Bill Clinton

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(Bill Clinton)

(b. Hope, Arkansas, 19 Aug. 1946) US; Governor of Arkansas 1979 – 81, 1983 – 92, President 1993 – 2001 At birth Clinton was given the name of William Jefferson Blythe. His father was killed in a road accident four months before he was born. His mother — who worked to put herself through medical school — remarried three times, the young child taking the surname (at the age of 15) of her second husband, a car dealer. Educated at Hot Springs High School, Arkansas, he proved to be a bright student. He was notable for the number of organizations he joined (he served as president of several), his competitiveness, and his apparent desire to please people. He was one of two Arkansans picked for "Boys Nation", a summer vacation programme for outstanding high school pupils. It was while on this programme that he met President John F. Kennedy, a meeting captured on film. This meeting is believed to have inspired his interest in politics. He went on to study at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, working part-time in the office of Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, a leading Democratic opponent of the Vietnam War. With Fulbright's help, he achieved a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years at University College, Oxford. On his return to the USA, he went to Yale law school, where he met and married a fellow student, Hillary Rodham.

He returned to his home state to teach law at the University of Arkansas and to seek election to public office. A Democrat, he cut his political teeth in 1974 by contesting a safe Republican congressional district. In 1976 he was elected state attorney-general. Two years later — at the age of 32 — he contested and won the governorship, the youngest person ever to hold the office. He was defeated at the end of his first term, having attempted to tackle a range of issues without clearly identifying where he was going. He fought back to regain the governorship in 1983 and then served four consecutive terms. During this period, goals were targeted and he spent time visiting all parts of the state. He channelled resources to education. Though liberal on social issues such as abortion, he nonetheless introduced welfare policies that appealed to conservatives, for example requiring single mothers to name the father in order to receive welfare support. In 1987 he served as chairman of the National Governors' Association. He also became vice-chairman, and subsequently chairman, of the Democratic Governors' Association. In 1988 he introduced the presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, at the Democratic convention but gave a lengthy, rambling speech. (He won applause only when he said "In closing …".) By 1992 he was the nation's senior governor.

Clinton announced in October 1991 that he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President. His campaign was dogged by accusations of infidelity — one woman, Gennifer Flowers, claimed she had a twelve-year affair with him — and by accusations that he avoided military service in Vietnam. He nonetheless polled well in the New Hampshire primary in February 1992, coming second with 25 per cent of the poll, 8 per cent behind Paul Tsongas, the former Senator from Massachusetts. Clinton then pulled ahead in succeeding primaries — sweeping the South in "Super Tuesday" primaries on 10 March. He went on to victories in the large eastern states, including New York, and his nomination at the Democratic Convention in New York in July became a formality. He chose Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his running mate.

In the general election Clinton attacked the economic record of his opponent, President George Bush, and managed to convey that he had policies to address the nation's social problems and that Bush did not. He out-performed Bush in three television debates, though the debates served also to bolster the campaign of the independent candidate, Ross Perot. Clinton emerged the victor, wining 43 per cent of the popular vote, to 37.4 per cent for Bush and 18.9 per cent for Perot. Clinton had patched together the old Democratic coalition of the poor, blue-collar workers and minorities and had polled well in areas of Republican strength, notably the West. He had become President at the age of 46.

