I | INTRODUCTION |
Bill
Clinton, born in 1946, 42nd president of the United States (1993-2001),
who was one of the most popular American presidents of the 20th century and the
second president to be impeached (see Impeachment). Clinton was the first
president born after World War II (1939-1945) and the third youngest person to
become president, after Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. He was also the
first Democrat in 12 years to hold the presidency and the first Democrat since
Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to two terms.
A moderate Democrat and longtime governor of
Arkansas, Clinton promised to change not only the direction the country had
taken under the two previous Republican presidents but also the policies of his
own Democratic Party. However, Clinton’s presidency was marked by unusually
bitter strife with Republicans in Congress. In his second term, Clinton became
the second president to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, after
admitting to an improper relationship with a White House intern. The Senate,
however, defeated the impeachment articles and did not remove him from
office.
During Clinton’s presidency, the country
enjoyed the longest period of economic growth in its history. A graceful
speaker, Clinton had a remarkable ability to connect with people, which enabled
him to bounce back from defeats, scandals, and even impeachment. He left office
with the highest voter approval rating of all modern presidents.
II | EARLY LIFE |
A | Childhood |
Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in
Hope, Arkansas. His given name was William Jefferson Blythe IV. He never knew
his father, William Jefferson Blythe III, a traveling salesman who died in a car
accident several months before Bill was born. After Bill became president, he
and his mother learned that his father had been married at least three other
times and that Bill had a half brother and half sister whom he had never met.
Bill took the name William Jefferson Clinton after his mother remarried.
As a small child, Bill lived with his
mother, Virginia Cassidy Blythe, and her parents in Hope, Arkansas. When Bill,
or Billy, as he was known, was one year old, his mother went to New Orleans,
Louisiana, to study to be a nurse-anesthetist, and for the next two years he was
reared mainly by his maternal grandparents.
When Bill was four years old, his mother
married Roger Clinton, later the owner of a car dealership in Hope. Two years
later, the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Life at home for Bill and his
mother was not always easy. Roger was an alcoholic and a gambler, often losing
the family’s money, including Virginia’s earnings as a nurse-anesthetist. He
cursed and sometimes beat his wife and verbally abused Bill and Bill’s younger
brother, Roger, Jr., who was born in 1956. Bill was especially close to his
mother and sometimes stood up to his stepfather to protect her. As a college
student, Bill reconciled with his stepfather, who died of cancer in 1967.
B | Schooling |
Clinton attended a Roman Catholic school for
two years in Hot Springs before attending public schools. He was a popular
student and maintained top grades. He held several student offices, played the
tenor saxophone, and was a member of the all-state band. In 1963, after his
junior year in high school, Clinton was elected as one of two delegates from
Arkansas to Boys Nation, a government study program for young people sponsored
by the American Legion, a veterans organization. There he debated in favor of
civil rights legislation and met President John F. Kennedy at a ceremony in the
White House Rose Garden.
C | College |
Clinton graduated from high school in 1964
and enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he majored in
international affairs. He was elected president of his class during his freshman
and sophomore years. As a junior and senior he earned money for school expenses
by working as an intern for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, which was chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas
Democrat. Clinton greatly admired Fulbright, who was a leading critic of United
States involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Clinton was also deeply moved
by African Americans’ fight for equality in the 1960s. In April 1968, a few
weeks before Clinton graduated, the assassination of civil rights leader Martin
Luther King, Jr., set off rioting in several American cities, including
Washington, D.C. Clinton volunteered to work with the Red Cross and took
clothing and food to people whose homes had been burned in the riots.
During his senior year, Clinton won a Rhodes
Scholarship to the University of Oxford in England, and he spent two years in
Oxford’s graduate program after graduating from Georgetown. In 1970 Clinton
enrolled at Yale University Law School, where he studied for a law degree. He
paid his way with a scholarship and by working two or three jobs at the same
time. At Yale he met fellow law student Hillary Diane Rodham, who was from the
Chicago area (see Hillary Rodham Clinton). They began dating, and in 1972
Clinton and Rodham worked in Texas for the presidential campaign of Democrat
George S. McGovern. Clinton worked as a campaign coordinator for McGovern in
Texas and Arkansas, and Rodham helped organize a voter-registration drive for
the Democratic National Committee.
D | Marriage |
Clinton graduated from law school in 1973
and went to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to teach at the University of Arkansas Law
School. Rodham worked with a congressional team investigating Watergate, a
political scandal that involved members of the administration of President
Richard M. Nixon. She joined Clinton on the law school faculty in 1974, and they
were married on October 11, 1975. Their daughter, Chelsea Victoria Clinton, was
born on February 27, 1980.
III | EARLY PUBLIC CAREER |
Clinton had worked on a number of political
campaigns in the late 1960s, including those of several Arkansas Democratic
politicians and a U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut. In 1974, midway
through his first year of teaching at the University of Arkansas, Clinton
entered his first political race, campaigning for a seat in the United States
House of Representatives. The incumbent Republican congressman, John Paul
Hammerschmidt, was a popular candidate and was considered unbeatable. Clinton
defeated three candidates for the Democratic Party nomination and ran an
energetic campaign against Hammerschmidt. Although Hammerschmidt defeated
Clinton with 52 percent of the vote, the election was his closest in 26 years in
Congress.
Clinton’s close race with Hammerschmidt
earned him statewide attention and helped him during his campaign to be attorney
general of Arkansas in 1976. He defeated two Democrats for the nomination and
had no Republican opposition. Clinton took public office for the first time in
January 1977. As attorney general, he fought rate increases by public utilities
and opposed the construction of a large coal-burning power plant. He promoted
tougher laws to protect the environment and consumers.
When Arkansas governor David Pryor ran for
the U.S. Senate in 1978, Clinton ran for governor. He promised to improve the
state’s schools and highways and to improve economic conditions so that more
jobs would be created. At that time, the average income of people in Arkansas
ranked 49th among the 50 states. Clinton won easily, receiving 60 percent of the
vote against four opponents in the Democratic primary election and 63 percent
against the Republican candidate, Lynn Lowe, in the general election. When he
took office in January 1979 at age 32, he was one of the youngest governors in
the nation’s history.
A | Governor of Arkansas |
A1 | First Term |
Clinton’s first term as governor
included efforts to improve Arkansas’s economy. One of his biggest successes as
governor was his highway program, but it was politically costly. Clinton thought
good highways were a key to developing the state, and the state’s roads were
among the worst in the country. To upgrade the highways, he asked the
legislature to pass a package of tax increases. The largest increases were on
licensing fees on automobiles and on large trucks that damaged the highways with
heavy loads. Clinton was forced to make compromises in his plan because many
businesses and the trucking industry opposed his program. The compromise plan
passed but was unpopular because it levied more taxes on individual car owners.
