Bill Clinton: From Hope to Hot Springs to the Presidency

William Jefferson Clinton was born on August nineteenth, nineteen forty-six, in Hope, Arkansas, a small town in the southwest corner of the state. His father, William Jefferson Blythe Junior, had been killed in a car accident before he was born. His mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy, remarried Roger Clinton, a car dealer in Hot Springs, and William took his stepfather's name. He grew up in Hot Springs during the open-city era, a city of bathhouses and casinos and a kind of wide-open tolerance for whatever the market would bear that the young Bill Clinton would later describe as a formative education in the range of what people do.

He left Arkansas for Georgetown University, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham. He returned to Arkansas, taught law at the University of Arkansas, ran for Congress and lost, ran for state Attorney General and won, ran for governor and won, lost a reelection bid, won it back, and served as governor until nineteen ninety-three, when he became the forty-second President of the United States.

His presidency reshaped American domestic policy, including welfare, trade, and crime legislation, in ways that remain debated across the political spectrum. The policies that bear his name, on crime, welfare, and trade, were forged in part by the political geography of the modern South, the world he had grown up in, the compromises it required, and the history that shaped the choices available.

The Clinton Presidential Library stands on the Arkansas River in Little Rock, a glass building on stilts that looks out over the river the state is named for.