The Clinton presidency got off to a poor start. His first two nominees for Attorney-General had to withdraw after it was revealed they hired illegal aliens. The issue of allowing gays to serve in the military — a policy favoured by Clinton but opposed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell — achieved political prominence, ended in a messy compromise, and obscured other policy initiatives. Clinton reorganized his White House staff after only a few months in office. He battled with Congress on health care reform and lost. His handling of foreign policy — as on Bosnia and Somalia — appeared uncertain. The influence of his wife became a political issue. Both he and his wife were implicated in the Whitewater affair, involving the Whitewater Development Co., in which the Clintons had invested and which was funded by a company being investigated for financial improprieties. He had some notable successes, including approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but the overall impression was of a presidency in trouble. In the 1994 midterm elections the Republicans won control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. Clinton looked like a probable one-term President. However, his standing improved. He proved to be an adept politician, brokering deals to achieve results. His international standing increased as he began to appear more sure-footed in responding to events abroad. A Bosnian peace treaty was agreed in Dayton, Ohio, between the warring parties. The President visited Northern Ireland and tried to act as an honest broker in attempts to move talks forward. The economy continued to improve, with a significant growth in GDP and falling unemployment. The "misery index" was the lowest since 1969. Deadlock with Congress over the budget in 1995, resulting in a shutdown of government offices, was blamed on Congress rather than the President. In 1996, Clinton ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination. The only cloud on the horizon was the Whitewater affair, especially following the conviction of key participants in the affair. The Republican contest was initially hard fought and bitter, resulting in the selection of Senate Majority Leader, Robert Dole, a 73-year-old Washington insider with little obvious interest in propounding a vision of the future. Clinton led in the opinion polls throughout the campaign and achieved a healthy but not spectacular victory, winning 49 per cent of the popular vote to 42 per cent for Dole and 9 per cent for Perot. There was little evidence of a coat-tails effect. The Republicans retained control of both Houses of Congress.

Clinton essentially developed two persona. Clinton the President established respect both in Washington and in the country; by the end of the first term, he was looking presidential. He had carved out a New Democratic coalition (much admired by British Labour leader Tony Blair), maintaining an appeal to minorities while introducing measures on crime and welfare that drew the support of middle-class Americans. Clinton the man remained controversial. Early controversies over whether he smoked marijuana — he admitted that he experimented with the drug but "didn't inhale" — and dodged the draft died away, but claims of sexual harassment while Governor of Arkansas continued to appear. The death — an apparent suicide — of White House deputy counsel and old Arkansas associate Vince Foster fuelled questions about the White House handling of the affair and speculation as to the reasons for the death. The Whitewater affair continued to cast a shadow. The return of Republican majorities in the House and Senate in 1996 meant that the issue would continue to be the focus of official investigation.

Clinton gained respect for his persistence and his handling of the office, ploughing on despite the various controversies, determined to rise above them rather than be dragged down by them. His re-election in 1996, following a period of notable unpopularity, appeared to confirm his reputation as "The Comeback Kid".

(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

Clinton, Bill (1946-)42nd president of the United States (1993-2001), born William Jefferson Blythe III, in Hope, Arkansas. Clinton was governor of Arkansas (1979-81, 1983-93). Clinton's relationship with the military was strained at best. During the 1992 campaign it was revealed that he evaded service in the Vietnam War, which he had protested against while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and soon after inauguration his administration was embroiled in a controversy about ending a ban on homosexuals in the military; he settled for a compromise policy, dubbed the ”Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue” policy, that satisfied no one.

Military actions during Clinton's two terms included periodic air strikes against Iraq and Operation Allied Force, a U.S.-led NATO air campaign to stop Serbian aggression in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, the largest military operation in Europe since World War II.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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

• Born: Aug. 19, 1946, Hope, Ark.
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: Georgetown University, B.S., 1968; Rhodes scholar, Oxford University, 1968–70; Yale University, J.D., 1973
• Military service: none
• Previous government service: attorney general of Arkansas, 1977–79; governor of Arkansas, 1979–81, 1983–92
• Elected President, 1992; served 1993–2001

Bill (William Jefferson) Clinton was only the second Democrat to win the Presidency since 1968. Like Jimmy Carter, he had been a Southern governor identified with the moderate rather than the liberal wing of his party. He was also the first President from the “baby boom” generation (born between 1946 and 1960).

Clinton's father was killed in an automobile accident three months before he was born, and he was adopted by his mother's second husband. Throughout his school years he was considered a leader. Selected for the Boys Nation Leadership Camp in 1963, he shook hands with John F. Kennedy at the White House. He worked for Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright as an intern during his college years at Georgetown University and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. In 1969 he organized two anti-Vietnam War rallies in London.

In 1972 Clinton worked for George McGovern as codirector of his Presidential campaign in Texas. That fall Clinton entered Yale Law School. He taught at the University of Arkansas law school from 1974 to 1976, becoming only the second future President to teach constitutional law (the first was Woodrow Wilson).

