Bill Clinton

President of the United States (1993–2001)

• Born: August 19, 1946
• Birthplace: Hope, Arkansas

Bill Clinton became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win election to two full terms. He presided over unprecedented national prosperity, assembled an administration that emphasized representation of women and people of color, balanced the federal budget for the first time in thirty years, and enjoyed consistently high approval ratings. He also displayed occasional episodes of political clumsiness, which led to recurring questions about his ethics and personal character.

Early Life

Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III in the rural town of Hope, Arkansas, three months after the death of his father in an automobile accident. Later, as a teenager, he changed his surname to that of his stepfather, Roger Clinton. He began to be popularly known as Bill Clinton at the start of his political career. As an infant, Clinton was reared primarily by his grandparents and a nanny. His mother, although devoted to him, frequently had to be away. When he was seven years old, his family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he received his elementary and high school education.

Clinton distinguished himself in both his class work and extracurricular activities, and his outgoing and congenial nature made him popular. He was elected president of his junior class and became a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist; he also played saxophone in his own band. As a senior, he was selected to participate in the Boys’ Nation program in Washington, DC. While at the White House, he met his idol, President John F. Kennedy, an encounter for the young Clinton that would help to determine his political dreams and ambitions.

Despite his academic and social successes, however, Clinton’s home life was often fraught with instability and tension. His stepfather was an alcoholic who physically abused Clinton’s mother; on some occasions, Clinton had to intervene to protect his mother. He also helped to care for his younger half brother, Roger Clinton Jr.

In 1964, Clinton enrolled at Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution in Washington, DC. He majored in international studies and he was elected class president during his first two years there. (Although he was brought up as a Southern Baptist, Clinton had significant experience with a Roman Catholic education; his primary education began in a parochial school.) While at Georgetown, he worked in the office of Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, who became his political mentor.

Upon his graduation in 1968, Clinton went to England to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. At the time, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and Clinton was eligible for the military draft. Although the number he received in the draft’s lottery system was high enough to ensure that he would not be called into military service, some of his political opponents would later point to his time abroad as an instance of “draft dodging.”

After returning to the United States, Clinton in 1970 began studies at Yale University Law School. There he met Hillary Diane Rodham (later known as Hillary Rodham Clinton), a fellow student whom he married in 1975. After receiving his law degree in 1973, he returned to his home state, where he accepted a position teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayettesville.

Life’s Work

In the 1970s, Clinton began his professional political career. His first efforts, though, were less than auspicious. In 1972, he managed the Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who was badly defeated; in 1974, Clinton himself campaigned unsuccessfully for an Arkansas congressional seat. In 1976, however, his political career gathered momentum: he managed the Arkansas campaign of victorious Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter , and he was himself elected the state’s attorney general.

Clinton proved popular as attorney general, and he was credited with helping to hold down utility and phone-service rates. In 1978, at the age of only thirty-two, he was elected to a two-year term as governor of Arkansas; however, he alienated key supporters by raising taxes to fund a highway-improvement project and by challenging major business interests. Moreover, he was identified with the Carter administration, which became particularly unpopular in Arkansas for relocating Cuban refugees in the state. When he ran for reelection in 1980, he was defeated.

Shocked by his defeat, Clinton and his staff knew that he needed to modify his image as a youthful radical. He decided to reassess what issues he should address and how to pursue them. During this difficult period, he was consoled by the birth of his only child, a daughter, Chelsea. He regained the governorship in 1982, and he was reelected in 1984, 1986 (at which point a four-year term was established), and 1990. He made improving the quality of education a major theme of his administration and cultivated a less radical image.

The education issue brought him wide support, particularly from business interests that needed an educated workforce to improve their competitiveness as the South experienced an economic resurgence. Clinton lobbied for increased teacher qualifications and pay, more rigorous administrative standards, and more demanding attendance and testing requirements for students. Financing for these efforts came from increases in the state sales tax. Clinton was soon dubbed the education governor, and his national stature began to rise. He became chair of the National Governors Association at the end of 1986. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, he gave the nominating speech for the party’s presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis. In 1990, he chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of moderate and conservative Democrats. As a New Democrat reassessing the role of big government and emphasizing the role of the private sector, Clinton positioned himself to run for the presidency in 1992.

