By the time his bold well being care laws was launched and carved up and cursed and left for useless and revived and compromised and handed and at last signed into legislation, the entire course of had taken a toll on President Barack Obama.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act can be his signature legislative achievement, however it propelled Republicans to a sweeping midterm election victory and management of the House. And Mr. Obama thought he is perhaps the following to pay the value on the poll field. “This is shaping up to be a one-term presidency,” he advised an aide in late 2010.

He turned out to be incorrect, however the fatalism Mr. Obama expressed privately that day captured the weighty penalties of considered one of Washington’s most high-wire legislative battles in trendy occasions. A brand new set of oral histories released on Friday, on the eve of its 14th anniversary on Saturday, paperwork the behind-the-scenes wrestle to rework the nation’s well being care system to cowl tens of tens of millions of Americans with out insurance coverage.

The interviews of key gamers within the drama had been carried out by Incite, a social science analysis institute at Columbia University, and had been made public because the second tranche of a yearslong effort to doc the eventful occasions below the nation’s forty fourth president. The transcripts posted on-line on Friday included recollections from 26 members of the White House workers, his cupboard and Congress in addition to activists, curiosity group figures and a handful of Americans who made their voices heard, however not from the previous president himself or, for that matter, his Republican opponents.

The oral histories chronicle Mr. Obama’s journey from an uninformed candidate embarrassed by the banalities he discovered himself spouting on the marketing campaign path to a besieged president playing his political future on all-or-nothing legislative brinkmanship. They additionally flesh out a portrait of Mr. Obama as a steady-as-she-goes, hyper-disciplined however not particularly heat, coverage wonk who scrolled the Brookings Institution web site for concepts and needed to overcome his personal political errors.

The story of the Affordable Care Act in some methods began at a candidate forum on health care in 2007 when Mr. Obama was operating towards Senators Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Joseph R. Biden Jr., amongst others, for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Senator Obama was terrible,” remembered Neera Tanden, who labored for Ms. Clinton on the time. “He was vapid. He had no facility with the issue, so he kept talking about, ‘This is why we need to come together.’”

Mr. Obama knew he had carried out badly, and it drove him to take the problem extra critically, she mentioned. “I honestly think if he did not have his butt kicked that he would not have put out such a detailed plan,” Ms. Tanden mentioned.

After Ms. Clinton misplaced and Ms. Tanden joined the Obama marketing campaign in 2008, she mentioned, “a lot of his advisers were like ‘We should just drop this health care thing.’ He said very clearly, ‘I am doing health care when I’m president. You guys have to figure out how we succeed in the campaign to build a mandate, but I’m doing it.’”

Upon taking workplace in January 2009, Mr. Obama tackled a problem that had vexed presidents of each events, most lately Bill Clinton, whose first time period almost collapsed after his personal failure to cross sweeping well being care laws. Mr. Obama’s advisers had been decided to be taught from the errors of the previous.

By growing their very own plan in public and involving main gamers with stakes within the challenge like insurance coverage firms and congressional chairmen, the Obama administration hoped to construct assist reasonably than merely springing a plan crafted in secrecy on Congress because the Clintons had carried out within the Nineties.

“The Clinton administration was focused inward on the perfect policy — and I was part of that, so I don’t want to sound ‘otherworldly’ about it,” mentioned Nancy-Ann DeParle, a Clinton administration veteran who turned director of Mr. Obama’s White House Office for Health Reform. “The Obama administration was the opposite. It focused much more on stakeholders and people and getting Congress to do the work of debating the policy and passing a bill.”

But Mr. Obama made his personal misjudgments. Ms. Tanden, who turned a senior adviser on the Department of Health and Human Services and admired Mr. Obama’s willpower to cross sweeping reform, mentioned his group nonetheless spent “an inordinate amount of time” on smaller points reasonably than systemic questions and didn’t initially anticipate the “big problem” abortion would turn out to be.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a particular adviser on well being care, who likewise appreciated that Mr. Obama “never wavered,” mentioned the White House ought to have despatched members of Congress house for his or her summer season recess in 2009 with a slide deck to explain the plan to constituents. “We did not do our work, and I think that was a big mistake,” Dr. Emanuel recalled. “They needed better tools to explain it to people.”

Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, bought a style of the misunderstandings and distortions of the plan whereas vacationing that summer season in Maine, the place he noticed indicators in entrance of retailers falsely warning about “death panels” that supposedly can be created by the laws.

“That was probably the first time it really hit me,” he mentioned, “just seeing sign after sign after sign about things that — you can see why people might think that that’s where it would go.”

Hopes of gaining Republican assist all however evaporated after that, leaving Mr. Obama to work solely with Democrats. He was deeply concerned within the haggling. Kathleen Sebelius, then secretary of well being and human providers, recalled a key assembly in January 2010 to reconcile completely different variations of the plan. “The president led those negotiations from start to finish,” she mentioned. “He was negotiator in chief.”

Eventually it will cross, however not with out painful concessions and legislative machinations. Ms. Sebelius recounted the champagne celebration on the Truman Balcony on the White House the night time that it handed. Mr. Biden, then the vp, advised her, “This is the most important thing that the president will do for the international community.”

She requested what he meant. “The world will now know when this young president says, ‘I will do something,’ that he will do it,” Mr. Biden answered.

Still, Mr. Obama was unsure how a lot time he must do one thing extra. Ms. DeParle was the aide who remembered Mr. Obama musing about having solely a single time period whereas attempting to influence her to remain on the White House after well being care.

“That’s OK with me,” he mentioned of a doable four-year presidency, “as long as we’re able to get the things that I think are important to get done.” But Ms. DeParle discovered his remark “very surprising” and thought to herself, “Gee, this is my fault.”

Ms. DeParle provided a few of the most private observations of the ascetic president. Among different issues, she mentioned, he refused to eat in public and solely ate at his set occasions every day. When he did eat along with his workers, “you ate with him silently” whereas he sat studying or making ready for his subsequent occasion. And his meal was virtually at all times the identical — both salmon or dry hen breast, brown rice and broccoli.

“Trust me,” she mentioned. “That was it.” His solely nod to style? “Lemon juice on the side, or something lemon.” And by no means dessert. “Food to him, it’s like putting a coin in the meter,” she mentioned. He wouldn’t even eat pie, although he mentioned he favored pie. “He has no weaknesses that I can tell,” she mentioned.

Ms. DeParle discovered him a thriller and solely got here to know Mr. Obama when she accompanied him to his house state of Hawaii. “The waves come in, and they go out,” she mentioned. “He has a calm demeanor that’s like that to me. He doesn’t get too upset about anything. And the fact that he was located in a place that was as close to Tokyo as it was to New York — he’s got an international vantage point,” she added. “He sees the world differently than many American presidents have.”

As it turned out, in fact, he had two phrases to take action in any case. And the Affordable Care Act, for all of its delivery pangs and flaws and the Republican efforts to repeal it, stays the legislation of the land.