The plan was also opposed by the trucking and poultry industries because it did
not raise the weight limit for trucks on Arkansas highways.
Clinton undertook other legislative
initiatives that generated opposition. His criticism of the practice of
clear-cutting trees in national forests alienated the lumber and paper-making
companies, which were the largest employers in the state. Physicians opposed his
efforts to increase health care in poor, rural areas. Bankers disliked Clinton’s
proposal to withhold state funds from banks that did not lend enough money for
businesses that created jobs in their communities. The state’s largest utility
tangled with Clinton over the cost-sharing arrangements for distributing power
from nuclear plants in Mississippi.
Another factor affecting the governor
was the presence of Cuban refugees in Arkansas. In 1980 Cuba temporarily removed
its exit restrictions and permitted about 120,000 people to go to the United
States. In May 1980 President Jimmy Carter temporarily housed about 18,000 Cuban
refugees at an old United States Army post near Fort Smith, Arkansas. By the end
of May, the confined refugees were disgruntled with delays in their
resettlement, and some 300 escaped from the fort. On June 1 approximately 1,000
Cuban refugees broke through the gate of the post and were met in the nearby
town of Barling by about 500 armed townspeople. State officers subdued the
refugees, but the incident proved disastrous for Clinton, who had previously
campaigned on his friendship with Carter.
Clinton ran for reelection in 1980
against Frank D. White, a Little Rock businessman who had switched to the
Republican Party to run against Clinton. White received support from many of
those alienated by Clinton—including the trucking and wood-products industries,
the poultry industry, banks, and utilities. In addition, White used television
advertisements that showed the Cubans rioting and claimed that they would be
released into Arkansas communities and would take jobs away from Arkansas
workers. Clinton’s popularity plummeted further, and White won the election with
about 52 percent of the vote.
A2 | Second Through Fifth Terms |
After his defeat, Clinton joined a
large corporate law firm in Little Rock. Against the advice of most of his
friends and advisers, who urged him to wait before running for office again,
Clinton quickly began planning his campaign for the 1982 gubernatorial election.
Clinton won the Democratic nomination, although it required a runoff election
because of the closeness of the race. In the general election, Clinton faced
White, who was running for reelection, and the two candidates swapped bitter
charges. White repeated his accusations from the 1980 campaign, and Clinton
accused White of unfairly letting utilities raise the rates people paid for
electricity and telephone service. Clinton promised he would make it harder for
utilities to obtain rate increases. Clinton campaigned for the votes of blacks,
and he received more than 95 percent of their votes. Clinton ultimately defeated
White with nearly 55 percent of the vote.
Clinton had found lessons in his 1980
defeat about how to govern. He learned to choose his fights carefully, to resist
the urge to change everything at once, and to prepare people before proposing
major changes. These lessons helped Clinton win reelection in 1984, 1986, and
1990, with the last reelection coming after the gubernatorial term was changed
from two years to four years.
At the start of his second term,
Clinton decided to spend all his energies trying to improve education, which he
thought was the state’s biggest problem. Clinton believed that the state’s poor
education system neither prepared children for good jobs nor made Arkansas
attractive to industries that offered such jobs. He appointed his wife as the
head of a committee charged with proposing higher standards for Arkansas
schools. She conducted hearings in each of the state’s 75 counties, and she and
her husband made numerous speeches across the state, saying more should be
demanded from schools and students.
In the fall of 1983, Clinton called the
legislature into a special session to approve many changes in the school system.
Clinton won approval of most parts of his sweeping reform program: Taxes were
increased to pay teachers more money, offer more courses in the high schools,
and provide college scholarships. State money for education was distributed
differently to help the poorest schools. Eighth graders were required to pass a
test of basic knowledge before going to high school, and all school teachers and
administrators had to take a basic-knowledge test to keep their jobs. The
Clinton administration also adopted tough new standards proposed by Hillary
Clinton’s committee. These standards raised the requirements for graduation from
high school and forced high schools to offer more science, mathematics, foreign
language, art, and music classes. They also reduced the size of kindergarten and
elementary school classes. School districts that did not meet these requirements
within three years would be merged into districts that did meet the
standards.
The requirement that called for the
testing of teachers angered many schoolteachers and generated a national debate.
But the program, along with the taxes, proved popular with Arkansas voters.
During this time, Arkansas students improved their scores on college-entrance
tests. In the early 1980s a high percentage of Arkansas students dropped out of
school before graduating, and fewer high school graduates went to college than
in any other state. But by 1990, the dropout rate had fallen well below the
national average, and the percentage of young people who went to college matched
the national average.
Clinton also concentrated on economic
development, promoting new businesses and job growth. He introduced an economic
package to change banking laws, provide money to start new technology-oriented
businesses, arrange loans for people to start new businesses, and reduce the
taxes of large Arkansas companies that expanded their production and created new
jobs. The legislature approved nearly the entire package. Although the rate at
which new jobs were created in Arkansas in the late 1980s was among the highest
in the nation, most of these jobs did not pay high wages, and the average family
income remained low.
Clinton had difficulty trying to
persuade the legislature to raise more taxes to carry out further reforms in
education. The business groups he had once angered—the state’s largest electric
utility, the wood-products industry, trucking companies, the poultry industry,
and other farm groups—combined to block Clinton’s proposed tax hike. They also
defeated legislation that would have imposed higher ethical standards on public
officials and lobbyists.
After his election to a fifth term in
1990, Clinton was more successful in getting his legislative program enacted.
Based on his overall success at the legislative session in 1991, Clinton
announced that, despite a campaign promise in 1990 to complete a four-year term,
he intended to run for president because he had accomplished his goals for the
state more quickly than he had imagined.
Clinton had assumed national leadership
roles during his years as governor. In 1985 and 1986 he served as chairman of
the Southern Growth Policies Board, a group that planned strategies for economic
development in 12 Southern states and Puerto Rico. He became vice chairman of
the National Governors Association in 1985 and was the organization’s chairman
in 1986 and 1987. As chairman, Clinton became a spokesman for the nation’s
governors. In 1988 he led a movement to change the nation’s system of providing
welfare to poor people. In 1990 and 1991 Clinton headed the Democratic
Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats and businesspeople who work to
influence national policies.
B | The Presidential Campaign of 1992 |
Clinton had prepared to run for president
in 1988, but he backed out at the last minute, saying the campaign and the
presidency would be too hard on his family, especially his eight-year-old
daughter, Chelsea. He was then asked to give the presidential nomination speech
at the Democratic National Convention for Massachusetts governor Michael
Dukakis, who eventually lost the election to Republican George H. W. Bush.
