U.S. president Bill Clinton breaks into laughter after his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, makes a comment about journalists at a news conference in 1995.
There stood Russian president Boris Yeltsin, drunk and wearing only his underpants while he tried to hail a cab across from the White House.
Through slurred speech, he explained to U.S. officials that he'd only wanted a pizza.
The incident during a visit by Mr. Yeltsin to Washington is recalled by then-U.S. president Bill Clinton in an "oral history" of his presidency set for release later this month.
In a series of excerpts obtained by U.S. media, Mr. Clinton remembered Mr. Yeltsin - a vodka lover who died two years ago - as being obviously drunk during a state visit, staying at the Blair House, government guest quarters.
The next night, he was mistaken for a drunk intruder when found by a secret service agent while stumbling in the home's basement.
The former U.S. president remembered the 1995 encounter (although State Department records show Mr. Yeltsin only visited New York in 1995 after a state visit in the fall of 1994) as a near-international incident.
The details are among those revealed in the project, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, which is based on 79 recorded interviews between Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch and Mr. Clinton between 1993, his first year in office, and 2001, when he left. They occurred in a number of locations throughout the White House and, once, at Camp David.
USA Today reported that Mr. Branch would often call Mr. Clinton's staff in the late afternoon, asking whether the president had a few hours free that evening for one of their many lengthy chats.
The series of interviews were said to have been the idea of Mr. Clinton, who wanted a by-the-year account of his time in the Oval Office. He'd tried dictating his own diary to no avail. He asked Mr. Branch to help him out until he could train a staffer to do the job, but no one else was ever trained.
In a brief account of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Clinton confided to Mr. Branch that he "just cracked" under personal and political pressure, the author told USA Today.
He said the affair began in late 1995 and resumed briefly a few months after Mr. Clinton's re-election in 1996.
"He said he could have done worse," Mr. Branch writes. "He could have blown something up."
In another passage, Mr. Clinton lamented that his successor, George W. Bush, was "unqualified to be president ... but he had shrewd campaign instincts," and that John McCain - who won the nomination eight years later but lost to President Barack Obama - "might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run."
Mr. Clinton also recalled a two-hour blowout between him and his former vice-president, Al Gore, after Mr. Gore lost to Mr. Bush in the 2000 election. Mr. Clinton was upset he hadn't been fully used to speak in New Hampshire and Arkansas, both states where he was popular but which Mr. Bush won. Either would have swayed the tight election in favour of the Democrats.
Mr. Gore replied that Mr. Clinton was a "drag" who had plagued his campaign, and the two "exploded" at one another, the report says.
Mr. Branch forwarded an advance copy of the book to Mr. Clinton, who was "hot and cold" in response and requested changes that Mr. Branch declined to make.
"I think it's fair to say he's nervous," Mr. Branch told USA Today.