Bill Clinton

A

4

Investigations and Impeachment

Clinton was plagued during almost his entire presidency by accusations of wrongdoing. In the fall of 1993, Clinton’s first year as president, questions were raised about the Clintons’ investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation, a land-development venture. In January 1994 Attorney General Janet Reno named Robert Fiske as independent counsel to probe the Whitewater allegations. In August 1994 a three-judge panel empowered to appoint special prosecutors removed Fiske and appointed Kenneth Starr to direct the Whitewater investigations.

In January 1998 Starr asked Attorney General Janet Reno to expand his Whitewater investigation. He wanted to determine if the president had had a sexual affair with a 24-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, had lied about it under oath, and had tried to influence others’ testimony about it. Although the Lewinsky affair was unrelated to the Whitewater issues, Starr justified the investigation by saying that it constituted a pattern of obstructing justice at the White House. The attorney general and a panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia enlarged Starr’s mandate to include the Lewinsky matter.

The Lewinsky affair came to Starr’s attention through a civil lawsuit against Clinton filed in 1994 by a woman in Arkansas, Paula Corbin Jones, a former state government secretary. Jones alleged in the suit that Clinton had violated her civil rights by making a sexual proposition to her in a Little Rock hotel room when he was governor. In 1998—after Starr began to investigate the Lewinsky affair—a U.S. District Court judge dismissed Jones’s suit, stating that “there are no genuine issues for trial in this case.” While Jones was appealing the dismissal, her lawyers negotiated a settlement with the president in which she agreed to drop her suit in exchange for a payment of $850,000.

Before her suit was dismissed, however, Jones had tried to show that Clinton had a pattern of sexual misconduct with women. Her lawyers received a rumor that Lewinsky had had an affair with the president, and they subpoenaed her as a witness. Although Lewinsky denied the affair, Starr acquired tape recordings of Lewinsky discussing the affair with a friend. After the recordings emerged, Lewinsky talked extensively to Starr’s investigators and to a federal Whitewater grand jury in Washington, D.C., in July and August 1998.

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In August Clinton testified by closed-circuit television for the grand jury, becoming the first president to testify before a grand jury in his own defense. Afterward, Clinton acknowledged to a national television audience that he had “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky. He apologized for misleading his family, his aides, and the country.

In September 1998 Starr delivered a report to the House of Representatives recounting graphic details of sexual incidents involving Clinton and Lewinsky. The debate in the House was bitter, with Democrats accusing Republicans of a vendetta to destroy a popular president. In December the House approved two articles of impeachment—perjury before the grand jury and obstruction of justice. Throughout the controversy, polls showed that a large majority of Americans thought the president was doing a good job and that he should not be impeached or removed from office.

The House vote moved the case to the Senate, which had the power to remove an impeached president by a vote of conviction by two thirds of its members. Senators sensed public unhappiness with the partisanship that surrounded the impeachment and set out to calm the congressional debate during its trial of the president. In February 1999 the Senate defeated both articles of impeachment. Afterward, Clinton addressed the nation by television from the White House Rose Garden and said he was “profoundly sorry” for his actions and “the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and on the American people.”

B

Foreign Affairs

Although the United States was no longer engaged in the Cold War, Clinton had to decide whether the United States, as a superpower, had a role to play in the conflicts and violence occurring in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti. These were all places where suffering was intense but the interests of the United States were not clear. Clinton was at first hesitant to commit American military forces and risk lives in regions torn by ethnic and religious strife, but gradually he expanded his view of the nation’s strategic interests. Because the interests of people all over the world had become so interconnected, Clinton thought the United States had a stake in protecting human rights and promoting the political and economic stability of remote countries. He sent armed forces to end fighting, maintain peace, and protect civilians in those countries, and few American lives were lost in military action. He also took a hand personally in trying to end conflict in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

B

1

Africa

Only weeks before Clinton took office, President Bush had sent American soldiers to Somalia, on the eastern coast of Africa, where people were dying from starvation and civil war. The soldiers were sent to prevent food and other relief supplies for starving people from being stolen by warring clans. When the soldiers came under fire from armed clans and 18 soldiers were killed in 1993, the mission became unpopular with the American people. Clinton doubled troops in the country to help the Americans defend themselves and to prevent anarchy and starvation, but calls for withdrawal grew louder. The U.S. soldiers were withdrawn in March 1994.

