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    Билл Клинтон

    When the Boys Nation buses arrived at the White House on July 24, 1963, the group on board, sponsored by the American Legion, included a 16- year-old Arkansan, Bill Clinton. Like the other boys, he had come to meet President John F. Kennedy. The president greeted his guests in the Rose Garden, and as he smiled and a gentle breeze tousled his hair, he told them about the hallowed ground on which they stood. "These trees which are just behind you were planted by Andrew Jackson when he was here in the White House,” Kennedy said. "The tallest tree over there was planted by the first president who came to the White House, John Adams.” 366 William Jefferson Clinton What feelings gripped Bill Clinton at that moment? Did patriotism overwhelm him when the president said, "I think all of us have a pride in our country”? Did ideals encourage him when Kennedy said the United States "stands guard all the way from Berlin to Saigon” in protecting freedom? Most likely they did, for Clinton believed in America’s greatness. Beyond that, he believed in himself and was convinced he would one day be president of the United States. After Kennedy finished his remarks, Clinton pushed to the front of the group as the boys angled to be near the president. He made sure the photographers standing nearby would capture him and Kennedy together. They did, and while the picture was later held up as a symbol of spontaneity and fate, it more accurately reflected the shrewd maneuvering, hard work, and determined planning that marked Clinton’s political career. k Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe IV on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, a small farming town near where the borders of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas converge. A few months before Bill’s birth, his father, William Jefferson Blythe III, a traveling salesman, was killed in an automobile accident, leaving the boy to be raised by his mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy Blythe, then 23 years old, and by his maternal grandparents, Edith and Eldridge Cassidy. When Bill was four years old, his mother married Roger Clinton, a car dealer. Three years later, in 1953, the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Years later, when he was running for president, Bill invoked images of Hope as his hometown, but he actually spent most of his youth and experienced his strongest childhood influences in Hot Springs, a wide-open city, at least for Arkansas, with its gambling and nightlife. The marriage of Virginia and Roger was tempestuous and stressful. Roger drank heavily and abused his wife verbally and physically. To escape this environment, at age eight Bill began attending the Park Place Baptist Church, arriving there every Sunday on his own, dressed in his best clothes. His parents separated several times as their battles continued. The couple eventually divorced, but in 1962 they remarried. Roger Clinton then sat around the house drinking, while the family’s life revolved around Bill, a bright youngster who Virginia believed was destined for greatness. Despite all of Bill’s problems with his stepfather, in May 1962 he officially changed his last name from Blythe to Clinton for the sake, he later said, of "family solidarity.” Bill Clinton excelled at Hot Springs High, a school known for its demanding teachers and excellent facilities. He was a band major and junior class president, and he spoke frequently to community groups about his experiences with Boys Nation. His picture appeared more than 30 times in the high school yearbook, including the photo of him shaking hands with John Kennedy. He graduated in 1964 as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, ranked fourth in a senior class of 363 students. Clinton applied to only one college: Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which he wanted to attend so he could enroll in the School of Foreign Service and be at the country’s political center. As an Arkansan at a college dominated by Easterners, he was an oddity; yet he quickly impressed his fellow students and professors with his intellect and friendliness. He entered Georgetown politicking from the start and won election as freshman class president. Two years later Clinton began clerking for Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright and expressed his enthusiasm for the political world in a letter to his grandmother that provided a roll call of famous names: "It is of course exciting to be here around all the senators,” he said, "and already this year I’ve seen the president, vice president, and senators Fulbright, Robert and Edward Kennedy, Javits, Long of Louisiana, Smathers of Florida, Yarborough of Texas, Anderson of New Mexico, McClellan, Thurmond of South Carolina, Church of William Jefferson Clinton 367 Idaho, Williams of New Jersey, Boggs of Delaware, McCarthy of Minnesota, Murphy of California, Stennis of Mississippi, and others.” At first a moderate supporter of the Vietnam War, Clinton began to change his views as he worked with Fulbright and his staff, who by 1966 were calling the American involvement a mistake. The following year he ran for student council president at Georgetown but lost when his opponent appealed to those discontent with the college’s paternalistic administrators. Clinton graduated from Georgetown in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in international studies and entered the graduate program at England’s Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. Like