Signed into law on November 21, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush after months of public debate over civil rights issues, the Civil Rights Act was a compromise measure with bipartisan support that amended and clarified certain aspects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its purpose was to strengthen federal civil rights laws, to provide for damages in employment discrimination cases, and to clarify provisions of the 1964 act relating to “disparate impact” actions. Essentially, this congressional action on civil rights was a response to decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court that limited the scope and weakened the protections of federal civil rights statutes.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 achieved this goal by reversing a series of U. S. Supreme Court decisions. For example, it reversed the Court’s decision in Ward's Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio (1989) in which the Court ruled that an employer could justify a discriminatory practice by proving that it was a “business necessity.” The new act eliminated the claim of “business necessity” as a justification for intentional discrimination. Additionally, in reversing the Court’s decision in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union (1989), the 1991 legislation broadened the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to extend the law’s protection to employees’ claims of post-hiring racial harassment. Finally, the new legislation narrowed the opportunities for challenging affirmative action policies in the courts by reversing the Court’s decision in Martin v. Wilks (1989).
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 had political repercussions, as well. Because it clarified and broadened the civil rights protections of previous legislation, especially by curtailing the ability to challenge affirmative action, President Bush had previously denounced the legislation as a “quota bill,” thus voicing the opinion of his constituency. By signing the bill, Bush only furthered the alienation of conservatives and Reagan Democrats that had begun when, in 1990, he reneged on his campaign promise not to raise taxes.
—William L. Glankler
Clinton, Hillary Rodham (1947- ) first lady, U. S. senator, secretary of state
Hillary Rodham Clinton, United States senator (D-N. Y.), attorney, author, and children’s rights activist, was the first career woman to become First Lady and the first First Lady to become a United States senator and, subsequently, secretary of state. She was born Hillary Diane Rodham on October 26, 1947, in Chicago. Her family was staunchly Republican and in 1964 Hillary Rodham worked for the Goldwater presidential campaign. Shortly after arriving at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she was elected president of the Young Republicans’ Club. Over the four years at Wellesley, however, Hillary Clinton’s political and ideological affiliations changed dramatically, and in 1968 she volunteered for the presidential campaign of antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy. After graduating with honors, she attended Yale Law School, where she became a protegee of children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman. In 1973, she served as a staff member for the Judiciary Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives during President Richard M. Nixon’s impeachment inquiry. In 1974 she moved to Arkansas to marry law school classmate William J. Clinton. There she became a law professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and, after their marriage in 1975, joined the prominent Rose Law Firm. In 1978 Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas.
As First Lady of Arkansas, Rodham came under criticism for keeping her maiden name. Nonetheless, she took an active public role and became involved in education issues, founding the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and chairing the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee. She also served on the board of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Her daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980. Clinton was named Arkansas Woman of the Year and Young Mother of the Year in 1984.
In 1993 Hillary Rodham Clinton accompanied her husband to the White House after he defeated incumbent George H. W. Bush with 43 percent of the popular vote. President Clinton immediately named her to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, from which she promoted a program for universal health insurance. The plan was submitted to the Democratically controlled Congress in September 1993, but met with fierce Republican opposition. Since both Clintons touted their health care reform agenda as the primary goal of their first year in office, its failure counted as a major defeat for the administration. During the same year, Rodham Clinton was also criticized for her role in firing seven members of the White House travel office. She then became the target of media rumors concerning Whitewater, a failed real estate development the Clintons had invested in 15 years earlier.
In addition to these political setbacks, 1993 brought personal difficulties for Rodham Clinton. In April her father, Hugh Rodham, died of a stroke after lingering for weeks in a Little Rock, Arkansas, hospital. In July, Vince Foster, a close friend and former law partner who had come to Washington at her request to serve as White House counsel, committed suicide. Foster’s death inspired yet another round of rumors of conspiracy that continued to plague Rodham Clinton and her husband, and in January 1994 Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Robert B. Fiske, Jr., as a special counsel with broad authority to investigate charges relating to the Whitewater development. In August Fiske was replaced by Kenneth Starr. Over the next two years, Rodham Clinton was the focus of Starr’s inquiry; no charges were ever brought.
