name	Pamela Churchill Harriman
order	58th
title	United States Ambassador to France
term start	1993
term end	1997
predecessor	Walter Curley
successor	Felix Rohatyn
president	Bill Clinton
birth date	March 20, 1920
birth place	Farnborough, Hampshire, England
death date	February 05, 1997
death place	Paris, France
party	Democratic
profession	Diplomat, socialite
religion	Roman Catholic
spouse	Randolph Churchill (1939-1946)Leland Hayward (1960-1971)Averell Harriman (1971-1986) }}

Pamela Beryl Harriman (née Digby; 20 March 1920 – 5 February 1997), also known as Pamela Churchill Harriman, was an English-born socialite who was married and linked to important and powerful men. In later life, she became a political activist for the United States Democratic Party and a diplomat. Her only child, Winston Churchill, was named after his famous grandfather.

Early life

Pamela Beryl Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, England, the daughter of Edward Digby, 11th Baron Digby, and his wife, Constance Pamela Alice, the daughter of Henry Campbell Bruce, 2nd Baron Aberdare, a peer in the House of Lords. Pamela Digby was educated by governesses in the ancestral home at Minterne Magna in Dorset, along with her three younger siblings. Her great-great aunt was the nineteenth-century adventurer and courtesan Jane Digby, notorious for her exotic travels and scandalous personal life. Pamela was to follow in her ancestor's footsteps, being frequently cited as "the 20th-century's greatest courtesan."

Amid acres of Dorset farmland and woods, Pamela as a young girl enjoyed an idyllic lifestyle at the top of the county’s social tree. From an early age Pamela was a very good horsewoman. She competed at shows at the International Olympia, Royal Bath and West Show, and local shows at Dorchester and Melplash. She show-jumped a tiny pony called Stardust that did a clear round at Olympia when every fence was above the animal’s withers.

At the age of seventeen, she was sent to a Munich boarding school for six months. While there she was introduced to Adolf Hitler by Unity Mitford. She subsequently went to Paris, where she took some classes at the Sorbonne. Although in her ''Who's Who'' biography she identified these classes as "post-graduate" work, she actually never completed a college degree. By 1937, she had returned to England.

Marriage to Randolph Churchill

In 1939, while working at the Foreign Office in London doing French-to-English translations, Pamela met Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill. Randolph proposed to her on the very evening they met, and they were married on October 4, 1939. Two days after Randolph Churchill took his seat in the House of Commons, their son Winston was born. Shortly after birth Pamela and the newborn were photographed by Cecil Beaton for Life Magazine, its first cover of a mother with baby.

In February 1941, Randolph was sent to Cairo for military service, where he accrued large gambling debts. His letter to Pamela asking her to make good on his debts along with her affair with Averell Harriman combined to shatter their marriage. Eventually, she filed for divorce in December 1945 on the grounds that he had deserted her for three years. Later, after having converted to Catholicism, she obtained an annulment from the Catholic Church.

Romantic involvements and affairs

Beside two additional marriages, Pamela Harriman had numerous affairs with men of prominence and wealth. During her marriage to Randolph Churchill, she had romantic involvements with men such as: Averell Harriman, who would much later become her third husband; Edward R. Murrow; and John Hay "Jock" Whitney. Notable consorts after her divorce included Prince Aly Khan, Alfonso de Portago, Gianni Agnelli, and Baron Elie de Rothschild.

Churchill became well known for her attention to detail with men. When involved romantically with a man, she paid extremely close attention to his desires, his preferences, and went to any lengths necessary to satisfy his needs during the affair. William S. Paley, briefly a consort during the war, said: "She is the greatest courtesan of the century", meaning it more as a compliment than a detraction. According to Max Hastings, "she was unkindly described as having become 'a world expert on rich men's bedroom ceilings'."

After her divorce from Randolph Churchill, she moved to Paris and in 1948 began her five-year-long affair with Gianni Agnelli. She described this as the happiest period of her life. Agnelli, however, was not faithful in this relationship. In 1952, Pamela found him with a young woman, Anne-Marie d'Estainville, and threw a rare fit about this. Agnelli sustained a severe leg injury in a car accident while bringing d'Estainville home. Pamela nursed him through his injury, and later became pregnant (although it was never confirmed that this was by Agnelli), but had an abortion in Switzerland. Later, Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto became pregnant by Agnelli, and Pamela Churchill ended the affair.

Her next significant relationship was with Baron Elie de Rothschild, who was married. He supported her financially, and she was schooled in art history and wine-making during this clandestine and short relationship. During this time she also entertained an affair with the writer Maurice Druon and with the shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos.

Marriage to Leland Hayward

In 1959, she met Broadway producer Leland Hayward who was still married to Slim Hawks. He proposed to her, and after her marriage ultimatum to Rothschild was rejected, she accepted Hayward's offer and moved to New York. The day Hayward's divorce was final, she became the fifth Mrs. Hayward with the ceremony taking place in Carson City, Nevada on 4 May 1960. Hayward was rich with income from his productions, notably the very successful ''The Sound of Music'', allowing for a lavish and luxurious life style mostly between their residence in New York City and the Westchester County estate "Haywire." ''Haywire'' also became the name of the bitter memoirs of her stepdaughter Brooke Hayward. Pamela Hayward stayed with her husband until his death on 18 March 1971.

Marriage to Averell Harriman

The day after Hayward's funeral, Pamela arranged to resume her acquaintance with her former lover Averell Harriman, then 79 years old and recently widowed. They were married on 27 September 1971. With this marriage, her social focus was moved to Washington, DC, where he owned a townhouse in Georgetown from which they entertained many notable persons. Harriman, a railroad heir, was wealthy and also bought an estate in Virginia and a private jet. With Harriman's involvement and links in the Democratic Party, her political career got started. Her last marriage lasted until his death in 1986. In later years, she had significant legal problems with Harriman's children concerning the inheritance.

Political life

As Pamela Churchill Harriman she became a United States citizen in 1971 and became involved with the Democratic Party, creating a fund-raising system — a political action committee — named "Democrats for the 80s", later "Democrats for the 90s", and nicknamed "PamPAC". In 1980, the National Women's Democratic Club named her "Woman of the Year". U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed her United States Ambassador to France in 1993. The Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris in 1995 while she served as ambassador.

Pamela Harriman died on 5 February 1997 at the American Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Seine, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while swimming at the Paris Ritz one day earlier. The morning after her death, President Jacques Chirac of France placed the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur on her flag-draped coffin. She was the first female foreign diplomat to receive this honour. President Clinton, in further recognition of her contributions and significance, dispatched Air Force One to return her body to the United States and spoke movingly at her funeral at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

She was buried 14 February 1997 at Arden, the Harriman estate near New York.

Her life story has been the subject of a documentary film, and has been somewhat Hollywoodised in the 1998 TV movie ''The Life of the Party: The Pamela Harriman Story'' with Ann-Margret in the title role. In the biography of Madeleine Albright, Pamela Harriman is cited in contrast to Albright, as a socialite who slept her way to the top. In addition, the novel ''Absolute Power'' tells the tale of a fictional woman named Christy Sullivan, married to a much older W. Sullivan (a striking similarity to the name W. Averell Harriman perhaps), whose extramarital liaison with the President ends in her murder.

Titles and styles

The Honourable Miss Pamela Beryl Digby (1920-1939)

The Hon. Mrs. Randolph Churchill (1939-1945)

The Hon. Mrs. Pamela Churchill (1945-1960)

The Hon. Mrs. Leland Hayward (1960-1971)

The Hon. Mrs. Averell Harriman (1971-1997)

The Honorable Pamela Churchill Harriman (1993-1997), United States Ambassador to France

References

Sources

''Reflected Glory:the Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman'', Sally Bedel Smith, 1996. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80950-8

''Life of the Party:the Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman'', Christopher Ogden, 1994.

''Dorset Pioneers'', Jack Dwyer, 2009. The History Press ISBN 978-0-7524-5346-0

External links

The Pamela Harriman Foreign Service Fellowship

Channel 4 documentary on Pamela Harriman

Category:1920 births Category:1997 deaths Pamela Harriman Category:American socialites Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism Category:Daughters of barons Category:Deaths from stroke Category:English emigrants to the United States Category:American Roman Catholics Category:English socialites Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:People from Loudoun County, Virginia Category:United States ambassadors to France Category:University of Paris alumni Category:Female diplomats Category:Democrats (United States) Category:People from Farnborough, Hampshire Category:American women in politics

fr:Pamela Harriman it:Pamela Harriman pl:Pamela Harriman pt:Pamela Harriman sv:Pamela Harriman zh:帕梅拉·哈里曼

Name	Bill Clinton
Office	42nd President of the United States
Vicepresident	Al Gore
Term start	January 20, 1993
Term end	January 20, 2001
Predecessor	George H. W. Bush
Successor	George W. Bush
Order2	40th and 42nd Governor of Arkansas
Lieutenant2	Winston BryantJim Tucker
Term start2	January 11, 1983
Term end2	December 12, 1992
Predecessor2	Frank White
Successor2	Jim Tucker
Lieutenant3	Joe Purcell
Term start3	January 9, 1979
Term end3	January 19, 1981
Predecessor3	Joe Purcell (Acting)
Successor3	Frank White
Office4	50th Attorney General of Arkansas
Governor4	David PryorJoe Purcell (Acting)
Term start4	January 3, 1977
Term end4	January 9, 1979
Predecessor4	Jim Tucker
Successor4	Steve Clark
Birth date	August 19, 1946
Birth place	Hope, Arkansas, U.S.
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Hillary Rodham (m. 1975)
Children	Chelsea (b. 1980)
Alma mater	Georgetown University University College, OxfordYale Law School
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Baptist
Signature	Signature of Bill Clinton.svg
Signature alt	Cursive signature in ink
Website	Clinton Presidential Library }}

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Before that, he was Governor of the state of Arkansas. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Some of his policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance, while on other issues his stance was left-of-center.

Clinton was born and raised in Arkansas where he grew to become both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend University College, Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since January 21, 2009 and was the Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

As President, Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, during the last three years of Clinton's presidency. After a failed attempt at health care reform by the Clinton administration, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, for the first time in forty years. Two years later, in 1996, Clinton was re-elected and became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president. Later he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a scandal involving a White House intern, but was acquitted by the U.S. Senate and served his complete term of office.

Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. Based on his philanthropic worldview, Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes such as treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and global warming. In 2004, he released his autobiography ''My Life'', and was involved in his wife Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently in that of President Barack Obama. In 2009, he was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Clinton teamed with George W. Bush to form the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Early life and career

Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe, III, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before Bill was born. His mother Virginia Dell Cassidy (1923–1994) traveled to New Orleans to study nursing soon after he was born. She left Bill in Hope with grandparents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and operated a small grocery store. At a time when the Southern United States was racially segregated, Bill's grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all races. In 1950, Bill's mother returned from nursing school and married Roger Clinton, Sr., who owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas with his brother. The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950.

