Bill Clinton

His father was already dead. William Jefferson Blythe Jr. ran his car off a highway near Sikeston, Missouri, in May 1946 and drowned in the ditch beside it, three months before his son was born in Hope, Arkansas. The boy took his stepfather's surname at 15, after years in a house where Roger Clinton gambled, drank and beat his wife. Virginia Kelley worked as a nurse anesthetist and held the place together. At 16 he shook John Kennedy's hand in the Rose Garden as a Boys Nation delegate, on film. Then Georgetown, a Rhodes scholarship, Yale Law and Hillary Rodham in 1971, and straight back to Arkansas, where he lost his first race at 28, made attorney general at 30 and governor at 32.

Eight years, governed by a man who had already lost an election he expected to win. NAFTA, the 1994 crime bill, welfare reform, family leave, a budget that ran a surplus, the Defense of Marriage Act, air wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, nothing at all in Rwanda, and an impeachment that failed to remove him. BriefHistory lays those years out in order with the politics that produced them. What is left to account for is what he traded to build the record, and what it looks like now.

The laws that defined his centrism were disowned by his own party inside 20 years. The 1994 crime bill fed an incarceration rate that peaked in the following decade, and Clinton said in 2015 that he had made the problem worse. The 1996 welfare law ended the federal cash entitlement for poor families with children. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and called for its repeal in 2013. He signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, both of them cited hard after 2008. And on January 19, 2001, his last full day in office, he accepted a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license and a 25,000-dollar fine to close the perjury inquiry. That October he resigned from the Supreme Court bar rather than fight disbarment there.

He left with approval above 60 percent and spent two decades as the most sought-after Democrat alive: a foundation, a global health initiative, tsunami and Haiti relief run alongside two Bushes, and a memoir written out in longhand that sold on a scale no political book had. Then the ground moved under him. By the 2016 primaries his signature laws were liabilities inside his own party, and after 2017 the Lewinsky matter was reread as a question of power rather than sex. His convention appearances have shortened every cycle. Jimmy Carter's death in December 2024 left him the earliest-serving living former president. The verdict is not in, and the people revising it are mostly Democrats.

Bill Clinton's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Family and Medical Leave Act law
  The first bill he signed, two weeks into the term 1993
• North American Free Trade Agreement law
  Negotiated by his predecessor and pushed through Congress by him against most of his own party 1993
• Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act law
  The largest crime bill in American history to that point 1994
• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act law
  Welfare reform. Three officials in his own administration resigned over it. 1996
• My Life book
  Written out in longhand and sold on a scale no political memoir had managed 2004
• Clinton Global Initiative company
  Launched in September 2005 to broker commitments between governments, companies and charities 2005

• August 19, 1946 aged 0 Born in Hope, Arkansas, three months after his father died in a car wreck
• July 24, 1963 aged 16 Shakes John F. Kennedy's hand in the Rose Garden as a Boys Nation delegate He was 16 and the moment was filmed.
• October 11, 1975 aged 29 Marries Hillary Rodham in Fayetteville, Arkansas
• November 7, 1978 aged 32 Elected governor of Arkansas at 32, the youngest in the country
• November 4, 1980 aged 34 Loses the governorship after a single term He won it back in 1982 and held it for a decade.
• January 20, 1993 aged 46 Sworn in as the first president born after the Second World War
• December 19, 1998 aged 52 The House impeaches him on perjury and obstruction
• February 12, 1999 aged 52 The Senate acquits him on both articles Neither count drew even a simple majority.
• September 6, 2004 aged 58 Undergoes quadruple bypass surgery in New York

• Hillary Clinton b. 1947
  First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. married to
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. chose as vice president
• Newt Gingrich b. 1943
  Speaker who engineered the 1994 Republican House majority and the Contract with America agenda. rival
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. appointed
• Madeleine Albright 1937–2022
  First woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State and shaped 1990s policy in the Balkans. appointed
• Alan Greenspan 1926–2026
  Chaired the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 across several financial crises. reappointed
• Bob Dole 1923–2021
  Wounded veteran and Senate leader who helped write the Americans with Disabilities Act. defeated