Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

This evening i'm thrilled to welcome people surprised when an author taylor branch is here to discuss the clinton tapes. Wrestling history. With the president. The clinton tapes is a unique. Book. It's an oral history. And a chronicle of the presidential experience. The book is drawn from seventy nine confidential conversations that mr branch had with president bill clinton. From one thousand ninety three. Until two thousand and one. He's covered these conversations. Somehow or had in secret and no one other than clinton's official scheduler. Knew that they took place. This. Not so slim volume right here contains. Unexpected and intimate insights into the white house and the life of a contemporary president. We learn about a tank to boris yeltsin demanding pizza. On pennsylvania avenue. And osama bin ladin splot. Against president clinton's wife. We learn about clinton's personal thoughts on the failure of health care reform. As well as many other national and international affairs. Mr branch presents for us. President clinton's. Experiences with insults on figures including. Pope john paul the second. Steven spielberg.

Star chelsea. Teddy clinton. Monica lewinsky. I'm sorry. Teddy kennedy. Scuse me. Monica lewinsky. The up and coming george w. bush. Nelson mandela and. Many many others. The new york times. In a review of the clinton tapes calls taylor branch. An excellent historian whose latest book will quote. Stand as an important work. About american political life. Because of two dominant themes that emerge gradually. One about the man himself. And the other. About the nature of the current era. In the los angeles times states that in one of. One of president clinton's shrewdest accomplishments. Was allowing taylor branch and. Arthur schlesinger like front row seat to the washington circus spectacle. Taylor branch's. And as you well know. Is a bestselling author of the definitive history. Of martin luther king jr. The first in a series of parting. Waters when the fuel it surprise. To the branches also receive the macarthur foundation fellowship in one thousand nine hundred one. And the national humanities medal in one thousand nine hundred nine has written

several other books. Worked as an editor for washington monthly and harper's. And has published extensively for a wide variety of publications including the new york times magazine. The new republic and esquire. Ladies and gentlemen so i have glad you're here with us tonight and thank you for your patience. Please join me in welcoming taylor branch. Thank you have there. It's nice to be back here i was here only three years ago to talk about the end of the of the mourning for king trilogy. Twenty four years of a life's mission. Book that i. Books that i yearn to write. This one i did not yearn to write. This was not a life's mission. This was a book that came and grabbed me. Out of nowhere. Beginning with a rip van winkle experience. When one of your buddies that you've known twenty years ago.

Drank beer with turns up as present united states hadn't seen him for twenty years. And he sent for me as president elect. For a dinner and in a huge crowd at kay graham's house of. Dignitaries and. Bill sapphire and newspaper editors and. Kay graham didn't even release the guest list to our own reporters at the washington post. He comes through the crowd with secret service agents. My wife and i were wondering why we were there. Not seen him in twenty years. He said to me. He pushed through. Screened. The people straining to get at him with a couple of secret service agents. And said two things to me. The first one was. Hi taylor. Can you believe all this. The first words in twenty years. Sent me reeling. Because i had.

Processed him into a standard politician i didn't even vote for him in the primary i told him this because i thought his forgotten middle class sounded too much like nixon silent majority and that he'd been eating chicken dinners down in arkansas for too long. But. While i'm still reeling from can you believe all this which makes connection that the guy i had known at twenty five. Even though he's president elect surrounded by all of this pomp and circumstance is the same guy. There are certain number of people in life. That it doesn't matter at fifty years you don't become strangers you pick back up again and. I had assumed that he and i would be strangers. Because he was president. And he'd been in politics in arkansas for twenty years. And i knew instantly that that one right he was still the same guy. I don't care what i'm reading about in the new york times or anywhere. He's the same guy. Then he said. I don't have much time because you could feel the dam about to break.

I want you to think about. I read your parting the waters and i read the footnotes. And i want to know if my presidential library is going to have the caliber of material that will enable historians fifty years from now. To recapture what really happened. Would you think about that for me. And i was stunned. And about that time the dam did break and. People came around and grabbed him how are you mr president this is bob mcnamara this is. You know this is alan greenspan and. And i'm sitting there with my head spinning. Because the question that he asked. I mean one. The first thing about can you believe all this with a boyish grin. Was very person. All. But the question about historical records. Was astonishing for two reasons number one that he was thinking about that. Even before he took office. And number two because it's something that was very very much on my mind as i had spent twenty years doing. Civil rights history in presidential history and.