many other American college students during the Vietnam War, he was preoccupied with the draft, and his peculiar reaction to it has, over the years, provided fodder for his political opponents who continue to see duplicity and opportunism in his actions. Clinton received his draft notice in May 1969 and soon after joined an ROTC unit connected with the University of Arkansas Law School. He was to report there in the fall of 1969, a move that would allow him to study law while avoiding service in Vietnam, but when fall came, he returned to Oxford. He later said he had the permission of his ROTC commander to do so, but no record of an agreement exists, and letters written by Clinton to his friends at the time contradict his story. In any event, in early October Clinton told his draft board to end his deferment. He later said he made the request because the deaths of friends in Vietnam made him uncomfortable about avoiding the war. Yet he could have requested the change earlier—in fact, he drafted a letter in mid-September to that effect but never sent it—or he could have enlisted. Clinton’s actions bespoke a person who wanted to avoid the draft but ultimately appear as if he had not avoided it—a coy move for someone looking to protect his reputation as he advanced his political prospects. Evidence indicates that he asked for an end to his deferment only after he realized that recent developments made it unlikely he would ever be drafted. The conscription law had just been changed to give graduate students a longer time to report to duty, and President Richard Nixon had stated that draft calls would be lowered as American troops gradually withdrew from Vietnam. In addition, Nixon announced the beginning of a draft lottery, and when the first one was held in December 1969, Bill Clinton received a high number that immunized him from induction. According to Clinton biographer David Maraniss, by avoiding military service the Arkansan "did what 16 million other young American men did during that tumultuous era.” In December 1969 Clinton wrote a lengthy letter to the colonel of the University of Arkansas ROTC explaining why he had chosen to remain at Oxford. At the time, military officials thought the letter exposed Clinton as a draft dodger, and later it came back to haunt him. Clinton said that in spite of his beliefs, he "decided to accept the draft” rather than become a resister, "for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.” It was a system that Clinton by and large supported. True, he opposed the war and in October 1969 briefly joined the activist cause when he helped organize an antiwar protest in London, but he stayed close to his moderate roots and rejected those who advocated radical change. Anxious to develop his political career, Clinton left Oxford without a degree and in the fall of 1970 he enrolled at Yale Law School. He spent little time in class and instead politicked for Joseph D. Duffey, a Connecticut Democrat running for Congress on a peace and civil rights platform. Clinton gained a reputation for his boundless energy, his need for little sleep, and his incessant desire to talk. To several of his friends, Clinton lacked sincerity. One said, "You could never view his performance in a totally positive way. You wondered, is it real? There were moments that were so genuine that there was no doubt about it, and moments when you wondered—is this posture?” 368 William Jefferson Clinton In spring 1971 Clinton met Hillary Rodham, a second-year law student at Yale, and in 1972 both of them went to Texas, where they worked in Democrat George McGovern’s presidential campaign. After graduating from Yale with his law degree in 1973, Clinton joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas School of Law at Fayetteville. The following year he sought public office for the first time when he ran for Congress as a Democrat from the Third Congressional District. Although he lost to the Republican incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt, he impressed fellow politicians by capturing 48 percent of the vote. In 1975 he married Hillary Rodham, who, in step with the feminist spirit then sweeping the country, kept her last name. In 1976 Clinton showed his statewide appeal when he won election as Arkansas attorney general. Two years later Bill Clinton garnered 63 percent of the vote to become the youngest governor in the United States. But many voters soon regretted their choice after he and his staff mishandled several problems. His troubles began when he failed to keep two campaign promises: that he would submit a completed budget for the legislature on its opening day, and that he would have all of his bills drafted by then. When he finally presented his proposals, legislators scoffed at their complexity and large number. Adding to his problems, Clinton mishandled a road improvement program. He hit on the project after an adviser, Dick Morris— a political hired gun who often worked for conservative Republicans—surveyed Arkansans and asked them what they considered to be the state’s most important issue. They said "road improvements” and intimated they would be willing to pay higher car license fees to pay for them. Consequently, Clinton proposed increased rates on trucks and automobiles. Then when the trucking companies complained, he shifted the burden for the new fees to cars. At the same time he based the rates on vehicle weight—a move that upset Arkansans who drove older, heavier cars—and he hiked the tax on gasoline. Angered by these tax increases, the