1. Early years
    Birth  Family 

2. Education

3. Interest in law and politics
    Decision to become a public figure  Meeting Hillary  Tenure as Governor 

4. References

William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He won two elections with landslide margins in the Electoral College in both 1992 and 1996, but failed to win a majority of the vote both times due to the presence of a third candidate, Ross Perot. Most of his early life was spent in his home state of Arkansas, where he was born and raised for his entire childhood in varying cities from Hope to Hot Springs. He served in multiple political offices in the state including as the state's Attorney General for two years and as Governor of Arkansas for a total of almost twelve nonconsecutive years.

Early years

Birth

Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas.^[1][2] He was the son of William Jefferson Blythe Jr. (1918–1946), a traveling salesman who had died in an automobile accident three months before his birth, and Virginia Dell Cassidy (later Virginia Kelley: 1923–1994).^[2] His parents had married on September 4, 1943, but this union later proved to be bigamous, as Blythe had never divorced his third wife and was therefore still married to her.^[3]

Family

Soon after Bill was born, Virginia traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana to study nursing. She left her son in Hope with her parents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and ran a small grocery store.^[2] At a time when the southern United States was racially segregated, Clinton's grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all races.^[2] In 1950, Bill's mother returned from nursing school and married Roger Clinton Sr., who co-owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas with his brother and Earl T. Ricks.^[4] The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950.^[5]

Although he immediately assumed use of his stepfather's surname, it was not until Clinton turned 15^[6] that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather.^[4] Clinton said that he remembered his stepfather as a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and half-brother, Roger Clinton Jr., to a point where he often had to threaten violence against Roger to protect them.^[4][7]

Education

As a student in Hot Springs, Clinton attended several schools, including St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School. There, he was an active student leader, an avid reader, and a musician.^[4] Clinton was in the chorus and played the tenor saxophone, winning first chair in the state band's saxophone section. He briefly considered dedicating his life to music instead of politics, but as he noted in his autobiography My Life:{{block indent|Sometime in my sixteenth year, I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service.^[4]}}

Interest in law and politics

Clinton began an interest in taking a career path in law at Hot Springs High when he took up the challenge to argue the defense of the ancient Roman Senator Catiline in a mock trial in his Latin class.^[8] After a vigorous defense that made use of his "budding rhetorical and political skills", he told the Latin teacher Elizabeth Buck that it "made him realize that someday he would study law".^[9]

Decision to become a public figure

Clinton has identified two influential moments in his life, both occurring in 1963, that contributed to his decision to become a public figure. The first was his visit as a Boys Nation senator to the White House to meet then-President John F. Kennedy^[4][7]. The second moment he has identified was watching Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 I Have a Dream speech on television, impressing him so much that he ended up memorizing it.^[10] In 1998, during an address commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington, Clinton stated his belief that watching the march on television "had a more profound impact" on his life than his meeting with President Kennedy.^[11]

Meeting Hillary

Bill Clinton met his future wife, Hillary, at Yale University and married her in 1975. They moved to Arkansas, where Clinton began to pursue a career in politics by running for and eventually being elected to the position of Attorney General of Arkansas. He was sworn into office in 1977. Had he not decided to study law, he may have never met Hillary at Yale.

Tenure as Governor

He eventually decided to run for Governor of Arkansas two years later. He was sworn in as Governor for the first time in 1979. At the time, the Governor and Attorney General served only two-year terms. He lost his 1980 election, but ran again in 1982, and was therefore sworn in for the second time in 1983. During his tenure, the Arkansas General Assembly changed the constitution to have the Governor serve four-year terms^[12]. He subsequently ran again in 1984, 1986, and 1990. He resigned in the middle of his last term after being elected President.

References

• Epistasis and Functional Genomics
• Epistasy
• Epistates
• Episteira
• Epistematics
• Episteme (moth)
• Epistemic Communities (International Relations)
• Epistemic community (international relations)
• Epistemic conservatism
• Epistemicism
• Epistemic logic
• Epistemic Modal Logic
• Epistemic regress
• Epistemic responsibility
• Epistemic theory of miracles
• Epistemocracy
• Epistemocrat
• Epistemologic
• Epistemological anarchism
• Epistemological externalism
• Epistemologically
• Epistemological nihilism
• Epistemological particularism
• Epistemological particularist
• Epistemological particularists