Transcribing lyndon johnson's telephone conversations and jack kennedy's. Meetings and. And even some of nixon's. And i believe that those records. Enable you to break through. A history that otherwise largely based on myth and stereotype and interpretation. Because they humanize a. People's presidency. I was lamenting the fact that. Before we really realize how valuable they are. To tell history. They will have long since become extinct. In other words. The tapes that we have have not been to just it into the history of the cold war presidents yet. Their own. Only a tiny fraction of them have even been transcribed. But of course nobody's been recording. Since nixon. Lost his presidency over tape recordings. Worse than that.

In this process for clinton. Verified what i had sensed a little bit which is that the modern era. With all for all of our. Hoopla about the information age and. Information gathering techniques. The records that are going into the presidential library since nixon. Are more voluminous but less instructive. Then you might think. White house aides no longer take note. They actively resist taking notes in meetings of substance. Partly because they see notes as a threat. To. Them. Things that can be used against them. And also quite frankly because they see it is beneath them to take the notes. President clinton task me to ask. Some of his incoming people if they would consider taking notes in meetings and. It was beneath every single one of them and they were quite alarmed. And i said you know bill moyers had a very healthy ego. But he

took notes. In vietnam meetings and left them behind for the government records and so did. Jack valenti and a number of other people. Tom johnson who was. Became head of c.n.n.. I was his job. But nowadays you don't have that. And a note taker in a meeting. Is a cause for friction before the meeting even starts. This led to some conversations between me and president clinton over. Right at the beginning of his presidency. About recordkeeping. And it's. Summarized in the second chapter of the book where. Talks about how we renewed our acquaintance with this extraordinary. Over this extraordinary assignment. That he gave to me out of the blue. Twenty after we didn't see each other for twenty years we had been roommates. Back in texas in one nine hundred seventy two. We knew each other in the and i war movement just well enough that each of us said fine when we were asked if we were willing to work together in texas where the

democrats were not only hopelessly behind but perpetually feuding between the. Ralph yarborough liberals and the john connelly conservative and they wanted southerners who weren't. From texas. To try to heal the civil war and. Would we work with each other we said we would and. He said could he bring his new girlfriend and i said fine and. So he and hillary and i got an apartment together and. We worked and. We worked in seventy two and. We bonded as you tend to bond when you're getting shellacked by thirty two points. We didn't see each other that much because we were like water boy. It's running over a big state. In the course of five months i don't know how many nights we all spent there together. But we didn't have any fights either parted with only. No inkling of course. I'm always asked did i know he was going to be present the united states. After i met and i said. We lost that election by thirty two points we weren't thinking we were going to be dog catcher.

I knew he loved politics. And in fact hillary and i both shared the notion that. We thought he liked politics too much because he wanted to go run for congress right after this and. I think hillary and i were more representative of are we. She finished law school and then came to washington to work for the impeachment committee. Nixon and i went back to washington. In my journalism career before i started writing books. And i saw her there occasionally during impeachment and we would go out to lunch and she would say. I'm struggling with this notion of whether i should go down and marry bill. He won't leave arkansas. What should i do. And i don't know what you should do it. She said. Taylor have you ever been to little rock and. It was. But it was kind of like. He was dead set on an arkansas political career and she's a

chicago. Girl in the in the in the. Klieg lights of impeachment and a career that she really wanted. Was she really willing to hitch or start of this guy. Down there in little rock. But i knew she was. She would. But that had been quite painful but there was a serious point about that which was that she and i both thought that he was a little bit too. Automatic pilot on his political ambition and. Untainted by the disillusionment. It was running pretty high among twenty five year olds in one thousand nine hundred seventy two. Eight years into the vietnam war after two elections in which we thought we had voted against war but only got it. And we just had the watergate break in. And we were on the verge of all the assassination scandals and. And we had had riots and. The great promise of the one thousand nine hundred sixty seemed to be blowing up in our face. Our faces and i told. Clinton. When we left texas. That i had had it with politics i been in

two elections i had been tear gassed in chicago and then all the stuff trying to go through the route of elected politics and. That we in texas. Wow. With all everything at stake with the great war and all the great issues. Wound up spending most of our time refereeing the. Pettiest of dispute between the arbor and connally people over who's that where in the motorcade and. I have had it. And. I was going back to journalism because i thought there was more integrity to deal with the problems in the world through journalism. And i didn't understand why he would want to run for congress and. I thought that was just his ambition speaking and. When we finish this project here. I reminded him of this and he said yes i remember what i told you then. He's very proud of his memory. But i thought. But it was accurate because what he told me was. If you want to solve big problems in the world.

