Bill Clinton | Biography, Presidency, Impeachment, & Facts | Britannica (original) (raw)

Quick Facts

Byname of:

William Jefferson Clinton

Original name:

William Jefferson Blythe III

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Bill Clinton (born August 19, 1946, Hope, Arkansas, U.S.) is the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), who oversaw the country’s longest peacetime economic expansion. In 1998 he became the second U.S. president to be impeached; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999.

(Read President Clinton’s Britannica essay on the Dayton Accords.)

Early life

Bill Clinton’s father was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before his son was born. His widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, married Roger Clinton, and, despite their unstable union (they divorced and then remarried) and her husband’s alcoholism, her son eventually took his stepfather’s name. Reared in part by his maternal grandmother, Bill Clinton developed political aspirations at an early age; they were solidified (by his own account) in July 1963, when he met and shook hands with Pres. John F. Kennedy.

Clinton enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and graduated in 1968 with a degree in international affairs. During his freshman and sophomore years he was elected student president, and during his junior and senior years he worked as an intern for Sen. J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fulbright was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, and Clinton, like many young men of his generation, opposed the war as well. He received a draft deferment for the first year of his studies as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in 1968 and later attempted to extend the deferment by applying to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Although he soon changed his plans and returned to Oxford, thus making himself eligible for the draft, he was not chosen. While at Oxford, Clinton wrote a letter to the director of the Arkansas ROTC program thanking the director for “saving” him from the draft and explaining his concern that his opposition to the war could ruin his future “political viability.” During this period Clinton also experimented with marijuana; his later claim that he “didn’t inhale” would become the subject of much ridicule.

After graduating from Yale University Law School in 1973, Clinton joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas School of Law, where he taught until 1976. In 1974 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1975 he married a fellow Yale Law graduate, attorney Hillary Rodham (Hillary Clinton), who thereafter took an active role in his political career. In the following year he was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and in 1978 he won the governorship, becoming the youngest governor the country had seen in 40 years.

Richard M. Nixon. Richard Nixon during a 1968 campaign stop. President Nixon Britannica Quiz U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz

At a glance: the Clinton presidency

Governor of Arkansas

After an eventful two-year term as governor, Clinton failed in his reelection bid in 1980, the year his daughter and only child, Chelsea, was born. After apologizing to voters for unpopular decisions he had made as governor (such as highway-improvement projects funded by increases in the state gasoline tax and automobile licensing fees), he regained the governor’s office in 1982 and was successively reelected three more times by substantial margins. A pragmatic, centrist Democrat, he imposed mandatory competency testing for teachers and students and encouraged investment in the state by granting tax breaks to industries. He became a prominent member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that sought to recast the party’s agenda away from its traditional liberalism and move it closer to what it perceived as the center of American political life.

Clinton declared his candidacy for president while still governor of Arkansas. Just before the New Hampshire presidential primary, his campaign was nearly derailed by widespread press coverage of his alleged 12-year affair with an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers. In a subsequent interview watched by millions of viewers on the television news program 60 Minutes, Clinton and his wife admitted to having marital problems. Clinton’s popularity soon rebounded, and he scored a strong second-place showing in New Hampshire—a performance for which he labeled himself the “Comeback Kid.” On the strength of his middle-of-the-road approach, his apparent sympathy for the concerns of ordinary Americans (his statement “I feel your pain” became a well-known phrase), and his personal warmth, he eventually won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. Facing incumbent Pres. George Bush, Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, argued that 12 years of Republican leadership had led to political and economic stagnation. In November the Clinton-Gore ticket defeated both Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot with 43 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot; Clinton defeated Bush in the electoral college by a vote of 370 to 168. Clinton thus became the first member of the baby boom generation to occupy the White House.