RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) –
As we continue to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we are revealing things you may not know about our presidents.
This Commander in Chief was the only Rhodes Scholar to become president.
William Jefferson Blythe III was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Blythe Jr., was killed in a car crash three months after he was born. Clinton’s mother would marry Roger Clinton Sr. in 1950. Bill officially adopted his stepfather’s last name when he was a teenager.
In 1963, he shook hands with President Kennedy as part of an American Legion Boys Nation trip to the White House, an event that inspired him to a career in public service.
In 1968, Bill Clinton graduated from Georgetown. That’s where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and received his degree from Yale Law. The Clintons married in 1975 and had a daughter, Chelsea.
He was elected Arkansas Attorney General and served as governor of the Granite State for 12 years, ending in 1992.
In that same year, Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination, and he defeated the incumbent George HW Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot to become the 42nd President of the United States.
In his first term, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.
Clinton appointed the first female US attorney general, Janet Reno, the first female secretary of state Madeline Albright, and the first female Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also appointed a second justice to the Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer.
Clinton was re-elected in 1996, and in his second term, America enjoyed prosperity and low unemployment. And in 1998, the US accomplished a federal budget surplus of $70 billion, the first surplus in 30 years.
But in December of that same year, scandal would rock the country. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate would acquit the president of the charges, and he would remain in office.
After leaving the White House, he established the William J. Clinton Foundation to fight poverty and global issues, and he remains in the public eye.
He is one of five living presidents.
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