Although he assumed use of his stepfather's surname, it was not until Billy (as he was known then) turned fourteen that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather. Clinton says he remembers his stepfather as a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and half brother, Roger Clinton, Jr., to the point where he intervened multiple times with the threat of violence to protect them.

In Hot Springs, Clinton attended St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School – where he was an active student leader, avid reader, and musician. Fellow students included the late watercolorist and sculptor, Tonya Bailey. He 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, but as he noted in his autobiography ''My Life'':

Clinton has named two influential moments in his life that contributed to his decision to become a public figure, both occurring in 1963. One was his visit as a Boys Nation senator to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy. The other was listening to Martin Luther King's 1963 ''I Have a Dream'' speech, which impressed him enough that he later memorized it.

College and law school years

With the aid of scholarships, Clinton attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (B.S.) degree in 1968. He spent the summer of 1967, the summer before his senior year, interning for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. While in college, he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Clinton was also a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth group affiliated with Freemasonry, but he never became a Freemason. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi honorary band fraternity.

Upon graduation, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, though because he had switched programs and had left early for Yale University, he did not receive a degree there. He developed an interest in rugby union, playing at Oxford and later for the Little Rock Rugby club in Arkansas. While at Oxford he also participated in Vietnam War protests, including organizing an October 1969 Moratorium event.

Clinton's political opponents charge that to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War during his college years, he used the political influence of a U.S. Senator, who employed him as an aide. Col. Eugene Holmes, an Army officer who was involved in Clinton's case, issued a notarized statement during the 1992 presidential campaign: "I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fullbright's office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program... I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification." Although legal, Clinton's actions were criticized by conservatives and some Vietnam veterans during his presidential campaign in 1992.

After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale Law School and obtained a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1973. In a Yale library in 1971 he met fellow law student Hillary Rodham, who was a year ahead of him. They began dating and soon were inseparable. After only about a month, Clinton proposed to Rodham and postponed his plans to be a coordinator for the McGovern campaign for the 1972 United States presidential election in order to move in with her in California. They later married on October 11, 1975, and their only child, Chelsea, was born on February 27, 1980.

Clinton did eventually move to Texas with Rodham to take a job leading McGovern's effort there in 1972. He spent considerable time in Dallas, at the campaign's local headquarters on Lemmon Avenue, where he had an office. There, Clinton worked with future two-term mayor of Dallas, Ron Kirk, future governor of Texas, Ann Richards, and then unknown television director (and future filmmaker), Steven Spielberg.

Political career 1978–1992

Governor of Arkansas

After graduating from Yale Law School, Clinton returned to Arkansas and became a law professor at the University of Arkansas. A year later, he ran for the House of Representatives in 1974. The incumbent, Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt, defeated Clinton in the general election by a 52% to 48% margin. With only minor opposition in the primary and no opposition at all in the general election, Clinton was elected Arkansas Attorney General in 1976.

Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978, having defeated the Republican candidate Lynn Lowe, a farmer from Texarkana. He became the youngest governor in the country at 32. Due to his youthful appearance, Clinton was often called the "Boy Governor", a referrent that continues to be used to refer to him during his gubernatorial era on occasion. He worked on educational reform and Arkansas's roads, with wife Hillary leading a successful committee on urban health care reform. However, his term included an unpopular motor vehicle tax and citizens' anger over the escape of Cuban refugees (from the Mariel boatlift) detained in Fort Chaffee in 1980. Monroe Schwarzlose of Kingsland in Cleveland County, polled 31% of the vote against Clinton in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1980. Some suggested Schwarzlose's unexpected voter turnout foreshadowed Clinton's defeat in the general election that year by Republican challenger Frank D. White. As Clinton once joked, he was the youngest ex-governor in the nation's history.

Clinton joined friend Bruce Lindsey's Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings. In 1982, he was again elected governor and kept this job for ten years. He helped Arkansas transform its economy and significantly improve the state's educational system. He became a leading figure among the New Democrats. The New Democrats, organized as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), were a branch of the Democratic Party that called for welfare reform and smaller government, a policy supported by both Democrats and Republicans. He gave the Democratic response to President Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address and served as Chair of the National Governors Association from 1986 to 1987, bringing him to an audience beyond Arkansas. Clinton made economic growth, job creation and educational improvement high priorities. For senior citizens, he removed the sales tax from medications and increased the home property-tax exemption.

In the early 1980s, Clinton made reform of the Arkansas education system a top priority. The Arkansas Education Standards Committee, chaired by Clinton's wife, attorney and Legal Services Corporation chair Hillary Rodham Clinton, succeeded in reforming the education system, transforming it from the worst in the nation into one of the best. Many have considered this the greatest achievement of the Clinton governorship. Clinton and the committee were responsible for state educational improvement programs, notably more spending for schools, rising opportunities for gifted children, an increase in vocational education, raising of teachers' salaries, inclusion of a wider variety of courses, and mandatory teacher testing for aspiring educators. He defeated four Republican candidates for governor: Lowe (1978), White (1982 and 1986), and businessmen Woody Freeman of Jonesboro, (1984) and Sheffield Nelson of Little Rock (1990).

The Clintons' personal and business affairs during the 1980s included transactions that became the basis of the Whitewater investigation that dogged his later presidential administration. After extensive investigation over several years, no indictments were made against the Clintons related to the years in Arkansas.

According to some sources, Clinton was in his early years a death penalty opponent who switched positions. During Clinton's term, Arkansas performed its first executions since 1964 (the death penalty was re-enacted on March 23, 1973). As Governor, he oversaw four executions: one by electric chair and three by lethal injection. Later, as president, Clinton was the first President to pardon a death-row inmate since the federal death penalty was reintroduced in 1988.

Democratic presidential primaries of 1988

In 1987, there was media speculation Clinton would enter the race after then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo declined to run and Democratic front-runner Gary Hart withdrew owing to revelations of marital infidelity. Clinton decided to remain as Arkansas governor (following consideration for the potential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for governor, initially favored – but ultimately vetoed – by the First Lady). For the nomination, Clinton endorsed Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. He gave the nationally televised opening night address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, which at 33 minutes was criticized for being too long. Presenting himself as a moderate and a member of the New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party, he headed the moderate Democratic Leadership Council in 1990 and 1991.

1992 presidential campaign

In the first primary contest, the Iowa caucus, Clinton finished a distant third to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. During the campaign for the New Hampshire primary, reports of an extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers surfaced. As Clinton fell far behind former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire polls, following Super Bowl XXVI, Clinton and his wife Hillary went on ''60 Minutes'' to rebuff the charges. Their television appearance was a calculated risk, but Clinton regained several delegates. He finished second to Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary, but after trailing badly in the polls and coming within single digits of winning, the media viewed it as a victory. News outlets labeled him "The Comeback Kid" for earning a firm second-place finish.

Winning the big prizes of Florida and Texas and many of the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday gave Clinton a sizable delegate lead. However, former California Governor Jerry Brown was scoring victories and Clinton had yet to win a significant contest outside his native South. With no major Southern state remaining, Clinton targeted New York, which had many delegates. He scored a resounding victory in New York City, shedding his image as a regional candidate. Having been transformed into the consensus candidate, he secured the Democratic Party nomination, finishing with a victory in Jerry Brown's home state of California.

During the campaign, questions of conflict of interest regarding state business and the politically powerful Rose Law Firm, at which Hillary Rodham Clinton was a partner, arose. Clinton argued the questions were moot because all transactions with the state had been deducted before determining Hillary's firm pay. Further concern arose when Bill Clinton announced that, with Hillary, voters would be getting two presidents "for the price of one".

While campaigning for U.S. President, the then Governor Clinton returned to Arkansas to see that Ricky Ray Rector would be executed. After killing a police officer and a civilian, Rector shot himself in the head, leading to what his lawyers said was a state where he could still talk but did not understand the idea of death. According to Arkansas state and Federal law, a seriously mentally impaired inmate cannot be executed. The courts disagreed with the allegation of grave mental impairment and allowed the execution. Clinton's return to Arkansas for the execution was framed in a ''The New York Times'' article as a possible political move to counter "soft on crime" accusations.

Because Bush's approval ratings were in the 80% range during the Gulf War, he was described as unbeatable. However, when Bush compromised with Democrats to try to lower Federal deficits, he reneged on his promise not to raise taxes, hurting his approval rating. Clinton repeatedly condemned Bush for making a promise he failed to keep. By election time, the economy was souring and Bush saw his approval rating plummet to just slightly over 40%. Finally, conservatives were previously united by anti-communism, but with the end of the Cold War, the party lacked a uniting issue. When Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson addressed Christian themes at the Republican National Convention – with Bush criticizing Democrats for omitting God from their platform – many moderates were alienated. Clinton then pointed to his moderate, "New Democrat" record as governor of Arkansas, though some on the more liberal side of the party remained suspicious. Many Democrats who had supported Ronald Reagan and Bush in previous elections switched their support to Clinton. Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, toured the country during the final weeks of the campaign, shoring up support and pledging a "new beginning".

Clinton won the 1992 presidential election (43.0% of the vote) against Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush (37.4% of the vote) and billionaire populist Ross Perot, who ran as an independent (18.9% of the vote) on a platform focusing on domestic issues; a significant part of Clinton's success was Bush's steep decline in public approval. Clinton's election ended twelve years of Republican rule of the White House and twenty of the previous twenty-four years. The election gave Democrats full control of the United States Congress. It was the first time this had occurred since Democrats controlled the 95th United States Congress during the Jimmy Carter presidency in the late 1970s.

Presidency, 1993–2001

During his presidency, Clinton advocated for a wide variety of legislation and programs, much of which was enacted into law or was implemented by the executive branch. Some of his policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance, while on other issues his stance was left-of-center. Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, during the last three years of Clinton's presidency. At the end of his presidency, Clinton moved to New York and helped his wife win eleection to the U.S. Senate there.

First term, 1993–1997

Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993. Shortly after taking office, Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 on February 5, which required large employers to allow employees to take unpaid leave for pregnancy or a serious medical condition. This action had bipartisan support, and proved quite popular with the general public.

On February 15, 1993, Clinton made his first address to the nation, announcing his plan to raise taxes to cap the budget deficit. Two days later, in a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress, Clinton unveiled his economic plan. The plan focused on reducing the deficit rather than on cutting taxes for the middle class, which had been high on his campaign agenda. Clinton's advisers pressured him to raise taxes on the theory that a smaller federal budget deficit would reduce bond interest rates.

