CHARLIE ROSE: Taylor Branch is here. During Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House, he enjoyed extraordinary access to the president. The two men met in secret on 79 different occasions for recorded conversations. Until now, the contents of those interviews were kept even from Clinton’s closest advisors. Although the original tapes were made in the former president’s possession, Taylor Branch has compiled his notes from the meetings into a single volume. It is called "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President." Over the years President Clinton has hat at this table three times. Here’s a look at some of those appearances. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This whole election will be determined in part by what you think A president is supposed to do, and whether you want a president -- and what you want them do based on what they have done, and whether you think it matters that -- I mean, in theory, no experience matters. In theory, we could find someone who is gifted television commentator... CHARLIE ROSE: You think? BILL CLINTON: ... and let them run. (LAUGHTER) They’d have only one year less experience in national politics. And so I’m just saying -- but I don’t want to be flippant here. There are a lot of people who honestly believe what you have done for other people in your public life... CHARLIE ROSE: Or your private life. BILL CLINTON: ... is completely irrelevant. CHARLIE ROSE: And you don’t? BILL CLINTON: That what matters is what you symbolize. No, I don’t. So I had a certain kind of intelligence and a certain emotional predisposition. And I always kind of got people, I got what was going on. And I think that it’s really -- it stood me in good stead in politics. And, as I said, this idea that I was obsessed with my legacy is always way overrated, because I have read enough history to know that my legacy won’t be fixed for 100 years, and I’ll be long dead and so will most of my critics and somebody that lets the dust settle will see. So I always kept score in a totally different way. The way I kept score was the way I was raised to keep score, that people have better stories than they did before I started. And I think they did. So I feel really good about it, and that’s the point I try to make in the book. CHARLIE ROSE: Do you remember every line of every Elvis song? BILL CLINTON: No, but I remember a lot of them. CHARLIE ROSE: Would you just hum one to give us a sense of your favorite? We were listening to a little Elvis as we were going out here. BILL CLINTON: But you know I don’t have a voice, I’m too hoarse. CHARLIE ROSE: Give us your best Elvis. BILL CLINTON: My best Elvis is weak tonight. CHARLIE ROSE: All right. BILL CLINTON: You know I can be found -- that’s all I can do -- sitting home all alone. If you can’t come around, at least please telephone -- my message to the New York press -- don’t be cruel. (LAUGHTER) BILL CLINTON: I’m too hoarse. (END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: Welcome. TAYLOR BRANCH: Thank you, Charlie, nice to be here. CHARLIE ROSE: So, you spent a lot of time with the guy we just saw. TAYLOR BRANCH: A lot of time. CHARLIE ROSE: When did you first know him? TAYLOR BRANCH: I first knew him a little in the antiwar movement when there weren’t very many southerners involved in it, and he would come to meetings during the Vietnam War as the guy who knew what Fulbright was thinking. CHARLIE ROSE: Because he worked for him? TAYLOR BRANCH: Because he worked for him, because they were both from Arkansas. I knew him just well enough so that when Gary Hart asked each of us if we were willing to go into Texas to run the ‘72 McGovern campaign in Texas with each other -- because he wanted co-coordinators -- we both said we were comfortable working with the other. And we went down to Austin, Texas, and lived together and worked together in that memorable shellacking that we took from Richard Nixon in 1972. Then I didn’t see him for 20 years. The next time I saw him was at Kate Graham’s dinner when he was president-elect. CHARLIE ROSE: So tell me what he was like. TAYLOR BRANCH: I assumed that he had been processed into a politician with slogans and was no longer my young friend. When I saw him at Kay Graham’s, he said, "Can you believe all this, surrounded by Secret Service, surrounded by the cream of Washington?" And instantly there was something of the same guy that I had always known. And then within a minute he awed me on two respects. He said, "I’ve only got a minute." People were crowding toward him. The Secret Service was holding him away. And he said, "I want you to do two things for me if you can. I’m worried about the legacy that I’m going to -- the records that will be used to tell the story of what I’m going to do. "And I read your ‘Parting the Waters’ about the King era and the footnotes you did from the presidential libraries. Will the records that I’m keeping now be good enough that historians will be able to bring alive what I’m going to do 50 years from now? Think about that for me. "And also think about what it means that two southerners -- me and Al Gore -- are elected vice president so soon after the civil rights movement. What does that mean in the cycles of American history?" And I was just impressed that he was thinking about things like that before he had even taken office. CHARLIE ROSE: But he said he didn’t think much about legacy there, but he was thinking about legacy from the very