The Clinton Tapes:
Wrestling History with
the President
By Taylor Branch
(Simon & Schuster, 707 pp., $35)
In her infamous first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm swings for the fences and proclaims that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She means that journalists use their human subjects and then dispose of them; that we con them in person by "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness"--it occurs to me to note that however bleak print's future seems, journalism will at least never run out of material--before gutting them in print. This was a provocative thought in 1990, in those years of innocence before the Internet turned the guttings into a spectator sport.
Malcolm was writing about a certain kind of journalism, and she was writing about murder: specifically, the case of the journalist Joe McGinniss's coverage of the murder trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, accused in 1970 (subsequently convicted, released, and re-imprisoned, where he stews today) of murdering his wife and daughters. Her basic criticism of McGinniss--that he cozied up to, and misled, MacDonald's defense team before producing a book that judged him guilty; and that he did so because he "found out too late … that the subject of his book was not up to scratch" as an interesting character--still stands as a useful indictment of journalists in those kinds of situations, especially when the scent of movie money hangs in the air.
But what about politics? Politics is different. In politics no one dies, usually; although, perhaps paradoxically, millions do, but it's not the same thing. And while there can be money in political journalism--sometimes very surprising injections of it, as we will see below--there isn't any really big money. Politicians, as subjects, are inherently interesting. Even when they are quite boring on a personal level (dirty secret: many of them are!), and even when their handlers tamp any remotely interesting human trait out of them for the sake of not offending some focus group, they are still interesting, because of the power they hold and the ways they use it. And in political journalism--this is important to remember--both sides are in on the con, so it all comes out in the wash.
Malcolm's statement, then, is far too broad. All journalism--let's say all urgent and serious journalism, so as to toss out coverage of last night's zoning-board meeting and Britney's latest breakdown and so forth--is not a morally indefensible con game. If one great claim may be made on behalf of The Clinton Tapes, it is that the book is not only morally defensible, but even (if one is basically sympathetic to Clinton, as I am) is good and useful and in places admirable. Taylor Branch performs a service in these pages. He reaches an audacious conclusion--that Clinton, through all the turmoil and scandal and pseudo-scandal, remained "consistently more candid and idealistic than my colleagues covering him for the press." We have been swimming in an ocean of journalism for the last fifteen years making precisely the opposite claims about Clinton, some of which of course have a basis in some of his actions, and so Branch's view is useful to have, and is more or less persuasive.
Even so, an odd quality floats through these pages--a withholding of journalistic assessment, a reluctance about getting to the bottom of things, an excessive identification with the subject, an offhandedness even--that often left me spellbound by the details but still in some way skeptical about Branch's project, and grabbing for its big narrative hook. All this gives the reader the odd feeling of leaving the dinner table stuffed but still undernourished. I finished The Clinton Tapes, very much to my surprise, with fewer questions for Clinton than for Branch.
In a somewhat obligatory fashion, the book opens with the first of their seventy-nine sessions, which took place on October 14, 1993. (Their meetings ran right up through January 2001, and straggled on as late as 2004.) But it is in the second chapter that Branch, the great historian of the civil rights movement whose work few contemporary journalists have equaled, describes how the project got started. A few days after the election in 1992, Branch read in his hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun, a quotation from Clinton, who had heard that Branch was in Little Rock on the night of the big victory celebration and expressed regret at having missed him. Branch and Clinton--both Clintons, actually--had worked and even lived together on the McGovern campaign in Texas. But they had split soon thereafter to pursue truth and justice in their different ways, and had fallen out of touch.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Branch's phone rang: a transition official wanted to know if he and his wife could come down to Washington to see the president-elect. Clinton got the Branches plum seats at the inauguration and an invitation to a dinner hosted by Katharine Graham. Branch was asked to draft language for the first State of the Union speech. Clinton said he wanted an in-house historian, his own Schlesinger. What did Branch think? "Reeling," he writes, "I played for time by complimenting the president for his quest to devise a practical solution." Inside, he was thinking what you or I would have been thinking. Wowza.
