#42 Bill Clinton (1946- )

“Bill Clinton did not come to the White House empty-handed: Among the assets he brought were a dazzling intellect, unmatched people skills, a passion for good governance, an insatiable curiosity” (Michael Takiff, p. 1)

I actually got to hear Bill Clinton give a speech once. Granted I was one of thousands but it was really cool nonetheless. Actually it was really hot because it was an outdoor commencement ceremony for the US Naval Academy’s graduation class and President Clinton was on speech rotation that year. I can’t remember the date (I’ll have to look it up in my diaries) but I’m guessing that it was either 1998 or 1999 because those were the summers that I worked up in Maryland. My grandmother got us tickets (she knows everybody) and so I sweltered in the bleachers at the Naval Academy’s stadium, trying not to burn and to pay attention to the president’s speech. After all these years I can only remember the gist of that speech but I do recall that it dealt primarily with terrorism. What’s ironic is that I dismissed the terrorism speech entirely because I thought that Clinton was jumping at nothing. Little did I realize that we were dealing with terrorism at that time and that it would become an even greater issue just a few years hence.

Oddly, I had a good amount of trouble finding a good biography. Would you believe it but I already had taken out two other biographies from the library before I settled for this one?? The reasons I discarded the other two were a.) one was simply about his years growing up, and b.) the other only dealt with his presidential time period. For obvious reasons, these two did not work for my purposes which led me to A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him Best by Michael Takiff(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Initially I had overlooked this book because it seemed too biased. After all, quoting 150 different people about Clinton seemed awfully crazy but when my original books fell through, I needed to expand my search. When I read more about A Complicated Man, I saw that the author researched not only people who knew and liked Clinton but also people who knew and didn’t like Clinton. Because of Takiff’s assiduity in creating a fair portrait of this man, I decided to take the plunge and use it as my main biography.

William Jefferson Blythe III was born on August 19, 1946 in Hope, AR. Bill’s father died before he was born and since his mother left shortly after his birth to go to nursing school in New Orleans, young Bill was raised by his grandparents. Through careful tutoring by his grandmother, Bill could read by the age of three. A couple years later, Virginia, Bill’s mother, returned to Arkansas as a certified anesthesiologist and married Roger Clinton on June 19, 1950.

In 1953, the Clintons moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a large multicultural city. Paul Root (Bill’s teacher) said, “I don’t know of any other place in Arkansas where Bill Clinton could have grown up with the attitudes he came out of Hot Springs with: a broad sense of what a lot of different kinds of people do and think and how they live” (p. 18). However, the marriage between Bill’s mom and Roger was a rocky one—Roger was an alcoholic and would sometimes hit Virginia. She divorced him in 1956 but they would remarry three months later. Roger eventually died of cancer in 1967.

Bill, growing up, was a good student and very active in extracurricular activities. “All-State Band, Student Council, Key Club, Mu Alpha Theta, Beta Club, Junior Classical League, Band Key Club, Trojan Pep Band, Starlight Dance Band, Trojan Marching Band, Junior Class President, Boys State, and Boys Nation. He was a very visible student” (Lonnie Luebben, p. 28). During Boys Nation (mentioned above), Bill was sent to Washington DC as a representative from Arkansas and where he met JFK. It was also around this time that Bill started playing the saxophone. “Bill’s saxophone was as important to him as his classwork. He and two fellow students formed a jazz trio, the 3 Kings, that entertained at various school functions” (Takiff, p. 29).

By 1964, Bill was accepted to Georgetown University. He did well there and became president of his class. During the summers, he worked at Senator Fullbright’s office in Little Rock, garnering political knowledge to use later. After Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in April 1968, there were riots throughout Washington DC and so Bill decided to volunteer at the Red Cross. “There was glass everywhere, bricks in the middle of the street and the sidewalks, bashed-in windows where looting had taken place, some buildings completely burned to the ground. We were the only souls—it was like there had been a nuclear explosion and we were the only two people left on earth. It was eerily quiet. We got out [of the car]. He [Bill] wanted to walk and breathe and feel and have firsthand knowledge” (Carolyn Staley, p. 36). That same year, he graduated from Georgetown.