After the political failure of her health care initiative and the negative press coverage of Whitewater and the White House travel office, Rodham Clinton returned to child welfare advocacy and in 1996 wrote It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach U. s, which discussed
Hillary Rodham Clinton (Getty Images)
Her view on raising children in contemporary society. The following year, she hosted two conferences at the White House on children’s issues, where she advocated federal support for day care. As a goodwill ambassador, she became the most widely traveled First Lady in American history, visiting countries in six continents to promote human rights, education, childhood immunization, socialized health care, and economic empowerment for women. This reentry into the limelight was again accompanied by political scandals. In 1998 her husband, Bill Clinton, lied about his involvement in a sexual scandal with a 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The day after President Clinton forcefully denied the affair, Rodham Clinton again became a center of controversy when she described a segment of her husband’s critics as a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Though this scandal led to her husband’s impeachment, many critics contend that Hillary actually benefited with a boost in popularity from those who sympathized with her as a victim of the ordeal.
Though technically a resident of Arkansas, in 1999 Rodham Clinton began to explore the possibility of running for the New York seat in the U. S. Senate soon to be vacated by Democrat Patrick Moynihan. She did not officially declare her intention to run until February 6, 2000. On May 20, five and a half months before the election, New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani dropped out of the race for health reasons, and Republicans chose congressman Rick Lazio to run for the seat. The New York race proved to be one of the most hotly contested elections in the nation with almost $60 million spent, most of which went to negative advertising on both sides. On November 7 Rodham Clinton decidedly beat Lazio with 55 percent to 43 percent to become the first woman senator from New York, and the only First Lady to win public office.
During her first year in office, Hillary Clinton was appointed to the Committee on the Environment and Public Works; the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; the Committee on the Budget; and the Special Committee on Aging. Despite these committee appointments, the junior senator from New York was relatively unseen by the public, but she was actively cultivating relationships with members of the Senate and observed the daily functions of the upper house. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York City, however, immediately propelled her into the public eye. She attended fund-raising events for the victims of the tragedy and actively pursued federal funding for recovery and redevelopment efforts for New York City with her colleague from New York, Senator Charles Schumer.
In October 2002 Clinton voted for the Iraq War resolution, which eventually led to the invasion of American forces in March 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In 2003 she was appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee. From this position, she visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequently secured legislation to provide a health-tracking system for U. S. servicemen and servicewomen. Clinton also voted against the tax cuts proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 but has supported a reduction in marriage and property taxes for the middle class. Additionally, Clinton took a strong interest in technology in America. She introduced legislation to deliver broadband Internet access to rural communities, cosponsored legislation supporting nanotechnology research and development, and strongly supported the Family Entertainment Protection Act to limit the amount of sexual and violent content in video games. In 2004 Clinton became more vocal on key votes in the Senate. She cast a vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment and strongly opposed the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito on September 25, 2005, and January 25, 2006, respectively.
In 2004 Clinton announced that she would seek a second term as senator, and she easily won in 2006 with 67 percent of the vote against the Republican candidate John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers. Clinton spent almost $36 million on her 2006 campaign, which led pundits to speculate that she was committed to a presidential bid in 2008.
Indeed, shortly after taking office on January 20, 2007, Clinton formed a presidential exploratory committee and strongly committed herself to fund-raising and campaigning across the nation with her husband, former President William J. Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy required that she clarify her position on several issues, including the Iraq War. Although she voted for the Iraq War in 2002, Clinton has become one of its harshest critics, arguing that the war has been mismanaged and based on false information. In the spring of 2007, she and other Democrats supported a resolution to deauthorize the war. Clinton has also actively spoken for the continuation of the 1974 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and supported the failed immigration overhaul found in the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Act of 2007. In the summer of 2007, Clinton had the support of 60 percent of registered male Democrats and 70 percent of registered female Democrats. She faced strong opposition in the Democratic primary from U. S. Senator Barack Hussein Obama from Illinois. In 2008, after a fierce primary race, Clinton lost the presidential nomination to Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). President Obama selected Senator Clinton as his secretary of state.