On May 19, 1993, Clinton fired seven employees of the White House Travel Office, causing a controversy even though the Travel Office staff served at the pleasure of the President and could be dismissed without cause. The White House responded to the controversy by claiming the firings were done because of financial improprieties that had been revealed by a brief FBI investigation. Critics contended the firings had been done to allow friends of the Clintons to take over the travel business and that the involvement of the FBI was unwarranted.

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Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 in August of that year, which passed Congress without a Republican vote. It cut taxes for fifteen million low-income families, made tax cuts available to 90% of small businesses, and raised taxes on the wealthiest 1.2% of taxpayers. Additionally, through the implementation of spending restraints, it mandated the budget be balanced over a number of years.

Clinton made a major speech to Congress regarding a health care reform plan on September 22, 1993, aimed at achieving universal coverage through a national health care plan. This was one of the most prominent items on Clinton's legislative agenda, and resulted from a task force headed by Hillary Clinton. Though at first well received in political circles, it was eventually doomed by well-organized opposition from conservatives, the American Medical Association, and the health insurance industry. However, John F. Harris, a biographer of Clinton's, states the program failed because of a lack of coordination within the White House. Despite the Democratic majority in Congress, the effort to create a national health care system ultimately died when compromise legislation by George J. Mitchell failed to gain a majority of support in August of 1994. It was the first major legislative defeat of Clinton's administration.

In November of 1993, David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against Bill Clinton in the Whitewater affair, alleged that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater land deal. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation did result in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project, but the Clintons themselves were never charged, and Clinton maintains innocence in the affair.

Clinton signed the Brady Bill into law on November 30, 1993, which imposed a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases. He also expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, a subsidy for low-income workers.

In December of that year, allegations by Arkansas state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry were first reported by David Brock in the American Spectator. Later known as Troopergate, the allegations by these men were that they arranged sexual liaisons for Bill Clinton back when he was governor of Arkansas. The story mentioned a woman named ''Paula'', a reference to Paula Jones. Brock later apologized to Clinton, saying the article was politically motivated "bad journalism" and that "the troopers were greedy and had slimy motives."

That same month, Clinton implementing a Department of Defense directive known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", which allowed gay men and women to serve in the armed services provided they kept their sexuality a secret, and forbade the military from inquiring about an individual's sexual orientation. This move garnered criticism from the left (for being too tentative in promoting gay rights) and from the right (who opposed any effort to allow gays to serve). Some gay-rights advocates criticized Clinton for not going far enough and accused him of making his campaign promise to get votes and contributions. Their position was that Clinton should have integrated the military by executive order, noting that President Harry Truman used executive order to racially desegregate the armed forces. Clinton's defenders argue that an executive order might have prompted the Senate to write the exclusion of gays into law, potentially making it harder to integrate the military in the future. Later in his presidency, in 1999, Clinton criticized the way the policy was implemented, saying he did not think any serious person could say it was not "out of whack."

On January 1, 1994, Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. Througout his first year in office, Clinton consistently supported ratification of the treaty by the U.S. Senate. Clinton and most of his allies in the Democratic Leadership Committee strongly supported free trade measures; there remained, however, strong disagreement within the party. Opposition came chiefly from anti-trade Republicans, protectionist Democrats and supporters of Ross Perot. The bill passed the house with 234 votes against 200 opposed (132 Republicans and 102 Democrats voting in favor; 156 Democrats, 43 Republicans, and 1 independent against). The treaty was then ratified by the Senate and signed into law by the President.

Clinton's 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill made many changes to U.S. law, including the expansion of the death penalty to include crimes not resulting in death, such as running a large-scale drug enterprise. During Clinton's re-election campaign he said, "My 1994 crime bill expanded the death penalty for drug kingpins, murderers of federal law enforcement officers, and nearly 60 additional categories of violent felons."

The Clinton administration also launched the first official White House website, whitehouse.gov, on October 21, 1994. It was followed by three more versions, resulting in the final edition launched in 2000. The White House website was part of a wider movement of the Clinton administration toward web-based communication. According to Robert Longley, "Clinton and Gore were responsible for pressing almost all federal agencies, the U.S. court system and the U.S. military onto the Internet, thus opening up America's government to more of America's citizens than ever before. On July 17, 1996, Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 - Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to utilize information technology fully to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public."

After two years of Democratic Party control, the Democrats lost control of Congress in the mid-term elections in 1994, for the first time in forty years.

Law professor Ken Gromley's book ''The Death of American Virtue'' reveals that Clinton escaped a 1996 assassination attempt in the Philippines by terrorists working for Osama bin Laden. During his visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Manila in 1996, he was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge where a bomb had been planted. Gromley said he was told the details of the bomb plot by Louis Merletti, a former director of the Secret Service. Clinton was scheduled to visit a local politician in central Manila, when secret service officers intercepted a message suggesting that an attack was imminent. A transmission used the words "bridge" and "wedding", supposedly a terrorist's code words for assassination. The motorcade was re-routed and the US agents later discovered a bomb planted under the bridge. The report said the subsequent US investigation into the plot "revealed that it was masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden". Gromley said, "It remained top secret except to select members of the US intelligence community. At the time, there were media reports about the discovery of two bombs, one at Manila airport and another at the venue for the leaders' meeting".

The White House FBI files controversy of June 1996 arose concerning improper access by the White House to FBI security-clearance documents. Craig Livingstone, head of the White House Office of Personnel Security, improperly requested, and received from the FBI, background report files without asking permission of the subject individuals; many of these were employees of former Republican administrations. In March 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray determined that there was no credible evidence of any crime. Ray's report further stated, "there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official was involved" in seeking the files.

As part of a 1996 initiative to curb illegal immigration, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) on September 30, 1996. Appointed by Clinton, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform recommended reducing legal immigration from about 800,000 people a year to about 550,000.

The 1996 United States campaign finance controversy was an alleged effort by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to influence the domestic policies of the United States, before and during the Clinton administration, and involved the fundraising practices of the administration itself. The Chinese government denied all accusations.

Second term, 1997–2001

In the 1996 presidential election, Clinton was re-elected, receiving 49.2% of the popular vote over Republican Bob Dole (40.7% of the popular vote) and Reform candidate Ross Perot (8.4% of the popular vote), becoming the first Democratic incumbent since Lyndon Johnson to be elected to a second term and the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected President more than once. The Republicans lost a few seats in the House and gained a few in the Senate, but retained control of both houses of the 105th United States Congress. Clinton received 379, or over 70% of the Electoral College votes, with Dole receiving 159 electoral votes.

An the January 1997 State of the Union address, Clinton proposed a new initiative to provide coverage to up to five million children. Senators Ted Kennedy – a Democrat – and Orrin Hatch – a Republican – teamed up with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff in 1997, and succeeded in passing legislation forming the Children's Health Insurance Program, the largest (successful) health care reform in the years of the Clinton Presidency. That year, Hillary Clinton shepherded through Congress the Adoption and Safe Families Act and two years later she succeeded in helping pass the Foster Care Independence Act.

In a lame-duck session of Congress after the 1998 elections, the House voted to impeach Clinton, based on the results of the Lewinsky scandal. This made Clinton only the second U.S. president to be impeached (the first being Andrew Johnson). Impeachment procedings were based on allegations that Clinton had lied about his relationship with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a sworn deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. After the Starr Report was submitted to the House providing what it termed "substantial and credible information that President Clinton Committed Acts that May Constitute Grounds for an Impeachment", the House began impeachment hearings against Clinton before the mid-term elections. Although the mid-term elections held in November 1998 were at the 6-year point in an 8-year presidency (a time in the electoral cycle where the party holding the White House usually loses Congressional seats), the Democratic Party gained several seats. To hold impeachment proceedings, the Republican leadership called a lame-duck session in December 1998.

While the House Judiciary Committee hearings ended in a straight party-line vote, there was lively debate on the House floor. The two charges passed in the House (largely with Republican support, but with a handful of Democratic votes as well) were for perjury and obstruction of justice. The perjury charge arose from Clinton's testimony about his relationship to Lewinsky during a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones. The obstruction charge was based on his actions during the subsequent investigation of that testimony.

The Senate later voted to acquit Clinton on both charges. The Senate refused to meet to hold an impeachment trial before the end of the old term, so the trial was held over until the next Congress. Clinton was represented by Washington law firm Williams & Connolly. The Senate finished a twenty-one-day trial on February 12, 1999, with the vote on both counts falling short of the Constitutional two-thirds majority requirement to convict and remove an officeholder. The final vote was generally along party lines, with no Democrats voting guilty, and only a handful of Republicans voting not guilty.

Clinton controversially issued 141 pardons and 36 commutations on his last day in office on January 20, 2001. Most of the controversy surrounded Marc Rich and allegations that Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham, accepted payments in return for influencing the president's decision-making regarding the pardons. Some of Clinton's pardons remain a point of controversy.

Military and foreign events

Many military events occurred during Clinton's presidency. The Battle of Mogadishu also occurred in Somalia in 1993. During the operation, two U.S. helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenade attacks to their tail rotors, trapping soldiers behind enemy lines. This resulted in an urban battle that killed 18 American soldiers, wounded 73 others, and one was taken prisoner. There were many more Somali casualties. Some of the American bodies were dragged through the streets – a spectacle broadcast on television news programs. In response, U.S. forces were withdrawn from Somalia and later conflicts were approached with fewer soldiers on the ground.

In 1995, U.S. and NATO aircraft attacked Bosnian Serb targets to halt attacks on U.N. safe zones and to pressure them into a peace accord. Clinton deployed U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia in late 1995, to uphold the subsequent Dayton Agreement.

Capturing Osama bin Laden had been an objective of the United States government from the presidency of Bill Clinton until bin Laden's death in 2011. It has been asserted by Mansoor Ijaz that in 1996 while the Clinton Administration had begun pursuit of the policy, the Sudanese government allegedly offered to arrest and extradite Bin Laden as well as to provide the United States detailed intelligence information about growing militant organizations in the region, including Hezbollah and Hamas, and that U.S. authorities allegedly rejected each offer, despite knowing of bin Laden's involvement in bombings on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. However, the 9/11 Commission found that although "former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Laden to the United States", "we have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim." In 1998, two years after the warning, the Clinton administration ordered several military missions to capture or kill bin Laden that failed.

In response to the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed a dozen Americans and hundreds of Africans, Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. First was a Sudanese Pharmecutical company suspected of assisting Osama Bin Laden in making chemical weapons. The second was Bin Laden's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Clinton was subsequently criticized when it turned out that a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (originally alleged to be a chemical warfare plant) had been destroyed.

To stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Albanians by nationalist Serbians in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's province of Kosovo, Clinton authorized the use of American troops in a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, named Operation Allied Force. General Wesley Clark was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and oversaw the mission. With United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, the bombing campaign ended on June 10, 1999. The resolution placed Kosovo under UN administration and authorized a peacekeeping force. NATO announced that its forces had suffered zero combat deaths, and two deaths from an Apache helicopter crash. Opinions in the popular press criticized pre-war genocide statements by the Clinton administration as greatly exaggerated. A U.N. Court ruled genocide did not take place, but recognized, "a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments". The term "ethnic cleansing" was used as an alternative to "genocide" to denote not just ethnically motivated murder but also displacement, though critics charge there is no difference. Slobodan Milošević, the President of Yugoslavia at the time, was eventually charged with the "murders of about 600 individually identified ethnic Albanians" and "crimes against humanity."

In Clinton's 1998 State of the Union Address, he warned Congress of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's possible pursuit of nuclear weapons: }}

To weaken Saddam Hussein's grip of power, Clinton signed H.R. 4655 into law on October 31, 1998, which instituted a policy of "regime change" against Iraq, though it explicitly stated it did not speak to the use of American military forces. The administration then launched a four-day bombing campaign named Operation Desert Fox, lasting from December 16 to December 19, 1998. For the last two years of Clinton's presidency, U.S. aircraft routinely attacked hostile Iraqi anti-air installations inside the Iraqi no-fly zones.

Clinton's November 2000 visit to Vietnam was the first by a U.S. President since the end of the Vietnam War. Clinton remained popular with the public throughout his two terms as President, ending his presidential career with a 65% approval rating, the highest end-of-term approval rating of any President since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Further, the Clinton administration signed over 270 trade liberalization pacts with other countries during its tenure. On October 10, 2000, Clinton signed into law the U.S.–China Relations Act of 2000, which granted permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) trade status to People's Republic of China. The president asserted that free trade would gradually open China to democratic reform. Clinton also oversaw a boom of the U.S. economy. Under Clinton, the United States had a projected federal budget surplus for the first time since 1969.

After initial successes such as the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, Clinton attempted to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clinton brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat together at Camp David. Following the peace talk failures, Clinton stated Arafat "missed the opportunity" to facilitate a "just and lasting peace." In his autobiography, Clinton blames Arafat for the collapse of the summit. The situation broke down completely with the start of the Second Intifada.

Judicial appointments

Clinton appointed the following justices to the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg – 1993 Stephen Breyer – 1994

Along with his two Supreme Court appointments, Clinton appointed 66 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, and 305 judges to the United States district courts. His 373 judicial appointments is second in American history, behind Ronald Reagan's. Clinton also experienced a number of judicial appointment controversies, as 69 nominees to federal judgeships were not processed by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. In all, 84% of his nominees were confirmed.

Public opinion

Clinton's job approval rating fluctuated in the 40s and 50s throughout his first term. In his second term, his rating consistently ranged from the high-50s to the high-60s. After his impeachment proceedings in 1998 and 1999, Clinton's rating reached its highest point. He finished with an approval rating of 68%, which matched those of Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt as the highest ratings for departing presidents in the modern era.

As he was leaving office, a CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup poll revealed 45% said they would miss him. While 55% thought he "would have something worthwhile to contribute and should remain active in public life", 68% thought he would be remembered for his "involvement in personal scandal", and 58% answered "No" to the question "Do you generally think Bill Clinton is honest and trustworthy?". Forty-seven percent of the respondents identified themselves as being Clinton supporters. The same percentage said he would be remembered as either "outstanding" or "above average" as a president, while 22% said he would be remembered as "below average" or "poor".

The Gallup Organization published a poll in February 2007, asking respondents to name the greatest president in U.S. history; Clinton came in fourth place, capturing 13% of the vote. In a 2006 Quinnipiac University poll asking respondents to name the best president since World War II, Clinton ranked 3% behind Ronald Reagan to place second with 25% of the vote. However, in the same poll, when respondents were asked to name the worst president since World War II, Clinton placed 1% behind Richard Nixon and 18% behind George W. Bush to come in third with 16% of the vote.

In May 2006, a CNN poll comparing Clinton's job performance with that of his successor, George W. Bush, found that a strong majority of respondents said Clinton outperformed Bush in six different areas questioned. ABC News characterized public consensus on Clinton as, "You can't trust him, he's got weak morals and ethics and he's done a heck of a good job." Clinton's 66% Gallup Poll approval rating was also the highest Gallup approval rating of any postwar President leaving office, three points ahead of Reagan.

In March 2010, a Newsmax/Zogby poll asking Americans which of the current living former presidents they think is best equipped to deal with the problems the country faces today, found that a wide margin of respondents would pick Bill Clinton. Clinton received 41% of the vote, while former President George W. Bush received 15%, former President George H. W. Bush received 7%, and former President Jimmy Carter received 5%. Although 26% chose "none", and 5% were not sure, Clinton maintained the highest percentage.

Public image

As the first baby boomer president, Clinton was the first president in a half-century not to have been alive during World War II. Authors Martin Walker and Bob Woodward state Clinton's innovative use of sound bite-ready dialogue, personal charisma, and public perception-oriented campaigning was a major factor in his high public approval ratings. When Clinton played the saxophone on ''The Arsenio Hall Show'', he was described by some religious conservatives as "the MTV president." Opponents sometimes referred to him as "Slick Willie", a nickname first applied while he was governor of Arkansas and lasting throughout his presidency. Standing at a height of (1.88 m), Clinton is tied with five others as the fourth-tallest president in the nation's history. His folksy manner led him to be nicknamed "Bubba", especially in the Southern U.S.

Clinton drew strong support from the African American community and made improving race relations a major theme of his presidency. In 1998, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison in The New Yorker called Clinton "the first Black president", saying, "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas". Noting that Clinton's sex life was scrutinized more than his career accomplishments, Morrison compared this to the stereotyping and double standards that blacks typically endure.

Sexual misconduct allegations

Throughout his career, Clinton has been subject to various allegations of sexual misconduct, though he as only admitted extramarital relationships with Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers. For alleged misconduct during his governorship, Paula Jones brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton while he was president. The case was initially dismissed, but Jones appealed the dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. During the deposition for the Jones lawsuit, which was held at the White House, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky a denial that became the basis for the impeachment charge of perjury. On November 18, 1998, Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement, and agreed to pay Jones and her attorneys a sum of $850,000.00. Clinton denies ever engaging in a sexual affair with her. Gennifer Flowers, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Sally Perdue, and Dolly Kyle Browning each have reported having adulterous sexual relations with Clinton during or before his service as governor. Gracen later apologized to Hillary Clinton.

His ability to survive multiple scandals and maintain high approval ratings led to a nickname of "Teflon Bill", in imitation of Ronald Reagan's nickname "Teflon Ron".

Post-presidential career

Bill Clinton continues to be active in public life, giving speeches, fundraising, and founding charitable organizations. Altogether, Clinton has spoken at the last six Democratic National Conventions, dating to 1988.

Activities up until 2008 campaign

In 2002, Clinton warned that pre-emptive military action against Iraq would have unwelcome consequences. In 2005, Clinton criticized the Bush administration for its handling of emissions control, while speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock, Arkansas was dedicated in 2004. Clinton released a best-selling autobiography, ''My Life'' in 2004. In 2007, he released ''Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World'', which also became a bestseller and garnered positive reviews.

In the aftermath of the 2005 Asian tsunami, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Clinton to head a relief effort. After Hurricane Katrina, Clinton joined with fellow former President George H. W. Bush to establish the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Fund in January of 2005, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund in October of that year. As part of the tsunami effort, these two ex-presidents appeared in a Super Bowl XXXIX pre-game show, and traveled to the affected areas. They also spoke together at the funeral of Boris Yeltsin in 2007.

Based on his philanthropic worldview, Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to address issues of global importance. This foundation includes the Clinton Foundation HIV and AIDS Initiative (CHAI), which strives to combat that disease, and has worked with the Australian government toward that end. The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), begun by the Clinton Foundation in 2005, attempts to address world problems such as global public health, poverty alleviation and religious and ethnic conflict. In 2005, Clinton announced through his foundation an agreement with manufacturers to stop selling sugared drinks in schools. Clinton's foundation joined with the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group in 2006 to improve cooperation among those cities, and he met with foreign leaders to promote this initiative. The foundation has received donations from a number of governments all over the world, including Asia and the Middle East. In 2008, Foundation director Inder Singh announced that deals to reduce the price of anti-malaria drugs by 30% in developing nations. Clinton also spoke in favor of California Proposition 87 on alternative energy, which was voted down.

2008 presidential election

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign, Clinton vigorously advocated on behalf of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Through speaking engagements and fundraisers, he was able to raise $10 million toward her campaign. Some worried that as an ex-president, he was too active on the trail, too negative to Clinton rival Barack Obama, and alienating his supporters at home and abroad. Many were especially critical of him following his remarks in the South Carolina primary, which Obama won. Later in the 2008 primaries, there was some infighting between Bill and Hillary's staffs, especially in Pennsylvania. Considering Bill's remarks, many thought that he could not rally Hillary supporters behind Obama after Obama won the primary. Such remarks lead to apprehension that the party would be split to the detriment of Obama's election. Fears were allayed August 27, 2008, when Clinton enthusiastically endorsed Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, saying that all his experience as president assures him that Obama is "ready to lead". After Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was over, Bill Clinton continued to raise funds to help pay off her campaign debt.

After the 2008 election

In 2009, Clinton travelled to North Korea on behalf of two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea. Euna Lee and Laura Ling had been imprisoned for illegally entering the country from China. Jimmy Carter had made a similar visit in 1994. After Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Kim issued a pardon.

Since then, Clinton has been assigned a number of other diplomatic missions. He was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti in 2009. In response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Clinton and George W. Bush would coordinate efforts to raise funds for Haiti's recovery. Clinton continues to visit Haiti to witness the inauguration of refugee villages, and to raise funds for victims of the earthquake. In 2010, Clinton announced support of, and delivered the keynote address for, the inauguration of NTR, Ireland's first ever environmental foundation.

Post-presidential health concerns

In September 2004, Clinton received a quadruple bypass surgery. In March 2005, he underwent surgery for a partially-collapsed lung. On February 11, 2010, he was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City after complaining of chest pains, and had two coronary stents implanted in his heart. It has been widely reported that Clinton has become a vegan for health reasons, but he still occasionally eats fish.

Honors and accolades

Clinton has received many honorary degrees, including Doctorate of Law degrees from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Tulane University, and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Schools have been named for him, and statues do homage him. The Clinton Presidential Center was opened in Little Rock, Arkansas in his honor on December 5, 2001. He has been honored in various other ways, in countries that include the Czech Republic, New Guinea, Germany, and Kosovo. U.S. states where he has been honored include Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, and New York. He was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Public Service by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen in 2001.