In October 1991 Clinton announced that he
would run for president in the 1992 election. Although President Bush was very
popular at the time, Clinton thought Bush was vulnerable because the economy had
been depressed for much of his presidency. Moreover, Clinton had established
nationwide connections from his education crusade and the National Governors
Association, and this network enabled him to raise campaign money more easily
than other Democratic candidates. In early 1992, Clinton faced five Democratic
contenders: former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas; former California
governor Jerry Brown; Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia; Senator Robert
Kerrey of Nebraska; and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.
Clinton’s campaign focused on domestic
issues, particularly the economy. He ran as a “New Democrat,” a term coined by
the Democratic Leadership Council to describe a new type of moderate Democrat.
Clinton believed that the big-government, high-spending policies of the liberal
wing of the Democratic Party did not appeal to most voters. He thought that the
party should find other ways to solve social and economic problems. For example,
he proposed reforming the existing welfare system and finding additional ways to
aid the poor, such as a special form of tax credits for low-income families.
Clinton also wanted to expand trade with the rest of the world through trade
agreements and lower tariffs.
During the campaign, Clinton promised to
reform the health-care system, enact a tax cut for the middle class, institute a
national service program, reduce the federal budget deficit, and make major
investments in the nation’s infrastructure (highways, bridges, airports,
libraries, and hospitals). Internationally, he pledged to use American military
power to stop the advance of Serbs against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (often referred to simply as Bosnia). His campaign
encountered some trouble when allegations of Clinton’s marital infidelity
surfaced. Clinton also came under attack for not serving in the U.S. military
during the Vietnam War (1954-1975) and for protesting the war. However, he was
able to overcome these obstacles and win the presidential nomination at the
Democratic National Convention, held in New York City in mid-July. Clinton
picked Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his vice-presidential running mate.
Gore’s military service in the Vietnam War made the ticket more appealing to
conservative voters.
During the presidential campaign, Clinton
ran against the incumbent Bush and Ross Perot, who ran as an independent
candidate. Clinton blamed Bush for the downturn in the nation’s economy and
accused him of not caring about working people. He promised to reduce the taxes
of middle-class families and to follow policies that would improve the economy.
Bush said that Clinton would raise taxes if he became president and that Clinton
lacked foreign-policy experience. He portrayed Clinton as a traditional
big-spending liberal in the guise of a “New Democrat.” But Bush was hurt in the
campaign because as president he had signed legislation raising taxes despite
promising not to do so during the 1988 campaign.
Clinton won the election with 43 percent
of the popular vote compared with 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot.
In the electoral college, in which each state has a certain number of electoral
votes depending on the size of its population, Clinton won 370 votes to Bush’s
168. In the congressional elections, the Democrats—who held a majority in both
houses of Congress—gained one seat in the Senate, lost nine seats in the House
of Representatives, but ultimately maintained their majority in both houses. On
January 20, 1993, Clinton was sworn in as president.
IV | PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES |
Throughout most of his presidency, Clinton
maintained a strong core of support from those who had elected him, principally
African Americans, women, and blue-collar workers in the Northeast and Midwest.
Among all American presidents, he was one of the most forceful champions of
civil rights for minorities and equality for women. He appointed record numbers
of minorities and women as federal court judges, Cabinet members, and other
government officials.
During his first year in office, Clinton
quickly focused on improving the economy. He believed that the key was reducing
government spending and the huge deficits that occurred in the federal budget
each year because government spending exceeded its revenues. Because the
government borrowed money to offset its deficit spending, it reduced the amount
of money available for private investment. Therefore businesses could obtain
capital only at high rates of interest, which discouraged investment and
expansion.
In 1993 Clinton submitted to Congress a
budget that reduced federal spending and increased taxes. With every Republican
in Congress voting against it, the budget passed in both houses without one vote
to spare. Clinton’s budget victory reversed the trend of rising deficits, and it
stimulated the economy. However, Clinton’s major policy initiative of his first
term—providing health care insurance for all Americans—collapsed after a bitter
fight in 1994. This failure, along with the tax increase and budget battles with
Republicans, hurt Clinton and the Democrats in the congressional elections of
1994. In those elections the Republicans won a majority in both houses of
Congress. It was one of the most dramatic upheavals in Congress in the 20th
century.
After the 1994 election, a conservative
Republican majority took control of Congress. The new makeup of Congress
dramatically changed Clinton’s strategy. Unable to push his own programs, he
turned his attention to preventing the Republicans’ conservative agenda from
becoming law by vetoing Republican budgets that cut spending on programs he
supported. In 1995 the Republican-controlled Congress twice shut down the
federal government for short periods because it had not approved a budget.
In his first term, Clinton was able to reach
a compromise with the Republicans on one major initiative, welfare reform.
Angering many in his own party, he signed a bill in 1996 reforming the old
system of welfare payments and instituting a welfare-to-work program.
In 1996 Clinton ran for reelection against
Republican senator Robert Dole, the majority leader of the Senate, and Ross
Perot, who ran as the candidate of the newly formed Reform Party. During the
campaign, Clinton stressed his desire to control the federal budget deficit and
to work for campaign-finance reform. At the nominating convention, held in
Chicago in August, Clinton announced more plans, including additional funding
for environmental programs and tax credits for college tuition. Voters were
happy with the robust economy, and Clinton claimed credit for decreased numbers
of people on welfare rolls. He also pointed to dwindling crime as a result of
legislation he helped pass that included gun-control measures.
In November Clinton defeated Dole with 49
percent of the popular vote, compared with Dole’s 41 percent. Perot was not as
successful as he had been in 1992; he won only 8 percent of the vote. Clinton
soundly defeated Dole in the electoral college, receiving 379 votes to Dole’s
159. But the election did not alter Clinton’s problems with Congress. While
Democrats gained seats in the House of Representatives, they lost more seats in
the Senate, and Republicans continued their control of both houses of Congress.
After Clinton’s resounding victory, the
Congress was at first less confrontational. In 1997 Clinton and Congress worked
out compromises on reductions in taxes paid by most Americans and on spending
cuts and other reforms aimed at producing a balanced budget.
From his first months in office until his
last day, Clinton’s presidency was plagued by charges of wrongdoing. The
longest-running investigation began with Whitewater, a small real-estate project
in Arkansas in which Clinton and his wife had invested during the late 1970s.
The independent counsel investigating Whitewater learned in 1997 that Clinton
had had a sexual affair with a young female intern at the White House. In 1998
the House impeached the president. The House charged him with perjury, for not
being truthful before a federal grand jury, and obstruction of justice, for
trying to influence the testimony of others. In 1999 the Senate tried Clinton
but defeated the articles of impeachment and did not remove him from
office.
