William Jefferson Clinton

William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton (born 1946) won the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1992 and then defeated incumbent George Bush to become the 42nd president of the United States. He was re-elected to a second term in 1996

William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946. He was a fifth-generation Arkansan. His mother, Virginia Kelly, named him William Jefferson Blyth, IV, after his father, who had been killed in a freak accident several months before Bill's birth. When Bill was four years old his mother left him with her parents, Hardey and Mattie Hawkins, while she trained as a nurse-anesthesiologist. His grandparents ran a small store in a predominantly African American neighborhood and, despite the racist practices of the South in the early 1950s, Bill's grandparents taught him that segregation was wrong.

After his mother's marriage to Roger Clinton when Bill was eight, the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. They lived outside of the town in a house that had no indoor plumbing, which was not unusual for rural Arkansas in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Though Bill changed his last name to Clinton when he was 15 in an expression of family solidarity, the Clinton household was a troubled one. Roger Clinton was an alcoholic, and the family was frequently disrupted by incidents of domestic violence. At the age of 15 Bill made it clear to his stepfather that he would protect his mother and half brother, Roger, Jr., from any further assaults.

Clinton considered several careers as a child. At one point he wanted to be a musician (a saxophonist), and at another he wanted to be a doctor, but in 1963, as part of a delegation of the American Legion Boys' Nation, he met then-President John F. Kennedy. As a result of that meeting Clinton decided that he wanted a career in politics.

Education of a Future President

He entered college at Georgetown University in 1964. As a college student Clinton was committed to the movement against the Vietnam War, as well as to the civil rights struggle. In 1966 he worked as a summer intern for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, who was at that time the leader of antiwar sentiment in the U.S. Senate. He was still a college student in Washington, D.C., when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, and he and a friend used Clinton's car to deliver food and medical supplies to besieged neighborhoods during the unrest that followed King's assassination.

Bill Clinton graduated from Georgetown University in 1968 with a B.S. in International Affairs. It was already clear to those who knew him that he was a natural politician. Clinton was awarded a Rhodes scholarship and spent the next two years as a postgraduate student at Oxford University. It was in 1969, while at Oxford, that Clinton wrote a letter to an army colonel in the University of Arkansas ROTC program concerning his draft eligibility and his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In his letter he expressed concern about his position both in terms of the draft and in terms of his later "political viability." At the age of 23 Clinton was already concerned with his electability.

In 1970 Clinton entered law school at Yale University. In his first year at Yale Clinton served as a campaign coordinator for Joe Duffy, an antiwar candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. While still a law student, Clinton worked with the writer Taylor Branch as campaign coordinator in Texas for presidential candidate George McGovern.

At Yale Clinton met Hillary Rodham, a fellow law student. After graduation Clinton and Rodham were offered jobs on the staff of the House of Representatives committee that was considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Clinton chose to return to Arkansas while Hillary Rodham went to work as a member of the House staff. Clinton went into private practice in Fayetteville, the center of Arkansas politics, and also began teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School.

A Political Career in Arkansas

In 1974 he ran for Congress against John Paul Hammerschmidt, who was a strong Nixon supporter. He lost the election, but it was a very close vote. In a heavily Republican district, running as the incumbent, Hammerschmidt got only 51.5 percent of the vote.

Hillary Rodham moved to Fayetteville in 1974 and also began teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School. On October 11, 1975, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were married. In 1976 the Clintons moved to Little Rock when Bill was elected attorney general of the State of Arkansas, an office he held from 1977 to 1979.

In 1978 Bill Clinton ran for the office of governor of Arkansas. He was elected, and was the youngest-ever governor of Arkansas; in fact, he was the youngest person to be elected governor of any state since Harold E. Stassen was elected in 1938 at the age of 31. In his first term in office Clinton attempted to make numerous changes, many of which were extremely unpopular, including an attempt to raise automobile licensing fees.

