Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton: Talent, Surplus, and Disgrace

In early 1998 the President of the United States looked into a camera and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." The investigation that followed established an eighteen-month relationship, produced the second presidential impeachment in American history, and cost him his law licence — and did not stop him leaving office with the joint-highest approval rating of any president. No modern American political career contains a wider gap between capability and self-inflicted damage.

Hope, Hot Springs, and a Violent House

William Jefferson Blythe III was born on 19 August 1946 at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas, three months after his father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., died. His mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy, left him with her parents while she trained as a nurse. In 1950 she married Roger Clinton Sr., a co-owner of an automobile dealership, and the family moved to Hot Springs. Clinton later described his stepfather as "a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his family"; the physical abuse stopped when the boy confronted him at fourteen. At fifteen he formally took the surname Clinton.

Georgetown, Oxford, Yale — and the Draft

He took a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1968, went to University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar from 1968 to 1970, and completed a Juris Doctor at Yale Law School in 1973, where in 1971 he met Hillary Rodham in the law library. The Vietnam draft shadowed all of it. He held educational deferments in England, took part in anti-war protests, failed to secure a National Guard or Air Force place, arranged an ROTC enrolment at the University of Arkansas and then declined to join, citing opposition to the war. He registered and drew number 311, high enough to make selection improbable. Colonel Eugene Holmes of the Army later alleged that Clinton had manipulated the process — a charge that resurfaced in every campaign he ran.

The Boy Governor and the Comeback Kid

Clinton was Attorney General of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979 and Governor from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. At thirty-two he was the youngest governor in the country, nicknamed the "Boy Governor," and made education reform his signature, with Hillary chairing the standards committee. In 1992, having survived the Gennifer Flowers allegations to earn the label "Comeback Kid," he unseated the incumbent George H. W. Bush by 370 electoral votes to 168 in a three-way race with Ross Perot. In 1996 he beat Bob Dole 379 to 159 with 49.2 per cent of the popular vote, becoming the first Democrat to win consecutive presidential elections since Franklin Roosevelt.

The Domestic Ledger

The presidency ran through the longest peacetime expansion in American history, and the Congressional Budget Office recorded federal surpluses of $69 billion in 1998, $126 billion in 1999 and $236 billion in 2000. The legislative record was substantial and, by later Democratic standards, ideologically awkward: the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993; NAFTA and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which expanded the death penalty, in 1994; the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act ending welfare as it had existed; the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the Balanced Budget Act in 1997; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999. His central first-term ambition, national health care reform, was destroyed in 1993 by conservatives, the American Medical Association and the insurance industry. He launched whitehouse.gov on 29 July 1994, reversed Reagan- and Bush-era family planning restrictions, doubled federal HIV/AIDS funding, appointed openly gay officials — and also introduced "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in December 1993 and signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which he later repudiated, coming out for same-sex marriage in July 2009 and urging the Supreme Court to strike DOMA down in 2013.

Bosnia, Belfast, Oslo

Abroad he pressed reluctant European leaders into action over Bosnia, authorised NATO bombing in 1995, deployed peacekeepers and delivered the Dayton Agreement; he later ordered intervention in Kosovo. In November 1995 he became the first American president to visit Northern Ireland, and his involvement helped produce the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He hosted the Oslo I Accord and the 2000 Camp David summit between Israelis and Palestinians. He signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 and ordered the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign that December, and in 1994 applied the first "rogue state" designation to Iran.

Whitewater, Jones, Lewinsky, Impeachment

The scandals were continuous. The Whitewater land investigation produced convictions of Susan and James McDougal but not the Clintons; both Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr found insufficient evidence to prosecute the President. Paula Jones sued him for sexual harassment over an alleged incident in 1991, when he was governor, and the case reached deposition — the procedural doorway through which the rest arrived. In early 1998 the affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public; the investigation established an eighteen-month sexual relationship, contradicting his public denial. On 19 December 1998 the House of Representatives impeached him, 228–206 for perjury and 221–212 for obstruction of justice, making him the second president impeached and the first since Andrew Johnson. On 12 February 1999 the Senate acquitted him, 55–45 on perjury and 50–50 on obstruction, both far short of the two-thirds required. The consequences were still real: Arkansas suspended his law licence for five years on 19 January 2001, the Supreme Court suspended him from practice before it in October 2001, and he resigned from the bar.

Why Bill Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is political cognition — a combination of retentive command of policy detail and an almost physical ability to read a room. He arrived in office having been an Arkansas attorney general at thirty, a governor at thirty-two, a Rhodes Scholar and a Yale-trained lawyer, and he could argue budget arithmetic and welfare caseloads at a level most presidents delegate. He fused that with a synthetic instinct: the ability to take positions from both parties — free trade, welfare reform, deficit reduction, crime, family leave — and assemble them into a coalition that won twice. Presiding over surpluses of $236 billion while leaving with historic approval, days after being impeached, is not luck.

The counter-case is severe and unavoidable. The same self-belief that made him formidable made him reckless: he lied publicly about a relationship with a subordinate less than half his age, was impeached for perjury and obstruction, lost his licence to practise law, and spent the last years of a presidency of enormous promise defending himself. Several of his signature laws — the 1994 crime bill, welfare reform, Gramm-Leach-Bliley — are now widely blamed for mass incarceration, deepened poverty and financial deregulation. And his greatest legislative ambition, health care, failed outright. Call it a genius of political adaptation, undisciplined by anything resembling self-restraint.

Legacy

After leaving office Clinton founded the Clinton Foundation, working on HIV/AIDS prevention and climate change, served as UN special envoy to Haiti in 2009, co-founded the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund in 2010, and campaigned for his wife's presidential runs in 2008 and 2016. The line from his first inaugural address remains his own best summary of the method: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America." That he half-proved and half-refuted it himself is the whole story.