voters turned against Clinton. His standing was further damaged when Cuban refugees at a resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee rioted. Clinton regained some of his support, however, by telling President Jimmy Carter, futilely as it turned out, that he would defy the federal government in refusing to accept additional refugees even if Washington brought "the whole United States Army down here.” In 1980 Bill Clinton’s opponent for the governorship, Republican Frank White, attacked him for raising taxes and linked him to Carter’s unpopular presidency. Voters responded to Clinton’s travails and to his attempts to be all things to all people by electing White. A shattered and disheartened Clinton joined the law firm of Wright, Lindsey, and Jennings in Little Rock. But he had already begun planning his comeback, determined to regain the governor’s mansion and with it the experience and background needed to eventually win the White House. Hillary Rodham directed his renewal, and she answered the unease Arkansans had with her feminist attitude by officially changing her last name to Clinton. With Dick Morris as his main adviser, Bill Clinton launched a negative campaign against White in 1982 and regained the governor’s office. This time around he recruited somewhat older and more experienced staff members and adopted education as his main issue. He appointed Hillary Clinton as chair of the Education Standards Committee, and the reforms it proposed, along with the taxes to support them, passed the legislature in the fall of 1983. In their wake, student test scores increased, as did the number of graduating seniors who enrolled in college. To appease conservatives, Clinton required that teachers take competency tests. Along with the education reforms, Bill Clinton appealed to African Americans when he named the first black lawyer to the state supreme court and appointed more blacks to state boards and commissions than all previous William Jefferson Clinton 369 Arkansas governors combined. But he failed to push for a civil rights law, leaving his state as one of only two without such legislation. His reformist credentials also suffered in other ways: To appease business he loosened environmental enforcement and gave tax breaks to corporations, and to fund his education program he relied on the regressive sales tax. In fact, support for schools from the property tax remained so low that Arkansas still stood near the bottom among states in school funding. Clinton won reelection as the "education governor” in 1984 when the gubernatorial term was increased from two to four years, and he won another term in 1988. While serving as governor he chaired the Education Commission of the States, the Democratic Governors’ Association, the National Governors’ Association and the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderates who wanted to make the Democratic Party more attractive to mainstream voters. He considered running for president in 1988 but instead gave the nominating speech for Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts—a speech widely panned as long-winded. He entered the Democratic presidential primaries in 1992, a year when dissatisfied voters criticized the incumbent, Republican George Bush, for ignoring domestic issues while the economy crumbled. Clinton finished second in the New Hampshire primary despite allegations he had carried on an affair with Gennifer Flowers, a nightclub singer. Although he denied the relationship, he went on the TV show 60 Minutes with his wife and admitted he had caused "pain” in his marriage. This tactic worked, and he would use it again during his presidency. Clinton went on to win the Democratic nomination despite lingering doubts about his character. During the general campaign, President Bush scored some points when he attacked Clinton for lying about how he had avoided military service in Vietnam. Clinton’s tortured response, in which he denied ever having received a draft notice, encouraged use of the disparaging nickname "Slick Willie,” given to him by his opponents. Writing in On the Edge, political analyst Elizabeth Drew says that "Slick Willie” derived from Clinton’s abnormally strong desire to be liked and that this, in turn, "was a large factor behind his wanting to please everyone. ‘Slick Willie’ came from something deep inside him. When one of Clinton’s closest advisers was asked why the Arkansan didn’t talk about core principles more seriously, he replied, ‘Because he wants to be all things to all people.’” Clinton won the presidency, but with only 43 percent of the popular vote, compared to 38 percent for Bush and 19 percent for thirdparty candidate Ross Perot. Nonetheless, Time magazine said the election "places [Clinton] in a position to preside over one of the periodic reinventions of the country—those moments when Americans dig themselves out of their deepest problems by reimagining themselves.” He came into the White House as one of the country’s brightest presidents, supremely articulate and able to quickly grasp details and complexities, but also crafty and expedient— qualities that gave him the potential for great achievements and damaging self-destruction. In one important way Clinton’s presidency would differ from all others: The first lady would wield considerable power for an extended period. The evidence for this appeared early, when Hillary Clinton decided she would have an office in the West Wing, where the president and his top aides worked. And when Bill Clinton interviewed prospective cabinet members, she