On February 27, 1980, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a daughter they named Chelsea Victoria. In November of that same year Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory against Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas to Republican candidate Frank White. Clinton was a strong Carter supporter, which accounted for some of his difficulties, but Clinton recognized that many of his own policies had cost him reelection. When Clinton campaigned for election in 1982 against White, he explained he had learned the price for hubris and the importance of adaptability and compromise. He was elected with 55 percent of the vote.

Clinton served as governor of Arkansas until 1992. He was considered to be an activist, pushing for school reform and for health care and welfare reform with mixed results. He continued in these years to be active in Democratic national politics. Increasingly, Clinton attracted interest as a new voice in post-segregation southern politics. In 1988 Clinton came to national prominence at the Democratic convention when he gave a lengthy speech nominating Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis as the party's presidential candidate. Clinton's speech was considered to be excessively long and was not well received. The audience, in fact, began to shout, "Get off, get off."

In spite of this unsuccessful debut, Clinton continued to be active in national politics. In 1991 he was voted most effective governor by his peers. That same year he was chosen as chair of the Democratic Leadership Conference. Along with such other southerners as Albert Gore of Tennessee, he worked to shift control of the party away from the northeastern liberal wing and to reshape a new party constituency. In October of 1991 Clinton announced that he was entering the 1992 race for president.

1992 Campaign and Election

Clinton had a lot of competition for the Democratic nomination, and many of those candidates claimed to be the alternative who offered a change from the party's past and a chance to beat the incumbent president, George Bush. Even before the New Hampshire primary in early 1992 Clinton had suffered many embarrassments and difficulties. He came from a state that was small and was regarded by many as unsophisticated and economically underdeveloped. Critics felt he had no experience on the federal level and no understanding of foreign policy. Clinton in turn insisted that his strengths lay in the fact that he was not connected to a Washington power base and therefore had a fresh perspective to bring to government.

Clinton's campaign was also plagued by charges of personal scandal that included allegations of sexual liaisons with women other than his wife and questions about his draft status during the Vietnam War. Clinton remained in the race, however, slowly gaining momentum until the 1992 Democratic convention, where he became his party's nominee. He selected Senator Albert Gore as his running mate. Clinton focused his campaign on economic issues, especially stressing his understanding of the plight of the unemployed and the underemployed as well as general concern over access to health care. In November 1992 Clinton was elected president, defeating Republican incumbent George Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot.

Once in office Clinton addressed economic issues as interest rates and unemployment began to drop. He also appointed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the head of a task force mandated to explore possibilities for large-scale health care reform.

Helped by a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Clinton was able to have enacted most of his proposals for the "change" issue that keyed his campaign. Probably the most enduring of the passed legislation was the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) making a single trading bloc of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. As the end of Clinton's term approached a new scandal threatened the President's credibility. The scandal was termed Whitewater for the suspicious Arkansas land deal in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved.

In 1996 Clinton was re-elected to a second term as the United States President. He won the election by a landslide, defeating Bob Dole with 49 percent of the popular vote and 379 electoral votes. Bill Clinton continues campaigning for the issues in which he believes. He remains the nation's youngest President since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Clinton has left a mark on not only the nation, but on the world as well.

Further Reading

There are a number of biographies of Bill Clinton, including The Comeback Kid: The Life and Career of Bill Clinton (1992) by Charles F. Allen and Jonathan Portis, Clinton, Young Man in a Hurry (1992) by Jim Moore with Rich Ihde, America: A Place Called Hope? (1993) by Conor O'Clery, and The Clinton Revolution: An Inside Look at the New Administration (1993) by Koichi Suzuki. Additional information may be obtained from the White House web site at http://www.whitehouse.com □

Bill Clinton (William Jefferson Clinton), 1946-, 42d President of the United States (1993-2001), b. Hope, Ark. His father died before he was born, and he was originally named William Jefferson Blythe 4th, but after his mother remarried, he assumed the surname of his stepfather. After graduating from Georgetown Univ. (1968), attending the Univ. of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar (1968-70), and receiving a law degree from Yale Univ. (1973), Clinton returned to his home state, where he was a lawyer and (1974-76) law professor. In 1974 he was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Two years later, he was elected Arkansas's attorney general, and in 1978 he won the Arkansas governorship, becoming the nation's youngest governor. Defeated for reelection in 1980, he regained the governorship in 1982 and retained it in two subsequent elections. Generally regarded as a moderate Democrat, he headed the centrist Democratic Leadership Council from 1990 to 1991.