Although the affair and impeachment sullied
Clinton’s presidency, he was able to turn the investigation against the
Republicans. Many voters thought the Republicans were being unfair and
hypocritical in pressing the investigation and impeachment. Republicans made the
president’s conduct a central issue in the congressional elections in the fall
of 1998, but voters defeated major critics of the president in the Senate and
left the Republicans with a razor-thin margin in the House.
Because the Cold War had ended in the late
1980s, Clinton faced no threat to the nation’s security like those of preceding
presidents. Still, he had to make difficult decisions about whether to intervene
in bloody conflicts in places such as Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia, and
Kosovo. He twice deployed American military forces to halt fighting between
ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia and negotiated peace between the warring
factions in Bosnia. Clinton also played a critical role in making both peace and
war in the Middle East and in fashioning peace in Northern Ireland.
But Clinton’s real emphasis in foreign
policy was on what could be called economic globalism. He believed that the
country’s security and prosperity depended upon removing barriers to trade with
other nations and upon stabilizing nations with economic troubles. Despite
opposition from members of his own party, Clinton pushed two major trade
agreements through Congress in his first term: the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), in 1993, and, the following year, a global trade agreement
that created the World Trade Organization.
In the end, Clinton’s most significant
achievement as president was eliminating the federal budget deficit. When he
left office, the nation was running a surplus instead of a deficit. Clinton
claimed the lower interest rates that came from reducing the deficit and the low
inflation produced by free trade amounted to a tax cut of hundreds of billions
of dollars for Americans. His economic policies helped produce the longest
period of sustained economic growth in the nation’s history.
Clinton changed the nation’s politics by
moving the Democratic Party more to the center of the political spectrum. At the
same time, his tawdry conduct and his tendency to evade the truth cost him the
personal respect of the American people, even when they approved of his
leadership. In addition, he never fulfilled his campaign promises to overhaul
the country’s health-care system and reform campaign-finance laws. While Clinton
was considered one of the nation’s most brilliant political leaders, the
inexperience he showed in his early presidency and the scandals, investigations,
and impeachment kept him from fulfilling his vision for the country.
A | Domestic Affairs |
A1 | Appointments |
In his first term, Clinton appointed
more women and minorities to Cabinet positions—the heads of major departments of
the federal government—than any previous president. He said he wanted a Cabinet
that “looks like America.” The Cabinet appointees included women such as
Attorney General Janet Reno, the first woman to hold that office; Secretary of
Energy Hazel R. O’Leary; and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna
Shalala. Other appointees included African Americans such as Secretary of
Commerce Ron Brown and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Hispanics such as
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros. In addition, in his
first two years in office, Clinton appointed two new justices to the Supreme
Court of the United States. Stephen Breyer replaced Harry Andrew Blackmun, and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second woman on the Supreme Court when she
replaced Byron Raymond White. The appointments strengthened the liberal faction
on the Supreme Court.
At the beginning of his second term,
Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to appointing women to Cabinet positions by
nominating Madeleine Albright the first female secretary of state. In addition,
he worked to make his Cabinet bipartisan, appointing Republican senator William
Cohen secretary of defense. Other second-term Clinton appointees included
Secretary of Commerce William Daley, Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, Secretary
of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo, Transportation Secretary Rodney
Slater, and Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. Herman and Slater were the
first African Americans to hold their respective positions.
A2 | Economic Policy |
A2a | Federal Budgets |
During his first term, Clinton focused
on the country’s domestic issues, especially the economy. Before taking office
in 1993, he received a report that the federal budget deficit would be $290
billion that year and more in succeeding years, much greater than had been
forecast. His economic advisers and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board, persuaded him that reducing the deficit should be the highest
priority. Clinton prepared a budget that called for reducing the deficit by $500
billion over five years, about $255 billion by cutting spending and $241 billion
by raising taxes. The suggested tax raise would mostly affect very wealthy
people.
Republican leaders said the tax
increase would wreck the economy, and every Republican in both houses of
Congress voted against the budget. In the most critical vote of Clinton’s
presidency, Vice President Gore broke a tie to pass the bill in the Senate, 51
to 50. Clinton persuaded enough Democrats in the House to vote for the bill that
it was approved without a vote to spare, 218 to 216. Although Clinton was
criticized for abandoning his middle-class tax cut, the budget package did
expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which aided low-income families by
reducing the amount of federal income tax they owed and by offsetting some of
their social security payroll taxes. The EITC put $21 billion into the pockets
of 15 million low-income families over the next five years. The
deficit-reduction package reassured investors in the bond markets, and long-term
interest rates began to go down. The budget deficit declined sharply in the
years afterward.
Clinton worked out another
deficit-reduction package in 1997 aimed at achieving a balanced budget by 2002,
this time with the help of Republicans in Congress. In the 1998 fiscal year, the
treasury experienced a surplus of $70 billion, the first surplus since 1969. The
surplus was achieved well ahead of expectations because of strong growth in the
U.S. economy. The country began to use surplus revenues to pay down the national
debt, which had risen to $5.4 trillion by 1997. The U.S. economy continued to
grow, and in February 2000 it broke the record for the longest uninterrupted
economic expansion in U.S. history, lasting ten years.
Many people credited Clinton’s fiscal
policies with the economic turnaround, while others credited the monetary
policies of the Federal Reserve Board and its chairman. An important factor of
the economic success during the Clinton years was the great growth of
technology, especially in computers and telecommunications. Technology improved
the rate of productivity—the average amount of work done by one worker. Rising
productivity prevented inflation from occurring as the economy grew. Unlike
growth periods in the previous two decades, low- and middle-income workers
experienced improved living standards.
For most of his eight years, Clinton
battled Republicans over tax cuts. After winning control of both houses of
Congress in 1994, Republicans, led by the new Speaker of the House of
Representatives, Newt Gingrich, proposed tax cuts in every session of Congress.
Clinton opposed the Republican tax reductions, saying they favored the very rich
and would return the country to rising budget deficits.
In August 1997, however, Clinton
struck a compromise with Republicans on a tax-relief act that reduced taxes on
capital gains and estates and gave taxpayers a credit of $500 per child and tax
credits for college tuition and expenses. The law also created a new type of
individual retirement account (IRA) called the Roth IRA, which allowed people to
invest taxed income for retirement without having to pay taxes on this money
upon withdrawal. In addition, the law raised taxes on cigarettes. The next year,
Congress approved Clinton’s proposal to make college more affordable by
expanding the financial-aid program known as Pell grants and lowering interest
rates on student loans.