beginning. TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, it depends on how you look at it. If you say "legacy" meaning how am I going to look? That’s one thing. That makes it selfish, and I’m sure there’s some of that in there, too. But he’s also saying that wants -- he believes the presidency is important, and he wants people to have a full human record of what the president does, good or bad. And this record here -- I warned him. I said, "If you’re worried about trying to make yourself look good, you cannot do a contemporaneous record about hindsight talking in the moment and be guaranteed that you’re going to be saying the right thing. People may come along later and think you’re an idiot." CHARLIE ROSE: How did you go from the meeting at Kay Graham’s dinner party to the first session in the White House? TAYLOR BRANCH: It took a lot of discussions. He first talked to me about going on his staff and becoming like an Arthur Schlesinger to gather the record. CHARLIE ROSE: Arthur Schlesinger was there for Jack Kennedy. TAYLOR BRANCH: For Jack Kennedy. And I didn’t want to do that. I told him I didn’t think it was a good model for history, that you’d have to sit there for four or eight years and be -- and fight for access and be regarded as an in-house historian, that he shouldn’t worry about controlling the history, he should just keep the best records possible. And he said, "Well, I can’t tape my phone conversations." And I said, "That’s a terrible tragedy, because it’s the greatest record for a people’s president ever discovered. But it’s already extinct." CHARLIE ROSE: A victim of Watergate. TAYLOR BRANCH: A victim of Watergate. And this diary, this oral history, was the best remedial prospect we could come up with to give something that was really immediate about what was on his mind that was not in the public record that would be available for future historians. It took us a long time to figure out how to do it, what was safe, how to keep it secret. I don’t say in the book, but I’m very proud of the fact that we kept this thing secret. It’s not easy... CHARLIE ROSE: Mainly you. TAYLOR BRANCH: ... to meet in the White House. CHARLIE ROSE: It’s mainly you that would keep it secret, isn’t it? You would expect him to, but the question would be the person who would from the outside. TAYLOR BRANCH: Right. I couldn’t talk about it. In fact, it even impacted my relationship with you. I don’t know if you remember that, but once I came on this show, and I had written an article about him, and you and I were going back and forth about what I knew about Clinton and I couldn’t tell you, Charlie, I’d been meeting him. CHARLIE ROSE: I remember. I remember. (LAUGHTER) I don’t forget that. But I’m glad you’re here now. What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t want to see those tapes released. TAYLOR BRANCH: Oh, I think he does. It’s just a question of when. CHARLIE ROSE: Well, but. TAYLOR BRANCH: Hillary’s still in politics. CHARLIE ROSE: Ah. TAYLOR BRANCH: If I had to guess, I would say as soon as Hillary is retired from politics and either out of the State Department or definitely not going to run for president, I think he will open them up in the library. Listen, that was the reason that he did this was so that they would be available to historians. And I think he would like to have historians be able to have them while there are people still around to bounce it off of. So I would be very surprised if he doesn’t open them up in his library pretty soon after Hillary retires. CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me the essence of this remarkable marriage, remarkable in very dimension. TAYLOR BRANCH: Absolutely. Well, she was only involved in our sessions intermittently. She would come in and out. Sometimes she’d just sit there and literally hold hands while he’s talking. Just like that, she’d be standing right next to you, and we’d be talking. It didn’t terribly surprise me, although a lot of this is going against my images of how processed they were, but they were just collegial. They would finish one another’s sentences. She was involved in everything he did. She gave frank opinions on every matter before him. There were times that -- I was very surprised -- she was much more strident in her defense of him in the impeachment than he was. CHARLIE ROSE: Expressed in what way? TAYLOR BRANCH: He would say, "Impeachment is political. If they want to throw me out of office, they can find a way to do it." And she would say, "Bill, that’s wrong. Impeachment is about abuse of power. It is about the constitutional system. And if you impeach and convict a president on something that has nothing to do with the exercise of presidential power, you are messing up our constitutional system. So this is wrong." For the same reason, she was the most vociferous opponent of his agreement to have the Whitewater special prosecutor. She said, "You are weakening future presidents. Just because there’s a great clamor to have this and everybody’s saying get the facts out...". CHARLIE ROSE: She was probably right, wasn’t she? TAYLOR BRANCH: She was right. But there was just a huge clamor. Everybody was saying, "This is the only way to end it. What do you have to hide?" And he gave in to that. And she said he was wrong. So -- but I don’t want to portray the whole thing as argumentative. It was argumentative if it needed to be and -- but they were pretty warm partnership. CHARLIE ROSE: And his relationship to Vice President