Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States, and the second to be impeached.

He
oversaw the country's longest peacetime economic expansion.
I judge my presidency primarily in terms of its impact on people's lives. That is how I kept
score: all the millions of people with new jobs, new homes and college aid; the people who left
welfare for work; the families helped by the family leave law; the people living in safer
neighborhoodsall those people have stories, and they're better ones now.
Bill Clinton

Synopsis
Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. In 1975, he married Hillary
Rodham. 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. Clinton was
elected president in 1992. Six years later, in 1998, he was impeached by the House of
Representatives, but was acquitted by the Senate in 1999.

Early Life
William Jefferson Clinton, better known as Bill Clinton, was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope,
Arkansas, a small town with a population of about 8,000. His father, William Jefferson Blythe,
died in a car crash several months before Clinton was born, leaving him in the care of his mother,
Virginia Cassidy Blythe. To provide for her son, Virginia moved to New Orleans, Louisiana to
complete two years of nursing school, while Clinton stayed with his grandparents, Eldridge and
Edith Cassidy. Clinton's grandparents were strict disciplinarians, who instilled in him the
importance of a good education. "My grandparents had a lot to do with my early commitment to
learning," Clinton later recalled. "They taught me to count and read. I was reading little books
when I was 3."
Clinton's mother returned to Arkansas with a degree in nursing in 1950, and later that year she
married an automobile salesman named Roger Clinton. Two years later, the family moved from
Hope to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Although neither his parents nor his grandparents were religious,
Clinton became a devoted Baptist from a very young age. On Sunday mornings, he woke himself
up, put on his best dress clothes and walked half a mile to Park Place Baptist Church to attend
services alone. Clinton was especially drawn to the gospel music performed at his church. He
began playing the jazz saxophone, and by the time he graduated from high school, many
considered him the best saxophonist in the city.
Throughout his childhood, Clinton grew increasingly disturbed by his stepfather's drinking and
abusive behavior toward his mother and younger half-brother. At the age of 14, already standing
more than 6 feet tall, Clinton finally snapped. He told his stepfather, "If you want them, you'll
have to go through me." The abuse stopped, but Roger Clinton's drinking did not, and Clinton's
mother divorced him in 1962.

Clinton attended Hot Springs High School, a segregated all-white school, where he was a stellar
student and a star member of the jazz band. The principal of Hot Springs High School, Johnnie
Mae Mackey, placed a special emphasis on producing students devoted to public service, and she
developed a strong bond with the smart and politically inclined Clinton.
In June 1963, as a 17-year-old high school junior, he attended Arkansas Boys State, where he
was elected the Arkansas representative to the American Legion's Boys Nation, earning him an
invitation to meet President John F. Kennedy at the White House Rose Garden. A photograph of
the young Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy has become an iconic image
symbolizing a passing of the baton between generations of modern Democratic leadership. On
the same trip, Clinton met another of his political heroes, Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee J. William Fulbright. Clinton said, "Fulbright I admired to no end ... He had
a real impact on my wanting to be a citizen of the world."

College Education
Upon graduating from high school in 1964, Clinton attended Georgetown University to study
international affairs. He immediately thrust himself into university politics, serving as the
president of his freshman and sophomore classes. However, Clinton lost the election for student
body president during his junior year, most likely because his classmates found him "too
political." Clinton began devoting his time to working as a clerk for the Foreign Relations
Committee under Senator Fulbright, one of Congress's most outspoken critics of the Vietnam
War. Clinton came to share Fulbright's view that the war was both immoral and contrary to the
United States' best interests.
After graduating from Georgetown in 1968, Clinton won a highly prestigious Rhodes scholarship
to study for two years at Oxford University. However, shortly after his arrival in England,
Clinton received his draft notice and was forced to return to Arkansas. Clinton avoided military
service by enrolling in the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas Law School, but instead
of attending law school that fall, he instead returned to Oxford. Apparently feeling guilty about
his decision to avoid the draft, Clinton resubmitted his name to the draft board, but he received a
high enough lottery number to assure that he would not have to serve in Vietnam.
Upon the completion of his Rhodes scholarship, Clinton entered Yale Law School, where he met
a bright young woman named Hillary Rodham, who shared his political ambitions. The pair
graduated from Yale in 1973 and married two years later in 1975. They had their only child, a
daughter named Chelsea Clinton, in 1980. After graduating from Yale, the Clintons moved to
Arkansas, where Bill began teaching at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Law School
and immediately thrust himself into politics. In 1974, he challenged Republican incumbent John
Paul Hammerschmidt for his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Clinton lost the race, but
it was much closer than anyone had expected and the race marked him as a rising political star of
the Arkansas Democratic Party. Two years later, Clinton was elected state attorney general, and
then in 1978, at the age of 32, he easily defeated Republican Lynn Lowe to become one of the
youngest governors in American history.

Governor of Arkansas
Working closely with his wife Hillary, Clinton set out on an ambitious agenda to reform the
state's education and health care systems. However, hampered by his youth and political
inexperience, Clinton made several big blunders as governor. He poorly handled riots by Cuban
refugees interned at Fort Chaffee and instituted a highly unpopular fee hike on auto licenses. At
the time, Arkansas governors served only two-year terms, and at the conclusion of Clinton's first
term in 1980 a little-known Republican challenger named Frank White shockingly knocked him
out of office. Although the loss devastated Clinton, he refused to let it put an end to his
promising political career. After working for two years at a Little Rock law firm, in 1982 Clinton
once again sought out the governorship. Freely admitting his past mistakes and beseeching voters
to give him a second chance, Clinton swept back into office. This time Clinton would hold onto
the job for four consecutive terms.
As governor, Clinton took a centrist approach, championing a mix of traditionally liberal and
conservative causes. Appointing Hillary Clinton to head a committee on education reform, he
instituted more rigorous educational standards and established competence tests for teachers.
Clinton also championed affirmative action, appointing record numbers of blacks to key
government positions. At the same time, Clinton favored the death penalty and put in place
welfare reforms designed to put recipients back to work. Also noteworthy was Clinton's tactic of
running the government like a political campaign, constantly consulting public opinion polls and
pitching policies to the people through carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns.
By the late 1980s, Clinton also sought to increase his own national visibility. From 1986-1987,
he served as the chairman of the National Governors Association, and in the early 1990s he
became actively involved in the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats
seeking to move the party in a centrist direction. However, at the 1988 Democratic National
Convention, Clinton squandered an opportunity to announce himself as an obvious future
presidential candidate when he delivered an excruciatingly long and boring nomination speech
for Michael Dukakis. In a skillful bit of political damage control, Clinton quickly made fun of his
disastrous speech on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.