PART 2 — BEFORE THE WHITE HOUSE: THE STORY BEGAN IN ARKANSAS
To understand Bill Clinton’s story, you cannot begin at the White House.
You cannot begin with the presidential campaign of 1992.
You cannot begin with Air Force One, meetings with world leaders, political battles in Washington, or the controversies that would eventually make his name almost impossible to separate from modern American political history.
You have to go much further back.
Back before “Bill Clinton” was a presidential name.
Back before Arkansas politics.
Back before Yale, Oxford and Georgetown.
Back to a small Arkansas town called Hope.
Because decades before he became the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton entered the world under circumstances marked by loss.
And even his name was different.
He was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas.
His biological father had died in an automobile accident before he was born.
Bill Clinton therefore began life without ever having the opportunity to know his father.
Years later, after his mother remarried Roger Clinton, the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Bill eventually adopted the Clinton surname.
But those few biographical sentences hardly explain the distance between the child born in Hope and the man who would eventually stand on the steps of the United States Capitol taking the presidential oath of office.
That journey would take decades.
And Arkansas would remain at the center of it for much longer than many people remember.
A CHILDHOOD FAR FROM WASHINGTON
Hope, Arkansas, was not Washington, D.C.
There were no presidential motorcades waiting for the young Bill Clinton.
No Secret Service agents.
No enormous campaign rallies.
No television networks following his movements.
No one looking at this Arkansas child could know with certainty what his future would become.
Yet the places where political leaders grow up can matter because they shape the world they first understand.
For Clinton, that world was Arkansas.
His early years were connected first to Hope and later to Hot Springs, where he attended school and came of age.
The Clinton Presidential Library today devotes part of its permanent exhibition to those early years, preserving photographs, school memorabilia, letters, newspaper clippings and other objects from the period before national politics entered his life.
And while the presidency would eventually take Clinton across the world, Arkansas remained woven deeply into his public identity.
Years later, after reaching the White House, he would return to Hope as president.
But that was still unimaginably far in the future.
For now, he was simply growing up.
And America around him was changing.
THE ARKANSAS OF HIS CHILDHOOD WAS ALSO CHANGING
One of the most important events of Clinton’s youth happened not inside his own home, but in Little Rock.
In 1957, the struggle to integrate Little Rock Central High School became a defining moment in the American civil-rights movement.
Nine Black students—the Little Rock Nine—attempted to attend the previously segregated school.
The confrontation became national news.
Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus initially used the National Guard to block their entry.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower ultimately sent federal troops from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce integration and protect the students.
Bill Clinton was eleven years old at the time.
The Clinton Presidential Library says he followed the events from his home in Hot Springs and was deeply affected by the courage of the Little Rock Nine.
Think about the historical distance contained in that fact.
An eleven-year-old boy in Arkansas watches one of the defining civil-rights confrontations of the 1950s.
Decades later, that boy becomes president.
And in 1999, President Clinton presents Congressional Gold Medals to members of the Little Rock Nine.
History has strange circles.
But in 1957, there was no guarantee that Clinton would enter politics at all.
First came school.
Then ambition.
Then an experience in Washington that became one of the best-known stories of his youth.
THE BOY WHO WANTED TO SEE A BIGGER WORLD
By his teenage years, Clinton had developed interests that would remain associated with him throughout his public life.
One was music.
He played the saxophone.
Years later, millions of Americans would see presidential candidate Bill Clinton play the instrument on national television, an appearance that became one of the memorable pop-culture moments of the 1992 campaign.
But before the saxophone became part of his national political image, it belonged to a student in Arkansas.
Clinton also showed growing interest in public life.
The world beyond Hot Springs was becoming increasingly important to him.
And then came a trip that gave him a much closer look at Washington.
As a teenager, Clinton participated in Boys Nation, a program that introduces students to government and civic leadership.
During the trip, he went to Washington and met President John F. Kennedy.
A photograph of the young Clinton shaking Kennedy’s hand would later become famous.
It is easy to look backward at such a photograph and imagine destiny.
A future president meeting a sitting president.
It almost seems written like the opening of a movie.
But real life is rarely that simple.
Thousands of young people dream about politics.
Very few become president.
Clinton still had an enormous distance to travel.
His next major destination would be Georgetown University.
FROM ARKANSAS TO GEORGETOWN
Moving from Arkansas into the academic and political environment of Washington, D.C., represented an important change.
Clinton attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
He graduated in 1968.
Georgetown placed him physically close to the institutions he was interested in understanding.
Congress.
The White House.
Federal agencies.
Embassies.
National politics.
International affairs.
Washington was no longer something happening far away on television.
He was living inside the city where national political decisions were made.
And the timing could hardly have been more dramatic.
America in the 1960s was undergoing enormous upheaval.