Clinton became active in Arkansas Democratic politics. After losing a race for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, he was elected attorney general of Arkansas in 1976 and then governor in 1978 with more than 60 percent of the vote. He raised taxes and was defeated for a second term, becoming the youngest ex-governor in U.S. history. He was again elected governor in 1982 and served until 1992. He was elected president of the National Governors Association and was instrumental in founding the Democratic Leadership Conference, an organization devoted to moving the Democratic party away from its liberal orientation toward a centrist position, designed to win back voters in the Southern and border states in Presidential elections.

In the spring of 1991, when President Bush's popularity stood at 91 percent in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Clinton began his run for the 1992 Presidential nomination. He defeated a weak field of contenders in the primaries despite allegations that he had engaged in extramarital affairs, had smoked marijuana, and had avoided military service during the Vietnam War.

In a three-candidate race (involving the independent candidacy of Texas billionaire Ross Perot) Clinton positioned himself as the one best equipped to manage the economy. His selection of Tennessee Democratic senator Al Gore as his running mate added strength to the ticket and took away the Republican advantage in the Southern and border states.

Clinton broke new ground in campaign strategy. He appeared on a late-night television show wearing sunglasses and played the saxophone in a successful attempt to appeal to younger voters. He followed up with many appearances on daytime television and radio talk shows.

Clinton won his first election with 42 percent of the popular vote, against 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot. He won 370 electoral college votes, compared with 160 for Bush.

In his first term, Clinton cut the annual deficits in half, laying the groundwork for growth, as well as lower unemployment and inflation. His bill to provide health insurance to all Americans was defeated after health insurers lobbied against it in Congress. Questions about his character continued to dog Clinton, especially his role in a scandal involving a failed savings and loan institution in Arkansas. In the 1994 midterm elections, Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, putting an end to Clinton's legislative agenda. Thereafter his threat to veto Republican measures enabled him to negotiate with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Robert Dole on welfare reform and environmental policy.

Clinton won reelection over former senator Bob Dole with almost half the vote of the electorate, but the Congress, which in the 1994 midterm elections had become controlled by Republicans, remained in the hands of the opposition party. Two years into his second term, Clinton had failed to win enactment of his major health care initiatives but otherwise had compiled a respectable legislative record by cooperating with the Republicans or outmaneuvering them. He reoriented the Democratic party toward the center by balancing the budget, winning crime control measures (crime rates plunged during his terms), and cooperating with the Republicans to end “welfare as we know it” by providing incentives for states to reform their programs to get recipients into jobs.

Clinton's administration also downsized the federal departments as part of a “reinventing government” initiative. Clinton worked hard to improve race relations by appointing minorities to high positions in his administartion and beginning a national dialogue on race. He appointed women to the highest positions in government, including for the first time secretary of state and attorney general. He presided over one of the longest periods of economic expansion in the 20th century, with low rates of interest, inflation, and unemployment and high rates of economic growth. In consequence, the stock market reached new highs, and so did his job approval rating in the polls.

Throughout his Presidency, Clinton remained a centrist, attacked by conservatives for his defense of affirmative action programs and abortion rights and attacked by liberals for his willingness to cut domestic programs.

In foreign affairs, Clinton acted cautiously. He pulled U.S. troops out of Somalia after they came under attack; negotiated with North Korea to halt its development of nuclear weapons; and allowed former President Jimmy Carter to negotiate an agreement with Haiti's military rulers that allowed for a peaceful occupation of Haiti. In other diplomatic efforts, Clinton worked to secure peace agreements between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Clinton and other Western leaders made the decision to launch air attacks in Bosnia against the Serbs, which led to the Dayton Accords. Then in 1999 NATO leaders acted militarily against Serbia for its repression of the Kosovars, a decision that required Clinton to use all his negotiating skills to lessen the confrontation between NATO and the Russians and between his administration and the Chinese.

Clinton also backed a “Partnership for Peace” that would eventually permit Eastern European nations to join NATO without antagonizing Russia. Twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, he established diplomatic relations with the communist government of Vietnam. Despite its human rights violations, Clinton refused to sever U.S. commercial relations with China.

