Bill Clinton

Early Life and Education

Mr. Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe 4th on Aug. 19, 1946, into a shattered family. Three months before the boy’s birth, his father, a young traveling salesman named William Jefferson Blythe 3d, died when the car he was driving left a wet Highway 61 in southern Missouri and crashed, throwing Mr. Blythe to his death in a rain-filled ditch.

Mr. Blythe’s widow, Virginia, was obliged to leave Billy with her parents in the small town of Hope, Ark., while she finished her nursing studies in New Orleans. In 1950, when her son was 4 years old, Virginia Blythe married the second of eventually four husbands, a car dealer named Roger Clinton. The new family moved an hour up the road from Hope to Hot Springs.

Mr. Clinton wrote that from a very early age he lived '‘parallel lives,’' with a public gregariousness and sunny disposition masking private turmoil and weakness. Several times he saw his alcoholic stepfather beating his mother and once firing a gun at her head. But he wrote that he would go to school the next day as if nothing had happened.

His way with people, combined with a formidable, organized intelligence, won Mr. Clinton a lifetime of prizes: In 1963, he was chosen to go to Washington as part of the American Legion program, Boys’ Nation. There he shook hands with President John F. Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden.

In 1964, Mr. Clinton entered Georgetown University in Washington. He actively opposed the Vietnam War, but agonized over whether he should serve in the military. In a letter to the Hot Springs draft board that he mailed in 1969, he acknowledged that avoiding the draft could cripple his “political viability.” So he signed a letter of intent to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps, but he reneged when it became likely that his draft number would not be called.

In 1968, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and, after his time abroad, went on to Yale Law School. There he met the woman he would marry, Hillary Rodham. A bright Wellesley graduate from suburban Chicago, she had caught Mr. Clinton staring at her in the law school library and introduced herself.

The two fell in love and moved together to Texas, where they worked on George McGovern’s Presidential campaign in 1972. Three years later, Mr. Clinton proposed marriage after buying a Fayetteville, Ark., house that Hillary had said she loved. The Clintons have one child, a daughter, Chelsea.

Arkansas

After a political apprenticeship that included clerking for J. W. Fulbright, then a United States Senator from Arkansas, while attending the Georgetown University and running unsuccessfully for Congress while teaching law at the University of Arkansas, Mr. Clinton was elected Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976. Two years later, at the age of 32, he was elected governor, the youngest person to hold that office in the state’s history.

But the brash, young, long-haired style of the first Clinton governorship alienated large numbers of voters in a state that was poor, rural and conservative. It was noted, with disapproval, that the governor’s wife, went by her maiden name, Hillary Rodham. At 34, Governor Clinton was thrown out of office.

Mr. Clinton cut his hair, and Hillary Rodham became, for political purposes at least, Hillary Clinton. In 1982 he regained the governor’s seat.

As governor, Mr. Clinton’s desire to please occasionally conflicted with his determination to bring about change in a poor state. It was early in his career that he began to garner a reputation for slipperiness and waffling in excess of even the norm of politics. The nickname Slick Willie, originally made popular by the Arkansas columnist Paul Greenberg in 1982, passed into common usage among the governor’s critics on the right and the left and soon stuck with the public. Jokes about Mr. Clinton’s honesty, about his predilection for saying whatever his listener of the moment wanted to hear, about his willingness to reverse himself, grew steadily through his five terms as governor.

1992 Campaign

When Mr. Clinton stood in front of the Old State Capitol in Little Rock and announced his candidacy for the 1992 presidential election, he was considered by many an unlikely prospect.

But Mr. Clinton, who was always the chief strategist of his campaign, banked on the central faith of his political life: If he could meet enough people, talk to enough people, make the essential connection enough times, he would win. The people would like him. After all, so many had before.

Campaigning in 1992 with running mate Al Gore, Mr. Clinton promised something for everyone: a package of spending to give the still-feeble recovery a jump; a longer-term package of government spending on needs like education, health and the environment, and a tax cut for the middle class.

He was elected with just 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race, beating �George H.W. Bush, the incumbent Republican president, and Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran on the ticket of the Reform Party he had created.

