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CLINTON, Bill,
full name, William Jefferson Clinton, (1946– ),
42d president of the U.S. (1993–2001).
Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe IV in Hope, Ark.,
on Aug. 19, 1946. Clinton’s father, William Blythe (1918–46),
died in an automobile accident before his son was born; as a teenager,
Bill legally changed his surname to that of his stepfather, Roger
Clinton (1913–67). He graduated from Georgetown University
in 1968, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship (1968–70),
and earned his law degree at Yale University (1973). At Yale he
met Hillary Rodham, also a law student, and they were married in
1975. Their daughter, Chelsea Victoria, was born in 1980.
After running unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives
in 1974, Clinton was elected attorney general of Arkansas in 1976;
two years later, at age 32, he won election as the nation’s
youngest governor. Defeated in 1980, he regained the governorship
in 1982 and was reelected in 1984, 1986, and 1990 (during this period
Arkansas changed the governor’s term from two to four years).
In 1992, campaigning as a centrist and emphasizing domestic economic
reform, he won the Democratic presidential nomination and, with
his running mate, Al Gore, defeated Republican incumbent George
H. W. Bush and independent H. Ross Perot in the 1992 election.
Clinton took office in 1993 with a crowded domestic agenda. Although
Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Clinton’s
economic stimulus package was dealt an early defeat. Legislators
narrowly passed his budget-reform measure, which increased taxes
and cut national-defense and other expenditures to reduce deficit
spending. Bills for increased and family leave for workers also
passed, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified.
Clinton signed executive orders easing abortion restrictions and
modifying the ban on homosexuals in the military. In 1994 he won
passage of new anticrime legislation, but a health-care reform bill,
based on the recommendations of a task force headed by the First
Lady, died in Congress. From 1994 onward, both Clintons faced intense
financial and legal scrutiny regarding their involvement with the
Whitewater Development Corp., an Arkansas real estate venture that
failed in the ’80s. An independent counsel was appointed
to investigate the Whitewater scandal.
In foreign affairs, Clinton encouraged the Middle East peace
process, won congressional approval for aid to Russia and other
former Soviet republics, ended the 19-year ban on U.S. trade with
Vietnam, and sent troops to Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide (1953– )
to power; the Clinton administration also continued to cultivate
relations with China. The continuing war in Bosnia, the chronic
U.S. trade deficit with Japan, and a series of crises in Africa
were among the problems encountered. Clinton sent more than 20,000 American
troops to Bosnia to help enforce a peace accord brokered by U.S.
officials in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995.
Clinton’s low approval rating among U.S. voters
contributed to the Democrats’ election losses in 1994 and
left him facing a Republican-controlled Congress. Partisan wrangling
over the federal budget and other issues produced few legislative
accomplishments in 1995. As the 1996 elections approached, Congress passed
and Clinton signed a series of measures that transformed the U.S.
welfare system, guaranteed continuing health-care coverage for workers
who changed jobs, cracked down on illegal immigration, and raised
the minimum wage.
Despite the controversy over Whitewater, as well as the 1993 firing
of the White House travel office staff and the administration’s
mishandling of Federal Bureau of Investigation files, which had
been added to the investigation, President Clinton and Vice-President
Gore were renominated without opposition in August 1996. In the
general election campaign against Bob Dole, the Republican presidential
nominee, and Perot, the candidate of the Reform party, Clinton promoted
his administration’s success in creating jobs, controlling
inflation, and reducing the federal budget deficit. He attacked
Dole’s plan for a 15-percent across-the-board tax cut as
a “risky scheme,” and he pledged to protect Medicare,
Medicaid, education, and the environment from excessive budget cuts.
After leading in public opinion polls throughout the campaign, Clinton
won in November with about 49 percent of the popular vote. He thus
became the first Democratic president in 60 years to win election
to two successive terms.
Immediately after the election, a series of resignations left Clinton
with the task of replacing numerous high-level appointees, including
his chief of staff and the secretaries of state and defense. His
victory was also clouded by reports that congressional committees
and the U.S. Justice Department were investigating whether Democrats
had engaged in illegal fund-raising practices and had improperly
solicited foreign contributions. Hobbled by surgery to repair an
injury to his knee, he nevertheless traveled to Helsinki, Finland,
in March 1997 for a summit meeting with Russian President Boris
Yeltsin. The U.S. Supreme Court dealt Clinton a legal and political
setback when it ruled, in May, that he could not postpone until
he left the White House a civil lawsuit that charged him with sexually harassing
Paula Corbin Jones (1966– )
while he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee.
In August Clinton signed a compromise budget measure that included
large cuts in taxes and spending; the following February, he became
the first president in nearly 30 years to submit a balanced federal
budget to Congress.
Largely because of the booming economy, Clinton’s
popularity soared in early 1998, despite a new scandal involving
allegations that he had had a sexual relationship with a White House
intern, Monica Lewinsky (1973– ),
and then urged her to deny it in an affidavit submitted in the Paula
Jones case. Although Jones’s lawsuit was dismissed by U.S.