Bill won the Rhodes Scholarship and in October 1968, he began studying in England. He was doing well there, if something of a slacker, but the very next year, he was drafted into the army for Vietnam. To get out of the draft, he, instead, joined the ROTC in Arkansas but when Nixon started reducing the number of drafted men, Bill quit the ROTC before even arriving there. He finished up his studies in England and arrived back in the US to study law at Yale in 1970. “Bill barely showed up for class the first couple of months he was enrolled at Yale Law, in the fall of 1970. Instead, he worked on the campaign of Joe Duffey to represent Connecticut in the U.S. Senate” (Takiff, p. 41).

After graduation in 1973, Bill headed back to Arkansas to work as a law professor at the University of Arkansas. “In three years as a law professor, 1973-1976, Bill would teach antitrust, admiralty, and constitutional law, among other subjects” (Takiff, p. 42). In 1974, he ran for Congress and eventually lost the race but his signature political style was cemented. “He gets close to you, he touches, he establishes a physical connection—an arm on a shoulder, a handshake. He looks you in your eye, and for a short period of time makes you think that you’re the only person in the room. And he quickly finds the common foundation—hometown, knows your cousin, knows somebody who went to the school you went to, knows your boss. And the other thing he can do, which is the real trick, is file it away and have near total recall of it at some point way in the future” (Max Brantley, p. 46).

In order to have a greater chance of winning the next race he would enter, Bill invited his girlfriend from Yale, Hillary Rodham, to Arkansas with him. Unlike the gently-bred Southern gals in Arkansas, Hilary was quite different. “I was floored. It couldn’t have been a bigger surprise if she had been a Martian in a spacesuit.
She had brown crinkled hair, no makeup, glasses that were six inches thick, she wore granny dresses—we call is ‘frumpy’ in the South, to put it mildly. And her shoes and everything…We were in shock. This is Bill’s girlfriend? That from the southern perspective of one who at the time looked like Dolly Parton…But we were big-old-hair girls, and we thought that Hillary should aspire to be like us” (Martha Whetstone, p. 47). Bill and Hillary were married on October 11, 1975 and she helped him get elected to the State Attorney General’s office in 1976.

Two years later, Bill ran for governor of Arkansas and won! However this first term did not go smoothly for Bill and he made some major political errors in office, including his handling of the Cuban refugee situation and an increase in the car tag tax. “The car tags were his biggest political issue, but there were others. We had managed to alienate doctors with a rural health program. We had alienated the utilities because of some regulatory issues. We had alienated the timber industry over clear-cutting issues. We had alienated the poultry and the trucking industry over the licensing issues. So all of a sudden, there were all these strong interest groups that were mad at Bill Clinton and the administration” (Rudy Moore, p. 57). Due to Clinton’s apparent arrogance and lack of loyalty, he lost the governorship to Frank White in 1980. Then Chelsea was born.

Even though Clinton went right back to practicing law, he did not intend to stay there long. When the next election rolled around for governor in 1982, he ran again and won…again. In fact, this second term was much more laid-back than the first. “He raised some taxes and there were some significant improvements in education. He did a very modest highway program, and toward the end, in his last session of the legislature—maybe his best—he got a bit more done. But it was a very modest, modestly progressive regime” (Ernest Dumas, p. 66-67). He even appointed a significant amount of African-Americans to major positions in the administration, which was unusual for the time. Plus he tried to stay active in national politics as well by being Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council from 1990-91 and he gave the nominating speech for Dukakis in 1988. In the end, Clinton did so well as governor that he was re-elected in 1984, 1986, and 1990.

