Bill Clinton

In 1996 Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a landmark international agreement that would have prohibited nuclear weapons testing by all signatory nations. The next year he sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification. In October 1999 the Senate finally voted on the treaty and rejected it. International reaction to the Senate’s action was uniformly negative, and the rejection was a political setback for Clinton, who had lobbied actively for its approval. Despite the rejection of the treaty, Clinton promised that the United States would continue to abide by a policy of not testing nuclear weapons, which had been in place since 1992.

Throughout the 1990s the United States did not pay its dues to the United Nations (UN). By 1999 the United States owed the UN at least $1 billion in back dues. That same year Clinton reached a compromise with Republicans in Congress to submit more than $800 million in back dues. Republicans in the House of Representatives had insisted that UN debt repayments be accompanied by restrictions on U.S. funding for international groups that lobbied for abortion rights in foreign countries. Clinton had vetoed similar measures in the past, but he agreed to the restrictions when faced with the possibility that the United States would lose its vote in the UN General Assembly for nonpayment of dues.

In 1999 Clinton and his wife moved their legal residency to Chappaqua, New York, a suburb of New York City, to enable Mrs. Clinton to run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Clinton campaigned for her, and she was elected in November 2000. When his successor, George W. Bush, was sworn in as president, Clinton moved to Chappaqua. He said he had no plans except to write a book and to oversee the construction of his presidential library along the Arkansas River in Little Rock.

But controversy followed Clinton after he left the presidency. Before leaving office, Clinton granted presidential pardons to 140 people. Among them was Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who had fled to Switzerland in the early 1980s to avoid prosecution for income tax evasion, racketeering, and illegal oil trading with enemies of the United States. That pardon and several others were widely criticized. Some people argued that Clinton granted certain pardons because friends and family of those pardoned had given money to the Democratic Party or the foundation that was commissioned to build and operate Clinton’s presidential library. The U.S. attorney in New York began a criminal inquiry into Rich’s pardon, and congressional committees conducted hearings. The controversy surrounding the pardons greatly reduced Clinton’s popularity after he left the White House.