District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright (1948– )
in April and an appeal dropped in mid-November as part of an out-of-court
settlement that obligated the president to pay Jones $850,000,
inquiries into the other allegations against Clinton and other present
and former members of his administration continued.
With his domestic agenda stalled in Congress, the president
took an active part in foreign policy during the first half of 1998.
He played an influential role in achieving a peace settlement in
Northern Ireland, and he made high-profile visits to Africa and
China. In June the Supreme Court struck down a 1996 law giving the president
line-item veto power, which had been used more than 80 times by
Clinton, the only president to have had this power.
Scandal reclaimed center stage on Aug. 17, 1998, when Clinton, who
had repeatedly said there was nothing improper about his contact
with Lewinsky, acknowledged both in grand jury testimony and in
a nationally televised speech that his relationship with the young
woman was “not appropriate.” He expressed regret
for having “misled people,” but denied committing
any crime. Three days later, the president authorized cruise missile
strikes at alleged terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and
Sudan; the military action came in response to terrorist bombings
at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7. A report
submitted on September 9 to the House of Representatives by Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr (1946– )
alleged that Clinton may have committed impeachable offenses in
the Lewinsky matter. The report accused Clinton of lying under oath,
obstructing justice, and abusing the powers of his office.
On October 8, for only the third time in U.S. history, the
House voted to launch presidential impeachment proceedings by the
Judiciary Committee. During the next three weeks, with polls showing continued
public support for the president, Clinton secured passage of many
of his domestic budget priorities and brokered an interim peace
agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian
leader Yasir Arafat. Clinton traveled to the Middle East in December,
becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in Palestinian-ruled
Gaza. On December 16, after UN weapons inspectors reported that Iraqi
officials were impeding their work, the president, in cooperation
with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, authorized the most intense
bombing campaign against Iraq since the Persian Gulf War.
Even as the aerial attack on Iraq continued, the full House
on December 19 approved articles of impeachment against a president,
for only the second time in U.S. history. The two articles passed
by the House charged Clinton with testifying falsely to a federal
grand jury and obstructing justice in the Lewinsky affair. The Senate
trial, which began on Jan. 7, 1999, concluded on February 12 with
his acquittal. Although most senators, including many Democrats,
used harsh language in criticizing Clinton’s behavior,
the vote on each article fell far short of the two-thirds majority
required to remove him from office. Immediately after the trial
ended, Clinton made another public apology and called for a period
of “reconciliation and renewal.”
In March, Clinton faced the most serious foreign policy crisis
of his presidency when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
launched a massive air assault on Yugoslavia in order to secure
the rights of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The bombing, carried out
largely by American forces, propelled hundreds of thousands of refugees
into Albania and Macedonia, frayed U.S. relations with Russia and
China, and left U.S. public and congressional opinion deeply divided.
When the Yugoslav government agreed to NATO’s terms in
June, the president authorized the participation of 7000 U.S. troops
as part of a 50,000-member Kosovo security force, known as KFOR.
Acquittal at his impeachment trial did not end Clinton’s
legal problems. In April, Judge Wright held him in civil contempt
of court for what she described as his “false, misleading
and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial
process” when he testified in the Jones case 15 months
earlier; in July the judge assessed penalties of more than $90,000,
which Clinton agreed to pay. The president suffered a major legislative
defeat in October, when the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty.
The U.S. economy remained strong for most of Clinton’s
final year in office. Polls showed continued support for his policies,
although the public also registered persistent disapproval of his
personal conduct. He remained active in foreign policy, winning
congressional passage of a major trade accord with China and making
a historic visit to Vietnam; despite numerous efforts, however,
he was unable to persuade Israel and the Palestinians to reach a
permanent peace settlement.
On Jan. 19, 2001, the day before he left office, the president
formally acknowledged for the first time that he had knowingly given
false testimony before Judge Wright. The admission came as part
of a deal under which Clinton also accepted a 5-year suspension
of his law license and agreed to pay a $25,000 fine; in exchange,
disbarment proceedings against him in Arkansas were dropped, and
Robert W. Ray (1960– ), Starr’s
successor as Whitewater independent counsel, concluded his investigation
without taking further legal action against Clinton. During his
last hours in the White House, Clinton issued 140 pardons, several
of them highly controversial, and commuted the prison sentences
of 36 other persons.
After leaving the White House, Clinton ceded much of the political spotlight
to his wife, who in November 2000 had won election as U.S. senator
from New York. On Oct. 1, 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended Clinton
from practicing law before the high court, a consequence of the
voluntary settlement he had entered into in January 2001. Clinton,
who had 40 days to respond to the order, chose to ask to resign
from the U.S. Supreme Court Bar rather than face a possible suspension;
he could apply to be reinstated at a later date.
Clinton dedicated his presidential library, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, which is the largest in the nation, in Little Rock, Arkansas on November 18, 2004. In 2004, Clinton released his autobiography, My Life, which set a worldwide record for single day non-fiction book sales according to the publisher. Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation which supports economic empowerment and the development of healthcare programs, in particular those targeting the global AIDS epidemic.