Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United States (1993–2001)
William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American retired politician and lawyer who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979, the governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981, and governor again from 1983 to 1992. His centrist Third Way political philosophy became known as Clintonism, which defined his presidency and the succeeding decades of Democratic Party into the 21st century.
Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton graduated from Georgetown University in 1968, and later from Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. After graduating from law school, Clinton returned to Arkansas and won election as state attorney general, followed by two non-consecutive tenures as Arkansas governor. As governor, he overhauled the state's education system and served as chairman of the National Governors Association. Running as a "New Democrat", Clinton was elected president in the 1992 election, defeating the incumbent Republican president George H. W. Bush, and the independent businessman Ross Perot. He became the first president to be born in the Baby Boomer generation and the youngest to serve two full terms.
Clinton presided over the longest American period of peacetime economic expansion at the time. He signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act but failed to pass his plan for national health care reform, and accepted a controversial compromise policy to his original plan to allow gay and lesbian service members to serve openly in the military.
The public source identifies “Bill Clinton” as 42nd President of the United States (1993–2001). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bill, Clinton and 42nd.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1124. VIAF identifies the subject as 102338519. The Library of Congress control number is n82029644. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1993, 2001 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Clinton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.