The civil-rights movement was transforming the country.
The Vietnam War divided Americans.
Young people were questioning institutions.
Political demonstrations filled streets and campuses.
President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy would both be assassinated in 1968.
For a young person deeply interested in government, these were not quiet years in which to study politics.
They were years when Americans were arguing intensely over what their country was and what it should become.
Clinton’s education therefore took place against a national background of conflict and rapid social change.
But Georgetown would not be his final educational stop.
An opportunity would soon take him across the Atlantic.
THE RHODES SCHOLARSHIP
After graduating from Georgetown in 1968, Clinton received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.
For someone raised in Arkansas, Oxford represented another enormous expansion of his world.
He had gone from Hope…
to Hot Springs…
to Washington…
and now to one of the world’s most famous universities.
This was no longer merely an American political education.
At Oxford, Clinton encountered students and ideas from different countries and political traditions.
He was living abroad during one of the most turbulent periods of the Vietnam era.
Questions about war, military service and American power were intensely personal for young men of his generation.
Clinton’s own handling of the military draft during the Vietnam era would later become a major political controversy when he ran for president.
Years afterward, opponents would scrutinize decisions he made during this period, while Clinton defended his choices and acknowledged the complexity of his feelings about the war.
That future political battle was still decades away.
At the time, he was a young American studying overseas in an era when decisions about Vietnam could affect the entire direction of a young man’s life.
Eventually, his education brought him back to the United States.
And the next institution he attended would change not only his career.
It would change his family and political future.
YALE LAW SCHOOL
Clinton enrolled at Yale Law School.
It was there that he met Hillary Rodham.
Before she became Hillary Clinton…
before she became First Lady of Arkansas…
before she became First Lady of the United States…
before the U.S. Senate…
before serving as secretary of state…
and long before her own presidential campaigns…
she was Hillary Rodham, a law student from Illinois.
Their meeting created one of the most consequential political partnerships in modern American history.
The Clinton Presidential Library records that Bill Clinton received his Yale law degree in 1973. Bill and Hillary later married in 1975.
But the important decision immediately after Yale was not simply where Bill Clinton would work.
It was where he would go.
He could have tried to build a career closer to America’s largest political and legal centers.
Instead, he returned to Arkansas.
That decision would determine the next major chapter of his life.
BACK HOME
After graduating from Yale, Clinton returned to Arkansas and taught law at the University of Arkansas.
Consider the path.
Hope.
Hot Springs.
Georgetown.
Oxford.
Yale.
Then back to Arkansas.
That return matters because Clinton’s national political career would eventually be built on his Arkansas career.
He did not move directly from an elite university into national office.
He had to build a political identity at home first.
And it did not begin with victory.
It began with losing.
THE 1974 CAMPAIGN
In 1974, Clinton ran for Congress.
He lost.
That fact can disappear when a person’s biography is told backward from the presidency.
Once someone becomes president, earlier events can start to look inevitable.
They weren’t.
Clinton’s first congressional campaign ended in defeat.
There was no guarantee that another opportunity would work out.
A political career can end very quickly after an early loss.
Candidates lose money.
Supporters disappear.
Opportunities close.
Some decide public life simply isn’t worth it.
Clinton continued.
Two years later, Arkansas voters gave him a different result.
ARKANSAS ATTORNEY GENERAL
In 1976, Bill Clinton was elected attorney general of Arkansas.
He served in that office from 1977 to 1979.
The young law professor who had lost his congressional race now held statewide office.
And he did not remain there long.
In 1978, Clinton ran for governor.
He won.
At only 32 years old, he was about to take charge of his home state.
It was an extraordinary rise.
But what happened next is one of the most important pieces of the Clinton political story.
Because once again, victory did not simply lead to more victory.
The voters who put him in office would soon remove him.
GOVERNOR AT 32
Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas in 1979.
Young.
Ambitious.
Educated at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.
Already experienced as attorney general.
From the outside, his rise could have looked almost unstoppable.
But governing is different from campaigning.
A candidate can promise change.
A governor has to implement it.
Decisions create winners and losers.
Taxes affect people.
Regulations affect people.
Administrative problems affect people.
And every mistake gives opponents something to use.
Clinton’s first term became politically difficult.
Then came the 1980 election.
He lost his bid for reelection.
After only one term, the young governor was out.
This was not a minor setback.
Clinton had already lost one race for Congress.
Now Arkansas voters had removed him from the governorship.
His rapid political rise suddenly looked much less secure.
He could have become one of countless American politicians whose careers appear promising for a few years and then disappear.
But Clinton did something that would become a recurring feature of his political story.
He came back.
THE COMEBACK
Two years after losing the governorship, Clinton ran again.
In 1982, Arkansas voters returned him to office.
This second chance proved far more durable than the first.
