Bill Clinton β America's 42nd president β grew up in an extended family of modest means, but one rich with storytellers. When I grew up and got into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories. When he was about a year old, his widowed mother, Virginia, a resilient and vivacious woman, went to New Orleans to train as a nurse-anesthetist, leaving Bill in the care of her parents, Edith and James Cassidy.
Bill adored his grandfather, a grocer who set a rare example in the segregated South as an "uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body," Bill Clinton, My Life , Knopf Publishing Group, , 11 as Bill would later remember it.
A few years later, the Clinton family moved to the resort town of Hot Springs. An outgoing and popular young man, Bill excelled in high school as a student and as a leader of school government, and he became a top saxophone player. On Sundays he would walk to the local Baptist church, usually by himself. But he was leading a dual life. At home, he was defending his mother and his much younger half-brother, Roger Jr. As Bill himself later observed, however, "No one can live parallel lives with complete success" My Life , Early Influences As a teenager, Bill considered careers in music and medicine.
But in he took a trip to Washington, D. Kennedy, the president he had defended in a ninth-grade debate. He was moved to tears by portrayal of a "beloved community," and he memorized the address. At age 16, he made the decision to forego music and medicine and go into public service. Strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, he worked at the national headquarters of the Vietnam Moratorium and helped organize demonstrations at Oxford in the autumn of Although he morally opposed the draft, he felt he had to accept it because of his political ambitions.
Opponents later criticized him for his antiwar efforts, and accused him of using his connection to Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, for whom he had interned during the summer of , to avoid being inducted into the military. In , he met fellow student Hillary Rodham, a "smart, resilient, and passionate" woman, he wrote, who "conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone," and whose politics, like his, were "both idealistic and practical" My Life , That summer, he gave up a job coordinating Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign in the South to follow Hillary to California, where she had a summer internship.
