[This is 10th in a series describing the 12
Post-War American Presidents from a British perspective]
Bill Clinton had the good fortune to preside over the US in
a period of sustained economic prosperity. Politicians reap the benefits of
such periods even if their own contributions are marginal. The international
crises Clinton faced were episodic rather than chronic. Knowledgeable and
articulate, he is rated as one of the most popular of US Presidents. Yet not
all his domestic programmes found favour and the sharp scandals surrounding his
personal life raised uncomfortable questions about his integrity.
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| President Bill Clinton |
Bill Clinton
(1946- ) was born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope, Arkansas. His father
died 3 months before his birth in a motor accident. His mother Virginia, who
trained as a nurse, brought him up alone, with her parents help, and her second
husband was Roger Clinton, a car salesman, moving to Hot Springs, Arkansas in
1950. Although Bill took on his stepfather’s surname in 1962, Roger Clinton was
a gambler, alcoholic and wife-beater with whom Bill was often in conflict. His
mother divorced then remarried Roger before he died in 1967. Bill was a good
student at Hot Springs High and when 16 he became so adept at the tenor
saxophone that he thought of a career in jazz music. However his political
interests were fired by meeting JFK in 1963 on a school visit to the White
House and by listening to Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream..” in the
same year.
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| Clinton meets JFK in 1963 |
Retrospectively and only partly fancifully, Clinton has been
described as “the first black President” coming as he did from a rural Southern
state, from a poor one-parent family and a broken home, enthused by jazz and by
Dr King – classic badges of the black experience. Bill’s ambition was to gain
admittance to Georgetown University, Washington DC and he won his Bachelor of
Foreign Service degree in 1968. During his time there he was active in college
fraternities and clerked in the office of the distinguished Senator for
Arkansas William Fulbright.
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| Young Clinton |
His academic prowess earned him a Rhodes scholarship to
University College, Oxford in 1968-9 to study PPE; he could have been drafted
to serve in Vietnam. He had straight-forward draft deferments in 1968/9 but he
subsequently went through various devious manoeuvres to avoid the draft. No
doubt these were common enough among ambitious young men at that time but they
rather haunted him as Presidential candidate later. He was moving Left then –
Fulbright was a critic of the Vietnam War and Bill joined anti-war demos in
England. In 1972 he worked in Texas for the doomed Democratic Presidential
candidate ultra-liberal George McGovern, thrashed by Nixon.
In 1970, he entered Yale Law School and from 1971 dated
fellow student Hillary Rodham from Chicago, Illinois. Relatively affluent
Hillary was clever and committed; they became inseparable and married in 1975.
In time they had one daughter, Chelsea.
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| Bill marries Hillary in 1975 |
Hillary was very influential and pro-active as First Lady at
Little Rock and at the White House. Her own independent political career as New
York senator and as Secretary of State has been a formidable one and may not
have ended, even though she is now 67.
After Yale, Bill taught law at the University of Arkansas,
but had turned his closest attention to politics. He narrowly failed to be
elected to the House in 1974, but was voted in as Attorney-General of Arkansas
in 1976. In 1978 he was elected Governor of Arkansas, at 32 the youngest state
governor ever. His first 2 year term was undistinguished and he was not
re-elected in 1980, a year of Republican resurgence. However he returned to
office in 1983 serving until 1992, establishing himself as a leader of the
centrist New Democrats. The Clintons, for they were a team, are credited with
transforming the Arkansas economy and with so improving the state education
system that from one of the worst in the Union it came to be rated as one of
the best. Bill became chairman of a Governors’ group and started to feature as
a modest national figure. The only real shadow was the convoluted Whitewater
controversy where some claimed the Clintons had acted improperly in a land
development deal, which later failed. The Clintons never faced charges though a
number of others, including Bill’s successor as Governor, were convicted for
fraud; whiffs of historic corruption are never easy to disperse.
In 1988, Clinton contemplated contending for the Democratic presidential
nomination but thought better of it. He gave an overlong and poorly delivered
speech to the Convention in support of Michael Dukakis, Governor of
Massachusetts who won the nomination but lost the election to George Bush,
Senior. Clinton planned his 1992 nomination campaign more carefully although he
started off as an outsider well behind Governor Jerry Brown of California. He
lost in Iowa, trailed in the polls and then came a close second in New
Hampshire (earning the nickname The
Comeback Kid). Some successes in the South including Florida and Texas, was
followed by a stunning triumph in New York. He went on to win the California
primary knocking out Jerry Brown. The Clinton bandwagon was racing on and he
easily secured the Democratic nomination, choosing Al Gore as his running mate.