interviewed them too. As with Bill Clinton’s first entry into the governor’s mansion, troubles at the White House beset him from the start. The first problem arose when he nominated Zoe Baird, counsel for Aetna Life and Casualty, as attorney general, even though she had violated the law in 1990 and hired illegal immigrants to work in her household. Forced to withdraw the nomination just two days into his presidency, Clinton looked inept. In April 1993, he nominated Lani Guinier to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights. A lawyer for the 370 William Jefferson Clinton NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Guinier had written academic articles in which she advocated that racial minorities should have veto power in legislatures. Conservatives damned her ideas as undemocratic and launched a withering attack against her. President Clinton failed to either end his support for her early or stand behind her, an indecisiveness that angered civil rights groups who rallied to Guinier’s cause only to have Clinton eventually withdraw the nomination. With the issue of the economy pressing down on him, Clinton allowed his presidency to be sidetracked by the controversy over whether to end the existing ban against gays in the military. The president let the matter fester for weeks before finally deciding in July 1993 on a "Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, whereby gays would not be discriminated against provided they kept their homosexuality secret. It was a decision meant to please everyone that, in fact, pleased no one. As medical costs mounted and 40 million Americans remained uncovered by any health care plan, and as opinion polls showed the public wanted something done about the problem, Clinton put together a task force to propose reforms. He realized that an effective plan would likely rally the middle class behind him and the Democratic Party. Republicans decided they could not let that happen, and they determined to oppose any "big government” health plan. In putting together the task force, Bill Clinton made the first lady its leader. This proved to be a costly mistake as she and some 600 experts worked in secret, shutting out members of Congress and the cabinet in a move that raised suspicions about diabolical scheming. When the much-delayed proposal turned out to be over 1,300 pages long, its complexity stunned and confused both Congress and the public and lent itself to charges that it promised a more intrusive government. The country’s four largest insurance companies, however, liked the plan, having helped the task force compile it. Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala, admitted that the plan could raise rates for 40 percent of insured Americans. Those words and the other complications doomed the proposal and with it any hope for substantial health care reform. Clinton admitted his role in the defeat when he said, "We made the error of trying to do too much, took too long, and ended up achieving nothing.” While that failure unfolded, stories circulated about President Clinton’s sexual promiscuity, along with charges that he and his wife had used state agencies in Arkansas and exerted their influence with a savings and loan bank to protect their investment in a land deal called Whitewater. More controversy ensued with the death in July 1993 of Clinton’s consul, Vincent Foster. Although Foster killed himself, right-wing rumors asserted that he had been murdered as part of a Clintonian plot to coverup Whitewater. President Clinton managed to direct three important measures through the Democratic Congress, but in so doing he compromised considerably. First, in putting together an economic package, he dropped his campaign pledge of a middle-class tax cut. Added to that, Congress rejected his plan to boost spending on social programs, along with his proposal to raise money through an energy tax. Instead, the Senate passed an increase in the federal gasoline tax and set corporate taxes at less than half of what Clinton wanted. While the economic package cut social spending, it did increase taxes for the wealthy and gave the working poor the largest earned-income tax credit in history. Together, the tax hikes and program cuts reduced the deficit, and the economic growth that had begun before Clinton entered the White House accelerated, while inflation remained moderate and mortgage rates dropped. In a second measure, Clinton won congressional approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had been negotiated under President Bush. NAFTA liberalized trade among the United States, Mexico, and Canada, in line with Clinton’s belief William Jefferson Clinton 371 that lowered barriers would stimulate economic growth and bolster democratic government. NAFTA took effect on January 1, 1994. Clinton’s third measure, a crime bill, provided more than $30 billion for hiring police officers and building more prisons. The bill banned the sale of 19 types of assault weapons, required that sex offenders notify authorities of their whereabouts for at least 10 years after their release from jail, and extended the death penalty to more than 50 crimes. President Clinton suffered a bitter defeat in the November 1994 elections when the Republicans gained 11 governorships, nine seats in the Senate, and 52 seats in the House, which shifted ideologically to the right. The GOP won votes by criticizing the president’s approach toward health care and by promising a smaller government, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. At the same time, an investigation