Clinton, Bill

Clinton, Bill, (1946– ), forty‐second president of the United States.Born in Hope, Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton was raised by his mother, Virginia Dwire Clinton, and his stepfather, Roger Clinton, a Hot Springs, Arkansas, car salesman. Clinton's natural father, William Jefferson Blythe III, died in an automobile accident before his son's birth. Graduating from Georgetown University in 1968, Clinton attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (1968–70) and graduated from Yale Law School in 1973. He returned to Arkansas to run for Congress, but lost to a popular Republican incumbent. In 1976, following his marriage to fellow lawyer Hillary Rodham, he was elected state attorney general. Two years later, at thirty‐two, he won the Arkansas governorship. Defeated for reelection in 1980 after raising gasoline taxes and licensing fees, he made a comeback in 1984, winning a second term. Reelected in 1986 and 1990, he helped found the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization devoted to moving the party closer to the political center.

As the Democrats' most visible advocate of pragmatic, centrist politics, Clinton sought the party's 1992 presidential nomination. Though dogged by charges of sexual impropriety and draft‐dodging in the Vietnam War Era, he won the nomination, choosing Tennessee senator Al Gore (1948– ) as his running mate. Stressing economic recovery amidst a nagging recession and styling himself a “New Democrat” blending fiscal moderation with social concern, Clinton pledged to overhaul the nation's health, welfare, and education systems while also reducing budget deficits. Opposing the Republican incumbent George Bush and independent H. Ross Perot (1930– ), a Texas billionaire, Clinton won with 43 percent of the popular vote.

During his first two years in office, Clinton won approval for a family‐leave law, a motor‐votor registration act, the North American Free Trade Agreement (negotiated by the Bush administration), the Brady gun‐control act, and a deficit‐reducing federal budget. His biggest disappointment came on health care, as Congress rebuffed a sweeping reform plan drafted by a team headed by First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Despite limited diplomatic experience, Clinton enjoyed considerable foreign policy succcess. His administration under Secretary of State Warren Christopher helped negotiate peace accords in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and dispatched peacekeeping missions to Haiti and Bosnia. But Clinton's enhanced stature abroad failed to mollify domestic opponents of “Clintonism,” defined by conservatives as a blend of cleverly disguised “tax and spend” liberalism, political opportunism, and private immorality. Religious and cultural conservatives assailed Clinton on issues ranging from abortion to gays in themilitary. Ironically, liberal Democrats also criticized Clinton, accusing him of forsaking the social justice causes vital to racial minorities, organized labor, and the poor. Despite an improving economy, Republicans brandishing a conservative, anti‐Clinton “Contract with America” won both houses of Congress, for the first time in forty years, in the 1994 midterm election.

Despite this setback, the likeable, articulate, and charismatic Clinton retained his personal popularity. A celebrity “Baby Boomer” and popular culture icon riding the crest of a booming economy, he dominated the political center. Sensing the electorate's rightward shift, Clinton embraced welfare reform, a favorite Republican cause, and in 1996 signed a landmark bill slashing welfare spending, limiting benefits, and shifting the major welfare program from Washington to the states. A consummate campaigner and fund‐raiser, Clinton easily defeated his 1996 Republican challenger, Kansas senator Robert Dole (1923– ). (Ross Perot ran again also, but garnered far fewer votes than in 1992.) As Clinton's second term began, few doubted his capacity for political survival.

This capacity was soon sorely tested. In 1994, Republicans had initiated an investigation of the Clintons' alleged involvement in the Whitewater scandal, a 1980s Arkansas real estate swindle. However, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr (appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno) failed to find evidence of illegality by either Clinton. Starr turned to other alleged presidential wrongdoings, however, and his inquiry gained momentum in 1998 with the disclosure of a sexual liaison between Clinton and a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. As the scandal unfolded, Clinton's initial denials gave way to a stunning public admission that he had not told the whole truth about the matter. Since Clinton had also denied the relationship in sworn testimony in an Arkansas sexual harrassment lawsuit, Starr presented this evidence of perjury to Congress in September 1998. In December, by a partisan vote, the House forwarded to the Senate two articles of impeachment. Clinton, however, mobilized enough Senate support to avoid removal from office. Both Congress and the public divided sharply over the gravity and “impeachability” of the president's offenses. He retained broad popular support, polls revealed, even among those who questioned his integrity.

Prosperity and Clinton's skillful handling of the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of presidential leadership helped him weather the storm, but public expectations of the presidency remained low in his final two years. Focusing on foreign affairs, trade, and strategic issues, Clinton with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1997– ), Defense Secretary William Cohen, and Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky pursued trade agreements with China, Vietnam, and other nations; urged support for the controversial World Trade Organization; sought to revive the stalled Mideast peace process; and promoted a scaled‐down version of the controversial missile‐defense system first proposed by President Ronald Reagan. On the domestic front, he continued to press for a financial restructuring of the nation's Medicaid and Social Security systems, and convened a high‐profile Presidential Initiative on Race chaired by historian John Hope Franklin. The Clinton scandals remained in the public eye, however, thanks to the president's continuing legal problems, including the threat of disbarment; Hillary Clinton's bid for a U.S. Senate seat from New York; and Republican attempts to link Vice President Gore—the Democrats' 2000 presidential candidate—to Clinton's political and ethical failings, particularly campaign finance irregularities in the 1996 election.

Confronting the disjunction between Clinton's public accomplishments and private shortcomings, citizens pondered the issue of character in public life; the boundaries between the public and the private spheres; and the nature of presidential leadership in a post–Cold War era of media‐driven politics, material abundance, and moral uncertainty. These debates seemed likely to represent Bill Clinton's primary contribution to American political history.
See also Democratic Party; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations; Foreign Trade, U.S.; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; Medicare and Medicaid; Strategic Defense Initiative; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Drew , On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency, 1995.
David Maraniss , First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, 1995.
David Maraniss , The Clinton Enigma, 1998.
Richard Posner , An Affair of the State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton, 1999.
Joe Conason and and Gene Lyons , The Hunting of the President, 2000.
Mark Rozell, ed., The Clinton Scandal and the Future of American Government, 2000.
Haynes Johnson , The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years, 2001.

Raymond O. Arsenault