Taylor Branch

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. In 1996, Frank Branch (1922–2003) gives his latest creation, a Jefferson Memorial bird feeder, to President Clinton on the South Lawn (below). Socks the cat is tethered in the background. 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) 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 inst