of Whitewater damaged Clinton by raising doubts about his credibility, especially after it was revealed that Webster L. Hubbell, third in command in the justice department and a close Clinton friend, had years earlier defrauded his clients at a law firm in Arkansas. (Hubbell was convicted and imprisoned for the crime in 1995.) Nonetheless, after the 1994 elections Clinton launched one of his notable political comebacks. He hired Dick Morris as a consultant, and before long he was following Morris’s advice that he appeal more strongly to the mainstream. Morris advocated what he called "triangulation,” meaning Clinton should stand at the political center between the liberals of his own party and the escalating conservatism of the Republicans as a voice of moderation. He wanted Clinton to defuse the Republicans by advocating a middle-class tax cut and a balanced budget, along with other measures that would leave liberal Democrats little to claim except that they blocked the right-wing juggernaut. Fortunately for Clinton, the Republicans, their heads swelled by their election triumph, alienated themselves from most Americans by pursuing a strident agenda under House Speaker Newt Gingrich that proposed too much too quickly (formerly Clinton’s failing). When they attacked Medicare by calling for it to be reduced by $270 billion over five years, and when they sought a tax cut for the wealthy roughly equivalent to that amount, they allowed Clinton and the Democrats to portray them as taking from the elderly to fill the wallets of the rich. In November and again in December 1995, House Republicans shut down the federal government in an attempt to force the president to accept their budget, but this action only made them appear excessive and Clinton all the more reasonable. As the 1996 presidential election neared, Clinton triangulated himself into accepting a welfare reform bill so at odds with the Democratic Party’s past policies that several members of his own administration strenuously objected to it. Later, his secretary of labor, Robert Reich, described what had happened: The original idea had been to smooth the passage from welfare to work with guaranteed health care, child care, job training and a job paying enough to live on. The [August] 1996 legislation contained none of these supports— no health care or child care for people coming off welfare, no job training, no assurance of a job paying a living wage, not, for that matter, of a job at any wage. In effect, what was dubbed welfare "reform” merely ended the promise of help to the indigent and their children which Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated. . . .” Indeed, the bill terminated more than 60 years of guaranteed federal assistance to the needy and provided the states with block grants to develop their own welfare programs. Under no circumstances, however, could the states provide families with benefits for more than five years or provide block grant monies to persons convicted of drug-related felonies. Nonworking adults were required to find jobs within two years. By 1999 the number of people receiving welfare had dropped to 7.6 million, the lowest in 30 years, and by the year 2000 there was a drop in the number of children living in 372 William Jefferson Clinton poverty, though it remained well above that for the 1970s. Much of the decline in the welfare rolls, though, resulted from economic growth, and how well the reform would work in times of decline remained to be seen. Clinton was more interested in domestic than foreign policy, but as the first post–cold war president he linked the two together with his goal of "democratic enlargement.” He believed that developing market economies overseas would lessen political oppression and make foreign countries pliable to American economic might (a vision parallel to President William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy). President Clinton said to Congress in 1994, "We have put our economic competitiveness at the heart of our foreign policy.” Toward that end, global free trade became imperative. In 1993 he convinced 15 Asian countries to promise they would develop a free-trade zone by the year 2010. The following year he signed a trade agreement that lowered tariffs worldwide by over $700 billion. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of nuclear stockpiles assumed critical importance. In 1994 the United States– Russian–Ukraine Trilateral Statement and Annex resulted in the dismantling of all atomic weapons in Ukraine. That same year Clinton sent 20,000 American troops to Haiti as part of a multinational force to replace its military regime with a democratic government. The force withdrew in March 1995 after elections were held, and Clinton declared the mission a success. In Europe he helped craft the Dayton Accords, leading to an agreement among Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnians to end their fighting in the Balkans. Troops led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enforced the agreement. In the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton portrayed his Republican opponent, Kansas senator Robert Dole, as a tool of the unpopular House Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Clinton pointed to his own work in reducing the deficit, fighting crime, and reforming welfare as bringing significant results and appealing to the moderate course most voters preferred. He amassed a huge campaign war chest as money rolled in from influential Americans. But critics derided his sales plan of letting wealthy