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A review by dansbooks
The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President by Taylor Branch
2.0
Taylor Branch is a fine historian, but this is not a history. He and Clinton called their monthly-ish taped conversations over the course of his presidency an oral history project, but in this particular project Clinton was the sole informant, and Branch’s book is not a transcript of the tapes but a contemporaneous record of his own recollections of the conversations after each one took place.
The book does have its amusing moments (many of which have already been revealed in reviews and interviews), as well as its icky ones (e.g., Clinton reading Bob Packwood’s diaries). Mostly, though, it amounts to a Presidential mood ring, a barometer of how Clinton was weathering the events that swept across the country’s and world’s landscape during his time in office.
In that sense, for me the most valuable aspect of reading it was the opportunity to revisit/rethink those events, some of which have an eerie resonance today: the emergence of the extreme/violent right wing, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing; the setbacks to the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, etc. There are, though, some key gaps: very, very little is said, for example, about the Rwandan genocide.
We’re never again likely to get the kind of historical treasure trove represented by the Nixon tapes or Johnson’s phone recordings. The Clinton tapes themselves may become useful as raw material for a history (though, as Branch laments, they did not become so for Clinton himself, whose memoirs were very, very rushed in covering his own presidency); this volume is mildly entertaining, but not especially illuminating. And be forewarned: the Audible version is to be avoided. Branch himself reads it, and his delivery is, to put it charitably, soporific.
The book does have its amusing moments (many of which have already been revealed in reviews and interviews), as well as its icky ones (e.g., Clinton reading Bob Packwood’s diaries). Mostly, though, it amounts to a Presidential mood ring, a barometer of how Clinton was weathering the events that swept across the country’s and world’s landscape during his time in office.
In that sense, for me the most valuable aspect of reading it was the opportunity to revisit/rethink those events, some of which have an eerie resonance today: the emergence of the extreme/violent right wing, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing; the setbacks to the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, etc. There are, though, some key gaps: very, very little is said, for example, about the Rwandan genocide.
We’re never again likely to get the kind of historical treasure trove represented by the Nixon tapes or Johnson’s phone recordings. The Clinton tapes themselves may become useful as raw material for a history (though, as Branch laments, they did not become so for Clinton himself, whose memoirs were very, very rushed in covering his own presidency); this volume is mildly entertaining, but not especially illuminating. And be forewarned: the Audible version is to be avoided. Branch himself reads it, and his delivery is, to put it charitably, soporific.