Clinton also fought Congress every
year on the federal budget, most often on how much money would be spent on
education, government health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the
environment, and AmeriCorps, the national service program that Clinton had
pushed through Congress while Democrats were still in control. In late 1995 the
fight over the budget reached a bitter stalemate over cuts in Medicare,
Medicaid, education, and the environment. When Clinton vetoed spending bills,
Congress twice refused to pass temporary spending authorizations and forced the
federal government to partially shut down because agencies had no authority to
spend money. The Republicans wanted to emphasize their dispute with the
president on spending, but the strategy backfired. The shutdowns proved
unpopular with voters, who blamed the Republicans.
In April 1996 Clinton and Congress
finally agreed on a budget that provided money for government agencies until the
end of the fiscal year in October. The budget included spending cuts that the
Republicans wanted, decreasing the cost of cultural, labor, and housing
programs, but it also preserved many programs that Clinton wanted, particularly
educational and environmental ones.
A2b | Trade Legislation |
Another one of Clinton’s goals was to
pass trade legislation that lowered the barriers to trade with other nations. He
broke with many of his supporters, including labor unions, over free-trade
legislation. Many feared that cutting tariffs (taxes on exports or
imports) and relaxing rules on what could be imported would cost American jobs
because people would buy cheaper products from other countries. But Clinton
argued that the country would be helped, not harmed, by free trade because the
country could boost its exports and grow the economy. Clinton also thought that
foreign nations could be moved to economic and political reform through free
trade.
Clinton’s first trade effort was the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would gradually reduce
tariffs and create a free-trading bloc of the North American countries—the
United States, Canada, and Mexico. Opponents of NAFTA, led by Ross Perot, said
it would drive American companies to Mexico, where they could produce goods with
cheaper labor and ship them back to the United States. Clinton argued that NAFTA
would expand U.S. exports and create new jobs. He persuaded many Democrats to
join most Republicans in voting for the measure. In 1993 the Congress voted on
the treaty and passed it.
Clinton also met with leaders of the
Pacific Rim nations to discuss lowering trade barriers. In November 1993 he
hosted a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Seattle,
Washington, attended by the leaders of 12 Pacific Rim nations. In 1994 he
orchestrated an agreement in Indonesia with Pacific Rim nations to gradually
remove trade barriers and open their markets.
Members of Clinton’s administration
also participated in the final round of trade negotiations sponsored by members
of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an international trade
organization. This round of negotiations had been going on since 1986. In a rare
lame-duck session, after the 1994 elections but before the new Congress began,
Clinton summoned Congress to ratify the trade agreement, which it did. As part
of the GATT agreement, a new international trade body, the World Trade
Organization (WTO), replaced GATT in 1995. The WTO had stronger authority to
enforce trade agreements, and it covered a wider range of trade than GATT
did.
During his second term, Clinton had a
notable defeat regarding trade legislation. In November 1997 Congress postponed
voting on a bill to restore a presidential trade authority that had lapsed in
1994. The bill would have given the president the authority to negotiate trade
agreements that Congress would not have been able to change but only approve or
reject. This presidential authority is known as fast-track negotiating because
it streamlines the treaty process. Clinton was unable to generate sufficient
support for the legislation, even among members of the Democratic Party.
Clinton also faced a trade setback in
December 1999, when the WTO met in Seattle, Washington, to initiate a new round
of trade negotiations. Clinton hoped new agreements on issues such as
agriculture and intellectual property could be introduced at the meeting, but
the talks failed. Anti-WTO protesters in the streets of Seattle disrupted the
meetings, and the international delegates inside the meetings could not reach a
consensus. Among other contentious issues, delegates from smaller, poorer
countries resisted Clinton’s efforts to discuss labor and environmental
standards.
That same year, Clinton signed a
landmark trade agreement with China, after more than a decade of negotiations.
The agreement would lower many trade barriers between the countries, making it
easier to export U.S. products such as automobiles, banking services, and motion
pictures. However, the agreement could not take effect until China was accepted
into the WTO and was granted permanent “normal trade relations” status by the
U.S. Congress. Under the pact, the United States would support China’s
membership in the WTO. However, many Democrats as well as Republicans resisted
granting permanent status to China because they were concerned about human
rights in the country and the impact of Chinese imports on U.S. industries and
jobs. But in 2000 Congress voted to grant permanent normal trade relations with
China.
In all, the Clinton administration
negotiated about 300 trade agreements with other countries. Clinton’s last
treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, said the lowered tariffs, which reduced
prices to consumers and kept inflation low, amounted to “the largest tax cut in
the history of the world.”
A3 | Social Policy |
With the Democratic Party’s sizable
majority in both houses of Congress when Clinton took office in 1993, he
promised in his inaugural speech “an end to the era of deadlock and drift.” In
little more than two weeks, he signed his first major piece of legislation, the
Family and Medical Leave Act. This act required companies with more than 50
workers to allow workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year to cope with
family concerns such as childbirth and illness. Also during his first year,
Congress passed Clinton’s national service program known as AmeriCorps. Under
the program, participants perform community service in return for money to
finance college or to pay back student loans. Congress also passed the so-called
Brady bill, which imposed a waiting period on prospective gun owners buying
handguns. In 1994 Clinton also supported a successful anticrime bill that banned
the sale of assault weapons and gave states money to hire police officers and
fund crime-prevention programs.
Clinton was the first president to
advocate equal rights for homosexuals. During his first campaign, he promised to
lift the ban against homosexuals serving in the armed forces. He moved ahead on
his plan as he took office, but the proposal ignited protests from military
leaders and members of Congress. It also made conservatives more suspicious and
resentful of the president. Clinton and military leaders reached a compromise:
Homosexuals would be allowed to serve if they did not reveal their sexual
orientation and refrained from homosexual conduct. It was known as the “don’t
ask, don’t tell” policy. It remained controversial, and late in his second term
Clinton expressed dissatisfaction with the policy because it had not prevented
harassment of gays in the military.
Clinton also openly championed the right
of women to have abortions. One of his first acts as president was to sign
orders overturning restrictions on abortions that had been put in place under
the two previous Republican presidents. He vetoed bills passed by Congress that
placed restrictions on abortions.
One of Clinton’s most popular promises
during his first campaign was to guarantee lifelong health insurance for every
American. At that time, 44 million Americans were not covered by private health
insurance or government health programs. Clinton promised that the health-care
system would be reformed in his first year in office. He appointed his wife,
Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head a task force to write a bill that would
guarantee health insurance and hold down the rapidly rising cost of health care.