donors sleep in the Lincoln bedroom in exchange for their contributions, and they balked when he personally solicited money at 44 "coffee” meetings at the White House. In the end, Clinton convincingly beat Dole and third-party candidate Ross Perot, though again with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. After Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1997, he testified in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Paula Corbin Jones, a former secretary in the Arkansas state government. As Jones’s lawyers questioned him about his past behavior toward women (Clinton’s own crime bill permitted a defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit to be asked such questions), he denied he had ever had sexual relations with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton said he saw her on five occasions and might have been alone with her once. Then in January 1998 Linda Tripp, a Lewinsky confidant, turned over tape recordings to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in which Lewinsky discussed her sexual affair with Clinton—one that had begun in November 1995. After the content of the Tripp tapes appeared in the press, scandal again rocked the Clinton White House. President Clinton assured his cabinet he had never engaged in sexual relations with Lewinsky and that she was exaggerating and lying. When doubts about his story continued, he told the American people, "I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Evidence gathered by Starr indicated otherwise, and in an unprecedented event, Clinton was forced to testify before a grand jury, where he insisted that he had answered the questions at the Jones deposition truthfully. By late 1998 Starr had compiled considerable evidence to show that the president had lied when testifying in the Jones suit, a civil case, and again when testifying to the grand jury, a criminal proceeding. Other evidence inWilliam Jefferson Clinton 373 dicated that Clinton had coached his secretary, Betty Currie, to answer questions in a way that would mislead prosecutors; that he may have encouraged Lewinsky to file a false affidavit in the Jones case (she denied this while admitting that Clinton suggested "if she were subpoenaed, she should file an affidavit to avoid being deposed”); and that he may have used his political influence to obtain a job for Lewinsky as a way to keep her quiet. Starr’s written report contained so much lurid evidence about the sexual dalliances between Clinton and Lewinsky in the Oval Office area—details used to prove the president’s lie—that it pulled the public’s attention away from the crime of perjury to the question of whether Starr had invaded Clinton’s privacy. As the November 1998 congressional elections neared, most Americans condemned Clinton for his actions but objected to his removal from office. When Republicans lost seats in the House and saw their majority in it cut to six, Clinton felt confident he would avoid impeachment. He seemed to be right as the election results forced Newt Gingrich from the Speakership and left the Republicans in disarray. But Clinton treated impeachment queries from the House so arrogantly that he even angered moderate congressmen. Then, as the House neared a vote on impeachment, he ordered an air attack on Iraq for having prevented arms inspectors from entering that country. While Clinton called the bombardment necessary to protect American security, others questioned the timing and suspected he had used it to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal and rally Congress and the public behind him. Whatever the case, in December 1998 the House impeached Clinton for lying under oath to the grand jury and for obstructing justice. The majority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, David Schippers, said, The President . . . has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to his Cabinet, he lied to his top aides, and now he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.” On the eve of the impeachment vote, Clinton’s counsel, Charles Ruff, stopped just short of saying the president had perjured himself. Ruff said Clinton had offered misleading testimony, but the president "believed that what he was doing was being evasive but truthful.” Neither this statement nor Clinton’s apology, in which he refused to admit he had broken the law, saved him from becoming only the second president ever to be impeached—"a big, permanent stain on his record,” said one Clinton adviser. Newsweek political analyst Jonathan Alter expressed the opinion of many Americans during the impeachment proceedings when he criticized both Clinton and Congress. "Clinton’s squalid behavior helped strip his office of much of its grandeur,” he said, and continued: "The House of Representatives has taken the solemn, even inspirational bipartisan process of 1974 [during the Richard Nixon impeachment hearings] and turned it into just another blunt political instrument.” According to the Constitution, an officeholder impeached by the House stands trial in the Senate. Conviction by two-thirds vote of all the senators results in removal from office. Consequently, Clinton’s case was presented to the Senate, with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist presiding. For 37 days the senators listened to testimony and read transcripts. "Is respondent William Jefferson Clinton guilty or not guilty?” By a vote of 55-45 they rejected a charge of perjury against the president. Then they split 50-50 on a second charge that accused Clinton of obstruction of