You have to build up your patience for incapacity to handle. Squabbles over who sits where in the motorcade. Because you have to work through the stubborn part of human nature. In politics if you ever want to get anything done and. The implicit rebuke was that we writers. Avoid all of that by going off in our ivory tower and writing about what could and ought to be. And i did think about that at the end of this project because confounding every one of my expectations and most of the world's experience of the clinton presidency. Up close. In the session. That came out as a result of this project. I came to really develop my own career choices against his. Because right or wrong and we had many surprises adventures and. Arguments in the course of collecting this history. But one thing that was fairly consistent was i found him to be infinitely more idealistic. Even

the throws of political calculation. Than the people i knew. At the pinnacle of my profession who were writing about him. That they were much more cynical than he was and. I do think that that is and enormous political task for this country. To face. Now. The degree to which the cynicism of our age and the doubt that we can address. Huge problems. Sustainability. Economic problems reorganization. Environmental problems war and peace problems with resolve and and. Intelligence that those doubts. Are are partly inbred in the citizenry in public attitudes. And not just a matter of leadership. It's not an accident that we're still squabbling about the birth years. And various other things that are somewhat like the vince foster. Conspiracy that he committed suicide all these years. During clinton's time.

In the white house ureter before he took office he briefly. Thought that possibly the solution. He's not going to record is telephone conversations. He thinks he's not likely to succeed to get people to take note. Of his meetings about what's going on he briefly talk to me about getting an arthur schlesinger coming into the white house. To kind of gather to be there and gather note. I told him that i thought it was a bad idea that. That i certainly one interested in doing it because i wanted to finish. Martin luther king. That was my life's work and i was not going to interrupt it. To go sit for four eight years and fight over access to the president. So that i could write to sister e. but more importantly i didn't advise him to get anybody to do it because i thought in this day and age it would inevitably be seen as a court historian and. Biased and that it would not be seen as

objective. And that. You really should worry about trying to control how the history was written. He should worry about the history he was making. But what he could do was to try to do what he could to collect. Records vividly. Vivid enough. And accurate enough and. Unfiltered enough that it would allow future historians. To make of the history what. They may. So i devised him to do an oral history he tried to do it by himself for a while and eventually said i can't do it. I said mr president i care about this more than anything. I'm writing every day. But i've been doing oral histories for over twenty years. And if you want me to get you started on doing an oral history until you train somebody i'll do it and he got all excited and he said well how would we do that and then there was a lot of talk about that we felt that it had to be secret. Because if it got out that he was taping things that were not on the public record. And he then all of

these scandals or in politics that the. Hue and cry. Would inevitably go up soon that there was some vital question that needed to get access to. The tapes to resolve. You know white water or travel gate or file gate or china gate or one of the gate. Or where vince foster's. Really died or you know something that people would wouldn't believe until they listened all the tapes they were there. So he. We resolve to do these things that night in the white house in the residence. Way from his staff and. Only his scheduler knew and she would call usually. With just a couple of hours' notice and i would drive down to washington with my list of questions about what had happened since last time and my two little. Dictaphone recorders and. Figure out how to get into the white house. At night it was very exciting when i first did it. I drove a pickup truck and parked under the truman balcony and went up into the residence part of it.

Nowhere near the west wing because there are people that working there he didn't want them to see me. And up into the residence which i had never seen either and. I would try to. And the ushers would follow around he would send for me and sometimes he'd be interrupted. Sometimes this would happen that would happen. But usually we'd start at ten o'clock at night with my little recorders are right. This is. January fourteenth whatever. One thousand nine hundred seven session number thirty seven with the president since the last time mr president so and so and so and so it happen. Let's start with bosnia. Is there anything that is not on the public record you want to record about that now and i would ask him questions from the very beginning. There were no rules. There was no precedent nobody's ever done anything like this. I saw my role as a provocateur or a gatherer oral historian to try to get as much. Unfiltered candid. Storytelling testimony. As i could. But it's never

that simple. Because he'd interrupt me and say gosh do you think i should fire the cia director. And. So what am i supposed to do with that you know should i if i said. I'm just here to ask. Historical questions. Our reporter would wither and die he liked interchange he liked. Particularly i later learned. The more he was in doubt about what he would do the more he would provoke me to kind of challenge him on questions and he liked the give and take. But there was a risk in the give and take of if i told him something that he really didn't like then i was a freight. All that was sustaining this project was that he was calling me again. All he had to do was to stop it was simply stop calling. And it was it was an enormous strain and. And you could see him. Aging. In front of me. So i knew it was an extra strain. To go back through all of the things that were most vexing to