Clinton showed leadership in international trade issues. He led the United States into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico against the opposition of a majority of his party and made $20 billion available to Mexico during the transition to a free-trade zone. He won congressional approval for the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lowered tariffs and provided for a World Trade Organization (WTO). Both NAFTA and the WTO led to an increase in world trade.

In January 1998 the news media reported that Clinton had had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. At first the President denied the allegation, but by late August he had admitted to having an “improper relationship” with her. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr submitted a referral to the House of Representatives outlining possible “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and the House subsequently voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice committed during the investigation of his sexual relationships with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. The vote was highly partisan, with most Democrats defending the President and most Repbulicans voting for impeachment.

In February 1999 the crisis ended when the Senate failed to muster the two-thirds vote needed to convict—or, for that matter, failed to secure even a majority. Clinton remained in office, but he was unable to pursue much of his legislative agenda because of the impeachment crisis and the conflict in the Balkans.

See also Bush, George; Gore, Albert, Jr.; Truman, Harry S.

Sources

• Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman, eds., The Clinton Presidency: First Appraisals (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1995).
• Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
• David Maraniss, First in His Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
• Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
• Stanley A. Renshon, High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition (New York: Routledge, 1998)

Clinton, Bill (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. He joined with George H. W. Bush to raise funds for the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) and Hurricane Katrina (2005), and in 2005 was appointed to a two-year term as UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, with responsibility for sustaining the international efforts for its victims. In 2009 he was named UN special envoy to Haiti, focusing on supporting the island's economic and social developement, and following the 2010 earthquake there joined with George H. Bush to raise funds for relief.

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); T. Branch, The Clinton Tapes (2009); K. Gormley, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (2010); M. Takiff, A Complicated Man (2010).

1946 -

U.S. president (1993 - 2001); closely involved in the Israeli - Palestinian peace process.

Bill Clinton received a B.A. from Georgetown University and a law degree from Yale University. Although he assumed the presidency of the United States in 1993 without a significant foreign policy background, Clinton almost immediately found himself thrust into Middle Eastern and South Asian issues. Attacks by Islamic militants against the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, and later against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, prompted Clinton to order bombing attacks against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan to disrupt the activities of Osama bin Ladin and his al-Qaʿida network. Clinton also focused considerable attention on Iraqi refusal to cooperate with United Nations (UN) weapons inspections and ordered that country bombed on several occasions.

Yet it was the Arab - Israeli peace process to which he devoted more personal attention and prestige than any other U.S. president. Clinton's administration was taken by surprise by the revelations in August 1993 that Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had agreed to a framework on peace through secret talks in Norway. Although the United States had not been involved in the talks, the subsequent Oslo Accord was signed by Israel and the PLO in Washington on the White House lawn. Clinton signed the accord as well, as a witness. When PLO chairman Yasir Arafat then reached out his hand to a hesitant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Clinton, known for his people skills, nudged the two men together for a handshake - the first public greeting ever between such high-level Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Given the long-standing U.S. refusal to deal with the PLO publicly, Clinton became the first sitting president ever to meet Arafat and to allow him to enter the country since he delivered a speech at the UN in 1974. In 1994, Clinton played host to Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein, who agreed to the second-ever peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Clinton later traveled to the Jordanian-Israeli border in October 1994 to witness the signing ceremony. In general, however, his administration allowed the various parties to the Arab - Israeli conflict to continue the pace of talks and negotiations themselves, removing the U.S. to a role of "honest broker."

Clinton's desire to keep the Israeli - Palestinian peace process alive was severely tried by the resumption of violence and the mutual recriminations between the two sides under Rabin's successor, Benjamin Netanyahu. In October 1998, Clinton invited Netanyahu and Arafat to Wye River, Maryland, where he persuaded them to negotiate a further set of Israeli redeployments from the West Bank. Two months later, he became the first U.S. president to visit the Palestinian Authority, addressing the Palestine National Council meeting in Gaza. In October 2000, Clinton traveled to Egypt for the Sharm al-Shaykh summit. His most significant effort to conclude a final Israeli - Palestinian peace treaty occurred in July 2001, when he hosted lengthy talks between Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at his presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. The talks ultimately failed and Clinton left the presidency having failed to see either a final peace settlement between Israel and the PLO or a resolution of the weapons inspections issue in Iraq.

