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90s Dreams Part 1: Clinton's First Term



Tags: bookshistoryseriesclinton

I've collected a few books which fall into the category of '90s dreams - the post-Cold War world and boom economy. This post is about:

The Clinton Tapes: Conversations with a President, 1993–2001 (Taylor Branch, 2009)

Throughout Clinton's presidency, he sat for dozens of interviews with author Taylor Branch. The back cover promises "what President Clinton thought and felt but could not say in public."
Branch was once Bill's roommate. Twenty years later, with a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship for a Martin Luther King biography, he reconnects with the Clintons shortly before they leave to Washington. Bill was media-savvy, and wanted his presidency immortalized in the way that Arthur Schlesinger had written about the Kennedys. For Branch, recording in the White House would echo his research into tapes left by Civil Rights era presidents Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon.

From early on, the book fit my curiosity about how Clinton would discuss foreign policy in Somalia, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia. I was surprised to see a bipartisan call for delivering more weapons to Bosnia, with Clinton saying he needed Europe and UN backing, and that they held back due to either an anti-Muslim bias or a lack of confidence in sustainable ethnic enclaves.
Also surprising: a belief that the elder Assad would make peace with Israel over the Golan Heights.
The first mentions of Rwanda are quite brief. Post-presidency this became the textbook Clinton regret, but it doesn't seem like he was following it closely at the time.
Chechnya also gets short shrift, secondary to relationship-building with Yeltsin and Russia as a whole.

While getting reacquainted with Clinton, Branch is connecting with the Haitian community at home in Baltimore. After the exiled President Aristide discovers Branch's connection to Clinton, he takes on a role in passing letters and vouching for Aristide's sincerity. He helps write Clinton's announcement of intervention, and accompanies the US delegations returning Aristide to power and investigating electoral fairness.
Former President Carter inserted himself into negotiations in Haiti and North Korea, showing an unusual ability to promise an elder statesman envoy but then bringing his story to the media rather than reporting back to the president. Nixon also tried diplomacy, touring post-Soviet states and meeting with figures outside the Clinton-Yeltsin alliance.

The sections on Clinton's tour through the Baltic States and Ukraine, walking through Prague with Madeline Albright (whose family fled Czechoslovakia), getting Russian troops out of the Baltic states and setting the foundation for the G-8 and NATO -  it makes you want to relive the era's optimism.

As a 90s kid, many of the social issues and day-to-day mishaps were unfamiliar. Within a week of his inauguration, Clinton was being pressured by the press, Congress, the Joint Chiefs to reject his plan to allow gay soldiers, leading to the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" compromise.
Clinton had difficulty finding a suitable Surgeon General - possibly due to initial issues with tobacco companies and not just social issues - but also a compatible Secretary of Defense, with one nominee (Bobby Ray Inman) quitting after the press asked personal questions, and about having allowed a gay employee to maintain a security clearance at the NSA. Wikipedia did not mention this, instead directing the narrative to a later military contract scandal.
Vague challenges with Republicans and the media become sharper after the assault weapons ban and the Contract with America lead to severe losses in the House. One unexpected story was a Clinton-Gingrich joint appearance at a senior citizen picnic in New Hampshire.

Given the personal friendship with the Clintons, you start to wonder what the author will say about Monica Lewinsky. In this first term Branch records comments on others' scandals such as Senator Packwood's diary and Governor Chuck Robb.
Clinton claims that he doesn't recognize Paula Jones, and that troopers were making up stories for jobs and movie deals. Clinton cannot risk talking about the case on tape, and they continue the project.

Recently I'd thought of Bill as portrayed in American Crime Story (thinking of when he asks Betty Currie to lie). In this half of The Clinton Tapes we see his presidential I.Q. and E.Q. - weighing logical outcomes of a policy with Congress, referencing the Classics and Tolstoy, reading a book on early executive privilege, going to that Gingrich picnic or frequently calling on Colin Powell to avoid an election year rivalry.

Extras

After challenges in court, Barack Obama signed a plan to phase out the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy taking effect in 2011.

On The West Wing, the show processes Clinton's impeachment through President Bartlett's secret illness. In an episode from April 2001, the president enters the Oval Office and agrees to appoint a right-wing special prosecutor, an obvious reference to Starr.
In The Clinton Tapes, Bill begrudgingly agrees on a late-night call from Europe ("sleepwalking half the time"), against Hillary's advice. The contrast just seems funny to me.

On John Major, the conservative UK Prime Minister during Clinton's first term: "A child waif, the son of a circus performer who sold garden ornaments, Major had lived on relief in Pittsburgh [PA]". But according to a 90s source on Wikipedia, his childhood was "comfortable but not well off". In Major's 2012 book about his father and music hall culture, he recalls both financial highs and lows. There is at least one mix-up here, because it was the prime minister's father who lived in Pittsburgh, as described in this local news story about Clinton and Major's visit.