Gore? TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, that’s a long story -- sometimes very close, sometimes admiring. Clinton often says here that Gore knew more about government and saved him from making a lot of mistakes, more mistakes than he did early on. CHARLIE ROSE: Especially foreign policy. TAYLOR BRANCH: Especially in foreign policy. Gore was much funnier with Clinton in the few times I saw them together. Recruiting members for his second Cabinet, Gore would get them in front on Clinton and reel in people when he was on the telephone and mimicking being out on a deep sea fishing boat and laugh, and "I just about got him. Here, you take him, you can get him." And very funny. But they did have this conversation that I didn’t even know about. Again, this is -- I didn’t know to ask... CHARLIE ROSE: This came from one of your conversations with him? TAYLOR BRANCH: From one of my conversations with him toward the end, he said, "I want to put this on the record that Al Gore came in and we had a donnybrook about the 2000 election, who was responsible. And he just started saying..." And to be fair, Clinton’s pretty good on these things. When he’s having arguments with people, he gives their side, too. He said, "This is what Al said, and then this is what I said. Al blamed me for losing the election because it was the Clinton scandal fatigue. And I said he ran away from our record and that it went back and forth from there." That was pretty raw. CHARLIE ROSE: Look at this. This is an interview I did with him about the very same thing. Here it is. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: You were not part of the debate in campaign 2000. BILL CLINTON: I don’t know. But I’ll tell you exactly what happened in Arkansas, which I do not know until I got down there and it was too late. The NRA beat him in Arkansas. The NRA and Ralph Nader stand right behind the Supreme Court in their ability to claim that they put George Bush in the White House. I mean, basically, I could show you a lot of empirical evidence, you just have to trust me, I know my state. CHARLIE ROSE: I trust you know your politics is what I trust. BILL CLINTON: And if I had -- I couldn’t have turned it with a few speeches. If I had known how big the NRA problem was, could I have gone down there and spent three days calling people on the phone and hauling people in and talking to them and turned it? Probably. But I didn’t know that. (END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: So great admiration for what Al Gore had done to him as an advisor. He bridled at the notion that he could have played a bigger role in the campaign. TAYLOR BRANCH: Why didn’t he broker somebody to do that? I’ve never understood why somebody didn’t go to Al Gore with great -- who was close to Al Gore and said "You’re making the biggest mistake of your political life not using the best piece of political talent this country has at the time." TAYLOR BRANCH: Well from what the president said, that is President Clinton, Al Gore had a lot of people around him who were telling him just the opposite. CHARLIE ROSE: He’s toxic. TAYLOR BRANCH: That this guy is a millstone around your neck, and that everywhere we go, that’s all people say. CHARLIE ROSE: Depends on where he goes. TAYLOR BRANCH: President Clinton felt that Al Gore was a victimized by a Washington point of view, that the Clinton fatigue and that was not so... CHARLIE ROSE: More Washington than around the country. TAYLOR BRANCH: It was more Washington than around the country and that Al Gore fell victim to it through his advisers. CHARLIE ROSE: You were living in Baltimore at the time. TAYLOR BRANCH: I was living in Baltimore. I still am. CHARLIE ROSE: You would go to the White House. TAYLOR BRANCH: I would get a call late in the afternoon, usually at the last minute. "Can you come down tonight? There’s a hole in his schedule. We don’t want you in the west Wink Wing. We want you in the residence because we don’t want the staff seeing you. Come down late at night and bring your materials." And I would bring my notes and my two little recorders and go and sit and wait for him. And then some room up in the residence, a greeting room or dining room or little kitchen, I would set up my recorders and say, whenever he was ready, "Mr. President, this is session number 40, oral history number 41, such and such a date. This is what’s happened in the last month, let’s start so and so." And he would either say, "The public record is pretty good on that, I don’t have much to add to it," or he would say "That has absolutely nothing do with what really happened. Let me tell you what really happened. Senator Byrd started talking about..." and so he told me whatever, and then we’d be off to the races. CHARLIE ROSE: And your sense was he simply wanted to tell what happened from his perspective? TAYLOR BRANCH: His point of view that was not on the public record. And he wanted to make sure that it was there -- as -- in its richness, you know, in human dynamics. CHARLIE ROSE: And what did he want to talk about? TAYLOR BRANCH: You know, he always prided himself on the ability to marry analysis. He was very cerebral and he loved being a wonk. But he said "Wonkism won’t get you very far unless you can make a personal connection with somebody. And I can go into rooms and make personal connections with strangers," and he was famous for that. But he felt that he had to do that with foreign leaders, with political leaders, too, and marry them together. In fact, he said the president