See also ELECTIONS; Reno, Janet; Starr, Kenneth.
Further reading: Hillary Clinton, Living History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
—Aharon W. Zorea and Matthew C. Sherman
Clinton, William J. (Bill) (1946- ) 42nd U. S. president
William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president of the United States (1993-2001), served following the end of the cold war. The last president of the 20th century, Clinton presided over the longest economic boom, but revelations of an affair and his attempt to deceive the public about it generated great controversy and the first presidential impeachment since 1869.
Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., was killed in an automobile accident before his birth. His mother, Virginia Blythe, to support her son, left the child with his grandparents while she moved to New Orleans to study nursing. In 1950 his mother earned her degree and reunited with her son. She married Roger Clinton in 1961, at which time William Blythe’s name was changed to Clinton. Clinton was a good student and demonstrated strong leadership skills. In 1962 he was selected to participate in a youth leadership conference in Washington, D. C., and, inspired by President John F. Kennedy, decided on a career in politics. After graduating from high school, Clinton entered Georgetown University to study international affairs. While at Georgetown, Clinton worked as an intern for his home-state senator and political mentor, J. William Fulbright. After earning his degree in 1968, Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford University. Clinton’s activities during this time haunted his future presidential campaigns. Clinton opposed the Vietnam War and attended antiwar rallies while at Oxford. When his one-year draft deferment expired, Clinton applied to the Reserve Officers Training Corps in an attempt to get an extension. Clinton later withdrew the application and returned to Oxford. Letters Clinton wrote in this period were later read as evidence of his draft evasion by critics and idealism by supporters. Revelations that he experimented with marijuana at this time likewise rekindled old controversies when Clinton ran for president.
When Clinton returned from Europe, he entered Yale University Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. Clinton began his political career in 1972 when he directed the presidential campaign of George McGovern in Texas. In 1973 Clinton earned his law degree and returned to Arkansas to teach law at the University of Arkansas.
In 1974 Clinton mounted an unsuccessful bid to oust incumbent Republican congressman John Paul Hammer-schmidt, garnering 48 percent of the vote. Ms. Rodham had come to Arkansas to aid in the campaign and began teaching at the University of Arkansas. The Clintons married in 1975. In 1976 Clinton, running unopposed, was elected state attorney general. That same year, he also managed the Arkansas campaign of Democratic presidential aspirant James Earl Carter, Jr. In 1978 Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in a landslide victory. At age 32, he became the youngest governor in the United States since 1938. During his first term, Clinton focused on improving the state education and highways systems and bringing women and minorities into senior job positions. Unpopular policies, Rodham’s independence, and the federal decision to house thousands of Cuban refugees in Arkansas alienated many voters, and he was defeated in his reelection bid in 1980. Clinton returned to the office of governor two years later after moderating his liberal rhetoric and abandoning some of his more unpopular policies. He was reelected in 1984 and 1986.
While governor, Clinton’s priorities were education, economic development, and welfare reform. During his administration, Arkansas increased teacher salaries, mandated teacher competency exams, and instituted standardized testing to track student progress. These reforms improved Arkansas’s high school graduation rate to the highest of any southern state, and thereafter more Arkansans entered college. Incomes in the state increased 61 percent, though they remained below the national average. Clinton pursued welfare reforms that required the ablebodied to get job training or education to receive benefits.