In 1992, Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination after a primary campaign in which his character and private life were repeatedly questioned and, with running mate Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, went on to win the election, garnering 43% of the national vote in defeating Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and independent H. Ross Perot . By his election, he became the first president born after World War II to serve in the office and the first to lead the country in the post-cold war era.

In his first year in office, Clinton won passage of a national service program and of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the federal deficit. He also proposed major changes in the U.S. health-care system that ultimately would have provided health-insurance coverage to most Americans. Clinton was unable to overcome widespread opposition to changes in the health-care system, however, and in a major policy defeat, failed to win passage of his plan. After this failure, his proposed programs were never as sweeping. The president's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton , whom he married in 1975, played a more visibly active role in her husband's first term than most first ladies; she was particularly prominent in his attempt to revamp the health-care system.

In 1994, Clinton sent U.S. forces to Haiti as part of the negotiated restoration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide 's presidency. He also withdrew U.S. forces from Somalia (1994), where while helping to avert famine they had suffered casualties in a futile effort to capture a Somali warlord. Clinton promoted peace negotiations in the Middle East, which bore fruit in important agreements, and in the former Yugoslavia, which led to a peace agreement in late 1995. He also restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.

After the Democratic party lost control of both houses of Congress in Nov., 1994, in elections that were regarded as a strong rebuff to the president, Clinton appeared to have lost some of his political initiative. He was often criticized for vacillating on issues; at the same time, he was embroiled in conflict with sometimes radically conservative Republicans in Congress, whose goals in education, Medicare, and other areas often were at odds with his own. In 1995 and 1996, congressional Republicans and Clinton clashed over budget and deficit-reduction priorities, leading to two partial federal government shutdowns. Perceived as the victor in those conflicts, Clinton regained some of his standing with the public. Allegations of improper activities by the Clintons relating to Whitewater persisted but were not proved, despite congressional and independent counsel investigations.

By 1996, Clinton had succeeded in characterizing the Republican agenda as extremist while himself adopting many aspects of it. Forced to compromise on such items as welfare reform in order to assure passage of any change, Republicans passed bills that often seemed as much part of the president's program as their own. The welfare bill that he signed at the end of his term revolutionized the system, requiring that recipients work, while providing them with various subsidies to aid in the transition. Clinton won renomination by his party unopposed in 1996. Benefiting from a basically healthy economy, he handily won reelection in Nov., 1996, garnering 49% of the vote against Republican candidate Bob Dole and Reform party candidate Ross Perot, and became the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to win two terms at the polls.

In 1997, Clinton and the Republicans agreed on a deal that combined tax cuts and reductions in spending to produce the first balanced federal budget in three decades. The president now seemed to have mastered the art of employing incremental, rather than large-scale, governmental action to effect change, leaving the Republicans, with their announced mandate for fundamental change, to appear visionary and extreme. Having taken the center, and with stock markets continuing to boom and unemployment low, Clinton enjoyed high popularity, presiding over an enormous national surge in prosperity and innovation.

At the beginning of 1998, however, ongoing investigations into his past actions engulfed him in the Lewinsky scandal , and for the rest of the year American politics were convulsed by the struggle between the president and his Republican accusers, which led to his impeachment on Dec. 19. He thus became the first elected president to be impeached (Andrew Johnson , the only other chief executive to be impeached, fell heir to the office when Pres. Lincoln was assassinated). It was apparent, however, that much of the public, while fascinated by the scandal, held the impeachment drive to be partisan and irrelevant to national affairs. In Jan., 1999, two impeachment counts were tried in the Senate, which on Feb. 12 acquitted Clinton. In the year following, U.S. domestic politics returned to something like normality, although the looming campaign for the 2000 presidential election began to overshadow Clinton's presidency. During both his terms Clinton took an active interest in environmental preservation, and by 2000 he had set aside more than three million acres (1.25 million hectares) of land in wilderness or national monuments, protecting more acreage in the lower 48 states than any other president.