him and. Anyway. So that's what we did and we had adapted and adjusted and we had many adventures. He's worried that the book is too personal. It's just out last week. Very few people have read very much of it. There's been mostly attention to monica lewinsky and. You know various other things like that but it is what i deliberately try to do this is not a book of historical judgment. Like a king book in my view i'm not playing the historian's role in part because i'm a character. I'm trying to take people into the white house with me. The only judgments i make are the ones that i'm trying to recapture that were going through my mind at the time in reaction because. That shows a little bit of what it's like. To be there with a president who's interacting with these issues. But i don't try to step back and pretend that i have some new objective assessment of clinton. Most of the time. During his years.

I would leave the sessions. Once the recording was done in the next day i'm back writing about selma. And my mind wasn't in it. And it's too. Primal it's too. Disorienting. For me to present is all i can do to present it in a coherent way. Because the president is not talking about all of these issues he's not talking about kosovo or tax policy. Or his relations with newt gingrich in language to be accessible to people he's. He's talking about them in his language. And i'm trying to present him. In ways that are accessible to everybody. What i remembered that he said. Just on the mechanics of it. At the end of each session. By design. I felt that the safest way. And the most trustworthy way to keep this secret was for him to have custody of the tapes that i made each night. I had two of them. A backup in case one

of the machines malfunctioned. I would record them. I would label them. And i gave them to him and we debated whether i should keep him because i had a. Arguably a first amendment claim form or whether lawyers could keep him but then he said lawyers would have to know about it. I didn't want to do that but also meant. Ultimately ultimately we decided the best thing what for him to have. And in fact a couple of times. It was more than once but i know once. We did one session at camp david with barak and arafat there and we were doing a session at camp david. And when it was over. We couldn't put the tapes away in the normal place. So he told me to keep them. And i think he did that one or two other times where i had custody of the tapes until the next. Next time and. It crossed my mind i wonder if he thinks there's any chance that i would copy the. Or even listen to them and. I told him when i took them back. Mr president i did not listen to these tapes or copy them i you know. You just have to trust them.

My word but. By this time we've kept this thing secret. In a town. That doesn't keep secrets for six years and. I want you to have confidence that you can control this in the interest. It's a paradox. It has to be secret now. In the interest of building the most candid record to make public. As soon as you release this to historians. In the second administration. He got comfortable enough with the secrecy that he showed me where he was hiding. The tapes. Which was in his socks drawer in the in a little bathroom. Right next to the bedroom. There off a room that we did a lot of our recordings in. And i'd been given him these boxes and he put them behind a sock. You showed me there and he said now you do this and make sure that they're all there and that they're all in order and. I would start. I did that.

But the routine from the very beginning because i believe so much. In trying that if you have access to a sitting president and state that you should keep a record of it. As soon as i would walk down to get in to the truman balcony and leave and say good night. I would take my little. Dictaphone machine that i used. And put another tape in there. And by the time i hit my truck i turned it on and would say i'm leaving the white house it's one forty seven am it session number twenty six. And it was a rough one tonight. And let me start. In. Let me start with. The shutdown of government what he said about that or hillary came in tonight and told me about the dream she had just had about henry kissinger. Or whatever. And i would record because i lived in baltimore fortuitously i think that it was really low i lived in baltimore so i had to drive all the way to baltimore and night. One two o'clock in the morning.

And so i would dictate all the way home everything that i could remember not only what he said on the tape. But what he said before the tape and what he said. I don't think this belongs on the tape you know i recorded everything i could and. Often when i'd get back to baltimore i hadn't finished and i would just pull into the driveway. Yawning about five times a minute. And sit there in the driveway and record until. I did everything i could. Those are the records out of which. This book. Group. Toward the end of his second term. Once when we were leaving the white house he he he said to me you know taylor. We had an agreement you know. This is mostly for the historical record for him to open at his library. Which i believe he will do when hillary retires. Probably not until i don't know that. But i don't think he's going to open them until. Hillary retires but he put so much effort in making it. I think you'll open it as soon as you can. After that. But he said i also want to use them for my memoirs. But you might think about writing a memoir yourself.