Bibliography

Enderlin, Charles. Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the PeaceProcess in the Middle East, 1995 - 2002, translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press, 2003.

Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy and theArab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, revised edition. Berkeley, CA: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.

— MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH

An American political leader of the late twentieth century. A Democrat, he handily defeated President George H. W. Bush's bid for reelection in 1992. Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, had served as governor of Arkansas. Although harried by questions about his character during his presidential campaign, Clinton proved adept at reconciling the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic party and establishing himself as the candidate of change. He was elected to a second term in 1996. His second term was plagued by charges of sexual misconduct, which led to the Clinton impeachment. Nevertheless, he retained great popularity, partly because of a booming economy.

With his election as the forty-second president of the United States on November 3, 1992, William Jefferson Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981. Clinton began his presidency pledging to reduce the federal government's budget deficit; streamline bureaucracy; increase public investment in education, job training, and the environment; and initiate widespread domestic reforms in health care, welfare, and taxation.

Although Clinton made progress toward reducing the budget deficit during his presidency, some of his other reforms, such as his proposal for universal health care coverage, met with opposition in the 103d Congress of 1993-94. Nevertheless, Clinton made an impact on U.S. law. On many issues, from abortion to environmental protection, he steered the nation in a different direction than his Republican predecessors, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. His opportunity to make two appointments to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, would affect the law for decades to come.

Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe IV on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe III, died in a car accident before he was born, and his mother, Virginia Cassidy Blythe, married Roger Clinton four years after Blythe's death. When Clinton was seven, the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he spent the rest of his childhood.

Clinton graduated fourth in his class at Hot Springs High School in 1964. Already intent on entering politics, he enrolled at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. He completed a bachelor's degree in international studies in 1968 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, in England. After two years at Oxford, he entered Yale University Law School on a scholarship in 1970. He married Hillary Rodham on on October 11, 1975.

After a brief stint as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee, Clinton was hired in 1973 as a member of the faculty of the University of Arkansas School of Law, in Fayetteville. The next year, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House representing Arkansas's Third Congressional District. He lost by only four percentage points in a Republican stronghold. After successfully running Carter's Arkansas presidential campaign in 1976, Clinton won the office of state attorney general that same year.

In 1978, at the age of thirty-two, Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. He was the youngest governor ever to enter office in Arkansas, and the youngest governor in the nation since 1938, when Harold C. Stassen was elected governor of Minnesota at the same age. Shortly after entering office, Clinton raised the gasoline tax and automobile licensing fees in order to finance highway improvements. These tax increases proved unpopular, and he lost the governorship in the 1980 election.

Clinton spent the next two years working in private legal practice, then won reelection as governor in 1982 and held the post until his election as president. He implemented educational reforms in Arkansas during the 1980s, increasing educational funding through a higher sales tax and introducing such measures as competency tests for teachers and compulsory school attendance through age seventeen for students.

In 1992, Clinton entered a crowded field of candidates jostling for the Democratic nomination for president. His competitors included Jerry Brown, a former governor of California; Paul E. Tsongas, a former U.S. senator from Massachusetts; and Thomas R. Harkin, a U.S. senator from Iowa. Despite rumors of an affair with a singer named Gennifer Flowers, Clinton won his party's nomination. He chose Albert Gore, Jr., a U.S. senator from Tennessee, as his running mate. In the general election, he defeated President Bush and an independent candidate, H. Ross Perot. Clinton tallied 43 percent of the popular vote, against 38 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot.

Clinton was sworn in as president on January 20, 1993. At forty-six years of age, he was the youngest president since John F. Kennedy. Entering office at a time of economic recession, he immediately set to work on domestic agenda calling for economic stimulus, long-term public investments, and a deficit-reduction plan. Key aspects of this plan involved health care reform, reduction of tariffs, tax increases for the wealthy, tax cuts for the poor, spending increases for job training, and programs to increase the efficiency of the federal government.