In 1993, Clinton was selected as Time magazine's "Man of the Year", and again in 1998, along with Ken Starr. From a poll conducted of the American people in December 1999, Clinton was among eighteen included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th century. He has been honored with a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, a J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, a TED Prize (named for the confluence of technology, entertainment and design), and many other awards and honors.

References

Further reading

Primary sources

Clinton, Bill. (with Al Gore). ''Science in the National Interest.'' Washington, D.C.: The White House, August 1994.

--- (with Al Gore). ''The Climate Change Action Plan.'' Washington, D.C.: The White House, October 1993.

Taylor Branch ''The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.'' (2009) Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781416543336

''Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, William J. Clinton.'' Washington, D.C.: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1994-2002.

S. Daniel Abraham ''Peace is Possible'', foreword by Bill Clinton

Popular books

Peter Baker ''The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton'' (2000) ISBN 0-684-86813-X

James Bovard ''Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years'' (2000) ISBN 0-312-23082-6

Joe Conason and Gene Lyons ''The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton'' (2003) ISBN 0-312-27319-3

Elizabeth Drew ''On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency'' (1994) ISBN 0-671-87147-1

David Gergen ''Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership.'' (2000) ISBN 0-684-82663-1

Nigel Hamilton ''Bill Clinton: An American Journey'' (2003) ISBN 0-375-50610-1

Christopher Hitchens ''No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton'' (1999) ISBN 1-85984-736-6

Michael Isikoff ''Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story'' (1999) ISBN 0-609-60393-0

Mark Katz ''Clinton and Me: A Real-Life Political Comedy'' (2004) ISBN 978-0-7868-6949-7

David Maraniss ''The Clinton Enigma: A Four and a Half Minute Speech Reveals This President's Entire Life'' (1998) ISBN 0-684-86296-4

Dick Morris with Eileen McGann ''Because He Could'' (2004) ISBN 0-06-078415-6

Richard A. Posner ''An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton'' (1999) ISBN 0-674-00080-3

Mark J. Rozell ''The Clinton Scandal and the Future of American Government'' (2000) ISBN 0-87840-777-4

Michael Waldman ''POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words That Defined the Clinton Presidency'' (2000) ISBN 0-7432-0020-9

Ivory Tower Publishing Company. Achievements of the Clinton Administration: the Complete Legislative and Executive. (1995) ISBN 0-88032-748-0

Academic studies

Cohen; Jeffrey E. "The Polls: Change and Stability in Public Assessments of Personal Traits, Bill Clinton, 1993–99" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 31, 2001

Cronin, Thomas E. and Michael A. Genovese; "President Clinton and Character Questions" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' Vol. 28, 1998

Davis; John. "The Evolution of American Grand Strategy and the War on Terrorism: Clinton and Bush Perspectives" ''White House Studies'', Vol. 3, 2003

Edwards; George C. "Bill Clinton and His Crisis of Governance" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly,'' Vol. 28, 1998

Fisher; Patrick. "Clinton's Greatest Legislative Achievement? the Success of the 1993 Budget Reconciliation Bill" ''White House Studies'', Vol. 1, 2001

Glad; Betty. "Evaluating Presidential Character" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 28, 1998

William G. Hyland. ''Clinton's World: Remaking American Foreign Policy'' (1999) ISBN 0-275-96396-9

Jewett, Aubrey W. and Marc D. Turetzky; " Stability and Change in President Clinton's Foreign Policy Beliefs, 1993–96" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 28, 1998

Johnson, Fard. "Politics, Propaganda and Public Opinion: The Influence of Race and Class on the 1993–1994 Health Care Reform Debate", 2004. ISBN 1-4116-6345-4

Laham, Nicholas, ''A Lost Cause: Bill Clinton's Campaign for National Health Insurance'' (1996)

Lanoue, David J. and Craig F. Emmert; "Voting in the Glare of the Spotlight: Representatives' Votes on the Impeachment of President Clinton" ''Polity'', Vol. 32, 1999

Maurer; Paul J. "Media Feeding Frenzies: Press Behavior during Two Clinton Scandals" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly,'' Vol. 29, 1999

Nie; Martin A. It's the Environment, Stupid!': Clinton and the Environment" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 27, 1997

O'Connor; Brendon. "Policies, Principles, and Polls: Bill Clinton's Third Way Welfare Politics 1992–1996" ''The Australian Journal of Politics and History'', Vol. 48, 2002

Poveda; Tony G. "Clinton, Crime, and the Justice Department" ''Social Justice'', Vol. 21, 1994

Renshon; Stanley A. ''The Clinton Presidency: Campaigning, Governing, and the Psychology of Leadership'' Westview Press, 1995

Renshon; Stanley A. "The Polls: The Public's Response to the Clinton Scandals, Part 1: Inconsistent Theories, Contradictory Evidence" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 32, 2002

Rushefsky, Mark E. and Kant Patel. ''Politics, Power & Policy Making: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s'' (1998) ISBN 1-56324-956-1

Schantz, Harvey L. ''Politics in an Era of Divided Government: Elections and Governance in the Second Clinton Administration'' (2001) ISBN 0-8153-3583-0

Wattenberg; Martin P. "The Democrats' Decline in the House during the Clinton Presidency: An Analysis of Partisan Swings" ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'', Vol. 29, 1999

Wattier; Mark J. "The Clinton Factor: The Effects of Clinton's Personal Image in 2000 Presidential Primaries and in the General Election" ''White House Studies'', Vol. 4, 2004

Smithers, Luken J. "The Miracle Whip"

External links

;Official

White House biography

Clinton Presidential Materials Project Press releases and speech transcripts from the administration.

Clinton School of Public Service

;Organizations

William J. Clinton Foundation official website

;Books and movies

;Interviews, speeches and statements

Oral History Interview with Bill Clinton from Oral Histories of the American South

President Clinton: The Youtube Interview

Full audio of a number of Clinton speeches via the Miller Center of Public Affairs (UVa)

''The Wanderer'' Profile in ''The New Yorker'', September 2006, the most extensive interview post-presidency

;Media coverage

;Other

Extensive essays on Bill Clinton and shorter essays on each member of his cabinet and First Lady from the Miller Center of Public Affairs

Armigerous American Presidents Series article from the American Heraldry Society.

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name	Christopher Hitchens
birth name	Christopher Eric Hitchens
birth date	April 13, 1949
birth place	Portsmouth, England
death date	December 15, 2011
death place	Houston, Texas, U.S.
occupation	Writer, journalist, public speaker
alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
nationality	English American
citizenship	British and American
religion	None
subject	Politics, religion, history, biography, literature
spouse
relatives	Peter Hitchens (brother)
influences	George Orwell, Leszek Kolakowski, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Hofstadter, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Israel Shahak, Isaiah Berlin, Émile Zola, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag
influenced	Johann Hari, Martin Amis, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins
signature	CH Signature 2.jpg|200px
website	}}

Christopher Eric Hitchens, nicknamed "Hitch", (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author, essayist and journalist, whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic for ''The Atlantic'', ''Free Inquiry'', ''The Nation'', ''Salon'', ''Slate'', ''Vanity Fair'', ''World Affairs'', and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a ''Prospect''/''Foreign Policy'' poll.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Britain's royal family, among others. His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a ''fatwā'' calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face". His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind".

Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens described himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book ''God Is Not Great''.

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 2007, his 58th birthday. Asteroid 57901 Hitchens is named after him. His memoir, ''Hitch-22'', was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later in the same month so he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer. On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, in the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Life and career

Early life and education

His mother, Yvonne Jean (née Hickman), and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Yvonne was at the time a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service), and Eric a "purse-lipped and silent" commander, whose ship HMS ''Jamaica'' helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship ''Scharnhorst'' in the Battle of the North Cape. His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Hitchens's mother having argued that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,", in the late fifties and early sixties he was educated at Mount House School in Tavistock in Devon, then at the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and then at Balliol College in Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's ''How Green Was My Valley'', Arthur Koestler's ''Darkness at Noon,'' Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ''Crime and Punishment'', R. H. Tawney's critique on ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,'' and the works of George Orwell. In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show ''University Challenge''.

Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, ''Hitch-22''. These experiences continued in his college years, when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher government.

In the 1960s Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.

He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organization was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".

Journalistic career (1970–1981)

Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine ''International Socialism'', published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree. His first job was with the London ''Times Higher Education Supplement'', where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admitted that he hated the position, and was later fired; he recalled, "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it." In the 1970s, he went on to work for the ''New Statesman'', where he became friends with the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, among others. At the ''New Statesman'' he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.

In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan. They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body. Hitchens said he thought his mother was pressured into suicide by fear that her husband would learn of her infidelity, as their marriage had been strained and unhappy. Both her children were then independent adults. While in Greece, Hitchens reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. It became his first leading article for the ''New Statesman''.

American career (1981–2011)

After moving to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for ''The Nation'', where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He became a contributing editor of ''Vanity Fair'' in 1992, writing ten columns a year. He left ''The Nation'' in 2002 after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'', but others — including Hitchens (or he indicated as such while alive) — believe it to be ''Spy Magazine''s "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest. In 1987, his father died from cancer of the esophagus.

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. His work took him to over 60 countries. In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Before Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir". In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a ''Vanity Fair'' piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Also, on the back of his book ''Hitch-22,'' among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H." His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by ''Foreign Policy'' and ''Prospect'' magazines. An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

In 2007 Hitchens' work for ''Vanity Fair'' won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary". He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in ''Slate'' but lost out to Matt Taibbi of ''Rolling Stone''. He won the National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer in 2011. Hitchens also served on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offered advice to Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.

Literature reviews

Hitchens wrote a monthly essay on books in ''The Atlantic'' and contributed occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, ''Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere'', is a collection of such works, and ''Love, Poverty and War'' contains a section devoted to literary essays. In ''Why Orwell Matters'', he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book ''Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left'', many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.

During a three-hour interview by ''Book TV'', he named authors who have had influence on his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Political views

The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto". In 2009, Hitchens was listed by ''Forbes'' magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media". However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens' political perspective can be found in his wide ranging writings which include many of the political dialogues he published.

Socialism

Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of ''Reason'' magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist." Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist", but added, "I don't think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any means all resolved." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies."

In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist". In a June 2010 interview with ''The New York Times'', he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". In 2009, in an article for ''The Atlantic'' entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was. Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs." However, in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself somewhat from some of Che's actions.

He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia. In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".

Iraq War and the war on terror

The years after the ''fatwa'' issued against Salman Rushdie saw Hitchens looking for allies and friends. In the United States he became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican-right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz. Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi. In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. Hitchens had also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

Following the September 11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in ''The Nation''. Chomsky responded and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky to which Chomsky again responded. Approximately a year after the September 11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left ''The Nation'', claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and that they were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues.

