his first sight at the crime scene was “several male Negroes” fighting with officers a block south of the Muslim temple. “Your Honor, I believe these defendants should be referred to exactly the same as if they were Caucasians,” said Broady. “This officer wouldn’t refer to male Jews. He wouldn’t refer to male Irishmen. He wouldn’t refer to male Swedes. He wouldn’t refer to male Caucasians.”

Judge David Coleman hushed stirrings in the courtroom and spoke gently to Broady, whom he had known for years, observing that race was a standard designation in all police reports. “This issue has been made by the defense and not by the People,” said the judge, who went on to remind Broady that the defense lawyers had tried to insert a racial standard by objecting, for instance, to the all-white jury. (On that matter, Judge Coleman had assured Broady privately that the all-white jury was probably best because most Negro jurors were too emotional to be objective about such a sensational case.) Broady argued that the drumbeat repetition of generic racial phrases was far from neutral in …

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In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of the narrative, Branch recounts the climatic struggles as they commanded the national and international stage.

Pillar of Fire covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1960 to 1965 – Dallas, St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. And it provides a frank, revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. – haunted by blackmail, factionalism, and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls.

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Branch’s gallery of historic characters also includes:

Malcolm X, who challenged King’s vision of nonviolent integration and lived under threat of death from the Nation of Islam.

Lyndon Johnson, who believed racial conflict was destroying his political base in the South and threatening his dream to end poverty.

J. Edgar Hoover, under whose direction the FBI, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval, spied on King with wiretaps and bugs, and yet solved the most heinous racial crimes of the era.

Diane Nash, the passionate leader behind sit-ins and Freedom Rides, whose determination shaped the Selma voting rights movement.

Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic theologian who bonded with King in devotion to the Hebrew prophets.

Robert Moses, the Mississippi SNCC leader who finally came undone over the human suffering caused by his Freedom Summer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who commanded a powerful voice for the unlettered.

Pillar of Fire takes readers inside the dramas that shook every American institution, from the local pulpit to the Presidency. We disappear with courageous young people into Mississippi’s feudal Parchman Penitentiary. We absorb the shock of a single Presidential election in 1964 that revolutionized the structure of partisan politics. We follow Northern rabbis summoned by King, and Mary Peabody, mother of the governor of Massachusetts, into the segregated jails of St. Augustine, Florida. We witness the Shakespearean conflicts between Lyndon Johnson and King, and Hoover and Robert Kennedy.

Branch brings to bear fifteen years of research – archival investigation; nearly two thousand interviews; new primary sources, from FBI wiretaps to White House telephone recordings – in a seminal work of history; Pillar of Fire captures the intensity of the legendary King years, when the movement broke down walls between races, regions, sexes, and religions, and between America and the larger world. Its struggle to rescue and redeem, its victories and defeats, its failings and sacrifices gave rise to opposing tides that still dominate government. The story of this movement is an incandescent chapter in America’s distinctive quest for freedom.

Awards

• Winner: American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, 1999
• Winner: Imus Book Award, 1999
• Winner: Sidney Hillman Book Award, 1999

Read reviews of America in the King Years.

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