In his unprecedented account "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President," historian Taylor Branch offers a vivid and candid portrayal of the inner workings of a modern presidency based on 79 secret conversations with President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001.
President-elect Clinton called on Branch in 1992 to help him preserve an unfiltered record of the presidential experience for future generations. The two eventually agreed to create a unique oral history. Branch conducted extensive interviews of President Clinton -- and the taping was never publicly revealed. Branch would drive to the White House from his home in Baltimore -- usually late at night, at Clinton's behest -- and talk with the president about timely issues, personal concerns and much more.
Clinton kept the interview tapes in "a safe place" -- his sock drawer -- and Branch did not have access to those tapes for the book. Instead, Branch's account rests on details he recorded immediately after each meeting covering the matters President Clinton discussed while capturing the atmosphere of the White House.
Branch takes the reader into the Clinton White House, never knowing what to expect from a president who was always on the job. A few revelations from the book:
* The besieged president's response to impeachment and personal scandal: and his surprising popularity in the face of bitter attacks on his character.
* Russian President Boris Yeltsin's drunken, late-night meandering in his underwear on Pennsylvania Avenue to hail a taxi for pizza.
* Clinton's view in 2000 of George W. Bush as a talented campaigner unqualified to be president, and John McCain as qualified, but with no idea how to run.
* Clinton's deep admiration for Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), and his view that Gore-Mikulski would have been a winning ticket in 2000.
* Osama bin Laden's plot to kill President Clinton.
"The Clinton Tapes" has been widely hailed as a truly unique and valuable blend of history, memoir and presidential scholarship. Historian Douglas Brinkley commented in the Los Angeles Times that the book "proves to be a remarkable read, paying out the huge dividends of history that Branch had hoped for."
Branch is perhaps best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed trilogy on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, "America in the King Years." He has written other nonfiction books and a novel, and is a former staff journalist for The Washington Monthly, Harper's, and Esquire. By telephone from the East Coast, Branch recently discussed the creation and challenges of his groundbreaking presidential history.
Your King and Clinton projects were very different, but do you see unifying threads?
Both of them are about keeping faith with the American tradition that politics in the town square can be ennobling and that we can enhance freedom through politics. Certainly that was true in the King era, [and] Clinton saw his mission [as redeeming] our political culture from an unwarranted cynicism. The great tragedy of his presidency was that the Lewinsky scandal essentially undermined his effort to restore a sense of balance and purpose in our national life.
When you worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1972 on the McGovern campaign in Texas, did it seem that you were working with a future president and a future secretary of state?
No, not a bit. Part of it was because we lost Texas by 30 points. We weren't thinking very optimistically at the time. In fact, I was disaffected and disillusioned with all politics and never came back to it. I didn't see him for 20 years, and I thought he was a kind of an Energizer Bunny on automatic pilot for politics. I and to a lesser degree Hillary were more typical of our generation: disillusioned that a lot of hope of the '60s [was] dissipating, that the war was continuing and that politics was petty.
When we parted in Texas, Clinton was still optimistic about politics. I thought it was just because he was ambitious, but he convinced me in the White House that he retained a sense of purpose that he got in the Civil Rights movement: that this great political upheaval in the 1960s really changed the everyday lives of millions of people for the better, far beyond what we even realized at the time.
Then 20 years later, in 1992, President-elect Clinton asked you to serve as a court historian of sorts, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the Kennedy years.
I resisted that proposal. Clinton was kicking around a lot of ideas. He thought the raw materials for future history were getting more slim and vague, that the real humanity of what it was like to run the government was getting buried in records that didn't preserve the drama. I didn't think [a court historian] would be taken seriously, and we came up with doing an oral history.
You and President Clinton kept this oral history secret from his staff and the press. How did you keep it secret from your family, your fellow writers?
We kept the project secret by not talking about it, even to my extended family. My greatest anxiety was that a careless word on my part would precipitate news that would kill not only Clinton's oral history but also the potential for future ones. Two extraneous factors helped. First, I lived in Baltimore instead of Washington, which meant I was not surrounded every day by people obsessed with secrets in national politics. Second, I was consumed by my regular work on the King-era trilogy.
You had an extremely challenging role as a personal friend, a listener, a historian, and maybe even a therapist of sorts.
It was very difficult. There was no precedent for this role [and] nobody I could consult because I couldn't tell anybody.