He would remain governor through 1992, leaving only when he was preparing to become president of the United States. Overall, he served roughly twelve years as governor across his nonconsecutive terms.
The politician who had once been rejected by Arkansas voters became deeply established in the state’s political system.
And during those years, education became one of the issues most strongly associated with his governorship.
The Clinton Presidential Library describes his efforts to improve public education as an important part of the national recognition he received while serving as governor. Some of the education ideas associated with his Arkansas years later influenced the education agenda of his presidential administration.
But there was now another Clinton whose public role was becoming increasingly important.
Hillary.
BILL AND HILLARY
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham had married in 1975.
Their only child, Chelsea Clinton, was born in Little Rock in 1980.
The family would eventually become one of the most closely watched political families in America.
But long before the White House, Hillary had her own professional career.
She taught law before joining the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas and became involved in organizations focused on children and education. During Bill Clinton’s years as governor, she also served as First Lady of Arkansas.
Their partnership attracted attention partly because it did not always resemble the traditional political marriage Americans had grown accustomed to seeing.
Hillary had her own education.
Her own career.
Her own policy interests.
Her own public profile.
That dynamic would later become much more significant once Bill Clinton sought the presidency.
But throughout most of the 1980s, the national political world still knew him primarily as the governor of a relatively small Southern state.
That was beginning to change.
THE NATIONAL STAGE STARTED GETTING CLOSER
Twelve years as governor gave Clinton something his younger self could not have possessed.
A record.
He had governed.
Won.
Lost.
Returned.
Negotiated with legislators.
Faced criticism.
Changed strategies.
Worked on education.
Dealt with economic issues.
Participated in national organizations of governors.
Built relationships outside Arkansas.
Every one of those experiences mattered because running for president requires something fundamentally different from winning statewide office.
A presidential candidate has to persuade voters thousands of miles away who may know almost nothing about them.
By the end of the 1980s, Clinton had begun appearing more prominently in national Democratic politics.
Yet deciding to seek the presidency would still involve enormous risk.
The United States already had a president.
And that president was George H. W. Bush.
WHY 1991 LOOKED SO DIFFICULT
Today, we know what happened in the 1992 presidential election.
That knowledge makes it easy to forget how uncertain the situation appeared beforehand.
George H. W. Bush had entered the presidency after serving as Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
Following the Gulf War, Bush’s approval ratings reached extremely high levels.
The Clinton Presidential Library notes that when Clinton decided to run in 1991, Bush was polling around 90 percent approval and was widely regarded as extremely difficult to defeat.
Imagine looking at that political environment from Little Rock.
You’re the governor of Arkansas.
The sitting president has enormous approval ratings.
You are not yet a household name across America.
Other Democrats are considering the race.
A presidential campaign requires extraordinary amounts of money, organization, travel, media attention and personal scrutiny.
And losing would happen in front of the entire country.
For Bill Clinton, there was another factor.
Running nationally meant that almost every part of his past could become national news.
His childhood.
His education.
His Vietnam-era decisions.
His marriage.
His record as governor.
His personal life.
His mistakes.
His contradictions.
Everything.
The larger the office, the brighter the spotlight.
Clinton chose to step into it.
FROM LITTLE ROCK TOWARD THE WHITE HOUSE
In 1991, Bill Clinton entered the presidential race.
The governor from Arkansas was now asking Democratic voters across America to imagine him as president.
It was not a smooth journey.
The campaign faced controversies.
Questions about Clinton’s past became national stories.
His Vietnam-era draft history received scrutiny.
Questions surrounding his marriage and personal conduct became part of the campaign environment.
Political observers repeatedly wondered whether his candidacy could survive.
Then came New Hampshire.
Clinton did not win the Democratic primary there.
He finished second.
Normally, second place does not sound like a triumph.
But politics is often about expectations.
Clinton’s campaign presented his New Hampshire performance as evidence that he had survived intense political pressure.
He began embracing an identity that would follow him for years:
the comeback politician.
From there, he performed strongly in Southern primaries and emerged as the Democratic front-runner.
The young man who had once lost a congressional race in Arkansas…
who had once been voted out of the governor’s office…
was now moving toward a major party’s presidential nomination.
But the hardest campaign of his life was only beginning.
AMERICA WAS ABOUT TO MEET BILL CLINTON
The 1992 general election would be unusual.
Three major figures shaped the contest.
Republican President George H. W. Bush.
Democratic challenger Bill Clinton.
And independent candidate Ross Perot.
The economy became a central issue.
So did generational change.
Clinton was the first baby boomer nominated for president by a major party and presented himself as a younger candidate focused on change, economic concerns and domestic issues such as health care.
His campaign also approached television differently from many traditional presidential campaigns.
One of the most memorable moments came when Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show wearing sunglasses and playing his saxophone.
It was unusual imagery for a presidential candidate.
