why did bill clinton change his last name?
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Bill Clinton served as the 42nd president of the United States during the 1990s. His two terms saw the U.S. economy flourish and the nation intervene in conflicts across the world. Despite facing several scandals during his administration, Clinton left office with the highest approval rating of any outgoing president in more than fifty years.
Bill Clinton‘s father died in a motorcycle accident and his mother remarried. He was adopted by that man and took his last name of Clinton. He didn’t change his name.
When he was 16, Clinton met President John F. Kennedy during a trip to Washington, D.C. This encounter helped solidify his decision to pursue a career in politics.
Clinton returned to Washington for college, attending Georgetown University. In 1970 he entered Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham. The pair married in 1975, and Hillary Rodham Clinton became a strong partner in her husband’s political career. At the end of Bill’s second term as president, Hillary entered politics herself, first as a U.S. senator and then as Secretary of State.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton, byname of William Jefferson Clinton, original name William Jefferson Blythe III, (born August 19, 1946, Hope, Arkansas, U.S.), 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), who oversaw the country’s longest peacetime economic expansion. In 1998 he became the second U.S. president to be impeached; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999.
Early life
Bill Clinton’s father was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before his son was born. His widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, married Roger Clinton, and, despite their unstable union (they divorced and then remarried) and her husband’s alcoholism, her son eventually took his stepfather’s name. Reared in part by his maternal grandmother, Bill Clinton developed political aspirations at an early age; they were solidified (by his own account) in July 1963, when he met and shook hands with Pres. John F. Kennedy.
Governor of Arkansas
After an eventful two-year term as governor, Clinton failed in his reelection bid in 1980, the year his daughter and only child, Chelsea, was born. After apologizing to voters for unpopular decisions he had made as governor (such as highway-improvement projects funded by increases in the state gasoline tax and automobile licensing fees), he regained the governor’s office in 1982 and was successively reelected three more times by substantial margins.
A pragmatic, centrist Democrat, he imposed mandatory competency testing for teachers and students and encouraged investment in the state by granting tax breaks to industries. He became a prominent member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that sought to recast the party’s agenda away from its traditional liberalism and move it closer to what it perceived as the centre of American political life.
Creating a National Image
Setting his sights higher, Clinton used his five terms as Arkansas governor to cultivate a national profile for himself. He soon emerged as one of the leading reform governors in the Democratic Party. In 1986 and 1987, Clinton served as chairman of the National Governors Association, speaking on behalf of the nation’s governors. Shrewdly charting a new course, Clinton helped guide the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats and business people who worked to affect national policies.
In 1990 and 1991, Governor Clinton led the council’s drive to lure back the white male vote into party columns without alienating blacks and women. With the goal of strengthening and unifying the party, Clinton used his persuasive oratorical skills to argue that the Republicans were using the issue of race to gain political advantages, and that race should not divide Americans who agreed on economic and other social issues.
He insisted on pragmatism and moderation in government programs, a centrist platform that emphasized opportunity, jobs, law and order, and responsibility. This meant that the government should provide opportunities for all citizens when the free market failed, but individuals had to accept the responsibility to work and to contribute to the common civil order.
Rhodes Scholar and Vietnam Draftee
Beginning in his junior year, Clinton worked as a clerk for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At that time, the powerful committee was headed by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a leading critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The experience greatly shaped Clinton’s perspective as he came to believe, as did Fulbright, that the United States had no moral or strategic reason for being in Vietnam.
Just prior to his graduation from Georgetown, he won a prized Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University in England for two years.
However, he faced being drafted for the Vietnam War due to a change in federal policy that eliminated almost all college deferments. His local draft board in Arkansas, however, allowed him to sail for England.
While in England, Clinton received his draft notice. He then returned to Arkansas, and with the help of Fulbright’s office and that of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, managed to persuade the admissions staff of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corp (ROTC) program at the University of Arkansas Law School to accept him the next fall.
Instead he returned to Oxford, although the evidence is unclear as to whether this was done with the approval of his ROTC contacts.