Clinton began his bid to unseat Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush at the end of 1991. During the primaries, while Clinton was competing for the Democratic nomination against numerous rivals, his campaign almost collapsed under allegations that he had been having an extramarital affair. Similar allegations had troubled him earlier during his tenure as governor.

With the support of his wife, he overcame these difficulties and triumphed at the Democratic National Convention in New York City in July 1992. In his campaign, he emphasized the human consequences of the recession and unemployment that were plaguing the nation and against which Bush seemed ineffective. He also emphasized the need for national health insurance and called for the federal government to balance the federal budget by increasing taxes in the higher income brackets and by reducing defense spending.

Clinton was elected the forty-second president of the United States on November 3, 1992. He received 43 percent of the popular vote; Bush received 38 percent, and an independent candidate, the mercurial billionaire Ross Perot, received 19 percent. Clinton garnered 370 votes in the electoral college to Bush’s 168, while Perot obtained none. Clinton’s running mate was Tennessee senator Al Gore, a fellow southerner and valuable adviser with whom Clinton established an exceptional rapport.

Sworn in on January 20, 1993, Clinton was the first Democrat elected president in twelve years and the youngest since Kennedy. He also was the first US president to be born after World War II and the first since Herbert Hoover not to have served in the military. In addition, he was the first president to be inaugurated during the post–Cold War period, in a world without the Soviet empire.

Clinton made domestic issues his top priority. His administration’s most difficult task was to find ways to support essential government programs, trim or eliminate others, and balance the federal budget, which had accumulated an enormous deficit during the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush years (1981–93). To staff his administration, Clinton assembled a team that emphasized representation of women and people of color. He appointed Janet Reno as the first woman to be attorney general. In 1997, he appointed Madeleine Albright as the first woman to be secretary of state, the senior position in the cabinet.

During his first two years in office, Clinton had the advantage of working with a Democratic Congress, and he was successful in several areas of legislation, somewhat satisfying both liberal and conservative agendas. He obtained passage of a budget that included both higher taxes on the wealthy and cuts in federal programs. Landmark anticrime legislation was passed that included a ban on certain assault weapons and increased the number of police. He also lobbied successfully for passage of family-leave legislation. On the world economic stage, he was successful in obtaining tariff reductions through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He also appointed two US Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, whom he hoped would restore a more moderate balance to the court, which had become increasingly conservative after a series of Republican appointments.

In foreign relations, the Clinton administration’s goals were principally economic in nature, rather than political or military. This emphasis represented a major shift in US foreign policy and vividly reflected the consequences of the post–Cold War period. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration dealt forcefully and immediately with renewed threats of Iraqi aggression against its neighbors. In Haiti, American forces restored civilian government; Clinton also sent peacekeeping forces into the troubled zones of the Balkans. A peacekeeping expedition to war-torn Somalia, however, was widely viewed as a fiasco. The administration also supported the emergence of market economies and democracy in the newly independent states of Eastern Europe and gave important backing to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. In the Middle East, the administration worked steadily for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

On the domestic front, however, Clinton failed to obtain congressional approval of his prime legislative objective, national health-care reform, a project headed by First Lady Hillary Clinton. He also was forced to compromise with the military establishment over efforts to end the ban against gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed forces.

Moreover, the Clinton administration became the focal point for a number of highly charged moral, ethical, and legal issues that received continuous media attention and criticism from political opponents. These issues included allegations of the improper dismissal of personnel from the White House travel office; charges of sexual harassment against the president; and questions about possible criminal involvement by the Clintons in the failed Arkansas land-development deal called Whitewater from more than a decade earlier. The Whitewater affair touched off an ongoing, wide-ranging independent counsel investigation. Most damaging, however, was Clinton's impeachment by the House for perjuring himself in the case of his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky .

