8-21-12: The Clinton Tapes

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Branch-0821.mp3

This conversation originally aired on November 24, 2009.

Taylor Branch is a Baltimore-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, who chronicled the civil rights movement in three books called "America in the King Years". The first volume of that acclaimed trilogy, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. When the final volume of that series was published in 2006, Taylor turned his attention to the American presidency, and in 2009, he published The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.

Taylor Branch has known Bill Clinton for more than four decades, and during the eight years of the Clinton administartion, Taylor drove from his Mt. Washington home to the White House 79 times, for private sessions with the President, in which Mr. Clinton reflected on the events of his presidency as they were happening at the time. No other journalist, pundit, or biographer has had, or perhaps will ever have, the kind of personal access to Bill Clinton that Taylor Branch had in those extraordinary sessions. The result is a riveting and fascinating look into the institution of the presidency, and the work of one of our country's most celebrated politicians. Tom Hall spoke with Taylor in September 2009.

Last fall, Branch published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Magazine as well as an e-book about NCAA Division I sports. Earlier this month, he published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he analyzes the sanctions imposed on Penn State following Jerry Sandusky's conviction on multiple sex abuse charges.