William Jefferson Clinton (1946 – )
Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father, an automobile-parts salesman, died in a car accident three months before Bill was born. His mother, Virginia Cassidy, married Roger Clinton, an automobile dealer, when Bill was seven years old. The family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Bill and his younger half brother, Roger, Jr., attended public schools. His mother often engaged Bill in political discussions and encouraged his ambitions. Growing up had its difficulties, however, because his stepfather was an alcoholic who sometimes beat his mother. Virginia and Roger eventually divorced but soon remarried, when Bill was 15. As a gesture Bill had his last name legally changed to Clinton.
Bill participated in many activities, including student government, at Hot Springs High School. In the summer of 1963 he was chosen to attend the American Legion Boys State, a government and leadership conference, in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was elected a senator and given the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. where he shook hands with President John F. Kennedy. When Bill returned to Arkansas, politics became a pursuit from which he never wavered.
Presidency of Bill Clinton
The Clinton administration got off to a shaky start, the victim of what some critics called ineptitude and bad judgment. His attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military was met with criticism from conservatives and some military leaders—including Gen.
Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In response, Clinton proposed a compromise policy—summed up by the phrase “Don’t ask, don’t tell”—that failed to satisfy either side of the issue. Clinton’s first two nominees for attorney general withdrew after questions were raised about domestic workers they had hired.
Clinton’s efforts to sign campaign-finance reform legislation were quashed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate, as was his economic-stimulus package.
Clinton had promised during the campaign to institute a system of universal health insurance. His appointment of his wife to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, a novel role for the country’s first lady, was criticized by conservatives, who objected both to the propriety of the arrangement and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s feminist views.
They joined lobbyists for the insurance industry, small-business organizations, and the American Medical Association to campaign vehemently against the task force’s eventual proposal, the Health Security Act. Despite protracted negotiations with Congress, all efforts to pass compromise legislation failed.
Life after the presidency of Bill Clinton
As Clinton’s presidency was ending, his wife’s political career was beginning. In 2000 Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate representing New York; she was the first wife of a U.S. president to win elected office.
She went on to lose narrowly to Barack Obama the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, but Obama appointed her secretary of state in his presidential administration. Bill Clinton remained active in political affairs and was a popular speaker on the lecture circuit.
In 2001 he founded the William J. Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that addressed various global issues through such programs as the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (established 2002), the Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (2002), the Clinton Global Initiative (2005), and the Clinton Climate Initiative (2006). In 2004 the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum opened in Little Rock.
Impeachment
Clinton was the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. He faced four charges from the House, two of which passed on December 20, 1998. The two charges that passed were perjury before a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice, both stemming from Clinton lying about an affair he had with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Two other charges—regarding a sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones and abuse of power—failed in the House. On February 12, 1999, Clinton was acquitted by the Senate on both charges.
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Bill Clinton
1. On Aug. 19, 1946, William Jefferson Blythe IV was born to 22-year-old Virginia Blythe in Hope, Ark. He was named after his father, a traveling salesman, who died in a car accident before Bill was born.
2. While his mother was in school in Louisiana studying to become a nurse anesthetist, his grandparents raised him.
3. Bill was 4 when his mother married Roger Clinton, a car salesman. The family left Hope and moved to Hot Springs, Ark., when Bill was 7. Bill was 10 when Roger Jr., his half brother, was born. He changed his last name to Clinton when he was a teenager.
4. He was a great student and musician. Bill was a saxophone player in his high school band and attended music summer camp in the Ozarks. Upon high school graduation, he received both music and academic scholarships.
5. During his senior year in high school, he traveled to Washington, D.C., as a delegate in an American Legion civics program called Boys Nation. While on the trip, he got to meet and shake hands with President John F. Kennedy.
6. Bill attended Georgetown University, the only college he applied to, from 1964 to 1968. He received a bachelor’s degree in international affairs.
7. Bill met Hillary Rodham at Yale University, where they were both studying law. They worked on the presidential campaign for George McGovern in 1972.
8. Clinton was elected Arkansas’s attorney general in 1976. In 1978, he won the governorship. After losing his re-election race in 1980, he recaptured the governor’s office in 1982 and served until 1992.
9. Clinton is also a Grammy winner. In 2004, he won for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf/Beintus: Wolf Tracks. The next year, he won a Grammy for a reading of My Life, his autobiography.
10. Since leaving office in 2001, Clinton has been involved in many causes, including fighting global warming, childhood obesity, and the AIDS epidemic. His book about volunteering and helping others—Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World—was published in September 2007.
