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This evening I'm thrilled to welcome her prize winning author Taylor Branch. He's 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 79 confidential conversations that Mr. Branch had with President Bill Clinton from one thousand ninety three until 2001. These convert these conversations somehow were 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 Laden's plot against President Clinton's life. 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 thoughts on figures including Pope John Paul the second Steven Spielberg his daughter Chelsea

Clinton Monica Lewinsky Teddy Kennedy excuse me Monica Lewinsky. The up and coming George W. Bush. Nelson Mandela and many many others. The New York Times and 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 that one of President Clinton's shrewdest accomplishments was allowing Taylor Branch an Arthur Slesinger like front row seat to the Washington circus spectacle. Taylor Branch's been as you well know is a bestselling author of the definitive history of Martin Luther King Jr. the first in a series Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize for the branches also receive the MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1901 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999. He's written several other books worked as an editor for a 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. And gentlemen I'm so glad you're here with us tonight and thank you for your patience. Please join me in welcoming Taylor Branch. I. 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 Martin Luther King trilogy. Twenty four years of a life's mission book that I books that I yearned 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 had known 20

years ago drank beer with turns up as President United States hadn't seen him for 20 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 who were 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 20 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's silent majority and that he'd been eating chicken 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 25. Even though he's president elect surrounded by all of this pomp and circumstance is the same guy. There are a certain number of people in life that it doesn't matter if 50 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 had been in politics in Arkansas for 20 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 50 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 grab you 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. It was very personal. 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 20 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 is otherwise largely based on myth and stereotype and interpretation. But because they humanize the 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 digested 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 than you might think. White House aides no longer take notes. 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 note. President Clinton tasked 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 CNN 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 record keeping and it's summarized in the second chapter of the book where it talks about how we renewed our acquaintance with this extraordinary over this extraordinary assignment that he gave to me out of the blue. 20 after we didn't see each other for 20 years we had been roommates back in Texas in 1072. We knew each other in the anti-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 Connally conservatives 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 72 and we bonded as you tend to bond when you're getting shellacked by 32 points. We didn't see each other that much because we were like water bugs 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 a meeting 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 our 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. I don't know what you should do. She said Taylor Have you ever been to Little Rock. And. It was. 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 you really wanted. Was she really willing to hitch

her 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 that was running pretty high among 25 year olds in 1972 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 1916 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 have been in two elections I've been tear gassed in Chicago

and done all this stuff trying to. Go through the route of elected politics and that we in Texas when out 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 disputes between the arbor and Connally people over who said where in the motorcade and that 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 finished this project here I reminded him of this and he said yes I remember what I told you then. He he's very proud of his memory but I think. 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 everyone of my expectations and most of the world's experience of the Clinton presidency up close in these sessions that came out as a result of this project. I came to really doubt my own career choice as against Who is 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 in the throes 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 an 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 birthers and various other things that are somewhat like. The Vince Foster conspiracies that he committed suicide all these years. During Clinton's time in the White House

here or before he took office he briefly thought that possibly the solution he's not going to record his telephone conversations. He thinks he's not likely to succeed to get people to take notes of his meetings about what's going on. He briefly talked to me about getting an Arthur Slesinger coming into the White House to kind of gather to be there and gather notes. I told him that I thought it was a bad idea. That. That I certainly wasn't interested in doing it because I wanted to finish. Martin Luther King III. 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 his history 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 he really shouldn't 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 the records a 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 advised 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 20 years and if you want me to get you started on doing an oral history until you train somebody 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 it had to be secret because if it got out that he was taping things that were not on the public record. And he's in 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 Whitewater or Travelgate or file gate or China Gate or one of the gates or where Vince Foster was really died or you know something that people wouldn't believe until they listened all the tapes that they were there. So he we resolve to do these things that night in the White House in the residence away from his staff and only his scheduler knew when 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 no where near the West Wing because there are people there 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 it and the ushers would follow around he would send for me. Sometimes he'd be interrupted. Sometimes this would happen that would happen but usually we'd start at 10 o'clock at night with my little recorders. All right. This is January 14th. Whatever. One thousand ninety seven session number thirty seven with the president since last time Mr. President so-and-so and so-and-so is happy. 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 didn't 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 she 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 like the give and take. But there was a risk in the give and take because if I told him something that he really didn't like then I was afraid 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 an enormous strain. 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 tried to do this is not a book of historical judgment like the King books in my view I'm not playing the historians 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 try 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 these 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. It's 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 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 people because I had a few arguably a First Amendment claim form or that where the Warriors could keep him but then he said lawyers would have to know about it. I didn't want to do that but ultimately ultimately ultimately we decided the best thing was for him to have them. 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 these 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. You know you just have to trust him.

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 offer room that we did a lot of our recordings in. And I'd been given these boxes and he put them behind his socks 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 United States 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 that 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 1:47 a.m. It session number 26. And it was a rough one tonight. And let me start let me start with the shutdown of the 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 like I lived in Baltimore so I had to drive all the way to Baltimore at 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 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 grew. 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 is soon as you can after that. But he said I also want to use him 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. I think that the idea had already crossed my mind. That I might do something like that but I still had six more years of work on. On Martin Luther King and I never touched 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 and made about 3000 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 a long 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 tapes 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 often only the things that you say I want to make the decision reach you everything reaches you. And but he was so tired that his eyes would roll up under his lids 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 look pretty strange he would say. And then Boris tried to put this and he was just talking about Morsi Elson or whatever was going on and then he crossed the other leg and pole. And I thought I mean all these contortions. The White House is a very. The presidency is a very amazing institution. So I saw my role is to try to preserve the record give a preview of what it's like and to take people in into the White House. The substance is goes all over the place I'm not going to try to get into any of that have 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 1999 and 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 that was full of 2000 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 1909.

