The Clinton Tapes
By Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuster; 707 pages
During 79 sessions taped between 1993 and 2001, President Bill Clinton and Pulitzer Prize--winning historian Taylor Branch recorded a secret and "unique, verbatim record" of Clinton's presidency, meant to serve posterity. At the end of each conversation, Branch would hand over his cassettes to Clinton--and then record his observations and recollections after leaving the White House. This book is the fruit of that second set of tapes, and it's by turns intimate and dispassionately historical. With its chronological account of Clinton's then contemporaneous comments on the Middle East peace process,...