In Bosnia sections, it strikes me as a conflict which (through American eyes) was distant and obscure enough to be the perfect intervention. NATO would do its first combat missions. It was the second instance of a humanitarian 'no-fly zone' (after Iraq). There's more detailed Bosnia discussion toward the end of this first term while keeping up with developments in Dayton, and a meeting with Milosevic - who pelted Clinton with conspiracies about JFK and the recent Rabin assassination. More practically, Branch suggests that military intervention was what made the parties come to Dayton, even though American public opinion was opposed to it.

Camp David is a little weird! George H. W. Bush advises Clinton to go more often, because the staff feel neglected. The Clintons preferred to be social in Washington, Baltimore, and other cities. Wiki supports this: each Bush visited over 100 times, and Clinton visited 60 times. Obama and Trump combined made fewer visits than the Clintons over three terms. Are the vibes off at Camp David? Bad WiFi?

After nominating Justice Breyer over an ill friend, Arkansas judge Richard Arnold, Wikipedia cites Supreme Court book The Nine to say that Clinton was "weeping" over the decision. In The Clinton Tapes Clinton doesn't know Arnold as well, and the decision also is influenced by a rumor about his wife. I didn't find any trace of this story online.

Where are they now?

Bill Clinton mention of Schlesinger's Kennedy biographies led me to find he also borrowed the term "the vital center". In 1997 Schlesinger responded negatively: It's My Vital Center. He passed away in 2007.

Betty Currie donated to Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, worked for John Podesta at the start of the Obama administration, and has since retired.

Bobby Ray Inman later served on the board of technology and post-Blackwater contractors. A 2022 article in the Washington Blade says that the linguist who he defended, Jamie Shoemaker, has been a guest speaker at an official Pride event at the NSA.

Mike Espy, a Secretary of Agriculture forced to resign over possible bribes, got acquitted and has since run for Senate twice. Tyson Foods accepted a guilty plea, but another company took it to the Supreme Court. US v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California was a unanimous decision further separating gratuities from bribery. This was a precedent for 2024's Snyder v. US bribery/gratuities case.

Sitting in 1993, Clinton and Branch saw former Oval Office tapes as valuable but inaccessible archives (this was pre-WWW, after all). The author gave tapes to Clinton to hide, aware that they could get subpoenaed. Later they allowed the White House counsel to listen to some tapes. There was a suggestion that transcripts would end up at the Clinton library.
The National Archives has kept friendly with Branch, including hosting an author talk on this book. When Branch completed his King biographies, he was awarded the 2015 Records of Achievement Award.
In 2019 he answered questions about going to a segregated high school, Clinton's awareness of history, and political fervor of the 60s.
No tape transcripts yet, though.

Updates to Previous Reads

Interesting astronaut diplomacy oral history: China in the 1980s and the USSR in the 1970s: https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LousmaJR/LousmaJR_3-15-10.htm

I paid for 23andMe's updated DNA chip and am underwhelmed. I got some more detail on French and German regions / percentages, but nothing new on health / traits / relatives. They also started pushing pay-to-read features.

Bowing toward Tokyo as implemented in occupied Indonesia: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ddovcb/did_the_japanese_empire_try_to_force_indonesian/

Vitalik had a good post about how voting for a "pro-crypto" candidate is often a failure for personal privacy and crypto ideals https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html

Google Translate now offers Greenlandic and Cantonese.

Scavenger's Reign is good, now on Netflix. Lot of weird aliens.

Weird Wiki article on disappearing polymorphs (crystals in chemistry)

I always thought that the scenes in the X-Men series were... oddly insensitive in portraying Magneto at Auschwitz, but just now learned that Bryan Singer had previously directed Ian McKellen in Apt Pupil (1998), playing a Nazi criminal in hiding? Singer was fascinated with the original story as a teenager, and "projected" his high school team name and colors in the film. Singer already went from the rumor mill to canceled in 2019, but this was a kernel of media literacy which I'd missed.

After the Rootclaim debate on Covid origins, this post on Astral Codex Ten from April digs into weird forum posts and frozen food hypotheses for Covid which I can just read about for hours
Rootclaim is a weird place! They follow Seymour Hersh on blaming Syrian rebels for chemical attacks and around the bin Laden raid, but they also have pages for murder cases, Stonehenge, and fraud in the 2020 election (given 10% probability).

Several of the UK's right-wing Reform Party candidates are being called "phantoms" - theories ranging from AI-generated, last-minute entries, dead and absentee candidates, etc. Several unknown candidates did not show up at the traditional final counts for the district.
I had seen a lot of pro-Reform messages in Twitter, especially replies in threads about Conservatives' handling of covid, so it was funny to me how few seats they got.