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled ''A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq'', and he has held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway and Scott Ritter. Though he admitted to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he stood by the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq had been a success not to be scoffed at. He argued that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, was a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should have been the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

Criticism of George W. Bush

Prior to September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design and capital punishment.

Although Hitchens defended Bush's post-September 11 foreign policy, he criticized the actions of U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and the U.S. government's use of waterboarding, which he unhesitatingly deemed as torture after being invited by ''Vanity Fair'' to voluntarily undergo it. In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ''ACLU v. NSA'', challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.

Presidential endorsements

Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself to be a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Hitchens made a brief return to ''The Nation'' just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, ''Slate'' polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".

In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for ''Slate'' stated, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens went on to support Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".

Blumenthal–Hitchens feud

Hitchens and Carol Blue chose to submit an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the trial of impeachment of Bill Clinton. In the affidavit, Blue and Hitchens swore that their then-friend, Sidney Blumenthal, had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial, and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's ''The Clinton Wars,'' Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.

Israel–Palestine

Hitchens had said of himself, "I am an Anti-Zionist. I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians."

A review of his autobiography ''Hitch-22'' in the ''Jewish Daily Forward'' refers to Hitchens as "a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he views Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians". Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well suggesting that his memoir was "marred by the occasional eruption of [his] anti-Zionism". The ''Jewish Daily Forward'' quoted him saying of Israel's prospects for the future, "I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable."

In ''Slate'', Hitchens pondered the notion that, instead of curing antisemitism through the creation of a Jewish state, "Zionism has only replaced and repositioned" it, saying: "there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews." Hitchens argued that instead of supporting Zionism, Jews should help "secularize and reform their own societies", believing that unless one is religious, "what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place?"

During a town hall function in Pennsylvania with Martin Amis, Hitchens stated that "one must not insult or degrade or humiliate people" and that he "would be opposed to this maltreatment of the Palestinians if it took place on a remote island with no geopolitical implications". Hitchens described Zionism as "an ethno-nationalist quasi-religious ideology" and stated his desire that if possible, he would "re-wind the tape [to] stop Hertzl from telling the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land".

He continued to say that Zionism "nonetheless has founded a sort of democratic state which isn't any worse in its practice than many others with equally dubious origins." He stated that settlement in order to achieve security for Israel is "doomed to fail in the worst possible way", and the cessation of this "appallingly racist and messianic delusion" would "confront the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". However, Hitchens contended that the "solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists" and wondered "What did they imagine would be the response of the followers of the Prophet [Muhammad]?" Hitchens bemoaned the transference into religious terrorism of Arab secularism as a means of democratization: "the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad". He maintained that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a "trivial squabble" that has become "so dangerous to all of us" because of "the faith-based element."

Hitchens collaborated on this issue with prominent Palestinian advocate Edward Said, in 1988 publishing ''Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question''.

Domestic policy

Hitchens actively supported drug policy reform and called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley. He supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic". On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritized in affirming that he believed a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposed the overturning of ''Roe v. Wade'' and supported the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believed in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights as "the only thing that is known to cure poverty", and in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.

Other

Other issues Hitchens wrote on the subjects of included his support for the reunification of Ireland, abolition of the British monarchy, and his condemnation of the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman in Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian War.

Critiques of specific individuals

Hitchens was known for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, ''No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton'', ''The Trial of Henry Kissinger'', and ''The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice''. Hitchens also wrote book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (''Thomas Jefferson: Author of America''), George Orwell (''Why Orwell Matters''), and Thomas Paine (''Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography'').

However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques took the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell, George Galloway, Mel Gibson, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, Daniel Pipes, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Cindy Sheehan.

Views on religion

Hitchens often spoke out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he called "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam". In his book, ''God Is Not Great'', Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in ''The New York Times'' for his "logical flourishes and conundrums" to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in the ''Financial Times''. ''God Is Not Great'' was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.

Hitchens contended that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world", "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In ''God Is Not Great'', Hitchens contends that:

[A]bove all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.

His book rendered him one of the major advocates of the "New Atheism" movement, and he also was made an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in ''Christianity Today'' magazine. This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film ''Collision'': "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.

On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Hitchens was accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share". Hitchens had also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in ''The American Conservative'', and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. In an interview with ''Radar'' in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part." When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile". Piatak claimed that "A straightforward description of all Hitchens's anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine", noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith.

Hitchens was raised nominally Christian, and went to Christian boarding schools but from an early age declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was of partially Jewish ancestry. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, who was then in her 90s, she said of his fiancée, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." Hitchens found out that his maternal grandmother, Dorothy Levin, was raised Jewish (Dorothy's father and maternal grandfather had both been born Jewish, and Dorothy's maternal grandmother – Hitchens' matrilineal great-great-grandmother – was a convert to Judaism). Hitchens' maternal grandfather converted to Judaism before marrying Dorothy Levin. Hitchens' Jewish-born ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland). In an article in the ''The Guardian'' on 14 April 2002, Hitchens stated that he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. In a 2010 interview at New York Public Library, Hitchens stated that he was against circumcision, a Jewish tradition, and that he believed "if anyone wants to saw off bits of their genitalia they should do when they're grown up and have made the decision for themselves".

In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Personal life

Marriages and children

Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in a Greek Orthodox church in 1981; the couple had a son, Alexander and a daughter, Sophia. In 1989 Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer. The couple married in a New York synagogue; they had a daughter, Antonia.

Relationship with his younger brother

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London, although, like his brother, he had been a Trotskyist in the 1970s. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to ''Commentary'', and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew (born in 1999); shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said that their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of the BBC current affairs discussion show ''Question Time''. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University, and at the Pew Forum on 12 October 2010.

Smoking and drinking

A June 2006 profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output." However, in late 2007 he gave up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin. His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision. It was while writing his memoir ''Hitch-22'' that he resumed smoking cigarettes and continued until his cancer diagnosis. Hitchens admitted to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", noting that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."

British politician George Galloway, founder of the socialist Respect Party, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true". Later, in a column for ''Slate'' promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

In the question and answer session following a speech Hitchens gave to the Commonwealth Club of California on 9 July 2009, one audience member asked what was Hitchens' favorite whisky. Hitchens replied that "the best blended scotch in the history of the world" is Johnnie Walker Black Label. He also playfully indicated that it was the favorite whisky of, among others, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, the Palestinian Authority, the Libyan dictatorship, and "large branches of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family". He concluded his answer by calling it the "breakfast of champions" and exhorted the audience to "accept no substitute".

In his 2010 memoir ''Hitch-22'', Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — ​most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."

Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:

I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle ... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit ... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.

Esophageal cancer and death

In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for ''Hitch-22'' to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer. He announced that he was undergoing treatment in a ''Vanity Fair'' piece entitled "Topic of Cancer". Hitchens said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". In November 2010, Hitchens canceled a scheduled appearance in New York, where he was to debate religion writers David Hazony and Stephen Prothero on the subject of the Ten Commandments. Earlier that year, he published a piece in ''Vanity Fair'' on the subject, and was working on a book about the Ten Commandments as well.

During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins' new cancer treatment which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.

In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel an appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." He closed with "And don't keep the faith." The letter also dismissed the notion of a possible deathbed conversion, in which he claimed that "redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before." In June 2011, he spoke to a University of Waterloo audience via a home video link.

In October 2011, Hitchens made a public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, TX. ''Atheist Alliance of America'' was also a participant in the joint convention.

In November 2011, George Eaton wrote in the ''New Statesman'':

The tragedy of Hitchens' illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. Of his tight circle of friends – Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie – Hitchens was the last to gain international renown, yet he is now read more widely than any of them." Eaton revealed that Hitchens would like to be remembered as a man who fought totalitarianism in all its forms although many remember him as a "lefty who turned right", and his support of the Iraq War and not his support of the War in Bosnia on the side of the Moslems. Eaton concluded, "The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he is increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like."

Hitchens died on December 15th, 2011 at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research.

Reactions to death

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character. He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held, that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance. He was an extraordinary, compelling and colorful human being whom it was a privilege to know."

Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and a friend of Hitchens', said, "I think he was one of the greatest orators of all time. He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants including imaginary supernatural ones."

Norman Finkelstein, American political scientist and author, wrote, "When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism. The news came just as Hitchens was about to go on a book tour for his long-awaited memoir. It was as if he was setting out on his victory lap when the adulating crowds were supposed to fawn over him and — wham! — his legs were lopped off at the kneecaps. The irony could not be more perfect: the god that the vindictive but witty Mr. Hitchens made a career scoffing at turns out to be ... vindictive but witty. When I heard that Hitchens was dead, I took a deep breath. The air felt cleaner, as if after a 40-day and 40-night downpour." Finkelstein also added, "I get no satisfaction from Hitchens's passing. Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child — or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent — left behind.

Sam Harris, American writer and neuroscientist, wrote, "I have been privileged to witness the gratitude that so many people feel for Hitch’s life and work — for, wherever I speak, I meet his fans. On my last book tour, those who attended my lectures could not contain their delight at the mere mention of his name — and many of them came up to get their books signed primarily to request that I pass along their best wishes to him. It was wonderful to see how much Hitch was loved and admired — and to be able to share this with him before the end. I will miss you, brother."

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project who helped treat Hitchens' illness, wrote, "I will miss Christopher. I will miss the brilliant turn of phrase, the good-natured banter, the wry sideways smile when he was about to make a remark that would make me laugh out loud. No doubt he now knows the answer to the question of whether there is more to the spirit than just atoms and molecules. I hope he was surprised by the answer. I hope to hear him tell about it someday. He will tell it really well."

British columnist and author Peter Hitchens, who had a tumultuous relationship with his older brother Christopher, wrote that he and Christopher "got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens," and praised his brother as "courageous."

Irish-American political journalist Alexander Cockburn, founder of the left-wing political magazine ''CounterPunch'' wrote an obituary critical of Hitchens, criticizing his support for the Iraq War, criticisms of Mother Teresa, and criticisms of their mutual friend Edward Said and concluded, "I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol."

Tributes followed from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, the actor Stephen Fry, the writer Ian McEwan, the philosopher A.C. Grayling; and ''Vanity Fair'', in which he was remembered as an "incomparable critic and masterful rhetorician".