From 1986 to 1987 Clinton served as chairman of the National Governor’s Association where he tried to spread his education and welfare reforms. In 1990 he cofounded the Democratic Leadership Council, which was devoted to shifting the party to the political center in an attempt to appeal to voters lost in the 1980s to Ronald W. Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
In 1991 Clinton announced he would seek the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite early controversy stemming from his activities at Oxford and allegations of extramarital affairs, Clinton outdistanced the other challengers and captured the Democratic nomination. Clinton benefited from more prominent Democrats’ choosing not to challenge the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush, who had received historically high approval ratings following the Persian Gulf War. He also benefited from a recession that turned public opinion against Bush in the months leading up to the election. Clinton seized on the
William Jefferson Clinton (Getty Images)
Issue of the ECONOMY, famously reminding his staff, “It’s the economy, stupid.” He promised health care reform, welfare reform, tax cuts for the middle class, and tax increases for the wealthy. He also pledged to protect reproductive rights and called for deeper cuts in defense spending with the end of the COLD war. Clinton and his running mate, U. S. senator Albert Gore, Jr., of Tennessee, took their message of change and economic renewal to the American people, traveling by bus and holding town meetings. Clinton extended his appeal beyond traditional voters by making use of new and unconventional media outlets such as MTV and late-night TELEVISION talk shows. Voters elected Clinton with 43 percent of the vote to George Bush’s 38 percent, and H. Ross Perot’s 19 percent on his new Reform Party ticket.
Amid high expectations for fundamental change, Clinton reversed a number of Republican policies from the previous years. He ended the ban on fetal tissue research, repealed the “gag rule” on abortion counseling at federally funded clinics, and appointed record numbers of women and minorities to senior positions in his administration. The early days of his term were not easy. Most notably, his proposal to end the ban on homosexuals in the military met with widespread and vehement opposition.
One centerpiece reform for Clinton’s first term was to be health care. Under the direction of the First Lady, an administration plan was conceived to establish a national health care system. The administration enacted gun control legislation (the Brady law), passed a historic deficit-reduction package, and passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandated employers to provide workers with paid leave for childbirth and family illness.
Clinton’s foreign policy program was as ambitious as his domestic agenda, and as with the domestic agenda, his administration would find it difficult to carry out its plans in a rapidly changing world. Called, “Assertive Multilateralism,” Clinton’s policy saw the collapse of the Soviet empire as clearing the way for a regime of collective security arrangements and international law that, with varying degrees of earnestness, had been the primary rhetorical goal of U. S. foreign policy since 1916. At the same time, Clinton believed the end of the cold war freed America’s substantial military resources for other missions, such as the suppression of “rogue states,” the bolstering of tottering governments, and peacekeeping in regions of civil strife. Finally, the policy elevated the “soft power” of economic and trade ties to the same status as military and diplomatic approaches, and called for closer international policy cooperation to fight transnational criminal and terrorist groups.
In September 1993 an attempt to destroy the World Trade Center office complex in New York City gave Clinton clear notice that the new multipolar world order was filled with danger and instability. In response, Clinton called for the expansion of the FBI and other U. S. law enforcement agencies into foreign operations. He also implemented efforts to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals of the disintegrating Soviet empire from falling into terrorist hands.
In December 1992 President George H. W. Bush had sent 28,000 U. S. troops to the strife - and famine-plagued nation of Somalia as part of a United Nations effort to ensure that international relief supplies were delivered to their intended recipients. On October 3 of the following year, as this humanitarian mandate had been changed into a “state-building” mandate, U. S. troops attempting to arrest local warlord Muhammad Farah Aideed encountered severe resistance. In a pitched battle lasting through the next day, these American troops faced hostile forces on the streets of Mogadishu, the nation’s capital. Later, the bodies of two American soldiers killed in the battle were dragged through the streets by cheering crowds in scenes broadcast around the world.
The disaster in Mogadishu had substantial policy and political fallout. Clinton, already politically vulnerable because of his controversial lack of military service, adopted constructive guidelines on future deployment of American forces. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned, and the administration’s ambitious effort to overhaul the military was shelved. U. S. forces were withdrawn from Somalia on March 31, 1994. Russian elections, held in December 1993, under a new constitution drafted by President Boris Yeltsin, yielded a stunning victory by nationalist candidates who had campaigned explicitly against American world leadership and Yeltsin’s closeness to Washington. A month later, a chastened Yeltsin rejected Clinton’s “Partnership for Peace” proposal to create a collective security regime for Europe. In response, Clinton began U. S. support for the expansion of NATO membership into the former Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe.