of China, Jiang Zemin, frustrated him the most in that regard, that he tried for years to make some sort of -- know something about his family, about his sense of humor, some way to have a personal connection with him that he could use to advance a common agenda and all the great issues between the United States and China, and he had a really hard time. CHARLIE ROSE: Could not break through? TAYLOR BRANCH: Could not break through. He was very opaque. He said this relationship with Jiang Zemin is my greatest failure in foreign policy to date. CHARLIE ROSE: And how did you decide what to include in this. TAYLOR BRANCH: This book is a couple of things. It’s trying to convey to the reader what it’s like to go into the White House and sit with the president so they can be there with me. And to some degree in my mind -- because my main role is to get this down in history -- but if he’s asking me questions and asking me my opinion, the rapport I have with him affects my ability to get out information on the record. So I went back and forth, and I had many doubts about what to do, about what course to take. But I felt I owed him my best advice. The other part of the book, of course, is just trying to summarize what he’s saying and how his mind works and how he reacts to things. And that you never knew, because there would be these endless mixtures of events, and he would be in different moods and then Chelsea would come in and ask for help with her homework. And you just never could tell what was going to happen when you’re with the president trying to put this record together. CHARLIE ROSE: There was one time that he didn’t want to go on some foreign trip because he wanted to help her do something, wasn’t it? TAYLOR BRANCH: Yes. During the government shutdown, when the Republicans shut down the government, Clinton canceled a trip to Japan. And it was a big economic summit. And Al Gore went instead and came back and said, "You have insulted these leaders. They all have terrible problems, too." And they were saying screw his government shutdown, he should be here, the prime minister of Australia and otherwise. He said, "And the Japanese are a very sensitive people, Mr. President. You have injured them. You have to go there now. Go there in January. You don’t have anything on your schedule in the middle of January." And Clinton said, "Yes, but those are Chelsea’s junior-year midterms. And Hillary has to go with me, and I’m not going to go over there and leave her here -- Chelsea here to take those midterms by herself. Those are the most significant midterms in high school." And Gore -- he said "Gore looked at me like I was a Martian and said "Mr. President, I’m talking about the relations with Japan, one of our major allies, and you’re talking about high school exams?"" And Clinton said "Al, I don’t care what you’re talking about, I am not going there to leave Chelsea alone." And they had a big fight about that. So -- and he didn’t go to Japan until April. So, yes, for better or worse -- and people can debate who had the better of that argument -- he and Gore had a tempestuous relationship, and Gore was giving him his best advice. CHARLIE ROSE: What are his flaws? TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, by his own admission the a lack of -- a tendency to feel sorry for himself and a lack of discipline to fulfill his major mission, which he described as to restore for the American people a sense of common purpose and nobility about politics that we’ve had for most of our history but have lost for the last few decades in the cynical era that government is bad, both from the right and the left. And he was trying to say, "We can accomplish things, we can end the deficit that nobody thought we could. We can create jobs. We can do things for women and children." CHARLIE ROSE: A road map to the 21st century. TAYLOR BRANCH: A road map to the 21st century that will restore people’s confidence in politics. It was constantly opposed by people who were saying, "Yes, but Travelgate, Whitewater, all these things, government is inherently in our face." And he fought against that for all these years, and then rescued or gave succor to the very cynicism that he was fighting by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He knows that. And he said it was self-pity and weakness. But in a way, at a point when he had fought a long fight to try to restore the capacity of government to be more of a positive role in American politics, he gave away a chance to be triumphant in that fight by validating all of this cynicism about him that had dominated his presidency and that he railed against in so many of our sessions. CHARLIE ROSE: But was that a reluctant conversation on his part? I mean -- TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, his -- his -- he was never reluctant to fuss about or to theorize about why the news media or particularly "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" -- which he admired -- he said, "You and I, Taylor, have admired these papers all our lives. Why are they leading the charge on Chinagate and all these?" He was never reluctant to talk about that, although his theories went all over the place. He was reluctant to talk about Monica Lewinsky, and it was a very personal... CHARLIE ROSE: Because it was painful or because it had such consequences or because... TAYLOR BRANCH: Because it was embarrassing, and it was painful, and because he knew that it gave away the store as far as his ability to