Clinton’s first-term troubles helped contribute to one of the most dramatic political reversals in US history in the 1994 congressional elections. The Republicans obtained majorities in the House and Senate for the first time since the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, reversing decades of Democratic congressional dominance. This was a blow as stunning to Clinton as that which he had suffered when he was defeated in his first bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas.

The 1994 reversal produced a similar reaction, as Clinton resolved to accommodate the conservative center on issues of reducing government size and cost. At the beginning of 1995, it seemed as if his presidency might become paralyzed by the powerful Republican Congress led by the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich.

The Republicans, however, lost popular support as wrangling over the federal budget resulted in the shutting down of federal government operations at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996. Clinton’s popularity rose as he stood firm against proposed drastic reductions in Medicare and Medicaid funding. His support was further solidified in midyear when, to the dismay of liberals, he vowed “to end welfare as we’ve known it” and signed legislation terminating many federal subsidies for the poor but emphasizing that those leaving welfare had to be helped with job training. He also succeeded in persuading Republicans to raise the minimum wage in two stages in 1996 and 1997. Throughout his first term, he presided over a period of peace and relative prosperity, the recession abating and unemployment steadily diminishing.

Clinton was well positioned for the 1996 presidential race. No Democrat challenged him in the primaries, and he was overwhelmingly nominated at the party’s August convention in Chicago. Clinton and Gore campaigned on a well-articulated platform of support for education, the environment, and Medicare, emphasizing that these would be the means of “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” His Republican opponent, Senator Bob Dole, did not articulate as extensive a program. In what was once again a three-way race, with Perot entering the campaign as the candidate of the new Reform Party, Clinton was reelected. He obtained 49 percent of the popular vote; Dole received 41 percent and Perot 8 percent. In the electoral college, Clinton obtained 379 votes to 159 for Dole; Perot again received none. The Republican majority was also returned to Congress. Clinton was inaugurated for a second term on January 20, 1997. He thus became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be inaugurated for two full terms.

Clinton’s substantial victory, however, did not shatter the Republican grip on Congress, which continued to confront him on all issues. This strength was most corrosively reflected through the prolonged Whitewater investigation, headed by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The Lewinsky case, however, quickened this withering inquiry in 1998. At the beginning of the year, Clinton denied under oath, and publicly, that he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. However, by the summer, it became apparent that he did have a past relationship with Lewinsky, and he was forced to retract his previous denial. The independent counsel then released his report with allegations that included a charge of perjury. The Republican-dominated House impeached Clinton in a special session the week before Christmas, making him only the second president in US history to be so indicted. He was not, however, convicted by the Senate and thereby remained in office to complete his term.

In the presidential election of 2000, Clinton’s vice president, Gore, was defeated in the electoral college by Texas governor George W. Bush . However, Hillary Clinton’s tenure as a US senator from New York, along with her announcement in 2007 that she was running for the presidency, marked the continuation of the Clinton legacy. Bill Clinton’s term as president ended in January of 2001 with a soaring approval rating of 65 percent. He had presided over an era of exceptional economic expansion.

In retirement, Clinton saw the inauguration in 2004 of the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his foundation is also located. He completed and published his memoirs, My Life, in 2004 as well, but he also suffered a heart attack. He had bypass surgery and recovered during the following year. The Clintons also experienced financial and legal difficulties at this time.

In the mid-2000s, Clinton and former president George H. W. Bush collaborated to raise funds for disaster relief following the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he served as the UN special envoy for tsunami recovery; two years later, he became the special envoy to Haiti.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton assisted Hillary in her unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination, which she lost to Illinois senator Barack Obama. In 2009, shortly after Obama took office, Hillary was appointed secretary of state, continuing the Clinton political legacy. During the 2012 presidential election, Bill Clinton toured the country on behalf of President Obama, who was running for a second term; Clinton’s work and his speech at the Democratic National Convention are credited with helping secure Obama’s victory.