Clinton did not fare any better in bringing an end to the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” and bitter civil war in Bosnia. Clinton had criticized his predecessor throughout the 1992 campaign for inaction in Bosnia and the related fighting that resulted from the collapse of Yugoslavia in December 1990. As president, however, Clinton found it impossible to convince NATO to agree to any intervention without the guarantee of significant numbers of American ground troops. Clinton refused to make such a commitment until a crisis erupted in the fall of 1994, when UN peacekeeper soldiers were taken hostage. Clinton was also sharply criticized for his slow response in Bosnia and for his inaction in the Rwandan genocide of April to June 1994.
Clinton had varied success with the three remaining problems inherited from Bush. Deteriorating relations with the hard-line communist regime in North Korea, spurred by that nation’s support for international TERROR
ISM and attempts to develop its nuclear arsenals, led to a dangerous and swift military escalation in May and June of 1994 between North and South Korea that was averted when former U. S. president Jimmy Carter negotiated a settlement.
The former president was also to play a role in the effort to restore democracy to Haiti. A 1991 coup d’etat by General Raoul Cedras had driven from power the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an avowed socialist and excommunicated Roman Catholic priest. In the aftermath, thousands of refugees from the impoverished island nation began migrating to the southern shore of the United States. Clinton’s gubernatorial reelection had been undermined in part by a similar refugee crisis 12 years earlier, and he was acutely sensitive to the political impact of such a migration. The administration brought tremendous pressure on Cedras, culminating in the Governor’s Island Accord, in which the general agreed to restore Aristide, in return for personal amnesty and a lifting of American sanctions. When Cedras appeared to be hedging on the agreement, Clinton issued an ultimatum to Cedras to abide by the agreement or face forcible expulsion. Eventually a team led by former president Jimmy Carter convinced Cedras to leave his country, paving the way for a peaceful transition. Clinton also dealt forcefully with Iraq, dispatching troops to Kuwait in 1994 and ordering air strikes in 1996 when it became clear that Iraq had violated the restrictions placed on it at the end of the Persian Gulf War.
International economics was given a high level of attention in Clinton’s administration. Clinton believed that the globalization of markets was an inevitable historical process, fueled by technological progress. He further believed that the liberalization of trade agreements, the elimination of tariffs and other nationally based barriers, and the integration of the regulations and legal structures of national economies was in the ultimate interest of prosperity in general and American prosperity in particular. In his first term, Clinton’s trade views led him into conflict with the organized LABOR and the environmental movement, two key constituencies of his party’s coalition. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton had criticized the early drafts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) for lacking provisions regarding worker rights, workplace safety, pollution, and environmental impact. He promised to force the inclusion of safeguards on these issues into the final agreement, as well as any future trade agreements. As in Bosnia, however, Clinton found the United States’s clout with its allies to be less than imagined, and he ultimately accepted the inclusion of a series of unenforceable protocols on these concerns. The cries of betrayal among many of Clinton’s key supporters were loud, especially when the president secured Senate ratification on the pact through a high-profile personal lobbying effort. The General Agreement on Tariees and Trade of that same year also lacked the promised provisions. Clinton also reversed his campaign opposition to increased trade preferences for the People’s Republic of China, further alienating human rights and democracy activists.
In 1994 a series of press investigations and rumors surrounding a real estate development in which Clinton had invested in 1978 led to the appointment of an independent counsel. The Whitewater development was first brought to national attention on March 8, 1992, by the New York Times. The story reported that Clinton and his wife had invested in a development company run by James McDougal, a former U. S. Senate aide and political ally. Five years later, after the development had become moribund (it later went bankrupt), McDougal purchased the Madison Guaranty, a small savings and loan institution. In the national savings and loan crisis that soon followed, the Madison Guaranty became insolvent, but not before retaining the Rose Law Firm, and its attorney, Hillary Clinton. The fact that Mrs. Clinton’s firm had a client S & L that was overseen, in part, by a regulator appointed by Mr. Clinton, and that both of them were investors in another company owned by the S & L’s owner, seemed pregnant with the possibility of impropriety.