Of what it's like to have been. To gather this material. Because you're a historian and you value all this and. As far as i know he said. No sitting presidents ever done anything like this which is true. I'm not going to kid you think that the idea hadn't already crossed my mind that i might do something like that but i still had six more years to work on. On martin luther king. And i never touch these tapes. Until martin luther king was done by which time they were all in a safety deposit box at my bank and i went and i transcribed them and had them transcribed and. Went through them. Made about three thousand pages of notes. Which i then. Wrestled with as a matter of craft. I've never written anything that's in the first person where i'm a character. Before. So it's kind of like a two person play except one of the characters is you and the other is

the present united states how are you going to balance that nobody's interested in me except as a foil to relieve. Along. In uninterrupted. String of he said he said sentences and. To some degree. To be an eye and a mind to observe the president. When he's talking because there are a lot of things that you will never hear on. On the tape. I mean. At times truly extraordinary things. I saw him talking about the middle east peace process when he was so tired and he was talking about a whole bunch of things at once each night session was a kaleidoscope. It's not an orderly thing where you check off and. Only the things that you say i want to make the decision and reach you everything reaches you and. But he was so tired that his eyes would roll up under is the lid while he was talking. And he would keep talking. And i said. Mr president are you all right and he would kind of come out it. Out of it and keep talking. There were other times

when he would cross his legs and pull his knee up with his arm. With all of his might next to his ear and it looked like it was pulling the off hip. Out of joint. And he would look at me and. He never would say i need to do these exercises or. This much looked pretty strange. He would say. And then boris just tried to put this and he was just talking about morsy elson or whatever was going on it. And then he crossed the other leg and pull. And i thought. I mean all these contortions. The white house is a very the presidency is a very. Amazing institution. So i thought my role is to try to preserve the record give a preview of what it's like and. Take people in. Into the white house. The substance. Goes all over the place i'm not going to try to get into any of that if any of you have heard about it or read any of it i'll be happy to answer questions on it. I am.

And i don't usually read because i think that's what. Fiction people should do but i'd like to read just a page. To give you a sense of what it's like. Because most of this is trying to recount. What a session. Feels like. So i'm going to read a small pass this is from december of one nine hundred ninety nine this is after impeachment. This is. The whole world is. And he's working on the middle east peace. But the world's attention is mostly already focusing on the next presidential election this is when gore. Bill bradley was challenging gore bill bradley was running ahead of gore. At this time. Mccain and. Was challenging george w. bush. On the republican side so it was full of two thousand politics. And in fact he talked about that at the beginning of this session. And a bunch of arms control matters. And others. But this is just a little section from the end of the end of a session and. In one thousand nine hundred nine.

We then recorded. Stories of his ten day trip through. Through mediterranean countries into the balkans. He described a televised clash in istanbul with an irascible. Boris yeltsin. The president joined chelsea in athens to view the parthenon at daybreak. We covered fine points about optics and the taper doric columns. He said greece faced security threats from anarchistic fascists. And the last active stalinist party in europe. Cadres still seeds more of the marvels clinton that harry truman had kept. Greece from becoming a soviet satellite. And a much larger segment resented the united states for condoning in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven military coup. Other favored moments on this trip included the crowd near alexander nevsky cathedral in sofia bulgaria. You came across things sold to get thing. Such as structures built for philip of massad on the father of alan xander the great. He exchanged

bracing salutes with u.s. troops and nato peacekeepers all the way to the bases in italy. Notably from kosovo. He conveyed the charged atmosphere of one muddy schoolyard packed separately with cheering albanians. Squealing children seldom serb politicians and nervous minority turks. All went silent the instant. A translator really relayed his first plea for them to reconcile. And he had plunged ahead to argue why. No one could make them do so but he had risked many lives to give them the chance. Sadly they weren't the only spattered people on earth. He told them he had sat on a chair like this to hear fathers and mothers tell of waking amidst whole families hacked to death with machetes. He said that three quarters of a million rwandans were killed without any guns in three months time. In israel. Children had showed him. Shown him photographs of friends blown up on school buses in northern ireland the girl sang for him who had been blinded and disfigured

by a bomb in the flower market. Ethnic hatred was the world's worst problem he told them. Its solution was always the same. He was irish. If his people finally ended the terror among themselves they would wonder why they hadn't begun the hard work of reconciliation decades before. Looking back on tape. Clinton was proud of his exhortation but he conceded that it had earned frowns and only a very polite applause. Chelsea popped into the kitchen with two friends including a stanford diver home for the december holiday. She delivered. A monologue on the phenomenon of college grogginess. Students under stress stayed up consecutive nights until they entered a giggling zombie does own she said. Illustrated in her case by habit of burning candles around the computer. Which somehow lit one term paper on fire and her best addled response was to shake the burning document in the air. Fanning the flames igniting her blanket among other

