President Clinton was born in Arkansas in 1946. His father died three months before he was born. His father was still legally married to his third wife, so his marriage to President Clinton's mother was actually bigamy. He stayed with his grandparents for a time while his mother attended nursing school. His mother remarried, and President Clinton legally assumed his stepfather's name at age 15. President Clinton has stated multiple times that his stepfather was into gambling, alcohol, and domestic violence. He attended a few schools, but when he entered into Hot Springs High School, his life really changed. He was very interested in reading, became a student leader, was in chorus, and played the saxophone. He said in the book that he had really considered being a musician as a career, but decided he wanted to be a public servant. To specific events really made him think about this career- meeting President Kennedy and seeing Martin Luther King's speech on television.

He attended Georgetown University, where he received a Bachelor's Degree in Foreign Service. He was part of a fraternal organization, and also was a member of the Order of DeMolay. (I looked into that further, and it is sort of an offshoot of Freemasons. He never became a Freemason, but was part of this secret society group.) He became an intern and a clerk in the Arkansas senator's office. He won a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford, which I thought was really cool. He didn't get a degree from there, as he left to go to Yale Law, but it was really neat that he had the chance to do that. While he was in school, he received some deferments from the draft (Vietnam). He actually made arrangements to join an ROTC program, but did not go through with that. He was very opposed to the war in Vietnam, but said that using the ROTC program to avoid the draft was not an honorable thing to do. I respect that very much. This came up during his run for President, which happened when I was about five so I never knew it. After all of that mess, he became the Governor of Arkansas. He ran for president in 1992.

President Clinton was inaugurated on January 20, 1993, and became the 42nd President of the United States. He has some inexperienced staff, which caused his approval rating to drop. He had also promised to support gay people in the military, but was opposed. He tried to get a stimulus package out to inner city people to help them, but Republicans certainly didn't want that (imagine that) and squashed it. He did get the FMLA passed, which was great, and reversed some restrictions on family planning (that we have now allowed to be royally messed up). One of the worst things that he did as president was have Janet Reno on his staff. I dislike her and her actions. He expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, signed the Brady bill to background check gun buyers, and the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. (I hate that policy, but I can see why he had to compromise after the opposition he got from the military.) He also signed the Free Trade Agreement into law, as well as the Omnibus Crime Law, and started the first official White House website. He also was very into the AIDS crisis and helping people with that. There are a lot of other things that he did, which I learned from this book. I didn't know much about his policies and actions as president, so I learned a ton. Some of the things he accomplished were really good things.

Of course, the most notable thing about President Clinton is his affair scandals. Truly, all that I learned about him in school was that he was number 42 and he got in trouble for his affair. That is ridiculous, because the policies were much more important than that. He should not have done what he did in general, but doing that overshadowed so much of his career and life story. I think there are a lot of things that he got wrong in his life, but people are a sum of all their parts. This book did a great job of explaining policies and life experiences without it being completely SCANDAL and CONTROVERSY and AFFAIR and CONSPIRACY THEORIES. If you are interested in learning about presidents, this might be a good book for you to pick up if you do not know much about Clinton.