The Clintons and their allies dismissed this press speculation as petty rumor-mongering of old enemies. In response the Clintons became mistrustful of the press and refused to release financial and personal files to journalists. Nonetheless, the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster, in July 1993, set up yet another round of speculation.
Yielding to public pressure and the media outcry, on January 20, 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Robert B. Fiske, Jr., as a special counsel with broad authority to investigate charges related to the Whitewater development. On August 5 Kenneth Starr replaced Fiske.
Further problems arose when an Arkansas state employee, Paula Corbin Jones, filed a civil lawsuit against Clinton, claiming that his propositioning of her while he was governor constituted sexual harassment. Clinton’s allies claimed that Jones’s lawsuit was financed and championed by Clinton’s conservative political opponents. (Later, a settlement was reached between Clinton and Jones.)
By 1994, Republicans gained control of the Senate and the House OE Representatives. The new Republican majorities called for fundamental reform of the federal government and the social contract to create “the opportunity society.” Labeled the “Gingrich Revolution” after the charismatic new Speaker of the House, Newton L. Gingrich, new legislation was enacted regarding federal trade regulations, as well as business and consumer regulations. Under political pressure from the right, Clinton moved to the political center to undercut Republican popularity, much to the dismay of the liberal wing of his party.
Despite their political differences, Clinton and the new Republican congressional majority negotiated a compromise welfare reform act. Clinton also managed to push through a significant increase in the minimum wage. By 1996, a surging economy and a falling federal deficit were seen by the majority of voters to be a vindication of Clinton’s economic program. In November Clinton was reelected with a little less than 50 percent of the vote, while his opponent, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, the Republican nominee, received nearly 42 percent of the vote, and Reform Party candidate Perot garnered 8 percent of the vote.
During his second term, Clinton urged on the Congress a plan to balance the federal budget by 2002. Furthermore, Clinton was able to present a balanced budget proposal for the 1998 fiscal year. At the end of that year, he announced a surplus for the fiscal year, after two decades of deficits. Despite a booming economy, Clinton’s second term was marred by further scandal. In 1997 charges were made by Republicans that the Clinton-Gore campaign had participated in illegal fund-raising activities in 1996. The controversy intensified in May 1998 when a former Democratic fund-raiser admitted that he had accepted illegal contributions from a Chinese military official.
On May 27, 1997, the U. S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton’s request to delay the Paula Jones lawsuit until he left office. In the months that followed, the hostility between the White House and the independent counsel increased dramatically. On January 12 Linda Tripp, who had secretly recorded the confidences of former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, released tapes in which Lewinsky described a series of intimate relations with the president that had occurred in the White House. On January 16 Starr was given authority by a grand jury to investigate Tripp’s charges that Clinton had encouraged Lewinsky to lie under oath in the Jones case. In his testimony the next day before the grand jury hearing, Clinton relied on narrow definitions and legal technicalities to deny that he had engaged in sexual relations with Lewinsky. On January 21 Clinton denied the affair to the media, a denial he repeated in more forceful terms five days later. Clinton issued similar denials to his cabinet, his staff, his family, and members of Congress. These denials before the grand jury and the media became part of the later impeachment in Congress.
As the existence and contents of the Tripp tapes and other incriminating evidence were revealed over the next few weeks, however, Clinton’s statements were clearly shown to be false. On August 17, 1998, Clinton testified before a grand jury. In a nationally televised address that same evening, Clinton admitted that he had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky but strongly denied that he had done anything illegal.
Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to the House of Representatives on September 9, 1998. The report concluded that Clinton’s actions “may constitute grounds for impeachment,” a conclusion that the president’s allies disputed. Public opinion had soured on Clinton with the revelation of the affair and the lies he had initially told about it. Critics of the Starr report wondered how an investigation of a 1978 land development had turned into an inquiry into the president’s recent intimate relationships. Others believed that impeachment was too severe a penalty for the offenses. The diverging views of Clinton’s character, the merit of the charges, the manner of the investigation, Clinton’s conduct during the investigation, and the appropriate penalties for Clinton’s action led to a deep rift in public opinion and stirred further partisan acrimony.
