<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr valign="top"> <td width="15%"> <td width="85%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">King <td width="10%"> <td width="45%">The King Years <tr valign="top"> <td width="15%"><table width="120" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> <tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 <td width="85%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">May: At age 25, King gives his first sermon as pastor-designate of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. <td width="10%">1954 <td width="45%">May: French surrender to Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board outlaws segregated public education. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">December: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott, which King is drafted to lead. <td width="10%">1955 <td width="45%"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">October: King spends his first night in jail, following his participation in an Atlanta sit-in. <td width="10%">1960 <td width="45%">February: Four students attempting to integrate a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter spark a national sit-in movement.
April: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded.
November: Election of President John F. Kennedy <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">May: The Freedom Rides begin, drawing violent responses as they challenge segregation throughout the South. King supports the riders during an overnight siege in Montgomery. <td width="10%">1961 <td width="45%">July: SNCC worker Bob Moses arrives for his first summer of voter registration in rural Mississippi.
August: East German soldiers seal off West Berlin behind the Berlin Wall. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">March: J. Edgar Hoover authorizes the bugging of Stanley Levinson, King's closest white advisor. <td width="10%">1962 <td width="45%">September: James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi under massive federal protection. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">April: King, imprisoned for demonstrating in Birmingham, writes the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
May: Images of police violence against marching children in Birmingham rivet the country.
August: King delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech before hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington.
September: The Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church kills four young girls. <td width="10%">1963 <td width="45%">June: Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers assassinated.
November: President Kennedy assassinated. <tr valign="top"> <td width="15%"><table width="120" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> <tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 <td width="85%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%"> <td width="10%"> <td width="45%">November: Lyndon Johnson, in his first speech before Congress as president, promises to push through Kennedy's proposed civil rights bill. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">March: King meets Malcolm X for the only time during Senate filibuster of civil rights legislation.
June: King joins St. Augustine, Florida, movement after months of protests and Klan violence.
October: King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and campaigns for Johnson's reelection.
November: Hoover calls King "the most notorious liar in the country" and the FBI sends King an anonymous "suicide package" containing scandalous surveillance tapes. <td width="10%">1964 <td width="45%">January: Johnson announces his "War on Poverty."
March: Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam following conflict with its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
June: Hundreds of volunteers arrive in the South for SNCC's Freedom Summer, three of whom are soon murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
July: Johnson signs Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
August: Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military force in Vietnam. Democratic National Convention rebuffs the request by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated in favor of all-white state delegation.
November: Johnson wins a landslide reelection. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">January: King's first visit to Selma, Alabama, where mass meetings and demonstrations will build through the winter. <td width="10%">1965 <td width="45%">February: Malcolm X speaks in Selma in support of movement, three weeks before his assassination in New York by Nation of Islam members. <tr valign="top"> <td width="15%"><table width="120" align=left cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" > <tr><td align=left> <a/> <tr> <td align=left> <span class="tiny">At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 <td width="85%"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">March: Voting rights movement in Selma peaks with "Bloody Sunday" police attacks and, two weeks later, a successful march of thousands to Montgomery.
August: King rebuffed by Los Angeles officials when he attempts to advocate reforms after the Watts riots. <td width="10%"> <td width="45%">March: First U.S. combat troops arrive in South Vietnam. Johnson's "We Shall Overcome" speech makes his most direct embrace of the civil rights movement.
May: Vietnam "teach-in" protest in Berkeley attracts 30,000.
June: Influential federal Moynihan Report describes the "pathologies" of black family structure.
August: Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, the Watts riots begin in Los Angeles.
<tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">January: King moves his family into a Chicago slum apartment to mark his first sustained movement in a Northern city.
June: King and Stokely Carmichael continue James Meredith's March Against Fear after Meredith is shot and wounded. Carmichael gives his first "black power" speech.
July: King's marches for fair housing in Chicago face bombs, bricks, and "white power" shouts. <td width="10%">1966 <td width="45%">February: Operation Rolling Thunder, massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, begins.
May: Stokely Carmichael wins the presidency of SNCC and quickly turns the organization away from nonviolence.
October: National Organization for Women founded, modeled after black civil rights groups. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">April: King's speech against the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside Church raises a storm of criticism
December: King announces plans for major campaign against poverty in Washington, D.C., for 1968. <td width="10%">1967 <td width="45%">May: Huey Newton leads Black Panthers in armed demonstration in California state assembly.
June: Johnson nominates former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.
July: Riots in Newark and Detroit.
October: Massive mobilization against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. <tr align="left" valign="top"> <td width="45%">March: King joins strike of Memphis sanitation workers.
April: King gives his "Mountaintop" speech in Memphis. A day later, he is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. <td width="10%">1968 <td width="45%">January: In Tet Offensive, Communist guerillas stage a surprise coordinated attack across South Vietnam.
March: Johnson cites divisions in the country over the war for his decision not to seek reelection in 1968.

This book rests upon a secret project, initiated by Clinton, to preserve for future historians an unfiltered record of presidential experience. During his eight years in office, between 1993 and 2001, Clinton answered questions and told stories in the White House, usually late at night. His friend Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch recorded seventy-nine of these dialogues to compile a trove of raw information about a presidency as it happened. Clinton drew upon the diary transcripts for his memoir in 2004.

Branch recorded his own detailed recollections immediately after each session, covering not only the subjects discussed but also the look and feel of each evening with the president. The text engages Clinton from many angles. Readers hear candid stories, feel buffeting pressures, and weigh vivid descriptions of the White House settings.

Branch's firsthand narrative is confessional, unsparing, and personal. The author admits straying at times from his primary role -- to collect raw material for future historians -- because his discussions with Clinton were unpredictable and intense. What should an objective prompter say when the President of the United States seeks advice, argues facts, or lodges complaints against the press? The dynamic relationship that emerges from these interviews is both affectionate and charged, with flashes of anger and humor. President Clinton drives the history, but this story is also about friends.

The Clinton Tapes highlights major events of Clinton's two terms, including wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the failure of health care reform, peace initiatives on three continents, the anti-deficit crusade, and titanic political struggles from Whitewater to American history's second presidential impeachment trial. Along the way, Clinton delivers colorful portraits of countless political figures and world leaders from Nelson Mandela to Pope John Paul II.

These unprecedented White House dialogues will become a staple of presidential scholarship. Branch's masterly account opens a new window on a controversial era and Bill Clinton's eventual place among our chief executives.