The late 1990s saw a number of foreign-policy successes and setbacks for President Clinton. He continued to work for permanent peace in the Middle East, and his administration helped foster accords between the Palestinians and Israel in 1997 and 1999, but further negotiations in 2000 proved unsuccessful. Iraq's Saddam Hussein increased his resistance to UN weapons inspections in the late 1990s, leading to U.S. and British air attacks in late 1998; attacks continued at a lower level throughout much of 1999 while the issue of weapons inspections remained unresolved. In Apr.-June, 1999, a breakdown in an attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement in Kosovo sparked a 78-day U.S.-led NATO air war that forced the former Yugoslavia to cede control of the province, but not before Yugoslav forces had made refugees of millions and killed several thousand.

The second term of Clinton's presidency saw a pronounced effort to use international trade agreeements to foster political changes in countries throughout the world, including Russia, China (with whom he established normal trade relations in 2000), Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. While global trade flourished, Clinton's hopes that trade would lead to democratization and improved human rights policies in a number of countries by and large failed to be realized. In 1997 the Clinton administration had won ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (signed 1993), but it refused to join in a major international treaty banning land mines . The Republican-dominated Senate narrowly rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in late 1999 in a major policy setback; in late 2000, Clinton made the United States a party to the 1998 Rome Treaty on the establishment of an International Criminal Court for war crimes .

Clinton benefited during his entire presidency from a strong economy, leading the country during an unprecedented period of economic expansion and, with some partisan critics giving credit to skill and some to luck, making a steady national prosperity the hallmark of his administrations. He left office having revived and strengthened the national Democratic party, which he guided toward more centrist positions, emphasizing fiscal responsibility, championing the middle class, and reversing many of the public's negative stereotypes regarding the party's liberal stance. Although Vice President Al Gore failed to win the 2000 presidential election, he won a plurality of the popular vote, and the party scored some gains in Congress, especially the Senate. The president's pardoning, however, of more than 100 people on his last day in office sparked one final controversy. Several persons he pardoned were well connnected and even notorious but not apparently deserving, and even Clinton supporters and appointees were openly critical. Charges that pardons were obtained through bribery, however, appeared to be unfounded.

No one major accomplishment or program marked Clinton's terms in office; his many real achievements were mainly incremental, and were often overshadowed by setbacks. However, through his extraordinary ability to relate to ordinary Americans, his intelligence and wit, and his skill in manipulating the media, he maintained an unusual level of popularity and a high approval rating throughout most of two terms in office. Nonetheless, the Lewinsky scandal, in particular, permanently marred his presidency. This was so although the sexual affair at its core was neither unique for Clinton, who had had other extramarital liaisons, nor for the office, some of the earlier holders of which had engaged in similar, although much less publicized, behavior.

As he left office, Clinton faced mountains of legal bills and continued threats of legal action. The youngest former president since Theodore Roosevelt, he established his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., and, moving to New York where his wife was now a senator, opened an office and foundation in Harlem . He remains an influential and generally popular figure, and became prominent in a number of causes, including international AIDS treatment. In Feb., 2005, he was appointed to a two-year term as UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, with responsibility for sustaining the international efforts that began following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, My Life (2004). See also J. Brummett, Highwire (1994); E. Drew, On the Edge (1994) and Showdown (1996); D. Maraniss, First in His Class (1995); R. A. Posner, An Affair of State (1999); J. Klein, The Natural (2002); J. F. Harris, The Survivor (2005); N. Hamilton, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency (2007).