In December a divided House approved two articles of impeachment charging the president with perjury and obstruction of justice. The impeachment trial was held in the Senate from January 7 to February 6, 1999, and resulted in an acquittal. Those supporting the president’s removal argued that Clinton was guilty of the charges, that he had disgraced his office, and that the failure to punish him would apply a different standard to the president from that applied to average citizens. Clinton’s defenders maintained that the crimes he was charged with were rarely prosecuted and that the alleged offenses did not meet the definition of impeachable crimes described in the Constitution.
Although Clinton was not removed from office, the impeachment crisis did have a profound effect on his second term by consuming the attention of the White House and Congress for over a year.
Although the Lewinsky inquiry paralyzed domestic politics, Clinton was continually challenged by international problems during his second term. An economic crisis in Asia, beginning in Thailand, then spread to Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines, and—as their economies sputtered—to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Japan. As major corporations and banks were caught in the Asia recession, Brazil, the leading economy of South America, was plunged into recession, and the Russian economy, struggling with the transition to a free market, collapsed. Clinton’s administration organized a successful international effort to avert world recession.
The Middle East also loomed large in Clinton’s second term. Iraq’s repeated refusal to comply with the international arms inspections required after the Persian Gulf War led to U. S. and British ultimatums to allow inspectors free access. Each time, Iraq backed down at the eleventh hour, only to resume its defiant stance once the threat had passed. In December 1998 Clinton ordered extensive bombing designed to cripple Iraq’s military.
On August 7 an Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist organization, associated with bin Laden, bombed U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 12 Americans. Clinton responded with air strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan believed, at the time, to be manufacturing chemical weapons for bin Laden. These U. S. attacks proved ineffectual in countering an extensive worldwide terrorist network that had been developed by bin Laden and his associates.
Clinton’s efforts to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians also failed. The Wye River Memorandum of October 1998 appeared to pave the way for Palestinian self-government, but Clinton’s last-minute efforts to achieve a permanent settlement in the closing days of his administration proved unsuccessful.
More successful was the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland. Negotiated by Clinton’s personal envoy, former Senate leader George Mitchell, the treaty brought decades of armed conflict in Northern Ireland to a close.
The most notable foreign crisis of Clinton’s second term was the Kosovo conflict. In February 1998 Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic? began a military crackdown on the ethnic Albanian population and other Islamic inhabitants in Kosovo. A small, armed separatist movement swelled into a full-fledged revolt in the face of this aggression. Clinton negotiated a cease-fire in November, but by January the fighting had resumed. In February peace talks collapsed, and Milosevic? began a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” attempting to drive the Albanian and Islamic majority from the country through mass murder and terror. In March Clinton led a U. S.-NATO coalition in a campaign of aerial bombardment designed to destroy Serbian military capability. Clinton and NATO achieved victory using only air power. Milosevic? was driven from power in October 2000 and brought to trial for genocide in 2001.
During the presidential election of 2000, Clinton remained largely marginalized because of Democratic candidate Al Gore, Jr.’s strategy of distancing himself from the controversy that had surrounded Clinton.
Because of his perjury before the grand jury, the Supreme Court ordered him to resign from the Supreme Court Bar, thus preventing him from arguing cases before the nation’s highest court. In addition, the Arkansas State Bar Association suspended Clinton’s license for five years. He currently divides his time between New York City and Washington, D. C. He continues to work for many charitable causes.
See also BusH, George H. W.; Bush, George W.; campaign einance; Clinton, Hillary Rodham.
Further reading: William C. Berman, From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton Presidency (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004); Charles O. Jones, Clin-ton and Congress, 1993-1996: Risk, Res-toration, and Reelection (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Steven E. Schier, ed., The Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Legacy in U. S. Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
—John Korasick
World History