Film and television appearances

As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose. {|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |- ! Year ! Film and/or Television |- |1984 |align="left" | ''Opinions'': "Greece to their Rome" |- |1988 |align="left" | ''Frontiers (TV series)'' |- |1993 |align="left" | ''Everything You Need to Know'' |- |1994 |align="left" | ''Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher'' |- |1994 |align="left" | ''Hell's Angel'' |- |1996 |align="left" | ''Where's Elvis This Week?'' |- |1996–2010 |align="left" | ''Charlie Rose (talk show)'' (13 episodes) |- |1998 |align="left" | ''Princess Diana: The Mourning After'' |- |1999–2002 |align="left" | ''Dennis Miller Live'' (TV show) (4 episodes) |- |2002 |align="left" | ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger'' |- |2003 |align="left" | ''Hidden in Plain Sight'' |- |2003–2009 |align="left" | ''Real Time with Bill Maher'' (TV show) (6 episodes) |- |2004 |align="left" | ''Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon'' |- |2004–2006 |align="left" | ''Newsnight'' (TV show) (3 episodes) |- |2004–2010 |align="left" | ''The Daily Show'' (TV show) (4 episodes) |- |2005 |align="left" | ''Penn & Teller: Bullshit!'' (TV show)(1 episode, s03e05) |- |2005 |align="left" | ''The Al Franken Show'' (TV show)(1 episode) |- |2005 |align="left" | ''Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope'' |- |2005 |align="left" | ''Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism'' |- |2005–2008 |align="left" | ''Hardball with Chris Matthews'' (TV show)(3 episodes) |- |2006 |align="left" | ''American Zeitgeist'' |- |2006 |align="left" | ''Blog Wars'' |- |2007 |align="left" | ''Manufacturing Dissent'' |- |2007 |align="left" | ''Question Time (TV series)'' (1 episode) |- |2007 |align="left" | ''Your Mommy Kills Animals'' |- |2007 |align="left" | ''Personal Che'' |- |2007 |align="left" | ''Heckler'' |- |2007 |align="left" | ''In Pot We Trust'' |- |2008 |align="left" | ''Discussions with Richard Dawkins'': Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen" |- |2008 | style="text-align:left;"| ''Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed '' |- |2009 |align="left" | ''Holy Hell'' |- |2009 |align="left" | ''Presidency'' |- |2009 |align="left" | ''Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?"'' |- |2010 |align="left" | ''Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune'' |}

Selected publications

1984 ''Cyprus''. Quartet. Revised editions as ''Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger'', 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso)

1988 ''Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question'' (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said) Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001

1990 ''The Monarchy'', Chatto & Windus Ltd

1990 ''Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies'', Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)(June 1990)

1995 ''The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice'', Verso

1997 ''The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification'', Verso

1999 ''No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family'', Verso

2000 ''Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere'', Verso

2001 ''The Trial of Henry Kissinger''. Verso.

2001 ''Letters to a Young Contrarian'', Basic Books

2002 ''Why Orwell Matters'' also ''Orwell's Victory'', Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03050-5

2004 ''Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays'', Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3

2005 ''Thomas Jefferson: Author of America'', Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4

2007 "Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography ", Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0871139553

2007 ''The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer'', [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6

2007 ''God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything'', Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as ''God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion'', Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6

2008 ''Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left'' (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press

2008 ''Is Christianity Good for the World? — A Debate'' (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2

2010 ''Hitch-22: A Memoir'', Twelve, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9

2011 ''Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens'', Twelve. UK edition as ''Arguably: Selected Prose'', Atlantic, ISBN 1-4555-0277-4 / ISBN 978-1-4555-0277-6

References

External links

Daily Hitchens, an archive of material on or by Hitchens

in 2010

Drexel Interview (One-hour video interview) with Paula Marantz Cohen, June 2010

Christopher Hitchens collected news and commentary at ''The Boston Globe''

"Journalist Christopher Hitchens fully embraces the Bush war camp" from the World Socialist Website, October 2002

"Christopher Hitchens" feature story in ''Prospect'' magazine, May 2008

"Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in ''The New Zealand Herald'', May 2008

"Such, Such are His Joys" David Brooks assessment in ''The New York Times'', 1 July 2010

Hitchens on Dying with Cancer, video interview with ''The Atlantic'', August 2010

"Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'" ''The Guardian'', 13 November 2010

"Christopher Hitchens's Jewish Problem" feature article on ''Jewish Ideas Daily,'' 13 December 2010

A debate between Hitchens and Berlinski 2010

Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens a 60 Minutes profile aired 6 March 2011

''Booknotes'' interview with Hitchens on ''For the Sake of Argument'', 17 October 1993.

;Articles by Hitchens

Contributor page at ''Vanity Fair''

Column archive at ''The Atlantic''

Article archive at ''The Guardian''

Hitchens articles at ''Slate''

Article archive at Journalisted

Category:1949 births Category:2011 deaths Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:Anti-Zionism Category:Anti–Vietnam War activists Category:Antitheists Category:Atheism activists Category:English people of Jewish descent Category:English people of Polish descent Category:British republicans Category:Cancer deaths in Texas Category:Deaths from esophageal cancer Category:English atheists Category:English biographers Category:English emigrants to the United States Category:English essayists Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English humanists Category:English journalists Category:English Marxists Category:English political writers Category:Genital integrity activists Category:Materialists Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:Old Leysians Category:People from Portsmouth Category:Slate (magazine) people Category:Socialist Workers Party (UK) members Category:The Nation (U.S. magazine) people Category:University Challenge contestants

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name	Madeleine Albright
order	64th
title	United States Secretary of State
term start	January 23, 1997
term end	January 20, 2001
predecessor	Warren Christopher
successor	Colin Powell
president	Bill Clinton
order2	20th
title2	United States Ambassador to the United Nations
term start2	January 27, 1993
term end2	January 21, 1997
president2	Bill Clinton
predecessor2	Edward J. Perkins
successor2	Bill Richardson
birthname	Marie Jana Korbelová
birth date	May 15, 1937
birth place	Prague, Czechoslovakia
nationality	Czech, American
party	Democratic
spouse	Joseph Medill Patterson Albright (1959-1982; divorced)
children	3 daughters - twins Anne and Alice, and Katherine (Katie)
alma mater	Wellesley College (B.A.)Columbia University (M.A., Ph.D.)
profession	Diplomat
signature	Madeleine Albright Signature.svg
religion	Episcopalian Christian
footnotes	}}

Madeleine Korbel Albright (born May 15, 1937) is the first woman to become a United States Secretary of State. She was appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99-0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997.

Albright now serves as a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her PhD is from Columbia University. She holds honorary degrees from Brandeis University (1996); the University of Washington (2002); Smith College (2003); University of Winnipeg (2005); the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007), and Knox College (2008). Secretary Albright also serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Albright is fluent in English, French, Russian, and Czech; she speaks and reads Polish and Serbo-Croatian as well.

Personal

Early life

Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová () in the Smíchov district of Prague, Czechoslovakia. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had been independent for less than twenty years, having gained independence from Austria after World War I. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Jewish Czech diplomat and supporter of the early Czech democrats, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. She was his first child with his Jewish wife, Anna (''née'' Spieglová), who later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son John (an economist).

At the time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. However, the signing of the Munich Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Beneš. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Albright spent the war years in England, while her father worked for Beneš’s Czechoslovak government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, London, where they endured the worst of The Blitz, but later moved to Beaconsfield, then Walton-on-Thames, on the outskirts of London. While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.

Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia perished in The Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.

After the defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany district (which later caused controversy, as it had belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian industrialist family forced out by the Beneš decrees - see "Controversies"). Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. Communists governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, she learned French and went by Madeleine, the French version of Madlenka, her Czech nickname.

However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support from the Soviet Union, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a United Nations delegation to Kashmir, and sent his family to the United States, by way of London, to wait for him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N. Headquarters, then in Lake Success, New York. The family arrived in New York City, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled in Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. Korbel applied for political asylum, arguing that as an opponent of Communism, he was now under threat in Prague. With the help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He became dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and later taught future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Life in the United States

Albright spent her teen years in Denver, and graduated from the Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village, a suburb of Denver, in 1955, where she founded the school’s international relations club and was its first president. She attended Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on a full scholarship, majoring in political science and graduated in 1959. Her senior thesis was written on Czech Communist Zdeněk Fierlinger. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and joined the College Democrats of America.

While home in Denver from Wellesley, Albright worked as an intern for ''The Denver Post'', where she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the nephew of Alicia Patterson, owner of ''Newsday'' and wife of philanthropist Harry Frank Guggenheim. The couple were married in Wellesley in 1959, shortly after her graduation. They lived first in Rolla, Missouri, while he served his military service at nearby Fort Leonard Wood. During this time, she worked at the ''Rolla Daily News''.

In January 1960 the couple moved to his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. The following year, Joseph Albright began work at ''Newsday'' in New York City, and the couple moved to Garden City on Long Island. That year, she gave birth to twin daughters, Alice Patterson Albright and Anne Korbel Albright. The twins were born six weeks premature, and required a long hospital stay, so as a distraction, Albright began Russian classes at Hofstra University in Village of Hempstead, New York.

In 1962, the family moved to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and Albright began studying international relations and continued studying Russian at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking over the family business. Albright gave birth to another daughter, Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at Columbia University's Department of Public Law and Government (later renamed as the political science department, which is located within the School of International and Public Affairs). She earned a certificate in Russian, a Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, writing her Master's thesis on the Soviet diplomatic corps, and her doctoral dissertation on the role of journalists in the Prague Spring of 1968. She also took a graduate course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the U.S. National Security Council.

Career

Early career

Albright returned to Washington in 1968, and commuted to Columbia for her PhD, which she received in 1975. She began fund-raising for her daughters' school, involvement which led to several positions on education boards. She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for the 1972 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine. This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976. However, after the 1976 U.S. presidential election of Jimmy Carter, Albright's former professor Brzezinski was named National Security Advisor, and recruited Albright from Muskie in 1978 to work in the West Wing as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison. Following Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Albright moved on to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she was given a grant for a research project. She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in Poland's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention. She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow. Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her for another woman.

Albright joined the academic staff at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1982, specializing in Eastern European studies. She has also directed the University's program on women in global politics. She has also served as a major Democratic Party foreign policy advisor, and briefed Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (both campaigns ended in defeat). In 1992, Bill Clinton returned the White House to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed to handle the transition to a new administration at the National Security Council. In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

Albright was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N., she had a rocky relationship with the U.N. Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in Rwanda. Albright wrote:

My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt these crimes.

In ''Shake Hands with the Devil,'' Roméo Dallaire claims that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it; this is now how she describes these massacres in her memoirs. She was instructed to support a reduction or withdrawal (something which never happened) of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda but was later given more flexibility. Albright later remarked in PBS documentary ''Ghosts of Rwanda'' that

it was a very, very difficult time, and the situation was unclear. You know, in retrospect, it all looks very clear. But when you were [there] at the time, it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda."

Also in 1996, after Cuban military pilots shot down two small civilian aircraft flown by the Cuban-American exile group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters, she announced, "This is not cojones. This is cowardice." The line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign policy."