The task force proposed a plan under which employers would be required to
provide health insurance for their workers. Under the plan, people would join a
regional health-care alliance that would contract with insurance organizations
and others to offer health insurance to its members.
Many businesses, health insurance
companies, and Republicans in Congress opposed the plan. They criticized it for
being too complicated and for giving the federal government too large a role in
medical care. The administration was unable to reach a compromise with
Republicans, and a universal health care bill never made it through
Congress.
In August 1996, however, Clinton and the
Republican majority in Congress compromised on several health-care issues.
Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill making it easier for workers to
transfer their health insurance between employers without being denied coverage
for preexisting conditions. In 1997, as part of a budget deal, Congress approved
another health-care initiative. It created the Children’s Health Insurance
Program (CHIP), which extended the medical coverage of Medicaid to children of
low-income families who did not otherwise qualify for Medicaid.
Clinton also signed his most important
domestic legislation in August 1996. He approved a bill overhauling the federal
welfare system, in part to fulfill a 1992 campaign promise to “end the welfare
system as we know it.” Clinton had vetoed two previous welfare bills, saying
that the cutbacks were too severe. The welfare-to-work bill that he signed
limited lifetime benefits to five years, denied some welfare programs and food
stamps to illegal immigrants, and required that adult recipients work after two
years. The federal government gave states annual block grants to pay for
programs and allowed them to set some of their own guidelines for deciding which
potential recipients were eligible to receive benefits. Clinton signed the bill
despite objections from many members of his party and administration. They
thought eliminating benefits would be cruel to many poor women and children. But
criticism waned in succeeding years as welfare rolls declined dramatically and
women found work in the booming economy.
Clinton built a significant
environmental record as president. During his tenure he designated a total of 18
new national monuments, encompassing 8 million acres. He also added more than
2.2 million acres of land to national parks and ordered nearly one-third of the
nation’s existing national forests, or 58 million acres, protected from logging
and development. Clinton’s other environmental achievements included preventing
mining in Yellowstone National Park and helping restore the Florida Everglades.
In addition, he strengthened the Clean Water Act in 1996 by signing the Safe
Drinking Water Act amendments, which protected the quality of drinking water.
Clinton was also involved with the negotiations of an international treaty to
reduce the threat of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
However, Congress refused to ratify the treaty.
A4 | Investigations and Impeachment |
Clinton was plagued during almost his
entire presidency by accusations of wrongdoing. In the fall of 1993, Clinton’s
first year as president, questions were raised about the Clintons’ investment in
the Whitewater Development Corporation, a land-development venture. In January
1994 Attorney General Janet Reno named Robert Fiske as independent counsel to
probe the Whitewater allegations. In August 1994 a three-judge panel empowered
to appoint special prosecutors removed Fiske and appointed Kenneth Starr to
direct the Whitewater investigations.
In January 1998 Starr asked Attorney
General Janet Reno to expand his Whitewater investigation. He wanted to
determine if the president had had a sexual affair with a 24-year-old White
House intern, Monica Lewinsky, had lied about it under oath, and had tried to
influence others’ testimony about it. Although the Lewinsky affair was unrelated
to the Whitewater issues, Starr justified the investigation by saying that it
constituted a pattern of obstructing justice at the White House. The attorney
general and a panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia enlarged
Starr’s mandate to include the Lewinsky matter.
The Lewinsky affair came to Starr’s
attention through a civil lawsuit against Clinton filed in 1994 by a woman in
Arkansas, Paula Corbin Jones, a former state government secretary. Jones alleged
in the suit that Clinton had violated her civil rights by making a sexual
proposition to her in a Little Rock hotel room when he was governor. In
1998—after Starr began to investigate the Lewinsky affair—a U.S. District Court
judge dismissed Jones’s suit, stating that “there are no genuine issues for
trial in this case.” While Jones was appealing the dismissal, her lawyers
negotiated a settlement with the president in which she agreed to drop her suit
in exchange for a payment of $850,000.
Before her suit was dismissed, however,
Jones had tried to show that Clinton had a pattern of sexual misconduct with
women. Her lawyers received a rumor that Lewinsky had had an affair with the
president, and they subpoenaed her as a witness. Although Lewinsky denied the
affair, Starr acquired tape recordings of Lewinsky discussing the affair with a
friend. After the recordings emerged, Lewinsky talked extensively to Starr’s
investigators and to a federal Whitewater grand jury in Washington, D.C., in
July and August 1998.
In August Clinton testified by
closed-circuit television for the grand jury, becoming the first president to
testify before a grand jury in his own defense. Afterward, Clinton acknowledged
to a national television audience that he had “inappropriate intimate contact”
with Lewinsky. He apologized for misleading his family, his aides, and the
country.
In September 1998 Starr delivered a
report to the House of Representatives recounting graphic details of sexual
incidents involving Clinton and Lewinsky. The debate in the House was bitter,
with Democrats accusing Republicans of a vendetta to destroy a popular
president. In December the House approved two articles of impeachment—perjury
before the grand jury and obstruction of justice. Throughout the controversy,
polls showed that a large majority of Americans thought the president was doing
a good job and that he should not be impeached or removed from office.
The House vote moved the case to the
Senate, which had the power to remove an impeached president by a vote of
conviction by two thirds of its members. Senators sensed public unhappiness with
the partisanship that surrounded the impeachment and set out to calm the
congressional debate during its trial of the president. In February 1999 the
Senate defeated both articles of impeachment. Afterward, Clinton addressed the
nation by television from the White House Rose Garden and said he was
“profoundly sorry” for his actions and “the great burden they have imposed on
the Congress and on the American people.”
B | Foreign Affairs |
Although the United States was no longer
engaged in the Cold War, Clinton had to decide whether the United States, as a
superpower, had a role to play in the conflicts and violence occurring in
Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti. These were all places where
suffering was intense but the interests of the United States were not clear.
Clinton was at first hesitant to commit American military forces and risk lives
in regions torn by ethnic and religious strife, but gradually he expanded his
view of the nation’s strategic interests. Because the interests of people all
over the world had become so interconnected, Clinton thought the United States
had a stake in protecting human rights and promoting the political and economic
stability of remote countries. He sent armed forces to end fighting, maintain
peace, and protect civilians in those countries, and few American lives were
lost in military action. He also took a hand personally in trying to end
conflict in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.
B1 | Africa |
Only weeks before Clinton took office,
President Bush had sent American soldiers to Somalia, on the eastern coast of
Africa, where people were dying from starvation and civil war. The soldiers were
sent to prevent food and other relief supplies for starving people from being
stolen by warring clans. When the soldiers came under fire from armed clans and
18 soldiers were killed in 1993, the mission became unpopular with the American
people. Clinton doubled troops in the country to help the Americans defend
themselves and to prevent anarchy and starvation, but calls for withdrawal grew
louder. The U.S. soldiers were withdrawn in March 1994.