Normally the one-term incumbent George W H Bush, could
expect re-election. Bush had won huge public support during the Gulf War, but
his breaking of pledges not to increase taxes, the looming economic recession
and Bush’s diffident manner told against him. Clinton won in 1992,
substantially helped by the 3rd party intervention by Ross Perot to
whom Republican votes mainly leaked. The outcome was:
Bill Clinton 43.0%
George Bush 34.7%
Ross Perot 18.9%
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| Clinton takes the Oath at his 1993 Inauguration |
Clinton was a mere 46 when he became President. He spoke
well in a folksy and informal way; he could be cheerfully convincing although
he was ever the consummate politician, pressing whatever buttons appealed to
the audience he happened to be addressing. It was hard to pin down his
principles or his deeply held beliefs, if he indeed possessed any. His critics
called him “Slick Willy” and he somehow never seemed entirely trust-worthy.
Throughout his career he had enjoyed various liaisons with other women like a
large percentage of men and he lied about them, like an equally large
percentage of men. He was all too human and no saint.
Clinton’s first term was fruitful. He tried to introduce a
comprehensive Health Care Reform bill, but the opposition of the doctors’ lobby
and the insurance industry was enough to see the bill rejected by a
Republican-dominated Congress in 1994. The abortion laws were liberalised, the Don’t ask, Don’t tell compromise protected gays in the services and the Brady
Act modestly tightened up the gun laws. A new Family and Medical Leave law
allowed (unpaid) absences from work in certain circumstances. His 1993 Deficit
Reduction Act overhauled the tax system, introduced new tax bands and restored
some welfare benefits. The US economy began to recover steadily. Overseas,
Islamist enmity grew. A US engagement in anarchic Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993
resulted in Marine casualties and in 1996 Clinton escaped assassination in
Manila when at the last moment a Bin Laden-inspired bomb plot was uncovered. Aggressive
Bosnian Serbs were bombed in the lethal civil wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Clinton did enough comfortably to brush aside the challenge in 1996 of
Republican Senator Bob Dole in the Presidential election.
But trouble was brewing. In 1997 Clinton embarked on a
series of encounters with a White House intern, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky,
who regularly gave him oral sex, on a wholly consensual basis. Investigators of
other complaints against Clinton seized on this liaison, which Clinton denied.
The affair became a partisan public scandal and in due course Clinton was
accused of obstruction and perjury; he was impeached by the House but
fortunately the Senate acquitted Clinton in 1999.
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| Monica Lewinsky |
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| Clinton denies Monica |
Clinton had behaved very unwisely in unzipping himself and
looked like an ignorant hillbilly when he insisted that “I have never had
sexual relations with that woman!” His shameless apologists claimed that he was
the victim of a predatory girl and that, to the Southern male, oral sex does
not count – only penetrative sex does. A blow by blow account (pun intended!)
of the affair and of a notorious stained blue dress was published in the Starr
Report by an “independent counsel” to the toe-curling embarrassment of the US
public and wretched humiliation of Hillary. In time the matter faded but
Clinton had demeaned himself and besmirched his high Office.
To his credit Clinton (with Hillary pushing too) passed the
Children’s Health Insurance Programme, a policy centre-piece, which gave joint
Federal and State aid to families in a band above the Medicare income limit.
Europeans would consider this rather basic assistance but the US has been very
slow to provide universal affordable healthcare, jibbing at the expense and
ignoring the social benefits. Most crucially the Clinton years ended on an
economic high with 3 years of budget surpluses from 1998 to 2000.
In foreign affairs, Clinton responded sensibly to events.
Harassment of ethnic Albanians by Serbs triggered off US punitive bombing and
in time the creation of UN administered Kosovo. Friendly overtures to a
renascent China were returned; substantial efforts were made at Camp David to
reconcile Palestine and Israel but while Ehud Barak was willing, Yasser Arafat
eventually walked away. More ominously in view of later events, US embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania were bombed with substantial loss of life by Islamic
terrorists in 1988 provoking bombing raids on Sudan and Afghanistan. As Saddam
Hussein’s tyranny worsened, US forces imposed a no-fly zone over parts of Iraq.
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| Clinton leaves Office |
Clinton was succeeded by George W Bush in 2001, as the
political pendulum swung towards the Republicans. Clinton’s popularity ratings
were high as he left office. ABC News summed up the public consensus pithily: You can’t trust him, he’s got weak morals
and ethics – and he’s done a heck of a good job.
In 2001 he was only 55 and he is now 68 and still in the
public eye. He has devoted himself to lecture tours and to good works, notably
to help earthquake ravaged Haiti, to improve global public health and to
resolve ethnic conflict. He campaigned vigorously in favour of Hillary when she
tried to win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008; though she was
unsuccessful he loyally supported Barack Obama and nominated him for
re-election in an admired speech in 2012.
Americans have forgiven Clinton his various transgressions
and look back nostalgically to the booming, confident Clinton years after the stumblings
of George W and the disappointments of Obama.
SMD
25.11.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
