President Clinton tapes to be made into book

Hours of conversations between then-President Clinton and award-winning historian Taylor Branch are being transcribed for a new book.

Simon & Schuster will publish “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes” at the end of 2008, a source familiar with the project told the Associated Press on Wednesday. The source requested anonymity because the deal had not been announced.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Clinton reportedly received $10 million to $12 million for his memoir “My Life,” published in 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf.

“I’m not calling this a biography of Clinton or a history of the administration,” Branch told the New York Times, which first reported the deal. “It is what it was like to live through it that way, sitting alone with him, talking about the presidency as he saw it, right in the moment.”

The interviews took place in the White House not long after Clinton was first elected, in 1992, and continued throughout his two terms.

The friendship between Branch, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” and Clinton dates to the early 1970s, when both worked on the campaign for Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern.

Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal said the conversations covered a wide range of subjects, but noted the bond between Branch and the former president.

“I think he will accurately depict what was said,” Rosenthal told the New York Times. “But they’re old friends, and I think they have an affectionate relationship, to say the least. 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.”