Clinton experienced only partial success in implementing his proposals in Congress, even though his party enjoyed majority status in both the House and the Senate during the 103d Congress. He won passage of an earned income tax credit for working poor people; cut federal spending and bureaucracy; and passed the National and Community Service Trust Act (107 Stat. 785 [1993]), which provides students with tuition assistance in exchange for work on special service projects.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (32 I.L.M. 605), signed by Clinton on December 8, 1993, was hailed as landmark legislation. Although NAFTA negotiations had begun under President Bush, Clinton made the controversial trade agreement a test of his presidency and used his influence to secure its passage through Congress in the North American Free Trade Implementation Act (107 Stat. 2057 [1993]). The agreement removes tariffs on products traded between the United States, Mexico, and Canada over a fifteen-year period. The Clinton administration also secured major changes in the General Agreement on Tariffs andTrade (GATT).

Clinton did not win passage of his entire economic stimulus package, nor was he able to generate significant welfare reform. But the most noted failure of the early Clinton administration proposals was its sweeping plan to reform health care. Organized by HillaryRodham Clinton and presented to Congress in the fall of 1993, the 240,000-word document was one of the most detailed legislative proposals ever presented to Congress. The Health Care Security Act, as it was later called, would have provided health insurance to all citizens. Although the act was defeated in Congress, it spurred modest reforms that helped bring down the health care inflation rate in future years.

During the presidential campaign, Clinton had pledged to lift a ban on homosexuals in the military. His efforts to fulfill this promise during his first year in office quickly met with disapproval from military leaders, members of Congress, and the general public. After lengthy debate of the issue in Congress, Clinton moderated his initial position with a new policy that was dubbed "don't ask, don't tell." Under this policy, homosexuals are free to serve in the military as long as they do not display their homosexuality or engage in homosexual conduct. Many homosexual rights advocates voiced their disappointment with Clinton's compromise on the issue. See also armed services; gay andlesbian rights.

Other significant legislation signed by Clinton included the Family and Medical Leave Act (29 U.S.C.A. § 2601 et seq. (1993)), which allows employees to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave each year for family illness, childbirth, or adoption. The National Voter Registration Act (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973gg et seq. (1993)), also called the motor-voter law, permits citizens to register to vote by mail or while obtaining a driver's license. Similar bills had been vetoed by President Bush. See also voting rights.

Another bill signed by Clinton, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 248 [1994]), strengthens protection of family planning clinics that perform abortions by making it a federal crime to obstruct clinic entrances and harass clinic patients and per- sonnel.\

Clinton signed into law a major piece of anticrime legislation on September 13, 1994 (108 Stat. 1796). The $30.2 billion measure is a complex mixture of government spending and changes incriminal law. It provides for social programs, prisons, and the hiring of one hundred thousand police officers nationwide; the extension of the death penalty to more crimes; and the banning of nineteen different assault-style firearms.

Clinton was the first Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson to make an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Clinton appointed Ginsburg in 1993 and Breyer in 1994. Both justices were approved by the U.S. Senate with little controversy. With their moderate positions, these justices were likely to prevent threatened reversals of previous Court decisions on abortion and civil rights.

Clinton appeared less confident in the area of foreign policy. Early in his term, critics characterized his handling of U.S. policy toward conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda as indecisive. Clinton appeared to gain confidence with time, however, and claimed a number of foreign policy victories later in his administration. He successfully sent U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The Clinton administration also secured significant disarmament agreements with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, former states of the Soviet Union possessing nuclear weapons; restored normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam; helped broker peace negotiations in the Middle East and Northern Ireland; and halted North Korea's development of nuclear weapons.

In March 1992, questions arose concerning a failed Arkansas business deal that the Clintons had been involved in during the 1980s. The deal centered on the Whitewater Development Corporation, a proposed real estate development near Little Rock. Among the charges later directed at Clinton was that he had benefited from criminal actions of James McDougal, an Arkansas savings and loan owner. In particular, it was alleged that McDougal had illegally diverted money to Clinton's gubernatorial campaign fund—money that McDougal had been able to raise partly through the help of then governor Clinton.

The Whitewater scandal drew comparisons to the Watergate scandal under President Richard M. Nixon and the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan. The questions surrounding Whitewater hurt the credibility of the Clinton administration and caused the president's approval ratings to plunge.