We then recorded stories of his 10 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 an artist's fascists and the last active Stalinist party in Europe. Cadres still see them are the marbled Clinton that Harry Truman had kept Greece from becoming a Soviet satellite and a much larger segment resent of the United States for condoning in 1967 military coups. Other favored moments on this trip included the crowd near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia Bulgaria. You came across things sold he kept saying such a structure is built for Philip of Mastodon the father of Alice Xander the Great. He exchanged bracing salutes with U.S. troops 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 sell them 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. And Israel's children had showed him or shown him photographs of friends blown up on school buses in Northern Ireland a 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 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 zone 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 II which was full of meaning itself she said and she

had to insert them all manually before spreading 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 12 different languages. Back on tape the president passed lightly over topic 13 on my list of 16 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 14 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 newspaper damage the foreign policy of the United States. The president did not care about her excuses. He made sure he had made sure he she knew he was furious. The year closed on spies and terrorism the Justice Department after fierce debate among the security agencies indicted the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on 59 counts of copying classified material to his personal computer. Lee was being handled like a radioactive espionage defendant. No bail lockdown 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 their treason for a 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. Musharraf wants to kill Sharif he said I believe that's his goal. Just as the prime minister had feared his own army the ascendant general now plotted revenge against the prime minister he had overthrown. Clinton was mounting a concerted pitch for Machar have 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. Musharraf 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 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 who have read in any of the Martin Luther King books is it is a narrative history I'm trying to give you a sense of what it's like to be there but at the same time I'm trying to convey the just 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 theory and media theory than you would care to examine.

He said in 1994 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 press or 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 is no getting or 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 because Monica Lewinsky was at the end rather than the beginning. But these are all very very interesting questions. I'll only say what what. Well in saying what unites 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 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 citizens movement and a political system that answered them. Instead the dominant cultural message in the United States since the 60s which is why we're still fighting the culture wars of the 60s 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 1980s. Several times in here where Clinton says you can predict almost 85 percent of the vote. If you asked people one question what do you think the Unite the night the politics of the 1980s on balance were good or bad for the United States. You can predict people's vote on that. Clinton and I 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 politicised 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. Tremendous journalism and of course television news cut its teeth in Birmingham and in the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and in a lot of the domestic politics of that time.

So his mission to try to restore. But to overcome the cynicism and restore a sense of public purpose like the civil rights here and vindicate it links 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 up through the civil rights era. And in that sense it's very. It made me quite interesting when he was talking about all these theories Clinton gets may add. 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 an A He's a pop puzzle solver and he starts thinking about it in a lot of it is about the press and how he was disappointed in and what does this mean and how can we have a better politics because he always said democracy is inherently an

intellectually difficult. And it always has been and we take too much of it for granted. And we can't deal with difficult matters in democracy if our public culture and our best media organs 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 then 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 retraction and saber rattling both from New York Times reporters. And feeling that the Clintons remarks about their coverage were unfair to them and of course if you read the context of these things you'll see he felt that they are

awfully thin skinned of them given given the quality of the reporting that they themselves did. 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 a lot be happy to answer your question. Yes when I grew up I heard about Auschwitz and Doc how in 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 these sessions. I don't want to take too much time but I will say this the first time we discussed it was was right after it happened and he was pretty quick about I mean you're talking about regret and remorse and all that.

Then there are wanton genocide. He said two things he said number one the Rwandan genocide was not on CNN. 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 with a real 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 up. No it's not that I didn't want to turn it over it was up to him. He never trained anybody and it would have to be somebody else on his staff and I think he worried that if you meet 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 my mind and our kind of official story was that we had renewed our claims. We are 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 never train anybody else so I just kept coming as long as as long as he called. Think I'm very struck by the potential uniqueness of the situation. So as a historian you're

standing with with a strong commitment to a useful historical record and an illuminating 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 I wonder what about this could be reproduced. You know if it didn't depend on that kind of personal touch in a 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 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 not this but something like this. Maybe he's insisted that he's got no takers and 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 you 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 with 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 might 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 over according the president's phone conversations. Under some sort of stipulation that they would absolutely be embargoed for 10 years. I'm not sure we're mature enough as a country or that people would trust that

it wouldn't be broken and some excuse to be found well yes we agree to do that but by God we've got to get to the bottom of so and so let's so let's Wouldn't it be fun to listen to the tapes today and not have to wait 10 years. But it would be a useful has a 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 era 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 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 informants 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 the as I said the problem address more generally. Imagine that you know that the president made a comment to you after you finished one of the sessions that you might want to write a memoir about your experience in it but I was wondering since then whether you've had any conversation with Clint about this or whether you had any contact at all with him while you as you knew while you were writing this up or

we don't have that much conversation now. I think that we'll always have that 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 congruity 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. It was far beyond what we had done in Texas. Now he's doing the Clinton Global Initiative and he 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 I did taking the page proofs for this book in Chappaqua. 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 is more personal than he thought and he fears that the personal parts will be distorted. I hope I have to have the historians 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 bled every day because she was heavier than most ballerinas and after rehearsal her feet would bleed. But she persisted in ballet anyway 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 18. 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 daughter's 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 it last week and he's been in Haiti and flying all around. So I don't know what to say. Thank you. Thank you.