lead the country to rise above cynicism. It fed the cynicism that he was trying to fight. It said presidents are not uplifting for the country. They’re selfish and weak and this -- and corrupt. And he was trying to fight against all of that by saying, look, most of the people I know public life are trying to do pretty good things, and we’ve really gotten infected with the notion... CHARLIE ROSE: And he couldn’t make that argument after... TAYLOR BRANCH: He couldn’t make that argument... CHARLIE ROSE: Because of what went on in the White House. TAYLOR BRANCH: And he had worked really hard, and most of the things that had been used to prop up that argument and to prop up the special prosecutor, Ken Starr, ultimately turned out to be baseless, which would have vindicated him along with his record. I mean, you know, 4.6 percent unemployment and 20 million jobs and virtually wiping out the national debt. And that looks pretty good now. But we don’t talk about any of that because of Lewinsky. And Lewinsky just subsumed... CHARLIE ROSE: But there was also lying. Lying to friends and lying to other people. You had insight. You had opportunity that no one else had. TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, you know, I did -- I talked -- Obviously I had misgivings about how much -- You know, how much of this I should pursue. We weren’t supposed to talk about Whitewater because of... CHARLIE ROSE: Legal implications. TAYLOR BRANCH: ... because of legal implications. But we did off the tapes, and I could have more. And I didn’t want to talk too much about Monica Lewinsky because, quite frankly, I’m squeamish about it and I was afraid that it would injure the overall project if I upset him. You know, I will confess that. But I did talk some, which was when he was -- when he said he felt sorry for himself and he cracked and so on and so forth. CHARLIE ROSE: I saw that. I don’t understand what "cracked" meant. TAYLOR BRANCH: Cracked meant -- I’m speaking very hypothetically here because I don’t really know, and I probably shouldn’t at all -- but I think compared to his past he had made a superhuman resolve that the stakes were too high and he shouldn’t have any of these shenanigans in the White House. And compared to his previous life, he had been very successful in that. I mean, being president was enough, and that there was no straying. And that resolve cracked when he felt sorry for himself. And he said he felt sorry for himself in two ways. You know, the Monica Lewinsky -- I didn’t really realize it until I was looking back in the book. It’s a very odd -- on top of everything else, it was very odd because it was a period of kind of flirting and association, and then a year where it was broken off, and then she came back when it was consummated, if you will, or whatever, in another short and furtive time in ‘97. The first one was when he was feeling sorry for himself for losing the Congress. And the second one was when he was feeling sorry for himself because he thought reelection in 1996 was going to validate his popular mandate and make all these things go away. And instead Starr and Whitewater morphed into China-gate and allegations that the Chinese had bought nuclear secrets and that Al Gore was off in a Buddhist temple, and he just said, "It’s never going to go away, and I felt sorry for myself again." So he at least provided some context for it, but not an elaborate explanation. I asked him right at the end of his presidency -- I apologized, saying that as a friend I didn’t press him or invite him to talk about Monica Lewinsky as much as I should have. But I didn’t -- I was unsure about what would be good for the presidency, what would be good for the record, what would endanger the presidency if it got subpoenaed, and that sort of thing. And he said it wouldn’t have done any good for me to ask about that, that I did right. I wouldn’t have gotten any more information. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, and it doesn’t absolve me if I should have pressed harder on that, but I didn’t. CHARLIE ROSE: And it should be understood that what you’re talking about is eight years of a remarkably interesting man in the seat of power in a whole range of things happening of which this was only one small part. People can weigh how they consider the value of that or the weight of that. But it was, you know, when you talk about Middle East peace and when you talk about health care and when you talk about welfare reform and when you talk about trade and when you talk about an economy that goes from a deficit to a surplus, you’re talking about a whole range of things that primarily occupy somebody’s time. TAYLOR BRANCH: Absolutely. Not to mention his amazing observations about all kinds of people that he’s dealing with... CHARLIE ROSE: That’s what I want to know. TAYLOR BRANCH: With Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole and Trent Lott and all of the people -- the Pope, you know, constant recitations of his consultations and interactions... CHARLIE ROSE: What was the most interesting of those, because we can’t go through all of them? But in terms of sort of a right-on, spot-on analysis of somebody who was within his circle, friend or foe? TAYLOR BRANCH: I would say the Pope was the most surprising to me because he went -- ran down -- first of all, he had several different summits with open t Pope. They’re normally very circumspect about what’s released, and they were in this case, too. But he was pretty candid