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William Jefferson Clinton
William Jefferson Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope, Ark., on August 19, 1946. He was named for his father, who was killed in an automobile accident before Clinton's birth. Virginia Kelley, his mother, set an example of hard work and perseverance. She eventually married Roger Clinton, a car dealer, whose name the future president later adopted.
In high school in Hot Springs, Ark., Clinton considered becoming a doctor, but politics beckoned after a meeting with President John F. Kennedy in Washington on a Boys' Nation trip. He earned a B.S. in international affairs in 1968 at Georgetown University, having spent his junior year working for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford between 1968 and 1970. He then attended Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham, a Wellesley graduate. The couple has one child, Chelsea.
Clinton taught at the University of Arkansas (1974-1976), was elected state attorney general (1976), and in 1979 became the nation's youngest governor. But he was defeated for reelection by voters irate at a rise in the state's automobile license fees. In 1982 he was elected again. This time he reined in liberal tendencies to accommodate the conservative bent of the voters.
Clinton became the 42nd U.S. president following a turbulent political campaign. He overcame vigorous personal attacks on his character and on his actions during the Vietnam War, which he actively opposed. The "character issue" stemmed from allegations of infidelity, which Clinton refuted in a television interview in which he and Hillary avowed their relationship was solid. Throughout his term in office, Clinton was dogged by allegations in connection with the Whitewater real estate deal in which he and Hillary were involved prior to the 1992 election. Though the Clintons were never accused of any wrongdoing, their partners in the venture, including the governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker, were convicted of fraud and conspiracy in a trial in 1996.
The problems faced by the new president were as daunting as they were varied. Almost immediately after his inauguration in January 1993 he became embroiled with the military leadership over a politically sensitive issue-his campaign pledge to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the armed services. He ultimately agreed to a compromise, dubbed the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. This controversy was soon supplanted by a series of blunders in appointments to fill positions in his administration.
Early in his tenure, the new president encountered a major defeat when Congress rejected his proposed economic stimulus package. He later won approval for his budget despite criticisms by conservatives in Congress, including Democrats, who demanded more spending cuts, fewer taxes, and caps on entitlement programs. In his second year, Clinton faced persistent troubles on the domestic front, with acrimonious battles raging over health care, welfare reform, crime prevention, and White House personnel problems. Clinton appointed his wife to craft a health care reform package, but after months of effort the plan failed to gain sufficient support. Clinton had to reduce his objectives from massive overhaul to incremental reform. Though the health care reform was defeated, Clinton won a major victory with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Congress also approved a deficit reduction bill, rules allowing abortion counseling in federally funded clinics, a waiting period for handgun purchases (the Brady Bill), and a national service program.
As his tenure wore on, Clinton came under increasing pressure from Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who in 1994 took over the investigation of the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater land deal. Over time, Starr's brief was expanded to include other matters, such as the death of White House lawyer Vincent Foster, the handling of firings in the White House travel office, and allegations of sexual misconduct and cover-ups by the White House.
Foreign affairs, once a weak point for a man elected on a domestic economic agenda, became a proving ground for Clinton. With issues erupting around the world, in places as disparate as Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Cuba, Clinton was able to capitalize on several opportunities to improve his international image. The Israel-Jordan peace agreement was signed at the White House in the summer of 1994 by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein. In the fall of that year, the administration succeeded in restoring Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power. Clinton scored again by bolstering Russian president Boris Yeltsin's popularity with promises of economic aid.
But the problems in Eastern Europe put an end to his winning streak. Though Clinton wanted desperately to end the brutal "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and offer security to the 2 million refugees scrambling from one U.N. safe haven to another, he did not want to commit American ground troops to do so. A peace accord, which included provisions for American troops in a peacekeeping role, was ultimately constructed by Richard Holbrook and signed in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. The peace accord, however tenuous, greatly improved Clinton's standing in the eyes of the international community.
Foreign affairs continued to plague Clinton's presidency in 1996. In Russia, Clinton's support for Yeltsin drew criticism as the war for Chechen independence erupted. In the Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian disputes continued and Iraq invaded Kurdish territory. Clinton responded to the Iraqi aggression by ordering missile attacks on Iraqi planes and ground forces.
