Happy Birthday President Clinton
Today is former President Bill Clinton's 78th birthday. He was born with the name William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before young Bill was born. His mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy (who died in 1994), traveled to New Orleans to study nursing soon after he was born. She left Bill in Hope with grandparents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and ran a small grocery store. At a time when the Southern United States was segregated racially, it is said that the Cassidys sold goods on credit to people of all races.
In 1950, Virginia Cassidy returned from nursing school and married Roger Clinton, Sr., who owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas with his brother. The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950. Although he assumed use of his stepfather's surname, it was not until the future president turned fifteen that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather. Clinton later said that he remembered his stepfather as a gambler and an alcoholic who was regularly abusive to his mother and half-brother, Roger Clinton, Jr., to the point where he intervened multiple times with the threat of violence to protect them.
Clinton attended Georgetown University and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. In 1975 he married Hillary Rodham Clinton, who later served as United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 and who was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009 and the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 2016. Both Clintons earned law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met. Clinton served as Attorney-General of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979 and as Governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and from 1983 to 1992. As Governor, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.
Clinton was elected president in 1992, defeating incumbent George H. W. Bush. At age 46, he was the third-youngest president and the first from the baby boomer generation. Clinton was President for the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. One goal which eluded him was the passage of a national health care reform program. The Republican Party won control of Congress in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, but in 1996 Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected president twice. His second term saw the passage of welfare reform and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing health care coverage for millions of children.
In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice during a lawsuit against him, both related to a scandal involving White House (and later Department of Defense) employee Monica Lewinsky. At his trial in the US Senate he was acquitted and completed his term of office. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton's presidency.
Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Since leaving the Presidency in 2001, Bill Clinton has had an active in public life, giving speeches, fundraising, and founding charitable organizations. He has spoken at the last six Democratic National Conventions, dating to 1988. In 2002, Clinton warned that pre-emptive military action against Iraq would have unwelcome consequences.
The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock, Arkansas was dedicated in 2004. Clinton released a best-selling autobiography, called "My Life" that same year. In 2007, he released a book called "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World", which also became a The New York Times Best Seller. After the 2004 Asian tsunami, the late U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Clinton to head a relief effort. After Hurricane Katrina, Clinton joined with fellow former President George H. W. Bush to establish the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Fund in January 2005, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund in October of that year. As part of the tsunami effort, these two ex-presidents appeared in a Super Bowl XXXIX pre-game show, and traveled to the affected areas. They also spoke together at the funeral of Boris Yeltsin in 2007.
Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to address issues of global significance. This foundation includes the Clinton Foundation HIV and AIDS Initiative (CHAI), which strives to combat that disease, and has worked with the Australian government toward that end. The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), begun by the Clinton Foundation in 2005, attempts to address world problems such as global public health, poverty alleviation and religious and ethnic conflict. In 2005, Clinton announced through his foundation an agreement with manufacturers to stop selling sugared drinks in schools. Clinton's foundation joined with the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group in 2006 to improve cooperation among those cities, and he met with foreign leaders to promote this initiative. In 2008, Foundation director Inder Singh announced that deals to reduce the price of anti-malaria drugs by 30 percent in developing nations. Clinton also spoke in favor of California Proposition 87 on alternative energy, which was voted down.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign, Clinton vigorously advocated on behalf of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Through speaking engagements and fundraisers, he was able to raise $10 million toward her campaign. On August 27, 2008, Clinton enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, saying that all his experience as president assured him that Obama was "ready to lead". After Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was over, Bill Clinton continued to raise funds to help pay off her campaign debt.
In 2009, Clinton travelled to North Korea on behalf of two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea. Euna Lee and Laura Ling had been imprisoned for illegally entering the country from China. After Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Kim issued a pardon. Since then, Clinton has been assigned a number of other diplomatic missions. He was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti in 2009. In response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Clinton and George W. Bush would coordinate efforts to raise funds for Haiti's recovery. Clinton continues to visit Haiti to witness the inauguration of refugee villages, and to raise funds for victims of the earthquake. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Clinton gave a widely praised speech nominating Barack Obama.
In September 2004, Clinton received a quadruple bypass surgery. In March 2005, he underwent surgery for a partially collapsed lung. On February 11, 2010, he was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City after complaining of chest pains, and had two coronary stents implanted in his heart. After this experience, Clinton adopted the plant-based whole foods (vegan) diet. Clinton has reportedly begun practicing Buddhist meditation in order to help him relax and complete a healthier lifestyle.
On April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton formally announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. She was formally nominated as the party's presidential candidate on July 26, 2016. If she had been successful in becoming President, Bill Clinton would have added yet another honor to list of accomplishments: first "First Gentleman."
More recently, Clinton's reputation has been tarnished because of his association with Jeffrey Epstein. In the early 2000s, Clinton took flights on Epstein's private jet in connection with Clinton Foundation work and it was subsequenltly disclosed that while Clinton was president Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times. After Epstein was convicted on sex trafficking charges. Clinton's office released a statement in 2019 saying:
"President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York. In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took four trips on Jeffrey Epstein's airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation. Staff, supporters of the Foundation, and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg of every trip. He's not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade."
However, this turned out not to be entirely true. Later reports showed that Clinton had flown on Epstein's plane 26 times. Later, Clinton said he had "one meeting with Epstein in his Harlem office in 2002, and around the same time made one brief visit to Epstein's New York apartment with a staff member and his security detail". In July 2019 it was reported that Clinton attended a dinner with Epstein in 1995, a meeting with Epstein that Clinton had not previously disclosed.
Clinton is also reported to have used Epstein's private jet to visit Little St. James Island, where Epstein resided on multiple occasions between 2002 and 2005. Virginia Roberts (also known as Virginia Giuffre), claims in a lawsuit that while working at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Largo resort, she was enticed into a sex trafficking ring run by Epstein, and that while traveling with Epstein, she saw Clinton on the island. She claims that Clinton traveled to Epstein's retreat on Little St. James in 2002. She says that she asked Epstein what Clinton was doing there, and he told her that Clinton "owes me favors." She also claimed that Epstein and Clinton had dined in the presence of two girls aged approximately seventeen. She stated that Epstein had invited to have sex with Clinton, but that Clinton showed no interest in them. This allegation was not supported by a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service records of visits Clinton may have made to Little St. James. According to Epstein's flight logs, Clinton never flew near the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In July 2019, a Clinton spokesperson issued a statement saying Clinton never visited the island, but according to former Clinton aide Doug Band, Clinton visited Epstein's island in January 2003.
In 2024, unsealed court documents revealed allegations that Clinton had visited the offices of Vanity Fair magazine and threatened the magazine not to print stories about Epstein's sexual trafficking. However former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter denied that this had ever occurred,