justice. This tally was far short of the 67 votes needed to remove him from office. A large number of Americans had opposed Clinton’s impeachment. But after his acquittal, public opinion shifted, and a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup Poll late in 1999 showed that fully half of all Americans believed that it was 374 William Jefferson Clinton right that Clinton was impeached. Another poll by Gallup showed that most Americans—an overwhelming 71 percent—would best remember Clinton for the scandal, while an ABC/Washington Post poll revealed that they were "just plain tired of Bill Clinton.” Soon after his acquittal, Clinton displayed his resolve in a showdown with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. After Milosevic acted to crush an uprising in his country’s province of Kosovo by using troops to kill some ethnic Albanians and force many more of them from their homes, Clinton and NATO demanded that Serbian troops withdraw. When Milosevic refused, NATO planes, led by the United States, bombed Serbian military and civilian targets for 78 days, beginning in March 1999. The attacks forced Milosevic to withdraw his army and accept NATO troops into the province along with NATO governance, though he convinced the United Nations Security Council to confirm Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo. In October 1999 the U.S. Senate handed Clinton a stinging political defeat when it refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which would forbid all underground nuclear weapons tests. Opponents called the treaty "unverifiable and unenforceable.” The defeat marked the first time the Senate had rejected an international treaty since it voted down the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, following World War I. Around the same time, the president and Congress struggled over how to distribute a budget surplus, with Clinton wanting more money to fund programs for the elderly and Republicans on Capitol Hill wanting tax cuts. Despite Clinton’s victory in the Senate, his scandal woes continued. In spring 1999 Juanita Broaddrick offered credible, if ultimately unprovable, evidence that in the 1970s Clinton, while governor, had raped her. Then the judge in the Paula Corbin Jones case held the president in contempt of court and referred his perjury to a committee to decide whether he should be disbarred. In August 2000 independent counsel Robert Ray (who had succeeded Kenneth Starr) impaneled a grand jury to consider whether the events surrounding the Lewinsky scandal should necessitate indicting Clinton for criminal conduct after leaving the White House in January 2001. As for Whitewater, the investigation finally ended in September 2000, with Ray concluding he did not have the evidence to indict either Bill Clinton or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for criminal misconduct. Writing in the New York Times, James B. Stewart said that the Whitewater investigation was "preposterous” for the way it digressed from its original assignment, the way it took so long, and the way it cost so much money—nearly $60 million. He said, "From very early on, it should have been apparent that the criminal case could never be made against the Clintons. Who would testify against them?” As Clinton prepared to leave the White House in January 2001, he seemed intent on restoring respectability to his presidency through accomplishments in foreign policy. He tried to broker a new Mideast peace accord between Palestinians and Israelis, but that effort failed. Instead he found himself scrambling to arrange a cease-fire after the violence on West Bank and in the Gaza Strip threatened to ignite a war between several Arab countries and Israel. In November 2000 Clinton became the first American president to travel to Vietnam since the U.S. war with that country ended in the mid-1970s. He was trying to help revive normal relations with Hanoi, and he promised to assist the Vietnamese in their effort to counter the effects of Agent Orange, a defoliant used in combat by the U.S. military. The chemical has harmed more than a million people and has caused many birth defects. Some commentators though it hypocritical for Clinton to travel to Vietnam and honor American war dead, as he did in the one ceremony at a rice paddy, when as a young man he had dodged the draft. On the domestic scene, Clinton took bold steps to leave his mark as an environmental president. Among his final accomplishments, he banned road building and commercial logWilliam Jefferson Clinton 375 ging on about 60 million acres of public forestland. In late 2000, the Wilderness Society declared Clinton "one of the top conservation presidents of all time.” President Clinton hoped that voters would express their approval of his presidency by electing Vice President Al Gore to the White House in November 2000 and by placing the Democrats in control of Congress. To Clinton’s disappointment, although Gore finished ahead of Republican George W. Bush in the popular vote, he did so narrowly and lost the electoral count to his opponent; in Congress, the Democrats managed to win enough seats to reach a 50-50 tie in the Senate, but Republicans retained their razor-thin control of the House. Clinton publicly voiced his belief that Al Gore had really won the election and that political maneuvering in Florida by Gore’s opponent, Republican George W. Bush, had caused the vice president to lose. As much as controversy dogged Clinton during his presidency, it continued to do so in the days immediately after his departure. This