Bill Clinton
1946-

Pesident of the united states (1993-2000)

Lost Opportunities

Historians, political scientists, and psychologists will write at length about Bill Clinton and his presidency. First elected in 1992 with only 43 percent of the popular vote, and reelected in 1996, Clinton dominated the U.S. political landscape for most of the 1990s. He was the first president to be born after the end of World War II (1945) and he symbolized the rise to political maturity of the baby boomers. He began his presidency with the intention of resolving several high-profile, but seemingly intractable, political issues including national health insurance, balancing the budget, civil rights, and education. Like all presidents, Clinton soon learned that progress on any of these issues required spending political capital, and that significant progress on all of them was impossible. As the first president elected after the end of the Cold War, he enjoyed the benefits of an end to the hair-trigger military standoff with the U.S.S.R., but along with that came a host of new and unanticipated foreign-policy problems unleashed by the untidy demise of the Soviet Empire. Finally, his presidency has been forever tainted by his own personal behavior, including dishonesty about his draft status during the Vietnam War (ended 1975), whether he smoked marijuana as a young man, extramarital affairs, and the lies and half-truths that led to his impeachment. Although he was not convicted by the Senate, the sordid affair cast a moral and political pall over nearly all of his second term. His presidency was not without successes—for example, the balanced budget, peace negotiations and agreements in the Middle East, and the improved situation in Northern Ireland—yet, so much more could have been accomplished.

Southern Roots

William Jefferson Blythe IV was born in Hope, Arkansas, on 19 August 1946. Three months before his birth his father, Bill Blythe, was killed in an automobile accident. In 1947 his mother left the boy in the care of his maternal grandparents while she went to New Orleans and nursing school. For most of the next two years he was raised by his grandparents with only occasional visits with his mother. His mother married Roger Clinton when he was four years old. He took the Clinton name when he was in high school. When he was seven the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, though he frequently stayed in Hope with his grandparents. A younger brother, Roger, was born when Bill was ten. Clinton was a fine student and a musician with enough skill and talent with the saxophone to earn music, as well as academic, scholarships. When he was a senior in high school he was an Arkansas delegate to Boys Nation held in Washington, D.C., where he met President John E Kennedy. By all accounts this was a defining moment for young Clinton and may have been instrumental in his eventual decision to pursue a career in politics. He attended Georgetown University with the help of scholarships and student loans and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in International Affairs in 1968. Georgetown was an ideal place for a young man interested in politics. Its Washington, D.C., location allows students to be close to national politics. While a student there Clinton interned in the Senate office of one of his home-state senators, James William Fulbright (D). After graduation, Clinton was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. After two years abroad, Clinton returned to the United States and began legal studies at Yale University. While there, he met Hillary Rodham, also a promising law student. He graduated with his law degree in 1973. He briefly taught law, as did Rodham, at the University of Arkansas. They were married in 1975 and became parents of a daughter, Chelsea, in 1980. His first run for public office was an unsuccessful try at the Arkansas Third District congressional seat in 1974. Two years later he was elected Attorney General and in 1978 he was elected governor when he was only thirty-two years old. He was defeated in his 1980 reelection bid but came back and won the governorship again in 1982, and he held it from that point until his 1992 run for the presidency.