Clinton was damaged by another issue in 1994 when Paula Corbin Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, alleged that he had sexually harassed her in 1991 while he was governor of Arkansas. Later that year, she brought a $700,000 civil suit against Clinton. It was the first time since 1962 that a sitting president had faced a civil suit.

During the midterm elections of 1994, the Republicans won major victories at every level of government, gaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, a majority of state governorships, and parity in the control of state legislatures. Admitting that he was partly responsible for his party's losses, Clinton tacked rightward with the nation and moderated many of his reform proposals in the second half of his presidential term. After House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) pledged to balance the federal budget in seven years, Clinton created his own seven-year balanced budget plan. In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton surprised many when he echoed the Republicans in declaring the end of the era of big government.

However, Clinton would not entirely sacrifice his priorities. In a 1995-96 showdown with the Republican Congress, he resisted efforts to decrease government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and he vetoed several House spending measures in late 1995. As a result of this deadlock over spending, the federal government was forced to shut down nonessential functions for weeks at a time in late 1995 and early 1996.

Clinton won reelection in 1996, against Republican candidate Robert Dole and New Reform Party candidate H. Ross Perot.

Quotes:

"Just as war is freedom's cost, disagreement is freedom's privilege."

"I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo; your time has come and gone. It's time for change in America."

"I ask you to join in a re-United States. We need to empower our people so they can take more responsibility for their own lives in a world that is ever smaller, where everyone counts. We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American."

"Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure."

"You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year."

"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again."

See more famous quotes by Bill Clinton

• Genres: Jazz

Biography

Like him or hate him -- and there were few, it seemed, who did not energetically embrace one position or the other -- it's no surprise that Bill Clinton emerged as the 1990s' most inescapable figure in the public arena. Being president of the United States didn't hurt at all, of course, and his larger-than-life persona, in both his big dreams and goals and his notorious, gossip-worthy escapades, seemed tailor-made for being played out on TV screens and the Internet the world over. As a result, even his hobbies received high-level attention, and had it not been for the twist of fate that made him a global leader, his abilities on saxophone would never have received the notice it did.

Born William Jefferson Blythe IV in rural Arkansas in 1946, Clinton's father died shortly after his birth; he only took his stepfather's name some years later. Raised partially by his grandparents, his youth was that of many children, suffering in part from the effects of a stressful home life -- his stepfather was an alcoholic who could turn abusive -- but also with many bright spots, at home and in school. Besides his academic pursuits, he was involved in music, being the drum major in his high-school band. The saxophone turned out to be another great love, and it was this instrument that he came to be identified with over time. His pursuit was essentially that of the competent enthusiast, performed with love if not with any spectacular, noteworthy skill, but certainly a cut above most rank amateurs. He played with jazz combos and liked to perform jam sessions at political and fundraising events with whatever band happened to be there.

His increasing national notoriety -- initially prompted by an unintentionally hilarious nomination speech at the 1988 Democratic convention, so long and boring that its conclusion was greeted with cheers -- helped set the stage for his run for the presidency in 1992. Seen at first as a long shot, the campaign caught fire almost every step of the way, and assisted by H. Ross Perot's third-party drive, which splintered the conservative vote, he won the office. One of his more clever strategies, with the help of his campaign team, was to aim at younger voters via judicious TV appearances. The most successful of these turned out to be the one that brought his sax playing to a huge audience. Appearing on Arsenio Hall's popular late-night talk show, he punctuated his lengthy interview with Hall with a rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel" along with Hall's house band. As a musical performance it was merely fair, in keeping with his own admitted skills, but as a memorable public image, heightened by his sunglasses, it became a hallmark of his campaign and a discussion point for political scientists and media scholars since.

After the election, Clinton didn't make it a huge point to perform publicly on his chosen instrument -- given his political and personal struggles, he likely had other things on his mind. In 1994, though, with the help of a mostly Czech backing band, he did a brief performance at a political function later released as The Prez Blows, which received praise for its relaxed, entertaining vibe. Beyond that, as of 2001, other things kept Clinton busy, yet it's very likely he's still letting off steam every so often with a version of "Summertime," and there's no doubt that he's the world's most well-known sax musician -- at least, in terms of a hobby. ~ Ned Raggett, Rovi

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