Bill Clinton

I

Introduction

Bill Clinton (1946- ), American politician, 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001) and the second president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Clinton, who was in his fifth term as the governor of Arkansas when he was elected, was the third youngest person to become president; the first to be born after World War II.

II

Early Life

Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, as William Jefferson Blythe IV. His father, William Jefferson Blythe III, died in a car accident three months before Bill was born. His mother, Virginia Cassidy, married Roger Clinton when Bill was four years old, and the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. At the age of 15 Bill legally changed his last name to Clinton. He attended Georgetown University, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale University Law School, where he graduated in 1973.

Clinton had shown an interest in politics at an early age and in 1974 ran for Congress, nearly defeating four-term Republican Party incumbent Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt in a close race. In 1976 Clinton was elected state Attorney-General and directed Jimmy Carter’s successful Democratic presidential campaign in Arkansas. He married Hillary Rodham in 1977; they have one daughter, Chelsea. In 1978, at the age of 32, Clinton became the youngest state governor in the United States. Largely owing to his raising highway taxes, in his zeal to accomplish his reform platform, Clinton lost re-election to his Republican opponent, Frank White, in 1980. Two years later, running on education reform as a top priority, Clinton again became governor.

In 1986 and 1987 Clinton served as chair of the National Governors’ Association. His political agenda included concerns about health and consumer issues, the environment, education, and the deteriorating American infrastructure. In 1991 he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. An early front runner, Clinton garnered the nomination in July 1992. With his running mate, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, Clinton took an early lead over the Republican incumbent President George Bush and Vice-President Dan Quayle by presenting a national economic strategy that proposed government investment, reduction of the national debt, and tax reform. Clinton defeated Bush in the November national election, becoming the 42nd president of the United States.

III

First Term

Clinton’s first major domestic initiative, announced in February 1993, was a five-year, $700-billion programme to increase funds for education, job training, and public works. He also cut other federal spending, especially on defence; and raise revenues, in part through a broad-based energy tax. Early in his term he appointed First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to head a task force on health-care reform. Clinton also sought to end the ban on homosexuals in the US military. After heavy opposition from military leaders who opposed lifting the restriction, Clinton endorsed a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that would ease, rather than end, the ban. Clinton also tried to address growing concerns about rising violent crime and pressed for Congressional support of anti-crime legislation.

Clinton campaigned heavily for support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The pact, establishing a free-trade zone among the three countries, was barely passed by Congress and took effect in January 1994. In February, Clinton announced the end of a 19-year-long trade embargo against Vietnam. In other foreign-policy matters, Clinton was criticized for being indecisive, specifically regarding the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War, sanctions against the military regime in Haiti, and US military action in Somalia. The Clinton administration also faced criticism for mishandling the so-called Whitewater Affair, a controversy in which the Clintons’ role in a failed property venture in Arkansas was questioned. In June 1995, however, a congressional report largely vindicated the Clintons’ version of events.

In March 1994 the last US troops were withdrawn from Somalia. Throughout 1994 Clinton pressured Western European countries to take strong measures against the Bosnian Serbs, but in November, after the Serbs seemed on the verge of overwhelming the Bosnians in several strongholds, he changed course and pushed conciliation with the Serbs to reach a settlement with the Bosnians. A ceasefire, partly brokered by former president Jimmy Carter, came into operation around Sarajevo at the end of the year until hostilities resumed there in June 1995. In September 1994 a mixture of diplomatic and military pressure was successful in bringing about the voluntary exile of the military rulers of Haiti and the return to power of the elected government. Clinton also had success in helping to bring about a formal peace declaration between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993, and between Israel and Jordan in July 1994; and also in persuading North Korea to abandon its existing nuclear power plants and accept replacement plants from which the production of weapons-grade material would be less feasible.