In April 1994 a civil war erupted in
Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. Over the next few months, an
estimated 500,000 to 1 million Rwandans, mainly Tutsi, were massacred. Within a
few weeks after the war began, millions of people had fled the massacres and
repression in the country. With thousands more dying of disease and starvation
in refugee camps in neighboring countries, the Clinton administration was under
pressure to provide relief. Clinton ordered airdrops of food and supplies for
refugees, and in July he sent 200 troops to the Rwanda capital of Kigali to
operate the airport and safeguard relief supplies. These troops were withdrawn
by October 1994. When Clinton traveled to Africa in 1998, he apologized for the
international community’s failure to respond to the massacres.
In August 1998 terrorists exploded bombs
outside the United States embassies in the capitals of two East African
countries, Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. About 250 people,
including Americans, were killed, and more than 5,500 were injured. In
succeeding months several people were arrested and brought to the United States
to stand trial. The Clinton administration linked the bombings to Osama bin
Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian living in Afghanistan who was suspected of
terrorist activity. That same month Clinton ordered missile attacks on sites in
Afghanistan and Sudan to retaliate for the bombings at the U.S. embassies and to
deter future terrorist attacks. Clinton maintained that the sites—a chemical
factory at Khartoum (the capital of Sudan) and several alleged terrorist
encampments in Afghanistan—were involved in imminent terrorist plots.
B2 | The Balkans |
A major foreign policy issue for Clinton
during his first term was the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (often
referred to simply as Bosnia), a nation in southeastern Europe that declared its
independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 (see Wars of Yugoslav Succession).
This declaration sparked a war between Bosnian Serbs, who wanted Bosnia to
remain in the Yugoslav federation, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats.
The Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbia, were better armed than the
Bosniaks and the Croats and controlled much of the countryside. They besieged
cities, including the capital Sarajevo, and caused massive suffering. Clinton
suggested bombing Serb supply lines and lifting an embargo that prevented the
shipment of military arms to the former Yugoslavia but could not get European
nations to join him on either strategy. In 1994 he found himself opposing
Republicans in Congress who wanted to lift the arms embargo because the U.S.
allies in Western Europe were still resistant to that policy.
Throughout 1994 Clinton pressured
Western European countries to take strong measures against the Serbs. But in
November, after the Serbs seemed on the verge of overwhelming the Bosniaks and
Croats in several strongholds, he changed course and pushed for conciliation
with the Serbs. In November 1995 the Clinton administration hosted peace talks
between the warring parties in Bosnia. A peace agreement known as the Dayton
peace accord was reached that left Bosnia as a single state made up of two
separate entities with a central government.
In the spring of 1998, ethnic strife in
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)—the state formed from the former
Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro—flared when Serb forces moved into
the southern province of Kosovo. More than 90 percent of the people of Kosovo
were ethnic Albanians, many of whom wanted independence from the FRY. The Serbs,
however, had considered the area sacred territory for six centuries. Serb forces
moved into the province to put down Albanian rebels, but reports of Serb
atrocities against civilians sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing
across the border into neighboring countries.
After attempting to reach a peace
settlement, Clinton warned the Serbs of possible military strikes. In March,
military forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including
the United States, began dropping missiles and bombs on military installations
in Kosovo and Serbia. It was the first time in NATO’s history that its forces
had attacked a European country. In June 1999 NATO and FRY military leaders
approved an international peace plan for Kosovo, and NATO suspended its
bombing.
B3 | Haiti |
Clinton had more success in Haiti, an
impoverished country in the Caribbean Sea southeast of Cuba. In September 1991
military leaders, led by Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras, had ousted the
country’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide escaped to the
United States. In 1993 thousands of Haitians tried to flee to the United States,
but more than half were sent back to Haiti by the United States Coast Guard.
Although Clinton had criticized former president George Bush for returning
Haitian refugees to their country, he continued Bush’s policy on the grounds
that accepting refugees might encourage many more to flee to the United
States.
In 1994 Clinton demanded repeatedly that
the Haitian government step down and restore democratic rule. Members of both
parties in Congress opposed American intervention, but Clinton sent a large
military force to the country in September 1994. At the last minute, before the
troops reached Haiti, he sent a delegation led by former President Jimmy Carter
to urge Cédras to step down and leave the country. Cédras agreed to leave and
surrender the government to Aristide. Cédras and his top lieutenants left the
country in October, and a few days later, American forces escorted Aristide into
the capital. The democratic government was restored.
B4 | The Middle East |
Clinton also worked in the Middle East
to negotiate peace agreements between Arabs, including Palestinians, and
Israelis. Secret negotiations between the nation of Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) led to a historic declaration of peace in
September 1993. Clinton arranged for the peace accord to be signed at the White
House. This agreement paved the way for limited Palestinian self-rule in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In July 1994 Clinton helped
orchestrate a historic agreement between longtime enemies Israel and Jordan to
end their state of war. The leaders of the countries also signed their pact at
the White House.
However, the 1993 peace agreement
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and a second one in
1995 did not end the strife. After the peace process stalled, Clinton brought
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian
leader, together for talks in October 1998 at a resort on the Wye River in
Maryland. The leaders signed an agreement under which Israel would transfer more
territory in the West Bank to the Palestinian National Authority, the
Palestinian administrative body in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in exchange
for Palestinian steps to curb terrorism. They also adopted a timetable to
negotiate a final resolution of the Palestinian fight for an independent
state.
After an outbreak of violence, however,
Netanyahu refused to give up the West Bank territory and placed new demands upon
the Palestinians. This led to the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. In May
1999 elections Ehud Barak, the leader of a political coalition that favored
resuming the peace process, defeated Netanyahu to become prime minister. Clinton
continued to support negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Throughout his last year in office, Clinton sought to arrange a final peace
settlement but failed.
Clinton frequently faced trouble with
Iraq. In 1991, before Clinton became president, the United States participated
in the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. In 1991 a
cease-fire agreement was signed that required Iraq to eliminate its weapons of
mass destruction and allow inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission
(UNSCOM) to monitor the country’s compliance.
From the beginning of the inspections,
the UNSCOM team encountered resistance from Iraq, which blocked inspections and
hid deadly germ agents and warheads. Clinton threatened military action several
times when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein seemed to be thwarting the UNSCOM
inspections. In December 1998 Clinton ordered four days of intense air
bombardments against military installations in Iraq. After the bombing, Saddam
Hussein refused to allow any further UN inspections. For months afterward, U.S.
airplanes continued to target defense installations in Iraq, in response to what
the Clinton administration said were provocations by the Iraqi military,
including antiaircraft fire and radar locks on American planes.