In April 1994 a civil war erupted in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. Over the next few months, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Rwandans, mainly Tutsi, were massacred. Within a few weeks after the war began, millions of people had fled the massacres and repression in the country. With thousands more dying of disease and starvation in refugee camps in neighboring countries, the Clinton administration was under pressure to provide relief. Clinton ordered airdrops of food and supplies for refugees, and in July he sent 200 troops to the Rwanda capital of Kigali to operate the airport and safeguard relief supplies. These troops were withdrawn by October 1994. When Clinton traveled to Africa in 1998, he apologized for the international community’s failure to respond to the massacres.

In August 1998 terrorists exploded bombs outside the United States embassies in the capitals of two East African countries, Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. About 250 people, including Americans, were killed, and more than 5,500 were injured. In succeeding months several people were arrested and brought to the United States to stand trial. The Clinton administration linked the bombings to Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian living in Afghanistan who was suspected of terrorist activity. That same month Clinton ordered missile attacks on sites in Afghanistan and Sudan to retaliate for the bombings at the U.S. embassies and to deter future terrorist attacks. Clinton maintained that the sites—a chemical factory at Khartoum (the capital of Sudan) and several alleged terrorist encampments in Afghanistan—were involved in imminent terrorist plots.

B

2

The Balkans

A major foreign policy issue for Clinton during his first term was the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (often referred to simply as Bosnia), a nation in southeastern Europe that declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 (see Wars of Yugoslav Succession). This declaration sparked a war between Bosnian Serbs, who wanted Bosnia to remain in the Yugoslav federation, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats. The Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbia, were better armed than the Bosniaks and the Croats and controlled much of the countryside. They besieged cities, including the capital Sarajevo, and caused massive suffering. Clinton suggested bombing Serb supply lines and lifting an embargo that prevented the shipment of military arms to the former Yugoslavia but could not get European nations to join him on either strategy. In 1994 he found himself opposing Republicans in Congress who wanted to lift the arms embargo because the U.S. allies in Western Europe were still resistant to that policy.

Throughout 1994 Clinton pressured Western European countries to take strong measures against the Serbs. But in November, after the Serbs seemed on the verge of overwhelming the Bosniaks and Croats in several strongholds, he changed course and pushed for conciliation with the Serbs. In November 1995 the Clinton administration hosted peace talks between the warring parties in Bosnia. A peace agreement known as the Dayton peace accord was reached that left Bosnia as a single state made up of two separate entities with a central government.

In the spring of 1998, ethnic strife in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)—the state formed from the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro—flared when Serb forces moved into the southern province of Kosovo. More than 90 percent of the people of Kosovo were ethnic Albanians, many of whom wanted independence from the FRY. The Serbs, however, had considered the area sacred territory for six centuries. Serb forces moved into the province to put down Albanian rebels, but reports of Serb atrocities against civilians sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing across the border into neighboring countries.

After attempting to reach a peace settlement, Clinton warned the Serbs of possible military strikes. In March, military forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the United States, began dropping missiles and bombs on military installations in Kosovo and Serbia. It was the first time in NATO’s history that its forces had attacked a European country. In June 1999 NATO and FRY military leaders approved an international peace plan for Kosovo, and NATO suspended its bombing.

B

3

Haiti

Clinton had more success in Haiti, an impoverished country in the Caribbean Sea southeast of Cuba. In September 1991 military leaders, led by Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras, had ousted the country’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide escaped to the United States. In 1993 thousands of Haitians tried to flee to the United States, but more than half were sent back to Haiti by the United States Coast Guard. Although Clinton had criticized former president George Bush for returning Haitian refugees to their country, he continued Bush’s policy on the grounds that accepting refugees might encourage many more to flee to the United States.

In 1994 Clinton demanded repeatedly that the Haitian government step down and restore democratic rule. Members of both parties in Congress opposed American intervention, but Clinton sent a large military force to the country in September 1994. At the last minute, before the troops reached Haiti, he sent a delegation led by former President Jimmy Carter to urge Cédras to step down and leave the country. Cédras agreed to leave and surrender the government to Aristide. Cédras and his top lieutenants left the country in October, and a few days later, American forces escorted Aristide into the capital. The democratic government was restored.