things. And this was only the start. Her computer then refused to print the letter i. Which was full of meaning itself she said and she had to insert them all manually before spraining out with her paper to beat the semester deadline freezing in flip flops. And a purple t. shirt. Laughing hysterically when her entry card failed to open the teacher's building because of an overdue library book. Eventually there was a happy ending and the president responded with his own memories of a georgetown religion professor who gave oral exams in twelve different languages. Back on tape the president passed lightly over topic thirteen on my list of sixteen for the night. Of the kennedy center honors gala. He said only that hillary thought she had died and gone to heaven because she was seated next to sean connery. By contrast he dug into panama with surprising force. He had declined to attend the recent ceremony restoring local. Sovereignty over the panama

canal lands. Stories night that clinton did not want to share glory or blame with the treaties author jimmy carter and was angling instead for a victory lap in northern ireland. None of this was true. He had no qualms about carter's treaty nor any spot on the next ballot to worry about. He said he'd reserved a date for a priority trip to syria. Not ireland and he was tired from fourteen foreign trips already this year. What upset him was madeline albright. He had instructed the secretary of state to represent the nation. In panama. He said her puzzling refusal. Communicated to him by a newspaper damaged the foreign policy of the united states. The president did not care about her excuses. He made sure he had made sure she knew he was serious. The year closed on spies and terrorism. The justice department after fierce debate among the security agencies. Indicted the nuclear scientists when wholly on fifty nine counts of copying classified material to his personal computer.

Believe was being handled like a radioactive espionage defendant no bail. Locked down. Solitary confinement. Even though the long. Dragnet had produced no evidence that he offered secrets to china or anyone else. The president said the experts were telling him the worst spies. Sometimes stored there treason for rainy day. This sounded fishy to me. Clinton shrugged. Nothing would please him more than to establish lee's innocence. Speaking of treason he jolted me on pakistan. Move scharf wants to kill sharif he said i believe that's his goal. Just as the prime minister had feared his own army the ascendent general now plotted revenge against the prime minister he had overthrown. Clinton was mounting a concerted pitch from a jar of to refrain from testing more nuclear weapons and leave. Sharif along. If he met those two conditions there were things the united states could do to help musharraf government. I don't know if it will work he sighed. Off tate. At the end he told me to put saudi terrorist osama bin laden on

my list for next time move sharp had arrested a bin laden lieutenant near the border with afghanistan he said and was shipping him to jordan for interrogation. There were intelligence warnings that bin laden planned attacks on american targets in jordan over the millennium period just ahead. Of through ramadan. That's the end of that session. But. Anyway. The only thing that's similar between this and the for any of those of you have read any of the martin luther king books is it is a narrative history i'm trying to do. To give you a sense of what it's like to be there but it same time. I'm trying to convey the gist of the information that he's talking about which. I mean that's just one little sample it's a mix of politics where he's talking political strategy domestic strategies talking what about what's going on and endless

theories about the state of the world and and. Probably more press and media theory than you would care to examine. He said in one thousand nine hundred four he thought that maybe one reason that the media were so preoccupied with. Scandals stories and whitewater which mystified him. Was that their markets were being split up under pressure pressure from the cable companies and that they felt they had to the only way they could compete was with the tabloid emphasis. But he said if that's true it's really bad for the united states. We have to decide if that's true. What there is we can do about it. But i believe that it's vitally important. There's some very painful periods in here. He said that his mission was to try to rescue the united states from cynicism. He said he fought on that for many years but he forfeited any chance to actually make

dramatic headway. Because monica lewinsky. Vindicated cynicism. And. And there's no getting around getting around that. But the question we have to answer is what kept the cynicism going for all of the eight years of the investigations that led on him because monica lewinsky was at the end. Rather than the beginning. So these are all very. Very interesting question. I'll only say what what. Now and saying what you know once the two projects for me. Because they're so different you know. The king project. And the clinton project is. To me the king project. At a certain level of history. Ought to have a noble and and.

