Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton was President of the United States from 1993 to 2001, presiding over the longest peacetime economic expansion to that point and becoming the second president to be impeached. Born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope, Arkansas in 1946, three months after his father died in a car crash, he took the surname of a stepfather who was violent when drunk. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and took a law degree at Yale, where he met Hillary Rodham. He became attorney general of Arkansas in 1977 and governor in 1979 at thirty-two, lost re-election in 1980, and returned in 1983 for a further decade. He led the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to move the party towards the centre after three presidential defeats. He won in 1992 against George H. W. Bush in a three-way race with Ross Perot. His health-care reform, led by Hillary Clinton, failed in 1994, and Republicans took Congress that year for the first time in forty years. He then governed by triangulation, signing welfare reform in 1996 with work requirements and time limits, a crime bill in 1994 that increased incarceration, and financial deregulation including the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Deficits became surpluses. Abroad he brokered the Good Friday Agreement, the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian war, and NAFTA, and later described his failure to act on the Rwandan genocide as his greatest regret. He was impeached in December 1998 for perjury and obstruction over his relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and acquitted by the Senate in February 1999. He left office with approval near sixty-five per cent.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001)
