L et me start with a disclaimer. I used to live with Taylor Branch, the author of this interesting and essential book for understanding the Clinton years. This sounds more intimate than it was: For about a year and a half in the mid-1980s, I was an au pair for Branch and his wife, Christy, when they lived in the then (very!) un-gentrified Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. We got along well enough, but I wasn’t a very good au pair, being more interested in my nascent career and going out than in performing anything more than the most minimal child-care duties. We’ve seen each other only a handful of times since.

At the time, Branch was busy writing the first of the three books of his trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. While he would win the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards, he didn’t have much money (my room cost me $175 a month, low even by the standards of the time). But he had a discipline I always wish I had as a writer. If memory serves me, each morning Branch would rise at five a.m., if not earlier, and retreat to an office he’d built on the top floor of their row house. He’d work on his Kaypro, a bulky, corrugated-steel device said to be the first portable computer, but only because the behemoth had a handle on the top. Branch would take a break to get his kids out the door and then diligently work until 5 p.m., having dinner with his family. Maybe he’d get more work done in the evenings, except for when he sang with the choir in the nearby All Souls Unitarian church. And then he would start all over again.

That discipline served Branch well when he began this unusual project. As you probably know by now, Branch and Bill Clinton had 79 interviews during the course of the Clinton presidency. The two had met during the 1972 McGovern campaign, where they both worked in Texas, but they did not stay close afterward, by Branch’s account and my own memory. Branch was more interested in changing the world with his pen; Clinton sought higher office. They reunited shortly after the 1992 campaign and became close again. While President Clinton proposed making Branch an in-house historian, the Georgia-bred writer resisted the idea and came up with this interview scheme. They were taped, but Clinton kept the tapes after each session, using two recorders for back up. Branch would drive home to Baltimore and, in an act that would probably turn vehicle-safety advocates apoplectic, record every detail he could remember about the interview as he drove. Since this was Bill Clinton, the sessions often began late at night, and Branch, who was continuing to work on the third and final volume of his King biography, would be driving home to Baltimore often well past midnight.

Even after talking to the President, I’m not sure how many writers would have had the discipline or the wherewithal to record so consistently and in such detail. Critics have chided this second-hand account, but what was the alternative? To his credit, Branch isn’t hesitant to say where and when he can’t remember some particular wording. Nor does he hide his mistakes. A friend and counselor in their talks as much as an interviewer, Branch offers up plenty of bad advice–urging Clinton to dump "the middle-class Bill of Rights" from a speech when it proves to be popular.

Like a lot of people in Clintonland–I covered the Clinton White House for several magazines, including The New Republic, where I wrote the "White House Watch" column–I was aware that Branch was around the White House a lot, but I had assumed it was either to write a book about Clinton, help with his official memoirs, or simply as an F.O.B. the now little-used acronym for Friends of Bill. I hadn’t realized that they were off-the-record conversations, and most people in the White House didn’t either. The project was kept remarkably secret, especially given all the investigations of Clinton.

The candor engendered by this off-the-record agreement is illuminating, but not startling. We knew Bill Clinton was angry at the press and the Republicans and the scandalmongers, and here we see it in fuller detail. We knew he was a late-night work horse, and we see that, too. At one point, Clinton well past midnight, is in sweats, carrying a bowl of bean dip in one hand and chips in the other. He falls asleep in a barber’s chair. He rants like Lear. He’s often wrestling with allergies as much as he is history. And he’s brilliant, offering smart takes on everyone from Sam Nunn to Alija Izetbegovic, the first president of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Clinton Tapes is more than just a portrait of a president in real time. It is a stark reminder of other facets of Washington life that haven’t changed since the Clinton era, particularly the capacities of a right-wing message machine and a unified GOP bloc in Congress. It may be less potent than it was in the days of Whitewater, but it certainly still exists. The book also reminds us of the sheer limits faced by Democratic presidents who must clean up after Republican messes and try to corral their own atomized party. The insights here are as useful for understanding the Obama years as they are the Clinton years, and one hopes David Axelrod or others around the President find the time to thumb through a copy.

That said, the book itself is sometimes a difficult read, as many critics have noted. It’s laid out chronologically, session to session. Within each interview, Clinton and Branch bounce around from topic to topic, so that the overall feel is like that of Clinton’s own memoir, My Life, somewhat sprawling and meandering, but still interesting. Every couple of pages there’s a little shocker, usually a personal jab. Hillary calls Richard Gephardt an "asshole," which Branch dutifully erases from the Clinton tape but then recounts for us. Who did Bill Clinton think would be the strongest Republican candidate against him in 1996? The surprising answer: Dick Cheney. Branch doesn’t elaborate why, but the anecdote goes to show that Clinton’s vaunted political EQ sometimes failed him. Granted, if you consider the more temperate pre-vice presidential Cheney–House leader, Gulf War secretary of defense, Gerald Ford’s chief of staff–it made for a more attractive candidate than the one who no one, including himself, wanted to see run in 2008. But still, that was hardly the GOP’s best choice that year, given that they could have gone with a younger McCain or one of their then strong governors from blue states, like John Engler or Tom Ridge. In any event, the mere fact that Bill Clinton feared Dick Cheney is kind of titillating.

There’s more fun stuff. Early in Clinton’s presidency, the living former presidents, save for Ronald Reagan, gathered for dinner at the White House and got deep into a discussion of why they hated Ross Perot. George H.W. Bush for obvious reasons: he ran against him and accused Bush of personal terrorism, like supposedly sabotaging Perot’s daughter’s wedding. Jimmy Carter hated how Perot interfered in the Iran hostage debacle, and Gerald Ford thought Perot had gotten rich off the public teat (his business made millions from government contracts) while acting like he was Mr. Free Market Businessman. Another interesting, anecdotal question answered by the book: Who did Clinton think Al Gore should pick as his running mate in 2000? Barbara Mikulski. Clinton believed the Maryland senator had effectively dispelled rumors about her sexual orientation and was the kind of fiery figure a cool Gore needed but never would take. (He dissed Bill Bradley for looking as though he slept in his clothes and thought Nebraskan Bob Kerrey, whom he had dubbed a little screwy, was at least a proven vote getter with conservatives.) It’s George Stephanopoulos who blocks David Maraniss from access to Clinton for his biography, something Clinton later regrets. And it turns out Bill Richardson wanted to head the Commerce Department from the beginning, which makes his withdrawal earlier this year all the more bitter. Branch also recounts Clinton’s interview with Rolling Stone in which he gets into a screaming match with the journalist William Greider, who accuses the President of being a political animal and a sellout. "I did everything but fart in his face," Clinton said.