Taylor Branch knew Bill Clinton from their anti-war days, back when they were coordinators of the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972. For five months, Branch, Clinton and Hillary Rodham shared an apartment.</p><p>Afterward, Branch got into journalism, Clinton into Arkansas politics. Twenty years passed.</p><p>&ldquo;It was like Rip Van Winkle,&rdquo; Branch said. &ldquo;I wake up and he&rsquo;s president.&rdquo;</p><p>A president, it turned out, already thinking about the history books. Clinton approached Branch for ideas to preserve the historical record of his presidency. The plan: occasional, recorded conversations &mdash; Clinton would keep the tapes &mdash; held privately in the White House.</p><p>That&rsquo;s how 79 dialogues came about between Branch and Clinton from 1993 to 2001, usually conducted late at night when Clinton had the time. Branch was sometimes summoned on a moment&rsquo;s notice to drive to Washington from his home in Baltimore.</p><p>After each session, Branch recorded his immediate recollections of those conversations, along with impressions of Clinton&rsquo;s mood and descriptions of his behavior. Those recollections are the basis of his new book, &ldquo;The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.&rdquo; Clinton has retained possession of their taped conversations, which he used to write his 2004 memoir.</p><p>Branch, the Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote the three-book series &ldquo;America in the King Years,&rdquo; will be in Kansas City Tuesday. Here are excerpts of a conversation with him.</p><p><strong>Q. So how do you characterize this book? It&rsquo;s not exactly a memoir.</strong></p><p><strong>A.</strong> It&rsquo;s a narrative. It&rsquo;s a story. It&rsquo;s what it was like to go into the White House and to be there with the president, to watch him as he recalled the presidency even as he was president. I watched him order air strikes in Bosnia and help Chelsea with her homework.</p><p>I&rsquo;m trying to preserve the gist of what he said, but also how he seemed at the time, things that wouldn&rsquo;t be available to people if they just read the transcript of the conversations. He had this incredibly nervous habit of touching his books, for instance, taking them out, rearranging them.</p><p>Also, there are my reactions during the conversations. If I had only asked questions, he would have lost interest. He liked the rapport, the back and forth. He kind of thrived on it. Sometimes we had downright arguments. I was worried about those. After he lost both houses of Congress in 1994, he proposed the middle-class bill of rights. And he baited me, almost. What did I think of it? I told him I thought it was pandering.</p><p>But I don&rsquo;t call this an evaluation of Clinton&rsquo;s presidency. I was too close to it. This was an amazing experience. It&rsquo;s enough for me to be able to transmit this new information. And a lot of what&rsquo;s here is new.</p><p><strong>This is recent history, so some of it is relevant to current issues, including health care reform and the &ldquo;don&rsquo;t ask, don&rsquo;t tell&rdquo; policy.</strong></p><p>Yes. With health care reform, Clinton&rsquo;s approach was to retreat into consultation and then come out with a comprehensive bill, introduced to Congress by Hillary.</p><p>One of Clinton&rsquo;s lessons was that if you submit a comprehensive bill, the advantage goes to the people who can pick apart something so complex. President Obama took the opposite tack, to involve Congress and let them shape the bill.</p><p>Clinton also thought he had made a mistake in introducing it so soon after his anti-deficit package, opening himself up to criticism that he was a ruinous big-government liberal. He thought he should have delayed health care.