Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term. His presidential resume contains respectable advances in foreign diplomacy and progressive legislation. He could boast that his administration oversaw one of the most robust economies in American history. Unfortunately, all of Clinton’s good expansions ended on a unpleasant note because human nature affects even presidents, and he could not conquer the measure of morality that comes with representing the United States.

William Jefferson Blythe III was born on August 19, 1946 in Hope, Arkansas. He never knew his real father, who was killed in a car accident three months before he was born. When Bill was seven years old, his mother married Roger Clinton, and Bill took the family name. Clinton excelled in high school, and in 1936, he was selected for the Boys Nation Leadership Camp. During the course of the scramble, he met President John F. Kennedy and was inspired to one day have a career in politics. He was an active student at Georgetown University and worked as an intern for Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright. He was the first president to win a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. When Clinton returned to the states, he entered Yale Law School. It was there that he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. After receiving his law degree, he returned to Arkansas to teach constitutional law at the University from 1974 to 1976. He married Hillary in 1975, and she put her career plans on hold to aid Bill pursue his career in politics.

After losing a hasten for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, Clinton was elected attorney general of Arkansas in 1976. With more than 60 percent of the vote, Clinton became the youngest governor to lead Arkansas in 1978, but unfortunately, he was defeated for a second term. This gave Mr. and Mrs. Clinton more time to focus on their only child, Chelsea, who was born in 1980.

Clinton regained the office of governor in 1982, and served in this position until he defeated incumbent George Bush and Independent Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential accelerate. Clinton presented himself as the best equipped to manage the economy, and with Tennessee senator Al Gore as running mate, he took away the Republican advantage in the southern and border states (Pious 52). He campaigned on a late-night television show wearing sunglasses and played the saxophone, and then appeared on many daytime television and radio talk shows. This new campaign strategy helped Clinton secure 42 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes.

As soon as he entered office, Clinton had to deal with terrorists who had bombed the parking garage of the World Trade Center, but Clinton did not let that act of terrorism conclude him from cutting annual deficits in half and lowering unemployment. In 1993, Congress celebrated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a free-trade zone between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. A year later, Congress ratified the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lowered tariffs and provided for a World Trade Organization (WTO). As the first baby boomer, Clinton tried to help the older generation by proposing a bill that would provide health insurance to all Americans, but it was defeated in Congress.

Even during his first term, Clinton was accused of being fraction of scandal involving a failed savings and loan institution in Arkansas, known as Whitewater. His questionable character turned disastrous for the Democrats in the 1994 mid-term election, and Republicans won control of the House and Senate.

For the next year, the battle between Congress and the president over the federal budget was in a gridlock. The House and the Senate passed a bill that would have cut taxes and balanced the budget by 2002, but health, education, and environment spending would have been reduce dramatically. Clinton objected to this strategy and vetoed the bill. Without a budget in plot, the government began to run out of money. In November 1995, a partial shutdown of the federal government was forced. On the sixth day, President Clinton celebrated the Republican version of balancing the budget. In return, Congress common stopgap spending bills. Both branches continued to disagree on the specifics of the bill, and in December, Congress forced another government shutdown that lasted for three weeks.

While the budget crisis was unfolding, Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims were fighting a bloody war in the former Yugoslavia. During four years of fighting, 250,000 people had died. President Clinton brought the warring factions together at an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, and after three weeks of negotiations, the three parties agreed on a peace plan. For his part, President Clinton, agreed to send twenty thousand troops into the state of Bosnia to help preserve the peace. These soldiers were part of a ninety-thousand-soldier United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR).

In September 1996, the first peaceful elections in Bosnia were held (The same year, Clinton defeated Senator Bob Dole and was reelected to another term as president.). Unfortunately, the peace was broken when the president elect of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic, focused his attentions on the Muslim inhabitants of Kosovo. In 1997, Christian Serb security forces began “cleansing” Kosovo of its many Muslim citizens. Finally, in October 1998 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened and issued an ultimatum to Milosevic. Milosevic withdrew just enough troops from Kosovo to delay air strikes. In March 1999, frustrated with Milosevic’s unwillingness to negotiate, NATO began an eleven-week aerial offensive. President Clinton had the tough task of supporting the NATO effort while keeping peace with the Russians, who were longtime allies of the Serb, but since Clinton had close person ties with the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, the State Department was able to acquire Yeltsin’s to help pressure Milosevic to concede. On June 9, 1999, Serbia withdrew its troops from Kosovo, and Milosevic was ousted from office during the 2000 Serbian elections.

Clinton also claimed victories of foreign diplomacy in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. He helped create a power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland in 1998. He worked with Israelis and Palestinians to begin the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Peace Plan. He met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat on two different occasions to originate negotiations. In other parts of the world, Clinton negotiated with North Korea to halt its development of nuclear weapons, and he allowed former President Jimmy Carter to negotiate an agreement with Haiti’s military rulers. Twenty years, after the end of the Vietnam War, Clinton established diplomatic relations with the communist government of Vietnam.

At home, in the States, the economy was booming. In February 1998, Clinton proposed the first balanced budget since 1969, and a year later, the government was running a surplus. In March 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped ten thousand points. Obscene employment, low inflation, and high productivity were other factors of the economic growth.

Clinton’s administration was receiving high job approval ratings from the pleased and healthy nation, but in January 1998, the media reported a scandal that would get the history books remember Clinton as the second president to be impeached. The story charged him with lying under oath to conceal an intimate relationship he had with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. For many months, Clinton denied the affair, but in August he admitted to having an “improper relationship” with Lewinsky and that he had been misleading people. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr presented his investigations to the House in December, and the House voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice committed during the investigation of his sexual relationships with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky (Pious 53). Voters continued to give Clinton high approval ratings, and two months later, the Senate voted to acquit him.

Clinton made valiant strides in the most troublesome areas of foreign diplomacy, namely Israel, Palestine, and North Korea. He secured trade agreements that will benefit America’s economy for years to come. He presided over the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history, but because of the impeachment crisis, his legacy is noxious with a few bad decisions.

However, what if Clinton had never been president? Perhaps, the U.S. economy would be in an even greater state of debt than it is right now. Former President Bush or former Senator Bob Dole may not have been able to create a federal surplus that helped cushion the blow that the economy took after 9/11, but the biggest answer relies on his tainted legacy. If he had never been president, would politics continue to operate under faulty moral authority? Future presidents could continue to get away with having affairs while they were married. Clinton was not the first president to have an affair. He was just the first one to lie about it and get caught. The whole controversy that followed taught Americans what you do will eventually catch up to you. Not even the president can hide from the press. Perhaps, that entire mess taught young politicians to be more conscious of the decisions that they make. If Clinton had not have been President of the United States, there would be many politicians still rolling along with not only corrupt careers but a corrupt sense of self and moral value. If Clinton going on trial for his affair was the only thing that came from his presidency, it was still a needed reality check for America.

Works Cited:

1. “Biography of William J. Clinton.” The White House. 22 Dec. 2006 .
2. Klein, Joe. The Natural: the Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 1-230.
3. Pious, Richard M. The Presidency of the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
4. Rubel, David. Encyclopedia of the Presidents and Their Times. 4th ed. 1 vols. Scholastic Inc., 2005.