First Term

Mr. Clinton faced criticism from his first day in office from opponents who regarded his presidency as illegitimate. The passage, by a single vote in the summer of 1993, of a package of measures to reduce the federal budget deficit was the major achievement of Mr. Clinton’s first year in office, and it helped pave the way for the biggest success he claimed for his tenure: a booming economy.

But the 1994 failure of his effort, led by Mrs. Clinton �to overhaul the nation’s health care system overshadowed almost everything else about his first two years, and led the Republicans to reclaim majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

In foreign policy, Mr. Clinton’s first year was symbolized by searing images of weakness: an American soldier’s corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, and a United States military transport ship being turned around in Haiti by a rowdy rent-a-mob on the docks of Port-au-Prince. The blistering experience in Somalia forced Mr. Clinton to shy away from immediate action in Bosnia, where a civil war was taking thousands of lives. He also refused to intervene in the genocide that broke out late that year in Rwanda. After leaving office he called his failure to prevent the killings, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, his greatest regret.

In 1995, he gave the longest State of the Union address on record — - an hour and a half. Pundits were scathing, but the public loved it. By the fall, Mr. Clinton had his opponents on the defensive as he prevailed in two government shutdowns prompted by a standoff over the Republicans’ budget proposals.

In fighting poverty, he sought to shift his party’s emphasis from entitlements to programs that reward work, like the earned-income tax credit for the working poor. He upset liberal Democrats by signing a bill to force welfare recipients into the work force more quickly at a time when there was no assurance there would be jobs for them.

He reversed a previous stance that emphasized human rights over trade with China and finally put American troops in Bosnia. He also successfully linked American foreign policy with the domestic economy and jobs: overruling Congress to save Mexico from financial collapse; pressing Japan more aggressively to open its markets; winning passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The 1996 Election

In 1996, a politically chastened Mr. Clinton ran on a far lighter agenda than four years earlier. And he proceeded to embrace Republican positions with such relentless efficiency that his opponent, Mr. Dole, was left taunting his opponent as the '‘Me Too’' President.

The strategy worked: Mr. Clinton built a landslide in the Electoral College and won a decisive victory in the popular vote, overwhelming Mr. Dole in all regions of the country except the South and the High Plains, where the Republican won several states. Mr. Perot finished a distant third, drawing roughly half of the 19 percent he won in 1992.

The Second Term

A year into his second term, Mr. Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, became public as a result of his testimony in a sexual harassment lawsuit dating to his days as governor of Arkansas.

For more than a year, the president was all but paralyzed. At one point in the late summer of 1998, after he had acknowledged first to a grand jury, then to the public, offering misleading answers about the Lewinsky affair under oath, even a couple of his top advisers thought his presidency was over.

But Mr. Clinton also displayed a profound ability to compartmentalize his problems. Just a week after the scandal erupted in January 1998, he delivered a State of the Union address that crystallized his determination to use the projected federal budget surplus to '‘save Social Security first.’' He took a more active role in foreign policy, the major arena in which he could act unilaterally. And Mr. Clinton’s approval ratings remained high, which only infuriated his critics further.

The House voted to begin an investigation that would lead to the first impeachment proceedings since Watergate. But after a five-week trial in the Senate, on Feb.13, 1999, President Clinton was acquitted on two articles of impeachment, falling short of even a majority vote on either of the charges against him: perjury and obstruction of justice.

During Mr. Clinton’s second term, economic growth picked up speed, and real incomes rose across the board. The stock market soared as the dot-com boom took hold, before falling in 2000 as the easy riches promised by the Internet turned out to be not so easy.

In 1998, Al Qaeda struck American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and in 2000 attached the Navy destroyer, the USS Cole. Whether Mr. Clinton had pursued Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, aggressively enough became a subject of vigorous debate after the Sept. 11^th attacks. �

After the White House

When Mr. Clinton left office, he was lost at first. But then the former president established an organization with ambition to match his own, the William J. Clinton Foundation. Financed by Saudi princes, Indian tycoons, Hollywood moguls and governments like Australia and Norway, Mr. Clinton assembled an operation with 1,400 paid employees and volunteers working in 40 countries to fight disease, poverty and climate change. The foundation has made a place for itself as a generator of new ways of tackling old problems.

