Author Clinton William Jefferson

iod of peace-time economic expansion in American history, which included a balanced budget and a reported federal surplus.[6][7] Based on Congressional accounting rules, at the end of his presidency Clinton reported a surplus of $559 billion. On the heels of a failed attempt at health care reform with a Democratic Congress, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years.[8] Two years later, in 1996, Clinton was re-elected and became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term as president.[9] Later he was impeached for obstruction of justice, but was subsequently acquitted by the U.S. Senate.[10][11] Clinton left office with an approval rating at 66%, the highest end of office rating of any president since World War II.[12] Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes such as treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and global warming. In 2004, he released his autobiography My Life, and was involved in his wife Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently in that of President Barack Obama. In 2009, he was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti.[13] Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe, III, in Hope, Arkansas.[14] His father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before Bill was born.[1] Following his birth, in order to study nursing, his mother Virginia Dell Cassidy (1923-1994), traveled to New Orleans, leaving Bill in Hope with grandparents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and operated a small grocery store.[15] At a time when the Southern United States were racially segregated, Bill's grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all racial groups.[15] In 1950, Bill's mother returned from nursing school and shortly thereafter married Roger Clinton, who together with his brother owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas.[15] The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950. Although he assumed use of his stepfather's surname, it was not until Billy (as he was known then) turned fourteen that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather.[15] Clinton says he remembers his stepfather as a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and, at times, his half-brother Roger, Jr. Clinton intervened multiple times with the threat of violence in order to protect them.[15][16] In Hot Springs, Clinton attended St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School - where he was an active student leader, avid reader, and musician.[15] He was in the chorus and played the tenor saxophone, winning first chair in the state band's saxophone section. He briefly considered dedicating his life to music, but as he noted in his autobiography My Life: In 1963, two influential moments in Clinton's life contributed to his decision to become a public figure. One was his visit to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy, as a Boys Nation senator.[15][16] The other was listening to Martin Luther King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech (he memorized Dr. King's words).[17] With the aid of scholarships, Clinton attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (B.S. F.S.) degree in 1968. He spent the summer of 1967, the summer before his senior year, working as an intern for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.[15] While in college he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Clinton was also a member of Youth Order of DeMolay, but he never actually became a Freemason.[18] He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi's National Honorary Band Fraternity, Inc.[19] Upon graduation he won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, though as a result of switching programs and leaving early for Yale, he did not obtain a degree there.[16][20] He developed an interest in rugby union, playing at Oxford[21] and later for the Little Rock Rugby club in Arkansas. While at Oxford he also participated in Vietnam War protests, including organizing an October 1969 Moratorium event.[15] In later life he admitted to smoking cannabis at the university, but famously claimed that he "never inhaled".[15][16] During his college years, Clinton's political opponents claim he used the political influence of a U.S. Senator who employed him as an aide to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.[22] Col. Eugene Holmes, an Army officer who was involved in Clinton's case, issued a notarized statement during the 1992 presidential campaign: "...I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fullbright's office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program... I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification."[23][24] Clinton did not join the ROTC program, but the temporary ROTC status prevented him from being drafted. This was not illegal, but it became a source of criticism from conservatives and some Vietnam veterans.[25][26][27] After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale Law School and obtained a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1973.[16] While at Yale, he began dating law student Hillary Rodham, who was a year ahead of him. They married on October 11, 1975, and their only child, Chelsea, was born on February 27, 1980. During Yale, Clinton took a job with the McGovern campaign and was assigned to lead McGovern's effort in Texas. He spent considerable time in Dallas, Texas, at the McGovern campaign's local headquarters on Lemmon Avenue where he had an office. There, Clinton worked with Ron Kirk, who was later elected mayor of Dallas twice, future governor of Texas Ann Richards, and then unknown television director (and future filmmaker) Steven Spielberg. After graduating from Yale Law School, Clinton returned to Arkansas and became a professor at the University of Arkansas. A year later, he ran for the House of Representatives in 1974. The incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt, defeated Clinton by a 52% to 48% margin. Without opposition in the general election, Clinton was elected Arkansas Attorney General in 1976.[16] Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978, making him the youngest governor in the country at age thirty-two. He worked on educational reform and Arkansas's roads, with wife Hillary leading a successful committee on urban health care reform. However, his term included an unpopular motor vehicle tax and citizens' anger over the escape of Cuban refugees (from the Mariel boatlift) detained in Fort Chaffee in 1980. Monroe Schwarzlose of Kingsland in Cleveland County, polled 31% of the vote against Clinton in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1980. Some suggested Schwarzlose's unexpected voter turnout foreshadowed Clinton's defeat in the general election that year by Republican challenger Frank D. White. As Clinton once joked, he was the youngest ex-governor in the nation's history.[16] Clinton joined friend's Bruce Lindsey's law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, though he spent most of the next two years working on his re-election campaign. Clinton was again elected governor and kept his job for ten years. He helped Arkansas transform its economy and significantly improve the state's educational system. He became a leading figure among the New Democrats.[3] The New Democrats, organized within the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) were a branch of the Democratic Party that called for welfare reform and smaller government, a policy supported by both Democrats and Republicans. He served as Chair of the National Governors Association from 1986 to 1987, bringing him to an audience beyond Arkansas.[16] Clinton made economic growth, job creation and educational improvement high priorities. For senior citizens, he removed the sales tax from medications and increased the home property tax exemption. In the early 1980s, Clinton made reform of the Arkansas education system a top priority. The Arkansas Education Standards Committee, chaired by Clinton's wife, attorney and Legal Services Corporation chair Hillary Rodham Clinton, succeeded in reforming the education system, transforming it from the worst in the nation, into one of the best. This has been considered by many the greatest achievement of the Clinton governorship. Clinton and the committee were responsible for state educational improvement programs, notably more spending for schools, rising opportunities for gifted children, an increase in vocational education, raising of teachers' salaries, inclusion of a wider variety of courses, and mandatory teacher testing for aspiring educators.[3][16] The Clinton's personal and business affairs during the 1980s included transactions which became the basis of the Whitewater investigation, which dogged his later presidential administration.[28] After extensive investigation over several years, no indictments were made against the Clintons related to the years in Arkansas.[16][29]