Word: branches
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Chelsea wanders into and out of Branch's account of the Clinton presidency, singing show tunes, soliciting help with math homework or with an essay weighing Dr. Frankenstein's best and worst qualities. Bill Clinton's sensitivity to the challenges his daughter faced belies his image as an unabashed narcissist. The President would be late for anything except her ballet recitals; he would flaunt any asset for political advantage except...
...father can be proud of his daughter, but Branch's account suggests something more: that Bill looks up to Chelsea and finds the self he never managed to become. She was a source of hope when he was bitter, of perspective when he was self-pitying. Clinton liked doing what he was good at but marvels over Chelsea's devotion to ballet, how her feet bled after practice, how she worked hard at it because she loved it regardless of how good she was at it. "I've always admired that," Clinton says. "I've wondered whether I could ever...
...years now, replacing one cartoon with another: the empath who could feel our pain, the horndog who cared nothing for the pain he caused, the overreaching idealist, the triangulating pragmatist. Back and forth the image swings, but it has always been all about him. There is plenty in Branch's account to remind people why he drove them crazy. But it is bracing and confounding to see another side, the faults transcended, the ego contained. Clinton had great advantages as a parent, but unique challenges as well, and he rose to them in a way people sensed but rarely...
...Taylor Branch...
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, his Republican opponents and just...