Running for President

Clinton was a long shot to get the Democratic nomination in 1992 to run against President Bush. He did not have a high public profile nationally, and Arkansas is not usually thought of as a strong base for a presidential run. Clinton benefitted as several nationally prominent Democrats decided not to seek the nomination in part because they were intimidated by Bush's incredibly high approval ratings in public opinion polls. Unlike other potential Democratic candidates, Clinton was willing to take the chance. He believed that Bush was unlikely to be able to sustain the unprecedented poll numbers and that he was vulnerable on other issues—most notably, the economy. In the 1980s Clinton had positioned himself to be a new Democrat who could put together an electoral coalition to win the presidency. He believed that though the old Democratic coalition of labor, liberals, and blacks had been successful from the 1930 through the 1960s, now it had become increasingly prone to fracturing on important issues. Clinton believed that new issues, raised and discussed by the Democratic Leadership Council that included Clinton, and the associated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, were the framework for forming a new coalition. The broad outlines of this line of thinking included a continuing reliance on activist government and social issues such as civil rights, but with a simultaneous embrace of free enterprise on the domestic front and a commitment to a global free market trading system. There would be less welfare, to be replaced with a greater reliance on "workfare" and job-training programs. Unlike the old Democratic coalition, the new coalition would place an emphasis on reducing crime, and additional money would be committed to building prisons and putting more police on the streets. In addition, Clinton supported the use of the death penalty. All of these positions were a stark deviation from traditional Democratic paternalism, and his ability to position himself in the middle of the political spectrum was instrumental in securing the nomination and winning the general election campaign against Bush and H. Ross Perot. Perot's strong run as a third-party candidate in 1992 probably helped Clinton as well. Throughout the campaign, Bush and Perot engaged in a partly private, partly public feud that increased whatever negative impressions the public may have already had about them. Clinton focused on the economy, blaming President Bush for every negative economic reality. His campaign office posted a sign reminding the candidate and campaign workers that "It's the economy, stupid!" In November, Clinton barely won a plurality of the popular vote although he won a substantial victory in the Electoral College.

First Term

President Clinton got off to a difficult start. He had made promises to end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the U.S. military, and the homosexual community presumed that he would remove all restrictions on their military service. Clinton ran into a buzz saw of opposition to removing those restrictions, however, so he settled on a compromise position, ordering that the military not ask about sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians would be permitted to serve in uniform only if they did not tell others of their orientation. This satisfied neither the homosexual community nor those intent on maintaining traditional bans on their military service and earned Clinton the enmity of both sides. By the end of the decade, it had become clear that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was a failure. President Clinton also appointed First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to head a task force charged with designing a new health-care insurance system for the United States. Providing adequate and affordable health care was one of the core promises Clinton had made in the 1992 campaign. It was a promise he could not keep as the insurance industry turned up the pressure on Congress and engaged in a public-relations blitz that crippled the effort before the proposals ever emerged from the commission. Clinton spent an enormous amount of political capital in this doomed effort. The suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., his deputy counsel at the White House and former law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, just six months after the new administration took office was to have long-term consequences. Not only was this tragic death of a friend a personal blow, but Foster's suicide became the focus of conspiracy theorists hoping to smear the president. Foster was Clinton's counsel handling charges that the Clintons had been involved in suspect land deals in Arkansas. This next round of investigations led to a web of further inquiries that turned up some shady dealings by a variety of people in and out of the administration, damaged the reputations of others not involved, and ultimately led to the president's impeachment in 1998 and trial in 1999. The biggest blow of all was the resounding Republican success in the 1994 midterm elections. Many political observers believed the congressional elections that year would be a referendum on Clinton and his policies, and the Democratic defeat was widely viewed as Clinton's defeat. There were successes as well, of course. Certainly the agreement in 1993 between Israel and Palestine to begin to carve out a Palestinian presence in occupied territories was a major victory, as was his success in getting Congress to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that same year. The economy was getting stronger, some categories of crime were in decline, welfare reform had been tackled in tandem with the Republican Congress, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act imposing a waiting period on handgun purchases was passed, his national-service program (AmeriCorps) was created, and it was increasingly clear that the budget could be balanced after three decades of deficits.

The 1996 Election

In the months after the disastrous 1994 elections, it seemed unlikely that Clinton could sufficiently recover the political momentum necessary to secure a second term. Yet, he was once again the "Comeback Kid." He learned from his 1980 gubernatorial reelection defeat and his comeback victory two years later; from the Gennifer Flowers extramarital affairs charges that almost destroyed his candidacy before he got the nomination in 1992; and from the Republican success in capturing control of Congress in 1994. His opponents in 1996 were Robert Joseph "Bob" Dole (R-Kansas) and H. Ross Perot (Reform Party). Clinton successfully mobilized his constituencies around the New Democratic agenda; he was able to take credit for a strong economy, welfare reform, and reduced crime. He won the election by a wider margin than in 1992, but it was still only a plurality of the votes cast. He received 49 percent of the popular vote, while Dole garnered 41 percent and Perot trailed with 8 percent.