In January 1992, Clinton announced his candidacy for the presidential race. Unfortunately this announcement opened up a media frenzy of Clinton-related scandals beginning with the Gennifer Flowers episode. Flowers claimed that she had had an affair with Clinton while he was governor but Clinton, attempting to diffuse the situation, went on a special airing of 60 Minutes (after the Super Bowl) and made a heartfelt appeal to the American people. “The amazing thing to me was that Gennifer Flowers actually helped him the short term. It made him a nationally known figure” (Gene Lyons, p. 111). Next, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that alleged that Clinton tried to dodge the draft by staying in England and getting into the ROTC (only to get out of it again) but the Clinton team countered these accusations by publishing a letter Clinton had written to a general around that time. The letter stated that while Clinton was not trying to get out of going to Vietnam, he sincerely did not believe in that war. Most Americans could understand this sentiment. Finally, there was the marijuana use. Clinton made the heinous decision to claim that he did not inhale marijuana in his youth and whether or not this claim was true was beside the point—it caught the fancy of the entire nation. Regardless of all this, Clinton won the Democratic National nomination and he chose Al Gore as his vice president.

The 1992 campaign not only was one of the dirtiest in history but it also had a third party candidate in Ross Perot. In the end, Perot, even though he came in third, won a good bit of the vote, helping Clinton win over the Republican candidate, George Bush. Almost immediately, Clinton was faced with a tough issue: gays in the military. His solution? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell requires that people live a lie. It’s a construct that was designed to look like it was fair, and it wasn’t” (Chuck Robb, p. 154). “The effect of the flap on gay servicemembers is debatable. The effect on Bill is not: Added to his draft history it complicated his relations with the uniformed military as he embarked on his presidency” (Takiff, p. 155). Plus it was time to fix the economy. In 1993, Clinton put forth the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act in an attempt to stem the heinous results of Reagan’s supply-side economics. “Clinton balanced the budget, he ran surpluses, he paid down the national debt. No president in my lifetime had a record like that. More important than that, though, the record on growth, job creation, lifting people out of poverty, income growth across the board, every sector, was unsurpassed, unprecedented. He had an extraordinary overall economic record” (Roger Altman, p. 171).

There were quite a few foreign policy issues occurring around this time. Clinton had to deal with the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, the Bosnian War and ethnic cleansing, NAFTA (which was ratified on January 1, 1994), the massacres in Rwanda, and possible peace between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In November 1995, Rabin, Israel’s Prime Minister, was assassinated and the Yugoslavian Dayton Accords were signed. Clinton also took a trip to Europe, starting with Ireland, in ’95 as well.

Unfortunately, Clinton’s name would become most closely associated with his domestic problems, beginning with his healthcare plan. Healthcare has always been a potentially explosive issue in the United States and the words “universal healthcare” even more so. Clinton caught a lot of flak for not only promoting universal healthcare in the first place but giving the First Lady, Hillary, charge of it. The whole thing seemed doomed to fail. “Neither house of the 103rd Congress even voted on Bill and Hillary’s plan—nor on any plan prescribing comprehensive health care reform. Bill’s effort to remake America’s system of health care began as his most ambitious aspiration. It ended as his most spectacular failure” (Michael Takiff, p. 196). And then along came Whitewater and the Vince Foster suicide. “At the root of the story lay the 1978 investment of $200,000 by Bill and Hillary, and friends Susan and Jim McDougal, in the purchase of 230 acres of woodland in northern Arkansas. The partners planned to subdivide the grounds and sell lots to retirees…March 1992 to the end of Bill’s presidency, no one would prove any illegality by either Bill or Hillary relating to the ill-starred scheme to turn a buck by luring senior citizens to come to Arkansas and fish” (Michael Takiff, p. 221-22). What gave the story an added twist was when, on July 20, 1993, Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel and old friend to Bill, committed suicide in a park. Immediately, there was a media frenzy speculating on the Clinton’s role in the suicide (murder?) and if Foster knew anything incriminating about the Whitewater deal.

Before the presidential election of 1996, Clinton spent time on welfare reform and also comforting the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombings. He ended up winning the election against Bob Dole, Senator from Kansas, by the barest majority. Almost immediately thereafter, the Clinton administration came under scrutiny over campaign fundraising. Then came the sexual accusations of Paula Jones, an Arkansas staffer, against the president, leading him to lie in the deposition (this would come back to haunt him later.) It was also a nice preface to the incipient media shitstorm, courtesy of Monica Lewinsky.