The congressional elections of 1994 brought a dramatic end to the Democratic Party’s control of the Senate and House of Representatives, giving the Republicans majorities in both houses simultaneously for the first time in 40 years. Republican Newt Gingrich, committed to a conservative agenda, became the new Speaker of the House. Thwarted on domestic issues in particular, Clinton put new energy into foreign policy and trade. Against British wishes, he received Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams to the White House in March 1995 as his contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process; though shunning him after the Irish Republican Army resumed its campaign of violence. In December 1995 Clinton defied an order to hand over to a Senate committee documents relating to the Whitewater Affair: the case was expected to go before the Supreme Court. Confrontation with the Republican-dominated Congress over budget cuts led to several temporary shutdowns in government business in late 1995, as Clinton resisted demands that he cut government spending. He was rapturously received when he visited Ireland in December 1995. In April 1996, a bill approved by Congress and passed by Clinton gave him, for the first time, the right to veto single items within spending bills; in the same month, Clinton and Congress finally reached an agreement on the state budget, interpreted as a victory for Clinton against Congress Republicans. Also in April, Clinton gave videotaped testimony in the Whitewater hearings. Running against the Republican candidate Bob Dole, Clinton was re-elected president in the elections held on November 5, 1996, with a comfortable majority, although the simultaneous legislative elections left the Republicans maintaining their majority in both houses of Congress. Controversy followed the campaign, with the Clinton camp allegedly receiving large campaign contributions from Chinese sources and granting favours such as rides in the president’s jet Air Force One to contributors.

IV

Second Term and Impeachment

In 1997 a bipartisan bill to balance the federal budget and cut taxes was passed by Congress, a policy that promised to eliminate the federal deficit. Unexpectedly robust growth of the economy meant that the deficit was eliminated by 1998, after which a record budget surplus of US$123 billion (1999) began to accrue. In January 1998, as part of an alleged sexual scandal, it was claimed that Clinton had incited former White House assistant Monica Lewinsky to lie to investigators. The furore threatened to destroy his presidency. In April an earlier harassment suit brought by the former Arkansas state worker Paula Jones was dropped. However, in August 1998 Clinton became the first US president to testify before a criminal grand jury, when he was called to answer accusations relating to the Lewinsky affair, and in a televised address he admitted having had a relationship with Lewinsky. In October 1998 the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, voting on party lines, approved a formal impeachment inquiry, and in December approved his impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, making Clinton only the second president in American history to face impeachment proceedings. In February 1999, the Senate formally acquitted Clinton on all charges by a substantial majority, and also decided against censuring him. From March 1999, Clinton drove political leadership of the military campaign by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to force the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to peacefully resolve the status of the secessionist province of Kosovo.

In September Clinton announced that the United States would be taking steps to bring debt relief to the world's poorest nations by offering to write off 100 per cent of their loans. This built on an agreement of June 1999 to cancel all overseas developmental assistance debt and 90 per cent of commercial debt for countries that are eligible for the highly indebted poor countries (HIPC) debt relief programme. In October he blasted the Senate for failing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), accusing the Republican-dominated body of being 'new isolationists'. In a visit to Greece in November he backed the Greek government's claim for the return of the Elgin marbles from Britain. In January 2000 he reappointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve—it is Greenspan's policies that have been credited with providing economic stability in the United States for the duration of Clinton's administration. In April he called for Elian Gonzalez and his Cuban father to be reunited—Elian had been the focus of a custody battle between Miami Cubans and Castro's Cuba since he had been the only survivor of a shipwreck carrying him and his mother to the United States.

As the Middle East peace process began to unravel, Clinton attempted to mediate between Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak, first at a summit in Camp David in July and then in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in October, but with little success. In the same month trade relations with China were finally normalized by Congress, despite continued human rights concerns, a year after Clinton had made the agreement that would lead to a lowering of bilateral trade barriers. Kept out of the presidential campaign of Al Gore, who was looking to make a clean break with the scandal of the Clinton years, he lent his phenomenal campaigning skills to help his wife win the bitterly contested race for the Senate in New York, before becoming the first president to visit Vietnam since the end of the war there 25 years previously. One of his last acts of office was to secure a deal with the special prosecutor in the Monica Lewinsky case, whereby in exchange for admitting giving misleading information under oath, a US$25,000 fine, and a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law licence, he would not face prosecution once out of office. His successor to the presidency was George W. Bush.