On May 12, 1996, Albright defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a ''60 Minutes'' segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "we think the price is worth it." Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a loaded question; wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean"; and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel". Sanctions critics took Albright's failure to reframe the question as confirmation of the statistic. The segment won an Emmy Award.

Secretary of State

When Albright took office as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Not being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. In her position as Secretary of State, Albright reinforced the U.S.'s alliances; advocated democracy and human rights; and promoted American trade and business, labor and environmental standards abroad.

During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the formulation of US policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. But, together with President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia. According to Albright's memoirs, she once argued with Colin Powell for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?"

As Secretary of State she represented the U.S. at the Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997. She boycotted the swearing-in ceremony of the China-appointed Hong Kong Legislative Council, which replaced the elected one, along with the British contingents.

According to several accounts, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell repeatedly asked Washington for additional security at the embassy in Nairobi, including in an April 1998 letter directly to Albright. Bushnell was ignored. In "Against All Enemies," Richard Clarke writes about an exchange with Albright several months after the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in August 1998. "What do you think will happen if you lose another embassy?" Clarke asked. "The Republicans in Congress will go after you." "First of all, I didn't lose these two embassies," Albright shot back. "I inherited them in the shape they were." Albright was booed in 1998 when the brief war threat with Iraq revealed that citizens were opposed to such an invasion, although this is often overlooked.

In 1998, at the NATO summit, Albright articulated what would become known as the "three Ds" of NATO, "which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication—because I think that we don't need any of those three "Ds" to happen."

Both Bill Clinton and Albright insisted that an attack on Hussein could be stopped only if Hussein reversed his decision to halt arms inspections. "Iraq has a simple choice. Reverse course or face the consequences," Albright said.

In 2000, Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader of North Korea, during an official state visit to that country.

In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January 8, 2001, paid a farewell call on Kofi Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton administration on January 20, 2001.

Post-2001 career

Following Albright's term as Secretary of State, many speculated that she might pursue a career in Czech politics. Czech President Václav Havel talked openly about the possibility of Albright succeeding him after he retired in 2002. Albright was reportedly flattered by suggestions that she should run for office, but denied ever seriously considering it. She was the second recipient of the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the Prague Society for International Cooperation.

In 2001, Albright was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The same year, she founded the Albright Group, an international strategy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. It has Coca-Cola, Merck, Dubai Ports World, and Marsh & McLennan Companies among its clients, who benefit from the access that Albright has through her global contacts. Affiliated with the firm is Albright Capital Management, which was founded in 2005 to engage in private fund management related to emerging markets.

Albright currently serves on the Council on Foreign Relations Board of directors and on the International Advisory Committee of the Brookings Doha Center. She is also currently the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C..

In 2003, she accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. In 2005, Albright declined to run for re-election to the board in the aftermath of the Richard Grasso compensation scandal, in which Grasso, the chairman of the NYSE Board of Directors, had been granted $187.5 million in compensation, with little governance by the board on which Albright sat. During the tenure of the interim chairman, John S. Reed, Albright served as chairwoman of the NYSE board's nominating and governance committee. Shortly after the appointment of the NYSE board's permanent chairman in 2005, Albright submitted her resignation.

On October 25, 2005, Albright guest starred on the television drama ''Gilmore Girls'' as herself.

On January 5, 2006, she participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss U.S. foreign policy with George W. Bush administration officials. On May 5, 2006, she was again invited to the White House to meet with former Secretaries and Bush administration officials to discuss Iraq.

Albright currently serves as chairperson of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and as president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. She is also the co-chair of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and held the Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders ''Women's Ministerial Initiative'' up until November 16, 2007, succeeded by Margot Wallström.

In an interview given to ''Newsweek International'' published July 24, 2006, Albright gave her opinion on current U.S. foreign policy. Albright said: "I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy—worse than Vietnam."

In September 2006, she received the Menschen in Europa Award, with Václav Havel, for furthering the cause of international understanding.

Albright has mentioned her physical fitness and exercise regimen in several interviews. She has said she is capable of leg pressing 400 pounds.

At the National Press Club in Washington on November 13, 2007, Albright declared that she with William Cohen would co-chair a new "Genocide Prevention Task Force" created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute for Peace. Their appointment was criticized by Harut Sassounian and the Armenian National Committee of America.

On May 13, 2007, two days before her 70th birthday, Albright received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Albright endorsed and supported Hillary Clinton in her 2008 campaign for U.S. President. Albright has been a close friend of Clinton and serves as her top informal advisor on foreign policy matters. She is currently serving as a top advisor for U.S. President Barack Obama in a working group on national security. On December 1, 2008, then-President-elect Obama nominated then-Senator Clinton for Albright's former post of Secretary of State.

In September 2009, Albright opened an exhibition of her personal jewelry collection at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, which ran until January 2010. The collection highlighted the many pins she wore while serving at the United Nations and State Department, including the famous pin showing a snake and apple she wore after the Iraqi press called her "an unparalleled serpent", and several jeweled insect bugs she wore to meet the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov after it was discovered the Russian secret service had attempted to bug the State Department.

World Justice Project

Madeleine Albright serves as an Honorary Chair for the World Justice Project. The World Justice Project works to lead a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the Rule of Law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.

The Hague Institute for Global Justice

Madeleine Albright serves as Chair of the advisory council for The Hague Institute for Global Justice, which was founded in 2011 in The Hague.

Controversies

Art ownership controversy

Following the Washington Post's profile of Albright by Michael Dobbs, an Austrian man, Philipp Harmer, launched legal action against Albright, claiming Josef Korbel had illegally taken possession of artwork which belonged to his great-grandfather, Karl Nebrich. Nebrich, a German-speaking Prague industrialist, was forced to abandon some of his possessions when ethnic Germans were expelled from the country after WWII under the Beneš decrees. His apartment, at 11 Hradčanská Street in Prague, was subsequently given to Korbel and his family, which they occupied before also being forced to flee to America. Harmer felt Korbel stole his great-grandfather's artwork, which was left in the apartment. The matter was handled by Albright's brother, John Korbel.

Radovan Karadžić

During his first hearing in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić stated that Albright along with Richard Holbrooke offered him a deal which would allow him avoid prosecution for asserted war crimes if he leaves public life and politics. According to Karadžić, Albright offered him a chance to relocate to Russia, Greece, or Serbia and open a private clinic, or to go to Bijeljina. Karadžić was quoted as saying that Holbrooke or Albright would like to see him disappear and expressed the fear for his life by saying "I do not know how long the arm of Mr Holbrooke or Mrs Albright is ... or whether that arm can reach me here."

Books

''Madam Secretary'' (2003) -- Albright's memoir, published after her retirement,

''The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs'' (2006)

''Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership'' (2008)

''Read My Pins'' (2009).

References

Bibliography

Primary Sources

External links

''Madam Secretary'' The Madeleine Albright Memoir

''Voices on Antisemitism'' Interview with Madeleine Albright from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Portrait of Madeleine Albright – Madeleine Albright interviewed by Ulysse Gosset on France 24 - The Talk of Paris Show

Official biography at State Department site

Sample chapter and audio interview about ''The Mighty and the Almighty'' (Official publisher web page)

1997 commencement speech, Mount Holyoke College

2003 commencement speech, Smith College

2007 commencement speech, Wellesley College

Address at DePauw University, September 19, 2008 (with video clips)

Chapter excerpts and audio interview about foreign policy (Official publisher web page)

Madeleine Albright Co-Chair Genocide Prevention Task Force

Audio recording of Albright's talk, "The Mighty and the Almighty," as part of the University of Chicago World Beyond the Headlines series.

Estimates of Iraqi deaths during sanctions

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name	Jimmy Willis
fullname	James Anthony Willis
birth date	July 12, 1968
cityofbirth	Liverpool
countryofbirth	England
height
position	Defender
youthyears1	1985–1986
youthclubs1	Blackburn Rovers
years1	1986–1987
years2	1987–1988
years3	1988–1991
years4	1991–1997
years5	1992
clubs1	Halifax Town
clubs2	Stockport County
clubs3	Darlington
clubs4	Leicester City
clubs5	→ Bradford City (loan)
caps1	0
caps2	10
caps3	90
caps4	60
caps5	9
goals1	0
goals2	0
goals3	6
goals4	3
goals5	1
manageryears1	2001–2002
managerclubs1	Bamber Bridge
nationalgoals1	}}

James Anthony "Jimmy" Willis (born 12 July 1968) is an English former footballer, who played for Halifax Town, Stockport County, Darlington, Leicester City and Bradford City. During his career he scored goals in all of the top five divisions of the English football league system. This was a record that Willis held until it was equalled in 2004, by then Liverpool defender Steve Finnan.

Career

Born in Liverpool, Willis served his apprenticeship at Blackburn Rovers, before he signed for Halifax Town in 1986. His impact at both Halifax and subsequent club Stockport County was limited, although he came into his own at Darlington where he won medals for both the Conference and Football League Fourth Division triumphs despite suffering from a broken leg in 1991. Willis' form at Feethams netted him a £100,000 move to Leicester City in late 1991, although he initially struggled at the higher level and was even loaned out to Bradford City. Eventually, however, Willis adapted to the higher standard of football and was the man of the match in the play-off final of 1994 when Leicester secured promotion. In 1996, Willis was set to join Burnley but the deal collapsed at the last minute because of contractual problems. However, a year later, Willis was forced to retire from the game because of injury.

Willis briefly came into the media spotlight again in 2007 when it was reported on Sky Sports that Steve Finnan was the only player to score in the top five divisions of English football. However, as reported in the ''Liverpool Echo'', Willis had scored for Darlington in both the Conference and the Fourth Division, for Bradford in the Third Division and for Leicester in the First Division (second tier of football) and the Premier League.

Willis dreams of breaking into football management, and briefly had a spell in charge of Bamber Bridge of the Northern Premier League. He was appointed manager in November 2001, taking over from Tony Greenwood, but only lasted two months until he left because of the financial problems at the club.

Without Jimmys Vital Involvement In Leicester City Football Club Many Believe That They Wouldnt Be The Football Club They Were And Without Him Wouldnt Of Reached The Premier League, He Has Been Quoted By Many Great Footballers As One Of The Hardest Central Defenders To Play Against And One Of The Most Talented Of His Generation

Honours

Football Conference (V): 1990

Division Four (IV): 1991

Division One (II): Playoffs 1994

References

External links

Category:1968 births Category:Living people Category:English footballers Category:Halifax Town A.F.C. players Category:Stockport County F.C. players Category:Darlington F.C. players Category:Leicester City F.C. players Category:Bradford City A.F.C. players Category:Premier League players Category:The Football League players Category:Sportspeople from Liverpool