Clinton, Bill

Clinton, Bill (1946–), forty‐second president of the United States.William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, graduated from Georgetown University in 1968, went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (1968–70), and then Yale Law School. With the exception of 1981–83, he served as Democratic governor of Arkansas from 1979 until 1993 when he became president, defeating the Republican incumbent George Bush and a third‐party candidate, Ross Perot.

From the beginning, President Clinton had a rocky relationship with the military. During the campaign, it was alleged that as a college student he had dodged the draft and publicly protested the Vietnam War. As president, his first policy action was to pledge to end the ban on gay men and lesbians in the military. The attempt to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces faced vigorous opposition in the Pentagon and the Congress. Clinton ultimately accepted a compromise dubbed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Clinton's first secretary of defense, former representative Les Aspin, Jr., initiated a “bottom‐up” review of the post–Cold War military. His successor, William Perry, further reduced the armed forces by closing bases, capping expenditures, and emphasizing reservists. Active duty personnel declined in Clinton's first term from 1.7 million to under 1.5 million. William Cohen became secretary of defense after Clinton's reelection in 1996. The former Republican senator from Maine sought to maintain a 1.4 million active duty force while boosting weapons spending by 50 percent and simultaneously keeping the defense budget at about $255 billion. Skeptics predicted more troop and procurement cuts instead.

In his foreign policy, Clinton often combined brinkmanship with indecision over the use of military force. He escalated the use of force in Somalia, then withdrew in 1994 after the killing of U.S. Army Rangers. Later that year, however, his brinkmanship with North Korea contributed to Pyongyang's agreement to dismantle the reactors that could make nuclear weapons. His vacillating policy on the military junta in Haiti ultimately led in September 1994 to the dispatch of an airborne invasion force, recalled only at the last minute when a negotiating team, led by former President Jimmy Carter, convinced the junta to step down. A combined United Nations/U.S. occupation force landed peacefully and ensured the return of Haiti's democratically elected president. In the Bosnian Crisis, Clinton avoided ground intervention until the peace accord of 1995, then included 20,000 Americans in the UN peacekeeping force, which was still in Bosnia four years later.

After a terrorist bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Khartoum, he ordered sea‐launched missile attacks on a plant in the Sudan and a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in August 1998. Faced with Saddam Hussein's blocking of UN weapons inspectors and challenging of U.S. air surveillance, Clinton ordered sporadic American air attacks against Iraqi military targets beginning in December 1998. Domestically, in January 1999, Clinton was acquitted in a Senate trial on House impeachment charges involving a sex scandal. In March 1999, he brought the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into NATO. In the Balkans, Clinton announced on 23 March 1999, a decision to use force to halt Serbian aggression against ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo Crisis; the next day, NATO began air strikes against the Serbs. The war lasted 78 days.
[See also Commander in Chief, President as; Haiti, U.S. Military Intervention in; Middle East, U.S. Military Intervention in; Somalia, U.S. Military Intervention in.]

Bibliography

David Maraniss , First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, 1995.
Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman, eds., The Clinton Presidency: First Appraisals, 1995.
Stanley Allen Renshon , High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition, 1996.
Thomas H. Henrikson , Clinton's Foreign Policy in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and North Korea, 1996.

John Whiteclay Chambers II