He won the presidency of his freshman and sophomore classes. In his junior year, Clinton ran for president of the student council, but lost in a stunning defeat. In attempting to please everybody, Clinton had miscalculated. He looked too political to his peers, and they elected his lesser-known opponent. Beginning in his junior year, Clinton worked as a clerk for the U. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
At that time, the powerful committee was headed by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a leading critic of U. The experience greatly shaped Clinton's perspective as he came to believe, as did Fulbright, that the United States had no moral or strategic reason for being in Vietnam. Just prior to his graduation from Georgetown, he won a prized Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University in England for two years.
However, he faced being drafted for the Vietnam War due to a change in federal policy that eliminated almost all college deferments. His local draft board in Arkansas, however, allowed him to sail for England. While in England, Clinton received his draft notice. Instead he returned to Oxford, although the evidence is unclear as to whether this was done with the approval of his ROTC contacts. Back in England, Clinton evidently remained conflicted about his decision to avoid the draft, torn between his moral convictions that the war was wrong and his sense of kinship with former classmates who were serving and dying in Vietnam.
In the fall of , he chose to re-subject himself to the draft—doing so, however, at a time when Nixon administration policy seemed to suggest that future call-ups of combat troops would significantly decline. In any event, Clinton's luck held when his birth date in the lottery drew the high number of , distant enough to ensure that he would never be called. Clinton then wrote a letter to the director of the Arkansas ROTC program thanking him for "saving" him from the draft, explaining that he still loved his country while nevertheless despising the war.
In England, Clinton participated in numerous antiwar demonstrations, and both his antiwar activities and his ROTC letter resurfaced years later during his bid for the presidency in Although Clinton remained in the Rhodes Scholar program, making many contacts with students who would later become part of his administration, his Oxford coursework never added up to a degree. In , Clinton entered Yale Law School, earning his degree in and meeting his future wife, Hillary Rodham, whom he married in During this period he also worked on the U.
Senate campaign of Joe Duffy in Connecticut, and toward the end of his studies he managed the Texas campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern who lost Texas in the Nixon landslide. After graduation, Clinton moved back to Arkansas with a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Almost as soon as he arrived home, Clinton threw himself into politics, running for a seat in the U.
Although Clinton lost this race, it was the closest election for Hammerschmidt in his twenty-six years in Congress, marking Clinton as a rising political star. Two years later, Arkansas voters elected Clinton state attorney general. Then in , at age thirty-two, Clinton ran for governor, winning an easy victory and becoming one of the nation's youngest governors ever.
However, his youth and inexperience quickly left Arkansans unimpressed. Governor Clinton had several missteps, including difficulties in handling rioting among Cuban refugees temporarily interned by the federal government at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. He also raised auto license fees to pay for road construction and alienated the state's powerful timber interests by an unsuccessful intervention in the controversy over the practice of clear-cutting. Consequently, the voters turned him out in favor of Frank White, a little known, freshly minted Republican savings and loan executive.
Clinton became the youngest former governor in American history. Shocked by his defeat, Clinton went to work for a Little Rock law firm but spent most of his time campaigning for reelection.
In the race, Clinton admitted his mistakes and used his incredible charm and well-honed TV ads to convince the voters to give him another chance. He won in and again in Voters then supported him for two, four-year terms in and This story has been shared , times.
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Email required. Comment required. Chelsea Clinton celebrating with her parents and husband Marc Mezvinsky. Appointing Hillary to head a committee on education reform, he instituted more rigorous educational standards and established competence tests for teachers.
Clinton also championed affirmative action, appointing record numbers of African Americans to key government positions. At the same time, Clinton favored the death penalty and put in place welfare reforms designed to put recipients back to work. Also noteworthy was Clinton's tactic of running the government like a political campaign, constantly consulting public opinion polls and pitching policies through carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns. Seeking to increase his national profile, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association from At the end of the decade he became chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats seeking to move the party in a centrist direction.
However, at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton squandered an opportunity to announce himself as an obvious future presidential candidate when he delivered an excruciatingly long and boring nomination speech for Michael Dukakis.
