President Talks, Historian Takes Notes
As Julie Bosman reports in this morning’s NYT, Bill Clinton has another book in him…except this time he roped Taylor Branch into doing all the heavy lifting. Late next year, Simon & Schuster will publish Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes, based on 80 interviews Branch conducted with Clinton starting in the early years of his presidency, which has him “winnowing 2,600 pages of raw material into a book that he plans to begin writing within a few weeks.” (But not, it turns out, the actual tapes—Clinton retained possession of those, leaving Branch to rely upon “his own notes and recollections of the conversations.”)
“They’re old friends, and I think they have an affectionate relationship, to say the least,” S&S publisher David Rosenthal tells Bosman. “So I think this is not so much in any way to discover any deep, nasty skeletons in Bill Clinton’s closet. Nor do I think it’s meant to polish the apple.” At which point, fellow Viacom employees Beavis and Butthead, previously unnoticed in the room, snorted with laughter and exclaimed, “Heh heh, he said ‘polish the apple.’” You can imagine what happened when they discovered the project was originally conceived as an oral history.
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