Taylor Marsh: The WJC Tapes and Beyond

[Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, author, and insightful journalist focusing on political analysis and foreign policy, as well as anything happening on the national scene, and has been writing on the web since 1996, long before blogging was born.]

As the Clinton Global Initiative kicks off, USA Today lands in the hotel rooms of the attendees, big shots and not, all converging on New York City. Talk about timing.

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and civil rights historian’s story is hitting everywhere right now, as Branch intends to offer the “unvarnished perspective” of William Jefferson Clinton. Back when Branch began gathering the story, the tapes were very tightly held: Parking on the South Lawn, he would head to the White House family quarters for interviews so secret Clinton stored the tapes of them in his sock drawer.

On Lewinski:

But one night in August 1999, six months after he had survived the Senate impeachment trial, words “spilled out” from an emotional Clinton. He told Branch the Lewinsky affair began because “I cracked; I just cracked.”

[...] The Democrats’ loss of Congress in the November 1994 elections — on top of the death of Clinton’s mother the previous January and the Whitewater investigation — made Clinton feel beleaguered, unappreciated and open to a liaison with Lewinsky, Clinton told Branch. The affair began during the government budget shutdown in November 1995 and resumed briefly a few months after Clinton’s re-election in 1996 — a victory that he felt should have been vindication but didn’t still his critics. …

Dissecting former Pres. Clinton’s state of mind when he succumbed to his carnal nature with Monica Lewinsky may seem trivial to some. But when considered in the context of the right wing, while understanding that the Republicans let Richard Nixon, for cover-up crimes, at least where impeachment and punishment were concerned, and Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra, off the hook, as well as Barack Obama ignoring what happened under Bush and Dick Cheney’s watch, it’s instrumental in understanding how the two parties differ in accountability given the opportunity and cases of serious illegal acts v. stupid sexual indiscretion. After all, Clinton’s consensual affair hardly compares to what either Nixon or Reagan did, not to mention George W. Bush. But yet it’s Bill Clinton who was drawn and quartered on the impeachment dock, with hatred so over the top that a leading right wing evangelical was yelling from the TV screen that William Jefferson Clinton was a murderer, with many on the right still forwarding nonsense about Vince Foster.

As Branch chronicles, even Al Gore blamed Bill Clinton for his loss in 2000, as Gore refused to use WJC where he could have made a difference, as people like me pleaded in interviews to let Bill loose where he could help. Branch revealing a serious blowup.

Then there was Clinton’s take on a heated, two-hour discussion he had with then-Vice President Gore just after Gore had lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush.

The meeting started politely enough, Clinton recalled. Then Clinton, who felt underutilized during the 2000 campaign, told Gore he could have tilted the election to the Democratic side if he had been dispatched to stump in Arkansas or New Hampshire, both states in which Clinton was popular. Either state would have provided the electoral votes Gore needed to win.

Gore replied that Clinton’s scandalous shadow was a “drag” that had plagued Gore at every step of the campaign. The two “exploded” at each other in mutual recrimination.

Being a strong supporter for former Vice President Gore, the Clinton “drag” became a self-fulfilling prophecy because many Democrats bought into and swallowed whole the right-wing talking point that was so skillfully sewed into the political narrative.

Today, people seem to have also forgotten just what the Clinton’s fought against, the full scale onslaught of the right that started the moment WJC took office, making light of the viciousness and no quarter aspect of the political mayhem.

It remains to be seen when we’ll hear about it all.

For historians wanting to plunge into the Clinton presidency, the unprecedented interviews will be invaluable, says Russell Riley, head of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He calls their existence “a major historical event,” though Clinton hasn’t said when and under what conditions they might be available to scholars...