time it stemmed from the 140 pardons that he granted during his final hours in the White House. Although presidents have an absolute constitutional right to grant pardons, several of those approved by Clinton raised suspicions that they came in exchange for contributions to his presidential library or to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. At the center of attention was the pardon granted to Marc Rich, a fugitive billionaire who fled to Europe after his indictment on charges of tax evasion, fraud, and racketeering. Clinton defended this and his other pardons as "based on the merits,” but critics pointed to the more than $400,000 donated by Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, to the Clinton library foundation. Added to this, newspapers revealed in late February 2001 that Hugh Rodham, the brother of Hillary Clinton, had received $400,000 in fees for successfully lobbying for a pardon and a prison commutation for two wealthy felons, one a businessman convicted of mail fraud and perjury, the other a cocaine trafficker. (After the controversy surfaced, Rodham returned the money.) The opprobrium that descended on Clinton for his pardons was bipartisan and widespread. Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter called the Rich pardon "disgraceful,” and Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief aide in the White House, charged that Clinton "saw the pardon power as just another perk of the office.” The New York Times, which had in the past largely supported Clinton, held nothing back in its editorial criticism. The last-minute pardon of Marc Rich, the paper said, "was a shocking abuse of presidential power and a reminder of why George W. Bush’s vow to a restore integrity to the Oval Office resonates with millions of Americans. . . .” Reflecting back on Clinton’s presidency, the paper said that he "constantly forced the nation to an unappetizing choice between investigations and the even more unsatisfactory route of ignoring outrageous and perhaps illegal conduct. . . . He throws our political and legal systems into arrest because he constantly comes up with ways of skirting the law or misrepresenting the facts that would never have occurred to anyone else in his position.” Both the House and the Senate began investigating the pardons (though without much enthusiasm, due in part to the fatigue over probing Clinton), and the U.S. attorney for New York launched a criminal investigation to determine if Denise Rich had used any of her former husband’s money in backing the presidential library as a means to influence Clinton. Yet in the broader context of the American presidency, other chief executives issued controversial pardons, none more so than Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal and George Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger following the Iran-Contra scandal. Clinton’s pardons, then, while reflecting a personal fault, may also have reflected a general trend by recent presidents to abuse the process. In June 2004, Bill Clinton published his massive memoir, My Life, which traced his life 376 William Jefferson Clinton from boyhood to his tumultuous years in the White House. "Early on the morning of August 19, 1946,” he began, "I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.” Some reviewers found the book to be as windy as his political speeches; others called it "candid,” "soul-searching,” and "enlightening.” Author Larry McMurtry called it "the richest American presidential autobiography.” In a review he wrote: "No other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years.” More than 3 million copies of the memoir were sold within the first eight days of its publication. Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in July to promote the presidential candidacy of John Kerry. For more than 30 minutes he held his audience spellbound. He criticized President George W. Bush for tax policies that favored the rich and for attacking Kerry as weak on terrorism. "Don’t you believe it,” he said in defense of Kerry. "Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.” The Kerry campaign displayed no reluctance about gaining the controversial former president’s backing; indeed, it was elated by Clinton’s support, and that of Clinton’s wife, Senator Hilary Clinton. "We welcome them in the race,” said a Kerry spokesperson. Bill Clinton’s efforts for Kerry were hindered, however, by a serious illness. In late summer, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Gaunt and exhausted, he nevertheless hit the campaign trail in October. In November, he attended the ceremony dedicating the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. The following January, President George W. Bush asked him to join former President George H. W. Bush in leading a relief effort to raise money for the victims of a tsunami wave that brought massive destruction to several nations around the Indian Ocean. Many political observers believe that Bill Clinton came into the White House with great promise but that he departed it with nothing better than modest accomplishments. His albatross turned out to be two developments of his own making: his desire to be well liked, which meant steering clear of risks that might have created a stellar record, and his refusal to admit responsibility for failure—a preference for deceit over forthrightness. On this last characteristic, his scandals thrived, leaving the imprint of impeachment that will forever detract
    from his legacy.

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