Inside The Clinton White House; An Oral History

xiii, [3], 441, [7] pages. Footnotes. Epilogue. Appendix. Index. Some DJ soiling. Inscribed on the title page by the author. Inscription reads For Father Winters--With great admiration for your long devotion to education--and to your friends! Warm regards--Russell L. Riley 12/14/16. Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program, is the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions. He is one of the nation's foremost authorities on oral history interviewing and the contemporary presidency. He has logged more than 1,500 hours of confidential interviews with senior members of the White House staff, cabinet officers, and foreign leaders back to the days of the Carter and Reagan Administrations. Since 2003, he has led both the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project and the George W. Bush Presidential Oral History Project. He has lectured on American politics and oral history methods across the United States and elsewhere. Riley graduated from Auburn University in 1983. He studied at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He subsequently taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown. He has authored or edited six books, including Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History; Bridging the Constitutional Divide: Inside the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; and The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-keeping from 1861 to 1965 (Columbia, 1999). The last of those was a finalist for that year's Neustadt Award as the best book on the presidency. President Bill Clinton led a remarkably productive White House that nearly ended in catastrophic failure. Yet because of the office's traditional climate of confidentiality, many details of his behind-the-scenes activities--including successes and failures--have remained absent from the written record, until now. How did the administration manage the horrific conflicts in Haiti and the Balkans that came to a head shortly after the president took the oath? How did he help bring peace to Northern Ireland, taking the initiative over the objections of his own State Department and attorney general? What motivated the president to place First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the helm of the ill-fated Health Security Act in 1993? And how did the president's closest confidantes and aides respond to the outbreak of the devastating scandal that resulted in his impeachment? Inside the Clinton White House offers an intimate perspective on these questions and many more, granting readers unprecedented access to the sensitive Oval Office banter that changed the course of history. Bringing together material from 400 hours of candid conversations with over sixty individuals, respected oral historian Russell L. Riley weaves this illuminating testimony with important contextual information to form an irresistible narrative, taking the reader from Clinton's first potential White House bid in 1988 to the final days of his controversial public career. Extended sections of the book are devoted to important domestic and foreign policy campaigns, the complicated politics of the president's two terms and impeachment, and portraits of important personalities in the administration, including Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. These forthright and often surprising accounts--including here, for the first time, observations from a new interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair--add a layer of nuance to an iconic figure in America's recent history, in the words of the people who knew him best.…