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Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
Dual Lives
When Bill was four, Virginia married car salesman Roger Clinton, whose last name
Bill would legally adopt in his mid-teens. A few years later, the Clinton family moved
to the resort town of Hot Springs. An outgoing and popular young man, Bill excelled
in high school as a student and as a leader of school government, and he became a top
saxophone player. On Sundays he would walk to the local Baptist church, usually by
himself.
But he was leading a dual life. At home, he was defending his mother and his much
younger half-brother, Roger Jr., from his stepfather Roger Sr.'s drunken and abusive
tirades. "Bill Clinton always found himself trying to redeem and rescue his family,"
historian William Chafe remarked in the film. "Part of doing that is to... put yourself
in the position of rescuing not just your family, but everybody, including yourself, by
doing good."
As Bill himself later observed, however, "No one can live parallel lives with complete
success" (My Life, 149).
Clinton meets JFK in 1963.
Early Influences
As a teenager, Bill considered careers in music and medicine. But in 1963 he took a
trip to Washington, D.C. as a delegate to Boys Nation; in the White House Rose
Garden, he scrambled to make sure he was at the front of the line to shake hands with
John F. Kennedy, the president he had defended in a ninth-grade debate. That same
year, alone in his den in Arkansas, Bill watched Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A
Dream" speech on television. He was moved to tears by portrayal of a "beloved
community," and he memorized the address. At age 16, he made the decision to
forego music and medicine and go into public service. "That's what I wanted to do,"
he would tell O magazine in 2004, "to put things together, make it better for people."
Anti-War Sentiments
Bill returned to Washington to attend Georgetown University, graduating Phi Beta
Kappa in 1968 with a degree in international relations, and he won a Rhodes
Scholarship to Oxford University. Strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, he worked
at the national headquarters of the Vietnam Moratorium and helped organize
demonstrations at Oxford in the autumn of 1969. Although he morally opposed the
draft, he felt he had to accept it because of his political ambitions. Opponents later
criticized him for his antiwar efforts, and accused him of using his connection to
Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, for whom he had interned during the summer of
1967, to avoid being inducted into the military.
A Political Natural
Returning to his home state after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, Bill
taught law at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, but his sights were still set on
politics. He had deep connections there, including a large extended family spread
across the state, and his political career took off rapidly. In his first bid for elected
office, a run for Congress in 1974, he campaigned tirelessly and lost by just 5,000
votes against an entrenched Republican incumbent. Despite skepticism about his
liberal background and the "outsiders" -- including Hillary -- who worked on his
campaigns, he attracted public attention and showed himself to be a political natural.
He also caught the attention of many women, a fact that did not go unnoticed in his
circle and one that would haunt his political career.
Despite the devastating election, Bill decided to run for governor again. He
obsessively studied what had gone wrong, and in 1982 he was elected governor of
Arkansas. He would remain governor for the next 10 years.
In 1988, Bill suffered another public setback when his nomination speech for Michael
Dukakis at the Democratic National Convention fell flat. Rebounding almost
immediately, Bill appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show where he poked fun at
himself and famously played his saxophone with the band, regaining public approval.
But there were echoes of his first gubernatorial term in Arkansas: public opinion
about him personally was divided; he and Hillary were inexperienced in handling
Washington politics; and the Clintons had powerful enemies. The failure of his
healthcare reform effort, an enormous undertaking he had pegged as his signature
initiative and tasked Hillary with leading, was a devastating setback that helped
Republicans turn the midterm elections into a "referendum on Bill Clinton" (The
Choice: How Bill Clinton Won, Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 2005, 52) and
sweep into power in Congress.
In 1995, a budgetary standoff with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich resulted in a
lengthy government shutdown late in the year. The public eventually sympathized
with Clinton, who refused to capitulate despite the possible political impact. "From
that moment on," recalled Clinton's chief of staff Leon Panetta, "it became a renewal
of Bill Clinton, in terms of who he was, both within himself and with the American
people."
But his second term was rife with scandal. Investigations begun during his first term
into the Clintons' investment in Arkansas' Whitewater land deal resulted in Bill
appointing a special prosecutor in 1994, an action he would later refer to as the "worst
mistake" of his presidency. The investigation, led by independent council Kenneth
Starr, would dog the administration for the remainder of Clinton's presidency. In early
1998, just as the Whitewater investigations were stalling due to lack of evidence,
news of Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky leaked, and
suspicions of illegal conduct prompted a new round of investigations. Clinton refused
to resign in the wake of the scandal, saying during a press conference on February 6,
1998, "I was elected to do a job. I think the American people know two or three things
about me now.... And I think they know I've worked very, very hard for them." In
December, Bill Clinton became the second president in U.S. history to be impeached
by the House of Representatives. In 1999, the Senate acquitted the president, who then
personally apologized to the American people.
Despite the scandals and breach of public trust that marked his time in the White
House, Bill Clinton is credited with significant achievements as president.
Internationally, he helped end the Bosnian War and worked to promote peace
settlements in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. At home, he eliminated the
federal deficit, expanded international trade, and presided over the longest peacetime
economic expansion in U.S. history. He left office with the highest approval ratings of
any postwar president, and remains one of the most popular U.S. presidents in recent
history.