I had this image that the president checked off on the issues he wanted to deal with, with a sense of distance and command -- but at least with Clinton, it seemed to me, he was bombarded in a crucible with everything at once. He was the president while he was remembering these episodes and he was buffeted all around between foreign issues, domestic issues, political issues, substantive issues -- things that are hard to figure out -- and then Chelsea would come in for help with her homework. I tried to be honest in the book just to portray it as it was, more or less taking the reader on my shoulder.
Contrary to many press accounts, you portray a warm personal relationship between the President and Mrs. Clinton.
That's true. Those are the parts of the book, by the way, that he was the most anxious about. He wanted to change the personal substance about Hillary and Chelsea. He said they hadn't agreed to be part of this oral history and he was protective of the family and worried that the material about them would be distorted.
His presidency was tainted by scandal so I don't blame people from afar for saying they must have had a cold and heartless marriage, but what I saw was anything but that. They certainly had a startling communion on virtually everything. The warmth between them was amazing.
The press often portrayed Clinton as insecure and even petulant, but you reveal an enthusiastic and resilient leader with endless curiosity and an amazing memory.
I hope so. I can't tell you how many people said [things like] I met Bill Clinton at a dinner with 200 people, and four years later I saw him in an airport and he remembered me. That truly is a gift that sometimes puts me in awe. He really enjoyed working the crowd and making some sort of connection with every human being in it.
Did President Clinton ever discuss death threats or fear of assassination?
Clinton mentioned worry about attack or assassination only once: before his trip to South Asia in 2000 [when intelligence indicated that Osama bin Laden had assassins on the trip route]. Otherwise, he seemed pretty indifferent, even when describing bullets that hit the White House fired by a deranged man or the plane that hit the White House [in 1994] in a bizarre suicide.
It must have been difficult for you to talk with him about the scandals, especially the Monica Lewinsky affair.
He didn't want to talk about it, and we were under orders not to talk about it, certainly on tape. He said in public that [the Lewinsky affair] was unforgivable, and he said in private that it was a stain on his presidency and would undermine his attempt to rescue us from cynicism. What more is there beyond the salacious detail of what color her thong was? I wasn't going to ask about that.
Should I have offered to talk with him about it as a friend, if not for the historical record? He said no, it wouldn't have done any good. And he did talk about how it was even harder on Chelsea even than on him or on Hillary, and how Chelsea banned him from Stanford for two years.
I did not grill him on it because I didn't see any purpose in it for the historical record, and I didn't feel comfortable doing it.
Have you been in touch with President Clinton since the book came out?
I talked with him when I took the proofs to Chappaqua. He called me a bunch of times afterward with [comments]. His only worry and anxiety was about the personal material, but I have not talked with him since the book came out.
I don't have a role in the Clinton Global Initiative because I don't have a billion dollars to give him, so I don't think we'll have as much interaction as we did again, but I think we'll retain our personal connection.
What do you see as President Clinton's greatest triumphs and greatest failings?
Clearly his greatest failings were the Lewinsky scandal and his inability to charm the press, which he analyzed.
I would have to say his relations with the press were his biggest failure through the scandal mongering. In that sense, he may have been dealing with larger historical tides than he was capable of [understanding].
All of the things he managed to pull off in the teeth of this look pretty darned good; 4.2 percent unemployment looks pretty good now, and 20 million new jobs.
Something he doesn't get much credit for is the military's confidence that he was not asking them to do something inherently political by force of arms. All of his military initiatives had finite and discrete objectives, and he wound up with almost zero casualties. That is why his relationship with the military was really good by the end.
Finally, he balanced the budget after 25 years in which nobody thought it was even feasible. He [also] started paying off the national debt so that we were on a course to have paid off the entire historical national debt of the United States by 2010. He said it was a matter of showing we were in control of ourselves, which goes to the heart of the democratic experiment... part of restoring our sense of confidence and idealism in public affairs and connects us to patriotism.
Are you working on another project now?
I'm working feverishly on the script, which is a new thing for me, for an HBO miniseries on the three King books. Hope springs eternal that we can finally get this on the screen for people who won't ever read my fat history books, and for new generations that have lost a sense of the King era.
I hope you're recording events with President Obama the way you did with President Clinton.
I wouldn't tell you if I were, but I will tell you that I'm not. I just hope he's doing it or doing something similar, because I think it's hard to capture a record of what the presidency is like.
In this culture you have to make a special effort to preserve things that have the ring of authenticity and truth and true human struggle. And I hope "The Clinton Tapes" gives at least a glimpse that's more real than just images of what presidents do and say.