Second Term

The soaring economy provided the opportunity for Clinton and the congressional Republicans to reach an agreement on the historic balanced budget in 1997. This was so successful that by 1999 the major domestic political issue was how to use the ever-increasing budget surplus. In 1998 former Maine Senator George John Mitchell successfully led negotiations to end the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and, while further negotiations continued at the end of the decade, this agreement and its successors constituted a major foreign-policy success for the administration. Yet, from the beginning of the second term ethical questions took center stage. First, there were allegations of illegal fundraising by the president's campaign, and by Vice President Al Gore personally. Then the investigations led by Special Prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr branched out from the original Whitewater investigation to look into Vincent W. Foster Jr.'s suicide, Paula Corbin Jones's allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of Clinton when he was Arkansas governor, and new charges of improper conduct with a young intern, Monica S. Lewinsky. As 1998 wore on these matters increasingly consumed the press coverage of the president to the near exclusion of most matters of public policy. In August, Starr presented a report to Congress alleging that Clinton had perjured himself in the Jones and Lewinsky matters. On 19 December 1998 the House of Representatives voted, largely along party lines, to approve two of the possible four articles of impeachment, making Clinton only the second president in American history to be impeached (Andrew Johnson, in 1868, was the other). The dramatic Senate trial was held in January and February of 1999. Two-thirds of the senators had to vote "guilty" in order to remove the president from office. Like his sole impeached predecessor, Clinton survived that critical vote. On the first article, alleging grand jury perjury, the Senate failed to remove him from office by a vote of fifty-five to forty-five margin, with ten Republicans joining the Democrats; on the second article, alleging obstruction of justice, the Senate split fifty-fifty, as five Republicans broke ranks with their colleagues. Throughout the entire process opinion polls repeatedly indicated that while the public had some serious reservations about Clinton's character, they viewed the impeachment as a partisan political ploy and emphatically did not want Clinton removed from office.

Foreign Affairs

Of course, events around the world did not stop just for the impeachment battle. In the spring of 1999 issues of national self-determination in the Balkans again surfaced, this time in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo whose large Albanian population lived uneasily with a powerful Serb minority. In February and March increasing violence against the Albanians by Serbs supported by the Yugoslav army put the Balkans once again at the front of the foreign-affairs agenda. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), comprising the United States and its European allies, decided in March to initiate a bombing campaign to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo. In the process, most of the Albanian Kosovar population became refugees and NATO relentlessly bombed Serbian assets, particularly the military, governmental, and economic infrastructure in the Serbian portions of Yugoslavia. In June an agreement was reached with the Serb political leadership that ended the bombing in exchange for Serb withdrawal from Kosovo, return of the Albanian refugees, and a multinational peacekeeping force in Kosovo led by NATO. While some peace was restored to the region, at the end of the decade it remained uncertain as to what the future would hold for Kosovo and its people.

Impact on American Politics

Clinton will be remembered as the president who was impeached and who, through the entire unsavory episode, was forced to publicly admit to embarrassing indiscretions, lies, and partial truths. Yet, in many ways his two terms in office were successful. The economy boomed, the budget was balanced, welfare reform was initiated, crime was reduced, several historic agreements were reached in foreign affairs, including movement toward peace both in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, major free-trade pacts were negotiated and implemented, and a national service program was instituted. Furthermore, he was instrumental in creating a new Democratic Party coalition that could effectively compete with Republicans on the national stage. Journalist Elizabeth Drew, quoting a friend of Clinton, said, "Bill has always been someone who has lived on the edge, politically and personally."

Sources:

Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon, & Schuster, 1995).

Stanley A. Renshon, High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Martin Walker, The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton, His Rise. Falls, and Comebacks (New York: Crown, 1996).