Generated enormous optimism about the capacities of politics. Because for all of its trouble it let loose an enormous amount of liberation. In this country and not just for the segregated south. But for the whole country and for women and lots of other things that have changed. And it was initiated through a citizen's movement and a political system that answered them. Instead. The dominant cultural message. In the united states since the sixty's which is why we're still fighting the culture wars of the sixty's. Is that that period. Showed politics to have gone off the rails and become overbearing and untrustworthy and that the reputation of politicians and most of our public institutions. Has plummeted. Since the one nine hundred sixty s. several times in here where clinton says you can predict almost eighty five percent of the vote if you ask people one question. What do you think the unite the one thing the politics of the one nine hundred sixty s. on balance were good or bad for the united states. You can predict people's

vote on that. Clinton are both children of the south. During the era of the political of the civil rights movement. We both were born into nonpolitical families that were politicized over many years. By the civil rights movement and who think that it was the greatest thing for us personally and for our region. Politics and that's how we got interested in politics and he's naturally trying to vindicate that which he associates with patriotism and says. You know that's just what george washington and. And all the founders were doing they're trying to uphold and build the government and politics for a constructive purpose. During the civil rights era. It was probably the finest hour of american journalism. That we know of tremendous journalism and of course television news. Cut its teeth.

In birmingham and then the freedom rides in mississippi and a lot of the domestic. Politics of that time. So. His mission to try to restore. To overcome the cynicism and restore a sense of public purpose like the civil rights era and vindicated. Link these two periods. And his disappointment with the media i think in some degree was brought about by the fact that he idolized particularly the new york times. From our time. Going through the civil rights era. And in that sense. It's. It's very. It made me quite interesting when he was talking about all these theories. Clinton gets mad and. You'll see him get an ad in here a lot including get mad at me. More than once. But he never gets mad very long without starting to think about why he gets in that he's a pop puzzle solver. On he starts thinking about it and a lot of it is about the press. And

how he was disappointed in him and what does this mean and how can we have a better politics for the always said. Democracy is inherently and intellectually difficult. And it always has been and we take too much of it for granted and. We can't deal with. difficult As in democracy if our public culture and our best media. Organs are. Have reduced politics to like a high school. Election and. Who's cool and who's not. So he was very disappointed on that and in the last thing i'll say is. In that light. My publisher has told me that we've received two. So far. We've received two complaints about this book. Only two. Normally you get a lot of demands for a retraction and. Saber rattling. Both from new york times reporters. Feeling that. Clinton's remarks about their coverage were

unfair to them. And of course. If you read the context of these things. You feel he felt that. It's awfully thin skinned of them given. Given the quality of the reporting that they've infiltrated. So there's something in there there's a nerve in there and i don't know how important it is but let me let me end with that thanks allow be happy to answer your question. Yes. When i grew up. I heard about auschwitz and doc hauen book involved and always the words. Never again never again never again. And i know from the page you read that president clinton cared. Yet how could he not seriously try to do something to stop the genocide in rwanda. Well that's covered in a lot of the sessions. And i don't want to take too much. Time. But i will say this. The first time we discussed it with our own was right after it happened.

And he was pretty quick about i mean you heard him talking about regret and remorse and all that and then there wanton genocide. He said. Two things he said number one. The rwandan genocide was not on c.n.n.. Most people didn't care. He said. Number two. It took us two years to organize an international coalition to do something about bosnia rwanda was over within three months. We responded. Slowly even after that. In the aftermath. But he said. There's a lot of wishful thinking that any international coalition could have done anything. Within the space of time that this happened. So i'm just going to tell you what he said. Actually just to respond to that really quickly he was spoke at my college two years ago. And someone in the audience asked him what his largest regret was about his presidency and it was rwanda. I had a question though you said that at first you were just going to get him started.

Because you had a lot of practice of oral history. When did you sort of the calls just kept coming and. You just kept going you didn't. Didn't want to turn it down. No it's not that i didn't want to turn it over it was up to him. He never trained in a body and. It would have to be somebody else on his staff and i think he worried that if you. If the. Somebody else on his staff was doing it that it was harder to keep a secret if you're around the white house. Then. You know i was out of sight and therefore out of mind. And our kind of official story was that we had renewed our acquaintance. Why talking from time to time about historical matters because i was a historian. Which is true. But it didn't. It didn't tip off anybody that we were doing all of these regular and. Extensive recordings. So we never he never trained anybody else so i just kept coming as long as as long as he called i think i'm very struck by