In 2015, Hillary announced her bid for the 2016 presidential nomination. Not long after, the nonprofit Clinton Foundation, known for forging public-private partnerships in countries around the world, became embroiled in controversy regarding large foreign donations it accepted from the government of Saudi Arabia, among others, during Hillary's tenure at the State Department. Critics alleged that such donors expected political favors in exchange for their financial backing. The Clintons asserted no malfeasance or impropriety had occurred, and the foundation released a more comprehensive donor list than it had previously and restricted which governments it would accept funds from during the Hillary Clinton campaign. Bill Clinton provided campaign-management support for his wife's ultimately unsuccessful race while continuing his active involvement in the foundation's work and traveling for speaking engagements.

In the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, in which Democrat Joe Biden challenged incumbent Republican Donald Trump, as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continued, Clinton gave a speech during the virtual Democratic National Convention in August. After Biden's victory and fulfilling his duty as a New York elector in the certification process, Clinton attended the new president's inauguration in January 2021.

Significance

As a centrist and New Democrat, Clinton positioned himself cautiously to the left or right of issues as political circumstances demanded. He thereby helped salvage many of the liberal Democratic policies first instituted in the New Deal. These historic policies and, therefore, the Clinton presidency were sorely challenged by leaner economic conditions, diminishing federal budgets, and a conservative political and ideological environment.

Clinton demonstrated foresight and effort in regard to public policy and practices. He also demonstrated leadership in such diverse areas as international trade, education, and the environment and became an effective advocate for the poor and the elderly as well as for women and minorities. He notably failed, however, in one of his principal objectives, the creation of a national health-care system. Furthermore, he compromised one of his party’s major tenets, financial assistance for the poor, by consenting to drastic cuts in federal drastic cuts in federal welfare programs. Occasional episodes of political clumsiness and recurring questions about his ethics and personal character clouded his government. Nevertheless, he presided over unprecedented national prosperity and peace, and he enjoyed consistently high approval ratings.

Throughout his political career, and in his life in general, Clinton showed a clear tendency to lead through conciliation. As a boy and a young man, he worked to reconcile differences between mother and stepfather, Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions, upper and lower classes, and black and white in the Deep South. In dealing with political opponents, too, he typically avoided confrontation. He also developed policy in exceptionally substantive, thorough, and analytical terms, and conveyed it in an articulate manner. Like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy before him—presidents he has deeply admired—he may prove to have been a president inadequately understood in his own time, yet out of office soberly respected for his foresight and diligence.

Bibliography

Allen, Charles F., and Jonathan Portis. The Comeback Kid: The Life and Career of Bill Clinton. New York: Carol, 1992. Print.

Berlant, Lauren, and Lisa Duggan, eds. Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest. New York: New York UP, 2001. Print.

Boyer, Peter J. "Can't Live With Him, Can't Live Without Him." Newsweek 10 Sept. 2012: 22–28. Print.

Chafe, William H. Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal. New York: Farrar, 2012. Print.

Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Print.

Drew, Elizabeth. On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency. New York: Simon, 1994. Print.

Klein, Joe. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Print.

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Matalin, Mary, and James Carville, with Peter Knobler. All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President. New York: Random, 1994. Print.

McFadden, Cynthia, and Jake Whitman. "Bill Clinton Defends His Foundation's Foreign Money." NBC News. NBCNews.com, 4 May 2015. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.

"President Bill Clinton." Clinton Foundation, www.clintonfoundation.org/about-the-clinton-foundation/leadership/#president-bill-clinton/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.

Renshon, Stanley A. High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and Politics of Ambition. New York: New York UP, 1996. Print.

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Wilkie, Christina. "Bill Clinton Lays Out a Stark Choice for Voters in His Democratic National Convention Speech." CNBC, 19 Aug. 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/08/18/bill-clintons-dnc-speech-lays-out-stark-choice.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2021.

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