The Republican sweep of the 1994 elections resulted in a Republican-controlled Congress, and 1995 was largely a tug-of-war between the White House and Capitol Hill over budget-balancing and other key points of the G.O.P.'s "Contract with America," crafted by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
In 1996, anticipating the fall election, Clinton moved to the political center by approving several major and widely popular legislative measures, including a welfare-reform bill that reversed several decades of federal policy, for which he was sharply criticized by liberals. He also enacted measures to improve access to health care, to raise the minimum wage by 90 cents per hour to $5.15, and to impose sanctions on companies that do business with Iran and Libya. In a move to discourage teenage smoking, Clinton approved a series of curbs on cigarette advertising and introduced plans for the FDA to regulate nicotine as a controlled substance.
Clinton's second term saw a shift away from the budget battlefield, as a soaring economy facilitated an agreement on balanced-budget legislation in 1997. But the character issues that had dogged Clinton since he first emerged on the national scene soon came to dominate his second term. In 1997 a series of investigations aimed to uncover irregularities in Democratic fund-raising for the 1996 election. Though Clinton and Vice President Gore insisted their actions were within the letter of the law and no charges were brought, the ensuing controversy highlighted the need for campaign-finance reform. Ironically, Clinton had called for such reforms during his first term, but could not get the Republican-controlled Congress to cooperate.
Clinton was able to strengthen his place on the world stage in 1998. Just before Easter, former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, Clinton's hand-picked envoy, helped broker a historic peace agreement that promised to end decades of fighting between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. In May-June Clinton made a controversial diplomatic visit to China. Critics balked at Clinton's decision to visit a country linked to questionable Democratic Party campaign contributions and at his decision to visit Tiananmen Square, the site of the notorious June 1989 massacre in which the Chinese government killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators. Despite pre-trip criticism, Clinton was generally praised for making advancements in U.S. relations with the most populous country in the world while taking a clear stance against Chinese human rights practices.
But Clinton's foreign policy gains were far overshadowed by Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation of Clinton's conduct in two sexually-charged cases. The President seemed to win a point in April when a federal judge in Arkansas threw out a long-pending sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Corbin Jones, a former Arkansas state employee. But Starr had already begun investigating the possibility that Clinton had perjured himself in his testimony in the Jones case over an alleged affair with a young White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky. On Jan. 17, Clinton adamantly denied ever having engaged in sexual relations with Lewinsky, or of asking anyone to lie to cover up the affair.
Despite the explosive charges, Clinton's overall popularity among Americans remained high. The country seemed willing to ignore Clinton's alleged weaknesses in character as long as the economy was good, his policies were popular, and the United States remained strong abroad. On August 17, 1998, Clinton made history by becoming the first U.S. president to testify in front of a grand jury, in an investigation of his own possibly criminal conduct. In an address to the nation that evening, he now admitted to having had an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky, but reaffirmed that he did not ask anyone to lie about or cover up the affair.
By August, the Lewinsky scandal so dominated Clinton's agenda that when he responded to the bombing of two American embassies in Africa by sending U.S. cruise missiles to strike alleged terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan, many questioned whether the strike was a ploy to draw attention away from his domestic plight.
Independent Counsel Starr-a conservative Republican whose investigation was seen by Clinton supporters as a politically-inspired vendetta-delivered his report on the presidential investigation to the House of Representatives on Sept. 9. While the report outlined 11 possible grounds for impeachment stemming from the president's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, it did not cite any impeachable offenses relating to the initial subjects of the investigation, including the Whitewater real estate deal. Included among Starr's accusations against President Clinton were perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice. The president's decision to testify before the grand jury by video transmission rather than in person led to the controversial public release of the videotapes, in which Clinton was shown trying to avoid discussing the details of his sexual relationship. Public and political reactions to Clinton's testimony varied greatly, even within the Democratic party.
Although polls clearly indicated that Americans had no stomach for impeachment hearings, and the public's conviction was backed by the November elections-Republicans lost five House seats-impeachment moved forward in highly partisan and acrimonious congressional proceedings. In December the House Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment: for grand jury perjury, civil suit perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Republicans rejected Democrats' call to censure Clinton for "reprehensible conduct" rather than continue with impeachment, but on Dec. 19, Clinton became the second president in American history to be impeached. Two of the four articles of impeachment passed (Article I, grand jury perjury, and Article III, obstruction of justice), the votes drawn along party lines.
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