the perp potential uniqueness of the situation. So as a historian you're standing. With a with a strong commitment to a useful historical record and eliminating historical record. But this particular relationship came out of a friendship or an acquaintance that was you know far preceded the election of clint to the presidency and i wonder what about this could be reproduced. You know if it didn't depend on that kind of personal. Tie in the previous part of both your lives is this something that you could imagine happening. Again without that or was it was that a necessary ingredient i wondered if you'd just reflect on. Sort of the future. Of such a process. That's a very good question. You know i hope. President obama is doing this but. Something like this and maybe he's insisted that he's got no takers in in the meeting. I know one thing if he has he's doing it and. Almost certainly he's doing it into the teeth of

bureaucratic resistance if he's trying to do it in in government meetings. But more privately if he's trying to do anything like this. Or if he wanted to do anything like this and i think. I think. Through my wonderful contacts with the white house ushers office because they were the ones that got me in and out of the white house all these years. I took him a copy of this book a couple of weeks ago. So i know that he knows about it i doubt that he's read it. But i hope maybe he's doing something like it my i have no doubt that barack obama if he wanted to do something like that has some writers or some people that he could do it with. But more broadly. I wish that there were. That there could be a discussion with lawyers and law makers and historians. About whether it. Whether it's possible ethical the pros and cons of recording these conversations of recording the president's phone conversations. Under some sort of stipulation that they

would absolutely be embargoed for ten years. Not sure we're mature enough. As a country. Or that people would trust that it wouldn't be broken and some excuse be found well yes we agreed to do that but by god we've got to get to the bottom of the so and so let's go let's win to be fun to listen to the tapes. Today and not have to wait ten years. But it would be a useful his. Useful exercise to. We right now we don't even address. How much we value. Value. This. I don't believe we will ever know the kind of conversations that george w. bush had before or after going into iraq. If we didn't have the phone conversations with lyndon johnson we'd still be debating whether or not he was a captive of the best in the brightest from the from the mcnamara error or whether he was an inherently a warmonger. The tapes. The tapes change that whole thing. And make it reconcilable at least at a human

level. How valuable would it be to to try to make preparations. So that the american people could be more informed about the human side of the government that's trying to represent them. Especially in the white house because after all the president is the only one of the three branches that. Whose powers are all vested in one person so it's a uniquely personal office. And so therefore. Tape recordings of how they behave. Are really all of our business or. I don't mean necessarily tape recordings but. But intimate and convincing. Information in the moment of how they have behaved how our presidents have behaved to inform us. Are really important. And i hope something like that happens but. I never seen any inkling of it at all and. I'd like to see that. As i said the problem addressed more generally. The president made a brief comment to you after you finished one of the sessions that you might want to write a memoir about your experiences. But i was. Entering since then. Whether you had any conversations clinton

about this or whether you had any contact at all with him while you. You knew while you were writing this war. We don't have that much conversation. Now. I think it will always have a connection as i said that people who've known each other for a long time do. But this was a pretty unique experience in the sense that it's something that i've been thinking about and working for all my life and something he had been working for all my life. That were kind of can groom and. That i cared about the history and he cared about being the president and keeping a record of it. And so our collaboration here and our. Was far beyond what we had done in texas now. He's doing the clinton global initiative and the. You know he would only. Hang out with me if i had a billion dollars and. Which i don't so i don't talk to him very much i did to. Taking this. Did taking the page proofs. For this book in traffic

law. And he called me a bunch of times. About it and i don't really think it's fair to get into his anxieties about when it came out but. It's more personal. Then he thought and he fears that the personal parts will be distorted. I hope. I have to have the historian's faith. In a way that reflects his kind of faith in the electorate. As opposed to the media. That readers will fairly take all of this stuff. In context. Just for example. There's a passage in there were at one point he's telling. What i think is a very nice story about. How he admires chelsea. That chelsea. Had pursued ballet for years because she loved the ballet. Even though. She was not the typical. Ballerina he said her feet boy at every day. Because she was heavier than most ballerinas and. After rehearsal her feet would bleed. But she persisted

in ballet anyway and. And he said that he had never pursued anything like that that he didn't know he was gifted for he said i knew i was gifted in politics from the from the time i was about eighteen and. Chelsea has. Is gifted for a lot of things but she pursued ballet just because she loved it and. But he's worried. And that to me is a. Is a very nice story. I mean it's interesting about both of them. But he's worried that it will be distorted into him criticizing his own daughters. You know. Physique. Or something like. So i don't know how it's going to go i've not heard from him since. Since the book came out but that's only. Last week and he's been in haiti and flying all around. I don't know what he'll say. Thank you thank you.