Mr. Clinton also penned “My Life,” a 957-page autobiography that was by turns painfully candid about his personal flaws and gleefully vindictive about what he called the hypocrisy of his enemies.

For the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Clinton returned to campaign mode, this time on behalf of his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, as she campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination against Barack Obama. Mr. Clinton’s flashes of temper and ill-considered remarks on the trail showed a side of him that surprised many accustomed to a smooth political operator.

Embraced by Obama as a Party Wise Man

In 2008, Barack Obama wrested control of the Democratic Party after portraying Mr. Clinton as a symbol of small-ball ambition and outdated politics. As president, Mr. Obama is turning to his Democratic predecessor for help as Republicans breathe down his neck.

The 44th president is enlisting the 42nd president, both as a historical validator of his own leadership and as a PIN to one of the richest A.T.M.’s in American politics. Rather than viewing him as a relic of the past, Mr. Obama is embracing Mr. Clinton as a party wise man who can reassure both the general public and the well-heeled benefactors needed to win re-election.

Privately, Democrats portray the evolving alliance as more utilitarian. “Once Obama’s out of office, I doubt they’ll take family vacations together,” said a former Clinton aide who has also worked for Mr. Obama and asked not to be named to avoid offending either man. “But Clinton thinks it’s critical for the country that he gets re-elected, and will do whatever he can to see that that happens.”

Another Democrat who has worked for both men said: “There’s no love lost. But Bill Clinton is not stupid. He knows if he can give a little of his 60-percent-plus approval rating halo to Obama, and Obama does well, that only helps Clinton. And it helps the missus if she wants to run.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost the Democratic nomination to Mr. Obama in 2008 only to join his cabinet as secretary of state, has made clear that she will step down after this term no matter what happens in the 2012 election. But people in the Clinton orbit said she has left the door more open to running for president again in 2016, a campaign that would benefit from Mr. Obama’s good will.

By many accounts, the president and the secretary of state get along fairly well despite their epic clash four years ago. Paradoxically, it has been the relationship between the two presidents that has been more awkward. At times, Mr. Obama has kept Mr. Clinton at a distance; at others, he has called on him for help, as he did after Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterm elections.

For all of their reputation as frenemies, Mr. Obama has stacked his administration with Clinton lieutenants. Aside from Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, national economic adviser, treasury secretary, defense secretary and attorney general, as well as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chief of staff, national security adviser and counselor, all worked for Mr. Clinton.

While Mr. Clinton’s presidency was rocked by controversy, his image has largely improved since leaving office. His camp expects Mr. Obama to deploy him to centrist or conservative states where the incumbent might be less effective. His economic record may help Mr. Obama argue that his programs have helped, even if unemployment remains high and growth sluggish.

In the meantime, Mr. Obama hopes Mr. Clinton can convince his backers that it is time to crack open their checkbooks.

The two men appeared together April 29 at the Virginia home of Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton fund-raiser, former Democratic National Committee chairman and chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s primary campaign in 2008. The joint appearance was brokered in part by Douglas Band, Mr. Clinton’s adviser; Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager; and Mr. McAuliffe, who may run for Virginia governor again in 2013.

The joint appearance included a reception for 500 people paying $1,000 apiece and a dinner for 80 donors paying $20,000 each. The $2.1 million take will go to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fund-raising committee of the president’s re-election campaign, the Democratic National Committee and several state Democratic parties. Mr. Clinton has also agreed to join Mr. Obama at two other fund-raisers.

That night, Mr. Clinton happily took on Mitt Romney, saying Mr. Obama has “got an opponent who basically wants to do what they did before — on steroids.”

Mr. Obama likewise mocked Mr. Romney for saying in a recent interview that Russia remained “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” “I didn’t know we were back in 1975,” the president said.

As for the man he once dismissed as not a transformational president, Mr. Obama heaped praise on Mr. Clinton, calling him “a master communicator” who refocused the Democratic Party when it “was a little bit lost.”

Hide