William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton (born
William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician
who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to
2001.
Inaugurated at age 46, he was the
third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and
was the first president of the baby boomer generation.
Clinton has been described as a New
Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third
Way philosophy of governance.
Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton
became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of
Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes
Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford.
He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton,
who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and
was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009.
Both Clintons received law degrees from
Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of
Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state’s education system, and served as
Chair of the National Governors Association.
Clinton was elected president in 1992,
defeating incumbent president George H.W. Bush. As president, Clinton
presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in
American history.
He signed into law the North American
Free Trade Agreement. He implemented Don’t ask, don’t tell, a
controversial intermediate step to full gay military integration.
After a failed health care reform attempt, Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, for the first time in forty years.
Two years later, the re-elected Clinton
became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D.
Roosevelt to win a second full term as president.
He successfully passed welfare reform and
the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing health
coverage for millions of children.
Later, he was impeached for perjury and
obstruction of justice in a scandal involving a White House intern, but
was acquitted by the U.S.
Senate and served his complete term of
office. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus
between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton’s
presidency.
Clinton left office with the highest
end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II.
Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian
work.
Based on his philanthropic worldview,
Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address
international causes such as prevention of AIDS and global warming.
In 2004, he released his autobiography My
Life, and was involved in his wife’s and then Barack Obama’s campaigns
for president in 2008.
In 2009, he was named United Nations
Special Envoy to Haiti, and after the 2010 earthquake he teamed with
George W. Bush to form the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. Since leaving
office, Clinton has been rated highly in public opinion polls of U.S.
presidents.
