Bill Clinton, born William Jefferson Blythe III on 19 August 1946, was the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He was the first president born in the baby boomer generation and the youngest to serve two full terms.
William Jefferson Clinton (née Blythe III) was born on 19 August 1946 and raised in Arkansas. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1968 and later from Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. After law school he returned to Arkansas and won election as state attorney general in 1976, serving from 1977 to 1979, then served two non-consecutive tenures as governor, from 1979 to 1981 and from 1983 to 1992. As governor he overhauled the state’s education system and chaired the National Governors Association.
Running as a “New Democrat”, he won the 1992 election, defeating incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush and the independent businessman Ross Perot. His centrist Third Way philosophy became known as Clintonism and defined his presidency and the Democratic Party of the decades that followed.
He presided over the longest American peacetime economic expansion up to that time. He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, but failed to pass his plan for national health care reform. After Democrats were soundly defeated in the 1994 midterms, he became much more conservative in domestic policy, signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and Republican-led financial deregulation, while championing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. He appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court.
In foreign policy he ordered US military intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, signed the Dayton Peace Agreement, and called for NATO to expand in Eastern Europe, with many former Warsaw Pact members joining during his presidency. He took part in the Oslo I Accord and the Camp David Summit to advance the Israeli–Palestinian peace process and assisted the Northern Ireland peace process. He won re-election in 1996, defeating Bob Dole.
His second term was overshadowed by the affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, revealed in early 1998. In December of that year the House of Representatives impeached him on two articles, perjury and obstruction of justice, making him the first president impeached since Andrew Johnson. The Senate acquitted him on both charges in 1999. In his last three years the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus, the first since 1969.
He left office with the joint-highest approval rating of any US president, and his presidency ranks in the middle to upper tier in historical rankings, though his personal conduct has drawn substantial scrutiny. Since then he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work, created the Clinton Foundation to address causes including HIV/AIDS and global warming, was named UN special envoy to Haiti in 2009, and founded the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund with George W. Bush after the 2010 earthquake. He turned 80 in August 2026.
Image: Bill Clinton on the White House lawn with his dog Buddy (file photo). Photo: Barbara Kinney / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
