Bill Clinton: Farewell Address

About the Author

William Jefferson Blythe III was born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946, three months after his father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., had died in an automobile accident. His mother, Virginia, remarried to a local automobile salesman, Roger Clinton, in 1950 and shortly thereafter changed young William's last name to Clinton. Bill Clinton graduated from Georgetown University in 1968 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University; he earned a law degree from Yale University in 1973.

Clinton was elected attorney general of Arkansas in 1976 and became governor of the state two years later. Although he lost his reelection bid in 1980, he successfully regained the governorship in 1982, holding the position until his election to the presidency in 1992. Campaigning on a platform of change and optimism during a period of economic decline, public dissatisfaction with government, and an electoral shift toward the political center, Clinton defeated the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush, and the independent candidate, Ross Perot. In January 1993 Clinton gave his First Inaugural Address to the nation, establishing the political tone and agenda for his administration.

Clinton's first term ended with mixed results. The revolutionary efforts put forth by Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to reform health care failed, and investigations into the Clintons' past real-estate dealings and allegations of improper firings in the White House travel office beleaguered the administration. However, Clinton accomplished two of his most important priorities. He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in December 1993 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which implemented sweeping reforms to the nation's welfare system, in August 1996.

Although the Democrats lost both houses of Congress to the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton won reelection in 1996 against the Republican candidate, Bob Dole. However, Clinton's second term was derailed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Called to testify in the sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones against the president, Lewinsky, an intern in the White House, became a public figure when her testimony revealed that she and the president had had an intimate relationship, though Clinton had publicly denied it. Clinton then testified before a grand jury investigation and admitted to the affair in a televised broadcast, but he denied that he had asked Lewinsky to lie. On September 9, 1998, the independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent Congress a report listing possible impeachable offenses against the president, including perjury and obstruction of justice. When the report was made public two days later, Clinton acknowledged that he had “sinned” at the annual White House prayer breakfast with religious leaders. He was impeached by the House of Representatives, but the Senate acquitted him on February 12, 1999.

George W. Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore in the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, and Bill Clinton gave his Farewell Address to the nation on January 18, 2001. Out of office, he published his memoir, My Life, in 2004 and dedicated the William J. Clinton Presidential Center on November 18 of that year. Clinton actively campaigned for his wife's bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He set up his own nonprofit foundation, which has funded a number of programs, including the Clinton Global Initiative, aimed at addressing poverty, the problem of limited access to health care, and religious and ethnic violence.