Sep 21, 2009 01:27 PM
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In case you missed the endless stream of lies Bill Clinton told about himself and others during his presidency, it turns out he was telling other, secret lies into a tape recorder the whole time. Now you can read them.
Sociopathic narcissist Bill Clinton began his own Legacy Project in September 1993, nine months into his first term, by inviting historian Taylor Branch to periodically come to the White House and interview him. Clinton kept the tapes—there were 79 interviews in all—and hid them in his sock drawer, next to the stack of copies of Leaves of Grass he kept to give to all the interns he was fucking.
Branch made his own tapes, though, recounting back what Clinton had said as he drove home from each interview, and he's written a 700-plus page book about them, USA Today reports. After Clinton's 1,000-plus page My Life, we imagine the market in self-justificatory wallowing is pretty well tapped, but there are some funny bits:
[Branch] also relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident. The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.
How does the leader of a nuclear-armed superpower end up drunk on the streets of the capital of his former imperial archenemy in the middle of the night without newspapers reporting this fact? How many reporters are there in Washington, D.C.? Is it possible that Taylor never let that little nugget slip at a dinner party? That Clinton never clued in his notoriously leaky staff? The October 1995 trip on which Yeltsin's hunger for pizza got the better of him was timed to a U.N. meeting, and Clinton and Yeltsin were discussing crucial issues about the war in Bosnia. Yeltsin was gearing up for re-election in Russia at the time. Disclosure of his drunken late-night underwear-clad romp could have been catastrophic.
Everyone knew Yeltsin was a drunk, but for some reason all the papers kept pretending he was a statesman. Here's the Washington Post's take on the same trip: "He ... put on a demonstration of his personal prowess in foreign policy, coming on for the Russian public as the man in charge, the one who can make the American connection work. The gritty problem of the command of Russian peacekeeping forces in Bosnia he deftly handed off to a professional tough guy, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. Not a day as great as he proclaimed, but not a bad day for him, politically speaking, either."
The night after his pizza escapade, Yeltsin got drunk and tried to leave again, according Branch. He ran into a guard who mistook him for a "drunken intruder."
Send an email to the author of this post at john@gawker.com.
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