V.

Life After the Presidency

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.