And it helped reinforce the image of a politician trying to communicate with audiences beyond traditional political programming.
The saxophone-playing student from Arkansas had carried that part of himself all the way into a presidential campaign.
But music and television appearances were only small pieces of a much larger election.
Millions of Americans were making a serious choice about the direction of their country.
And on November 3, 1992, they made it.
ELECTION NIGHT
Bill Clinton won.
He carried 32 states and the District of Columbia, receiving 370 electoral votes compared with 168 for President Bush. Ross Perot won a substantial share of the popular vote but no electoral votes.
The result completed an extraordinary political journey.
A child born in Hope, Arkansas, after his father’s death…
a teenager from Hot Springs…
a Georgetown student…
a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford…
a Yale law graduate…
a law professor…
a failed congressional candidate…
Arkansas attorney general…
a 32-year-old governor…
a defeated governor…
a comeback governor…
and now:
President-elect of the United States.
But winning the presidency and governing the country are two completely different achievements.
And Clinton was about to discover that almost immediately.
THE LAST WEEKS BEFORE EVERYTHING CHANGED
After the election, Little Rock temporarily became one of the centers of American political attention.
Reporters arrived.
Transition officials worked.
Potential cabinet members were discussed.
Appointments had to be made.
Policies that sounded straightforward during a campaign now had to become actual governing plans.
A presidential transition is a strange period.
One administration is still governing.
Another is preparing to take power.
For Clinton, it also represented a personal transformation.
Arkansas had been the center of his political life.
Now Washington would be.
The governor’s mansion would give way to the White House.
State-level problems would give way to national and international ones.
His decisions would no longer affect only Arkansas.
They could affect hundreds of millions of Americans—and, through U.S. foreign policy, people around the world.
The scale had changed.
So had the scrutiny.
And so had the consequences of failure.
JANUARY 20, 1993
On January 20, 1993, Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd president of the United States.
The journey from Arkansas had reached the White House.
But this is where the story becomes much more complicated.
Presidential campaigns are built around possibility.
Presidencies are judged by decisions.
Clinton entered office with ambitious plans.
The economy.
Health care.
Education.
Taxes.
Federal spending.
Crime.
Trade.
The environment.
America’s role overseas.
And almost immediately, his administration would encounter the fundamental reality of Washington:
A president may be powerful.
A president is not all-powerful.
Congress matters.
Courts matter.
Public opinion matters.
Events nobody predicted matter.
Members of your own political party matter.
Opponents matter.
And mistakes matter.
Some of Clinton’s early ambitions would succeed.
Others would fail dramatically.
Some policies enacted during his presidency remain debated decades later.
International crises would demand decisions far removed from the domestic issues that dominated his campaign.
The American economy would change.
The political balance of Congress would change.
The internet age would begin transforming daily life.
And the Clinton presidency would eventually become entangled in a personal and political scandal so enormous that the House of Representatives would impeach him.
Yet he would remain in office.
And years later, Americans would continue debating how to understand the contradictions of the Clinton era.
Economic expansion and political warfare.
Policy achievements and policy controversies.
Optimism about a new century and bitter partisan division.
A president capable of extraordinary political connection—and a presidency repeatedly forced to confront questions created by Clinton’s own decisions.
Those eight years cannot be understood from a single headline.
And they cannot be understood simply by knowing how the story ended.
We have to return to the beginning.
To January 1993.
To a new president walking into the White House with enormous ambitions…
and an American political system that was about to test almost every one of them.
AND THIS IS WHERE THE NEXT CHAPTER REALLY BEGINS
The boy from Hope had reached the destination that once seemed almost unimaginable.
But becoming president did not simplify Bill Clinton’s story.
It made everything bigger.
Every success became national news.
Every mistake became national news.
Every political fight mattered more.
Every personal decision carried greater consequences.
And the presidency that followed would contain enough major events to fill an entire story by itself.
There would be an ambitious attempt to transform American health care.
A stunning Republican takeover of Congress.
Battles over government spending that temporarily shut down parts of the federal government.
Major debates over crime, welfare and trade.
International crises from Europe to the Middle East.
A rapidly changing economy.
A second presidential election.
And eventually, a scandal that threatened Clinton’s presidency itself.
But before America reached any of that, the new president had to survive something much simpler:
his first year in Washington.
The campaign was over.
The crowds had gone home.
The inaugural celebrations would end.
On the morning after becoming president, Bill Clinton had to begin governing.
And almost immediately, the difference between promising change and actually delivering it became impossible to ignore.
PART 3 — BILL CLINTON ENTERS THE WHITE HOUSE: THE PROMISES, THE PRESSURE, AND THE FIRST MAJOR BATTLES OF HIS PRESIDENCY
That is where our story continues.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to Bill Clinton
Part 2 of 7
