meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Presidential

Bill Clinton: The good and the bad

Presidential

The Washington Post

History, Government, Education

4.53.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2016

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Maraniss, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Bill Clinton, explores how Clinton's core character traits had both a bright and a dark side. And Post reporter Jim Tankersley examines a similar duality in his policy legacy.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm going to be a little bit more of a writer.

0:07.0

I'm going to be a little bit more of a writer.

0:10.0

Clinton is, I always said he's an exaggeration of all of us.

0:14.0

He's sort of chaos theory.

0:16.0

There's a lot of good and bad in him.

0:18.0

And actually when I was writing my biography of Clinton,

0:22.0

it was the hardest three months of my writing career

0:25.0

where the final three months of writing that book

0:28.0

was, I kept saying, well, you've studied his whole life,

0:32.0

you're a biographer.

0:33.0

What is it you like him or not?

0:35.0

Is he good or bad?

0:36.0

And the obvious became obvious, which was that he's both,

0:41.0

that they're inseparable, that the same force is that

0:44.0

drove Clinton for the better, also drove him for the worse.

0:47.0

And you couldn't, you couldn't separate the two.

0:50.0

And his presidency is sort of like that.

0:52.0

It's a grab bag of good and bad.

0:54.0

As we get closer and closer to present day,

1:02.0

we don't have the great arc of history to tell us

1:05.0

whether a president is great or horrible,

1:08.0

whether certain decisions will be memorable or forgotten.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Washington Post, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Washington Post and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.