A Nov. 1, 1994, memo just days before the landslide they knew was coming, several Clinton aides wrote a plan for the president to get out in front of public mistrust in government institutions. “Voters believed that Bill Clinton understood this situation, and would rectify it,” they wrote. “But for all of our efforts over the past two years, the public is now more disillusioned, more embittered, than it was in November 1992.”

The aides recommended a three-part strategy, including “a renewed assault on bureaucracy,” an agenda aimed at “shifting power back to the American people” and a series of initiatives for “fixing Congress” like term limits, lobbying reform, a congressional pay freeze until the budget was balanced and a 25 percent cut in the congressional staff.

A month later, with the enormousness of the electoral loss now sunk in, a speechwriter, Michael Waldman, sent a memo discussing how to obstruct the Republican agenda. “We need to decide where, if anywhere, is the place to try and blow up the railroad tracks,” he wrote. “We need a complete strategy on how to paint the G.O.P. as the party of wealthy special interests.”

Financial Deregulation

The financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed cast a critical light on legislation signed by Mr. Clinton nearly a decade earlier that deregulated much of the financial services industry. It also provoked criticism of Robert E. Rubin, Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretary, who took a lucrative job at one of the law’s main beneficiaries, Citigroup, after he left office.

But in 1998, as senior administration officials prepared to meet with the chief executives of Citicorp and Travelers, who were proposing a megamerger to form Citigroup that relied heavily on deregulation, Mr. Rubin expressed concern over the regulatory effects of combining retail banking, investment banking and insurance, which was prohibited at the time.

“It would upset the existing balance between the elected administration and the independent agencies — diminishing the role of the elected administration in a critical area of economic policy-making,” Mr. Rubin wrote.

Mr. Rubin added that the legislation was “gravely flawed.”

“We see no reason to accept such a badly flawed bill — a bill that so dramatically (and gratuitously) reorders financial regulation against the administration and in favor” of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Rubin wrote.