in the book, saying that the Pope surprised him even on abortion and especially on women’s rights, that the Pope was saying that the hope for uncontrolled pregnancies was the education of women, that the more they controlled the families and the better educated they were -- I don’t know exactly how they’re going to keep from having those babies but he said... CHARLIE ROSE: Education... TAYLOR BRANCH: Education would do it. CHARLIE ROSE: ... would be a contraception in itself. TAYLOR BRANCH: But that the Pope would say, "Tell me how you see the world" and go all around the world and push him on Cuba, that the Pope was talking to President Clinton about trying to end sanctions against Cuba even though it’s a communist regime because he thought it was a senseless policy that hurt the poor. There was a lot of candor in there about the Pope and the Pope’s mind. And the president at the end of one of conversations said "I sure as hell would hate to be running against him for mayor anywhere," that this guy has a real sense of presidential election on top of everything else. CHARLIE ROSE: What thing that comes out of this book and in your recollection is that he was a politician, and in the best sense of that word. He’s someone who served the public good and likes the process. TAYLOR BRANCH: He loved politics. And I think it bothers him that in our modern culture -- and again, this is part of the cynicism -- that a politician has such a negative connotation in our culture, because, to him, George Washington’s a politician, Abraham Lincoln’s a politician, Franklin Roosevelt’s a politician. Theodore Roosevelt’s, who’s the president through here that he identifies with most, because it was not a major war crisis, but a time of trying to retool for a new world, retool for the industrial age of moving forward, and to take America on to the world stage, which is what Theodore Roosevelt did in the progressive era. By analogy, Clinton thought that was the closest thing that he had to do, was that we’re going into the cyber age and the world’s getting small and we’ve got to have American leadership in a new way. CHARLIE ROSE: What did he think the gifts were? TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, one of them was that ability to measure the abstract reading of policy, to marry that with personal interactions with people, that he could interact with people and figure out what makes them tick. Someone like Lyndon Johnson, who doesn’t get enough credit for his analytical abilities too. But you’re always hearing about the "Johnson treatment." Well, Clinton really believed in that, and had it. And there are a lot of remarkable passages in the book where he’s talking about his relationship with adversaries like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich where he doesn’t begrudge them cutting him apart. Within the fraternity of politicians, he says "That’s their job. They’re trying to get elected. What I begrudge is that they consistently don’t want to fight on politics. They want to fight on personal issues and side issues and tabloid issues, because they have more confidence that they can win there." And his bigger complaint was that the press would go along with them. And he would try to figure out why. CHARLIE ROSE: And his attitude about the press was? TAYLOR BRANCH: In the first few years he railed and screamed like a lot of other presidents and I’m sitting there saying "Don’t do that." (LAUGHTER) That he thought they were in cahoots with his political allies. CHARLIE ROSE: Really -- no, opponents. TAYLOR BRANCH: I’m sorry, with his political opponents. Then he said, you know, maybe they’re having their own problems and that tabloid stories are easy to do and they sell more. Maybe they’re insecure. And in some ways he anticipated some of the structural problems of the modern press. But he was constantly worrying about that because he did say that he - - unlike political opponents who he expected, there were several times where he said, "If I were them, I’d be doing the same thing. I respect political survival, that’s what the name of the game is. It’s almost like a lawyer on the opposing side." And he had a remarkably collegial relationship with somebody like Trent Lott, who would say terrible things about him in public. And he would say to Trent, according to him, "You really cut me up today, but I’d have done the same thing." But with the press, he idealized them so much that he was much more disappointed that they weren’t helping to set a more serious agenda through the Clinton years than they did with constantly going back to Vince Foster and things like whether or not he may have killed his own best friend who committed suicide, and the constant preoccupation with things like that. CHARLIE ROSE: The book is called "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History where the President." "Wrestling"? TAYLOR BRANCH: He is wrestling there. I was just talking about him literally wrestling with how do you change the perception of politics? And wrestling -- a lot of our contemporary politics today is wrestling over what we mean by our history. Does it see that we should be optimistic about the capacity of government? CHARLIE ROSE: "Wrestling History with the President," an insight into the 42nd president of the United States while he was in office in conversations that took place when the memory is fresh and the motive is less. My thanks to Taylor Branch. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. END 14