B5 | Korea |
Tensions on the Korean peninsula
increased in 1994 when North Korea, a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, refused to allow international inspectors to look at two nuclear waste
sites. The inspectors wanted to see if North Korea was reprocessing spent fuel
into plutonium, which could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons in violation
of the treaty. Despite international concerns and repeated warnings by Clinton,
North Korea refused to allow the inspections and raised the prospect of war with
South Korea, an ally of the United States.
After private diplomacy by former
president Jimmy Carter, the Clinton administration reached an agreement with
North Korea in October 1994. North Korea would shut down the nuclear plants that
could produce the bomb material, and the United States would help North Korea
build plants that generated electricity with light-water nuclear reactors. These
reactors would be more efficient, and the waste they produced could not be
easily extracted for use in nuclear weapons. The United States promised to
supply fuel oil to operate electric plants until the new plants were built, and
North Korea agreed to allow inspection of the old waste sites when construction
started on the new plants.
B6 | Mexico |
Another foreign crisis occurred in
early 1995, when the value of the peso, the currency of Mexico, began to
fall sharply, threatening the collapse of the Mexican economy. Clinton said the
collapse of Mexico’s economy would have a harsh effect on the United States
because of the economic ties between the two countries. He submitted a plan to
Congress to help Mexico ease its financial crisis. Fearing that voters would not
favor giving money to Mexico, Congress refused to approve the plan. Clinton then
devised a $20 billion loan package for Mexico to restore confidence of investors
around the world in the Mexican economy. In January 1997 Mexico announced that
it had completed its loan payments to the United States, three years ahead of
schedule. However, issues such as drug smuggling and U.S. immigration policies
strained relations between the United States and Mexico.
B7 | Cuba |
Following talks with representatives of
the Cuban government, Clinton announced in May 1995 a controversial decision to
reverse a decades-old policy of automatically granting asylum to Cuban refugees.
Some 20,000 refugees detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba were to be
admitted to the United States over a period of about three months; to prevent a
mass exodus of refugees to the United States, all future refugees would be
returned to Cuba. While some political figures praised the decision, such as the
governor of Florida (where refugees were expected to settle), others in the
Clinton administration voiced their opposition.
Relations between the United States and
Cuba worsened in February 1996 when Cuba shot down two American civilian planes
without warning. Cuba claimed that the planes had been in Cuban airspace.
Clinton tightened sanctions against Cuba, including the suspension of charter
flights from the United States to Cuba. The president hoped this suspension
would hurt Cuba’s tourist industry.
Also in response to the incident, the
U.S. Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act in March 1996. Parts of the bill
strengthened an embargo against imports of Cuban products. However, another
part, Title III, allowed American citizens whose property was seized during and
after the 1959 Cuban Revolution to file suit in U.S. courts against foreign
companies that later invested in those properties. Title III produced an
immediate uproar from countries such as Mexico, Canada, and members of the
European Union (EU) because they believed that the United States could not
penalize them for doing business with Cuba. In response, Clinton repeatedly
suspended Title III of the legislation (the Helms-Burton Act gave the president
the right to exercise this option every six months).
Clinton softened U.S. policy toward
Cuba in 1998 and 1999. In March 1998, at the urging of Pope John Paul II,
Clinton eased restrictions and allowed humanitarian charter flights to resume.
He also took steps to increase educational, religious, and humanitarian contacts
with the country. The U.S. government decided to allow Cuban citizens to receive
more money from American friends and family members and to buy more American
food and medicine.
B8 | Northern Ireland |
Clinton worked for much of his
presidency to end the conflict in Northern Ireland by arranging a peace
agreement between the Catholic and Protestant factions. In 1998 George Mitchell,
a former United States senator, brokered an accord that became known as the Good
Friday agreement. It called for the British Parliament to relinquish
administration of the province to a new Northern Ireland assembly that would
include members of both religious communities. But months of stalemate followed,
partly over the refusal of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a largely Catholic
paramilitary group, to surrender its weapons. Mitchell returned and worked out
the blueprint for a further agreement that resulted in December 1999 in the
formation of a power-sharing government, which was to be followed by steps
toward the IRA’s disarmament. That agreement faltered as well, although Clinton
continued to talk to leaders of the factions and British leaders to keep the
peace process from collapsing.
B9 | Other Issues |
In 1996 Clinton signed the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a landmark international agreement that
would have prohibited nuclear weapons testing by all signatory nations. The next
year he sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification. In October 1999 the
Senate finally voted on the treaty and rejected it. International reaction to
the Senate’s action was uniformly negative, and the rejection was a political
setback for Clinton, who had lobbied actively for its approval. Despite the
rejection of the treaty, Clinton promised that the United States would continue
to abide by a policy of not testing nuclear weapons, which had been in place
since 1992.
Throughout the 1990s the United States
did not pay its dues to the United Nations (UN). By 1999 the United States owed
the UN at least $1 billion in back dues. That same year Clinton reached a
compromise with Republicans in Congress to submit more than $800 million in back
dues. Republicans in the House of Representatives had insisted that UN debt
repayments be accompanied by restrictions on U.S. funding for international
groups that lobbied for abortion rights in foreign countries. Clinton had vetoed
similar measures in the past, but he agreed to the restrictions when faced with
the possibility that the United States would lose its vote in the UN General
Assembly for nonpayment of dues.
V | LIFE AFTER THE PRESIDENCY |
In 1999 Clinton and his wife moved their
legal residency to Chappaqua, New York, a suburb of New York City, to enable
Mrs. Clinton to run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Clinton campaigned for
her, and she was elected in November 2000. When his successor, George W. Bush,
was sworn in as president, Clinton moved to Chappaqua. He said he had no plans
except to write a book and to oversee the construction of his presidential
library along the Arkansas River in Little Rock.
But controversy followed Clinton after he
left the presidency. Before leaving office, Clinton granted presidential pardons
to 140 people. Among them was Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who
had fled to Switzerland in the early 1980s to avoid prosecution for income tax
evasion, racketeering, and illegal oil trading with enemies of the United
States. That pardon and several others were widely criticized. Some people
argued that Clinton granted certain pardons because friends and family of those
pardoned had given money to the Democratic Party or the foundation that was
commissioned to build and operate Clinton’s presidential library. The U.S.
attorney in New York began a criminal inquiry into Rich’s pardon, and
congressional committees conducted hearings. The controversy surrounding the
pardons greatly reduced Clinton’s popularity after he left the White House.
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