In a skillful bit of political damage control, Clinton quickly made fun of his disastrous speech on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In Clinton easily defeated his competitors in the Democratic primaries to become the party's nominee for the presidency, choosing Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his vice-presidential running mate. The Republican incumbent, President George H. Bush , was vulnerable in the election of because he had broken his celebrated campaign promise not to raise taxes and, especially, because the national economy was mired in recession.
Although Clinton's campaign was troubled by accusations of draft dodging and rumors of marital infidelity, he managed to turn the narrative by portraying himself as a hard-working, family man. Additionally, he successfully hammered home his economic message, underscored by chief strategist James Carville's pithy slogan, "It's the economy, stupid. Clinton was also aided by the surprisingly successful third-party campaign of billionaire Ross Perot , who siphoned off a significant portion of the Republican vote from President Bush.
On November 3, , Clinton was elected the 42nd president of the United States. Through a task force headed by First Lady Hillary, Clinton endorsed a massive health care reform act that was designed to provide universal coverage.
The bill failed to move through Congress, however, and became a massive political disaster, leading to Republicans regaining control of both houses of Congress in In an impressive political comeback, President Clinton again embraced centrist policies and rhetoric to restore his popularity in advance of the election. In , he signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a law that added , policemen and instituted harsher punishments for a variety of crimes.
In , he signed a law increasing the national minimum wage. He also emerged favorably from a budget dispute with House Republicans that resulted in a pair of government shutdowns in , the second of which lasted three weeks. Clinton's greatest accomplishment in his two terms as president was leading the nation to a period of strong economic prosperity. While Clinton was in office, the nation enjoyed the lowest unemployment rates in decades, as well as a surge in median income and a rise in home-ownership rates.
Clinton's foreign policy achievements included presiding over the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, during which the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat occurred, stabilizing war-torn Bosnia through the Dayton Peace Accords and helping to end Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. However the failure of the American military mission in Somalia and subsequent inaction in the face of genocide in Rwanda, both from Clinton's first term, stand out as major blemishes on his foreign policy record.
In Clinton handily defeated Republican challenger Bob Dole to secure a second term in office. Clinton's second term in the White House was dominated by the Lewinsky scandal. The president at first denied, and then later admitted, that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, his White House intern. A panel-appointed prosecutor, Kenneth Starr , exposed the affair after expanding an initial investigation of Clinton's Whitewater investments as Arkansas governor.
In , Starr produced an explicit report with salacious details, known as the Starr Report, which outlined a case for impeachment. Twenty years later, the MeToo movement sparked a reexamination of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, with many of the president's former supporters now questioning his handling of the affair.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said that Clinton should have resigned, and Lewinsky wrote that their relations were marked by "inappropriate abuse of authority, station and privilege.
Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but not the Senate, which meant that he remained in office through both of his two terms. In December , the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach the president for perjury and obstruction of justice for his actions in the Lewinsky affair.
However, in February , following a five-week trial, the Senate voted to acquit Clinton on both articles of impeachment. In the years since his presidency concluded in , Clinton has remained active on the global stage. Despite facing an enormous backlash from the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton rejuvenated his image and remained popular among Democratic supporters.
Clinton himself offered his own preliminary evaluation of his presidency in his memoirs: "I judge my presidency primarily in terms of its impact on people's lives. That is how I kept score: all the millions of people with new jobs, new homes and college aid; the kids with health insurance and after-school programs; the people who left welfare for work; the families helped by the family leave law; the people living in safer neighborhoods — all those people have stories, and they're better ones now.
Through the William J. Clinton Foundation founded in and later renamed the Clinton Foundation , he created the Clinton Climate Initiative, dedicated to supporting research to combat climate change; the Clinton Global Initiative, which connects entrepreneurs and world leaders to foster new ideas and action; and the Haiti Fund, dedicated to rebuilding Haiti in the aftermath of its devastating earthquake.
According to Clinton, the foundation's mission is "to alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies and protect the environment, by fostering partnerships among governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations and private citizens. Clinton has continued to be a force behind his foundation, which has overseen the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations, governments and individuals to global-minded charitable works.
Having published his first book, Between Hope and History , prior to the election, the former president in followed with a best-selling autobiography, My Life. Clinton has since published three more books, Giving , Back to Work and The President Is Missing , a political thriller co-authored with James Patterson.
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