Taylor Branch
On May 24, 1997, what she remembered as "Dump Day" in their love affair, a 22-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky was reminiscing in typically intimate terms with the president of the United States about his childhood.
"The President explained," as the Federal Bureau of Investigation later paraphrased the words she heard from Bill Clinton, "that during his life he had been two people, and kept up two fronts … that starting in the third or fourth grade, he was a good boy with his mother and stepfather, but also began telling stories and leading a secret life." Typically unimaginative about the human heart, the official summary of the conversation stops with that remarkable passage, leaving the rest to history.
On May 27, 1997, Taylor Branch, an old Clinton friend and eminent biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., met the president for another of their 72 private sessions over the eight years of the Clinton presidency, from 1993 to 2001, a kind of contemporaneous oral history that makes up this uniquely promising and ultimately saddening book.
In their usual practice for the customary 90 minutes, Branch prompting here and there but most of the time Clinton rambling about recent preoccupations, the subjects are Mexico and Central America, cigarette use in children, partial birth abortion, Republican disarray and division among Democrats - but with not a trace of the president's fascinating confession to his mistress three days before.
It is not surprising. Lewinsky got one Bill Clinton, Branch the other. Despite an accomplished historian's unprecedented access to a sitting U.S. president, we are still left to fathom the Clinton twins and their fateful consequences.
This book grew out of a worthy venture in real-time history, albeit fraught with potential compromise. Young Southerners Branch and Clinton were roommates in Texas in the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern, along with the then Hillary Rodham. Over the next two decades, they went their separate if mutually admiring ways as journalist and politician until, on the eve of his first inauguration, Clinton invited Branch to take up their "interviews," a veritable oral diary with a supposedly unrestrained interlocutor, as an ongoing account of his presidency. Tapes of the meetings, which Branch never heard, were to remain with Clinton as an aid to his eventual memoirs.
Both men understood, however, that the author might write his own subsequent book from the most extensive private conversations of their kind in American history - indeed in the history of high office anywhere in the modern world. The Clinton Tapes thus refers not to Clinton's words but to recordings made by Branch of his own recollections after each session as he drove home from the White House.
From that, he writes 40 occasionally colourful, always earnest chapters in which he sees himself as a "participant in a memoir" portraying the president "candidly in texture." Yet the seductions of proximity are lethal. Branch is far more sympathizer and intellectual co-dependent than an even mildly neutral oral historian. The empathetic but critical, thoroughly informed perspectives he brought to his multivolume portrait of Rev. King sadly desert him - or are jettisoned - in one of the most extraordinary opportunities ever given a historian. The result does little service to either the author or his subject.
Not that Clinton the protean political connoisseur is not on display here with the book's press-release tidbits. He rails against the media but endlessly courts them, just as he courts history with this devoted memoir-prepping, all too accurately deplores Republicans as "know-nothings" who are "terrified of their own base" but co-opts and legitimizes some of their worst policies, is "tired of this limp-dick shit" in the cravenness of his own party but blithely admits Democrats "sell access" while Republicans "sell control" (with regrettably higher campaign contributions for the latter), and remains convinced that substance is "beside the point" for his partisan and prurient critics while he shamelessly defends his pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to the Clinton Presidential Library.
For his friend Branch, he is the virtuoso parlour performer in their usual venue in the second-floor Treaty Room, adjacent to the White House living quarters. Typically, he recounts with weary nobility his strivings to reduce the budget deficit and deal responsibly with the Okalahoma City bombing, muses about lifting the U.S. embargo of Cuba, or "multi-tasks" with a crossword puzzle while on the phone orchestrating war in the Balkans.
Bill Clinton being Bill Clinton, it is often a dazzling show, full of biting portraits and ruminations sweeping and minute on policy and politics - and like the man, by turns charming and brutal, carnal and ingenuous, commanding and vulnerable, disarmingly honest and stunningly mendacious.
The president is talking to himself as much as to his chosen collaborator, and the outcome, which Branch leaves deprived of breadth, has the naturalness and spontaneity of the diary unburdening, along with the self-justification and shallowness of the ever-staged performance.
Branch's genius in the King biography was to capture the inner realities of the civil-rights drama, the seedy as well as majestic, the guilty innocence and mixed motives that make up the complexity and richness of politics as of life. No longer hostage to access when he came to write, he might have given us from his unrivalled vantage point an unrivalled portrait of a pivotal presidency. Ironically, that honour paid history would have magnified Clinton's best beyond the puerile self-promotion of the book's monologues.
It also would have explored Monica Lewinsky's second Clinton, the cultural roots of his fateful rule, and the other regime as well as the other man: locust years in domestic and foreign policy in which the Clinton 1990s were the parent of 2009, the historic ravage of the Democratic Party local to national, and, not least, a career-shrouding corruption that left more Clinton associates convicted of more crimes than in any other modern scandal, including Richard Nixon's Watergate and Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra.
After 668 pages, we know almost nothing of any of this, and little of lasting import about a presidency that bequeathed most of the personnel as well as much of the predicament of Barack Obama's government.
In this writing of history as well as making it, there is personal tragedy. From their 1972 origins, Branch and Clinton took very different directions, the author choosing what he called with justification the "greater integrity" of writing over politics. Yet what might have been a redemptive rejoining of the two paths in The Clinton Tapes ends in the ineffable sadness of exceptional men using and being used. We are all the poorer.
Roger Morris is the author of Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America.