- The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President
As he began his presidency, Bill Clinton invited his friend Taylor Branch, the journalist and award-winning historian, to become the Arthur Schlesinger of his administration: a chronicler of momentous events as they happened. Preoccupied with his own writing, Branch turned down the offer, but he agreed to visit Clinton periodically to conduct a series of taped conversations. Branch alternately calls the project an oral history and a diary, but the seventy-nine sessions, held almost monthly throughout Clinton's two terms, came closer to after-action debriefings. Recorded shortly after the events happened, the tapes captured Clinton's immediate reactions to the people and incidents he described. Since Clinton intended to use the interviews for his autobiography, and eventually to make them available for researchers at his library, he kept the tapes of each session. But when Branch drove home from the White House to Baltimore, he would dictate what he remembered about each encounter, with the idea of writing his own account. Unable to consult Clinton's tapes, Branch had to rely on his memory, bemoaning his inability to reproduce verbatim the president's astute and articulate observations—the very reason why oral historians record their interviews.
With so many special prosecutors probing the Clinton administration, the taping was done entirely sub rosa, at considerable risk. White House counsels advised that in order to avoid having the interviews subpoenaed, whenever the president wanted to talk about Whitewater or any other accusation being raised against him, he should instruct Branch to turn off the recorder. Branch realized that this act transformed him from an interviewer into "a sounding board, counselor, or simply a companion" (218). The interviews tracked Clinton's moods, portraying him alternately as elated and melancholy, given to venting steam against Congress, the media, the courts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Janet [End Page 138] Reno, Kenneth Starr, Yasir Arafat, Al Gore, and the White House telephone operators. His outbursts of rage shook Branch, who sometimes resembles the title character in the 1967 movie The President's Analyst, stressed out after listening to all the president's anxieties.
Should The Clinton Tapes be labeled oral history? Branch wrestled with the nature and value of his interviews. Clinton's constant complaining about his critics caused Branch to describe the recordings as a "wounded monologue" (337) and to try to nudge the president onto other subjects. Occasionally, they chatted so informally that Branch fretted that he had let the interviews slacken and not applied sufficiently rigorous questioning. At other times, he found it impossible to confine himself to interviewing and wanted to use the meetings to recommend new policies and bold departures. Toward the end of their sessions, he realized that he should have tried to elicit more general reflection, encouraging Clinton to look back on events rather than fume over the latest vexation, but Branch admitted that all the "improvising in secret without precedent or feedback" (442) had left him with no way to evaluate the project. For his part, Clinton seemed to relish the furtive nature of these meetings, pleased about having managed to keep them confidential even in the goldfish bowl atmosphere of the White House.
A disturbing aspect of this book is Branch's commentary on what was said off the tapes. On one occasion, when Hillary Clinton sat in on an interview, she uttered an expletive about the House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. When the president reminded her about the tape recorder, she winced, and Branch obligingly erased that portion of the tape. But then he quoted the expletive in his own book, seemingly a violation of their trust in the interviewer's discretion.
At the end of Clinton's presidency, Branch reported on the "dereliction" of those presidential libraries that had waited too long to start collecting oral histories, missing important officials who had died. Addressing the question of who would conduct the oral histories of Clinton's life and administration, Branch recommended that the University of Arkansas handle...