Ironically it was the government shutdown in late 1995 (which made Clinton look good)
that threw together the president and a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. “The shutdown was odd in many ways. You were not allowed to set foot on the campus unless you were deemed essential…And that was exactly where Monica came from, because the interns were running the show. Because they weren’t paid, they could show up and answer phones and staff the functions” (Mike McCurry, p. 269). “The president and the intern would enjoy ten sexual encounters over sixteen months. Only the last two times would Bill allow himself to reach ‘completion’; in so doing he spilled his DNA on his partner’s blue dress, which she’d bought at the Gap. In 1998 that DNA would have a story to tell” (Michael Takiff, p. 270).

To get away and do some good on the international front, Clinton took some trips. He went to Africa, where he was feted and adulated, and then to Ireland again to witness the Good Friday Agreement, signed on April 10, 1998 (this lead to peace in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants.) He traveled to Palestine and then had to deal with several terrorist threats, including the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (BTW, this is the first time we all learned about Al-Qaeda.) Clinton also was still dealing with the mess in the former Yugoslavian Baltic states and due to increased ethnic cleansing, began bombing in that area in 1999. “On March 24 some four hundred NATO aircraft, along with missile launchers on several warships in or near the Adriatic Sea, commenced the bombing of Serb assets with attacks on army barracks, air-defense installations, and airports, among other targets” (Michael Takiff, p. 381). Several months later, Serbian President Milosevic surrendered.

While Clinton was very busy overseas, his influence was practically nil in the United States. Between Whitewater, the fundraising scandal, draft dodging, pot smoking, and all the sexual accusations from various women, the country was in a gossip-loving shame spiral and Clinton appeared impotent before it. The Supreme Court appointed Kenneth Starr to ferret out the truth of the Whitewater implications, which soon led him straight into the Monica Lewinsky maelstrom. Clinton’s grand jury testimony, conducted by Starr and reproduced for television, instigated impeachment proceedings in the House on December 19, 1998. “The single most embarrassing day in the history of the American presidency was the day the grand jury testimony aired on national television. Here was the president discussing the most intimate sexual details on national television. The president of the United States, talking about whether he touched a woman’s vagina. It was unthinkable” (Jonathan Alter, p. 350). The House voted to impeach the president and the trial was then sent to the Senate where Clinton was acquitted in February 1999. From that moment forth, however, Clinton hovered near lame-duck status until the end of his term.

In January 2000, he handed over the government to George W Bush and retired to Westchester County, NY with his wife, the newest Senator from NY. Don’t worry there were still some final Clintonian scandals. For instance, nobody could believe it when Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a guy who had already given up his US citizenship, and then there were accusations of vandalism, when it was claimed that the Clinton administration left the White House a wreck. Clinton also put to rest the Lewinsky/Whitewater saga. “In exchange for Ray’s [Starr’s replacement] giving up the possibility of indicting Bill on any charge connected to the Lewinsky matter, Bill finally copped to lying under oath in the Jones deposition—‘certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewsinsky were false’—relinquished his license to practice law for five years, paid a $25,000 fine to the Arkansas Bar Association, and pledged that he would not seek reimbursement of his legal fees necessitated by the Lewinsky investigation, even though, because he had not been indicted, he was permitted to do so under the independent counsel statute” (Michael Takiff, p. 400).

Clinton has had an active post-presidential retirement. He began the Bill Clinton Foundation, which has worked on, among other things, Third World health and development and has even teamed up with Doctors Without Borders. He has done a massive amount of public speaking, while charging astronomical prices to help pay off his legal debts and multiple houses. In 2004, he wrote his autobiography, My Life, and also had quadruple bypass surgery. Clinton was also involved in some shady international deals. In 2009, through negotiations with the North Koreans, Clinton helped free two American women and aid talks about nuclear tests. More recently, he was instrumental—in a bad way—in Hillary’s run for the presidency in 2008, which she eventually lost to Barrack Obama. “His [Clinton’s] political skills had atrophied. And he handled himself in a way not befitting a former president. Whether it was born of his feeling he owed Hillary, or his guilt or whatever, it was very disturbing. Not just to outsiders, but to his own friends and supporters” (Jonathan Alter, p. 414). He is now the husband to the current Secretary of State and they live in Washington DC.