Bill Clinton in Partners in Power

On Principles & Values: New Democrat from the New South

The Governor of Arkansas is on his way to Washington to become the 42nd president of the United States. His own bus bears the license plate HOPE 1, after the small town where he was born in southwestern Arkansas. A reportedly prodigal young governor, wha he calls a New Democrat from the New South, he is the first of his party to win the White House in a dozen years and, at 46, the 3rd-youngest chief executive in American history. He is not alone, just as he has never been alone in an unswerving 20-year political career since law school. At his side is the woman who has been there from the beginning, 18 years as his wife. A year younger than the new president, Hillary brings her own vivid history to this moment. If the new president carries hope, so does she, the symbol of a matured liberation and equality of women. For now at least, on the eve of her husband’s inauguration, she promises to become the most powerful and significant First Lady in American history. Source: Partners in Power, by Roger Morris, p. 1-2 Apr 25, 1999

On Principles & Values: What’s right with America can fix what’s wrong with America

In an earnest if unremarkable speech--edited, like all his other major addresses, by Hillary--the president speaks of the hopes that have put him in office. “The American people have summoned the change we celebrate today. You have raised your voices in an unmistakable chorus,” he tells the vast throng spread the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue. “There is nothing wrong with America,” he assures them, “that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Source: Partners in Power, by Roger Morris, p. 8 Apr 25, 1999

On Principles & Values: Half siblings Henry & Sharron, by two different mothers

As in all the bawdy old jokes about traveling salesmen, there were women--especially for Bill Blythe [Bill Clinton’s father; known as “W.J.”]. He married, somewhat furtively, 18-year-old Adele Gash. They were divorced in 1936. Still, he went back to Adele often after the divorce and, the following spring, fathered a baby boy by her, Henry Leon, born in January 1938.

In 1940, he met a dark-haired 17-year-old named Wanetta Alexander. By the end of 1940 Wanetta was pregnant, and Bill Blythe had gone to northern California, supposedly to see Adele and his first child.

But after a few days Bill had suddenly run off with Adele’s pretty younger sister, Minnie Faye. Bill and Minnie Faye Gash were married on December 29, 1940, in Durant, Oklahoma. That too, was soon over.

Under pressure from the Alexander family, his hasty marriage to Minnie Faye was annulled in Little Rock in April 1941. In less than a week, he married Wanetta. His new wife gave birth to a baby girl. They named her Sharron.

Source: Partners in Power, by Roger Morris, p. 19-21 Apr 25, 1999

On Principles & Values: His father committed bigamy by marrying his mother

[In 1943 Bill Bythe met] Virginia Dell Cassidy. She was engaged at the time to a high school sweetheart but was immediately taken with Bill Blythe and his striking good looks. [They married in September.]

On April 13, 1944, a Missouri court granted the divorce [for Bill Blythe and Wanetta Alexander, whom he had married in April 1941. That means that on] September 3, 1943, Bill Blythe had committed bigamy by marrying Virginia Cassidy before a justice of the peace in Texarkana.

He joined the army and was sent abroad only five weeks after his marriage to Virginia. He was discharged as a technician, third grade, in December 1945 with a commendation for his service.

Virginia became pregnant [with Bill Clinton] almost immediately. Her conception came at the beginning of the great postwar baby boom. [Bill Blythe died in a car accident that May]

Source: Partners in Power, by Roger Morris, p. 20-22 Apr 25, 1999

On Principles & Values: 1992: opponents failed to find disloyalty in Bill in Moscow

Bill Clinton’s ties to the intelligence community go back all the way to Oxford and come forward from there, says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since destroyed. The subject of sharply varying accounts, the future president’s final months in England were indeed shrouded in some mystery and in inconsistencies never explained--though the very polarity of the suspicions and allegations seem only to obscure what really happened.

Republican aides rifled passport file in vain for some evidence of Clinton disloyalty while abroad. Trailing in October, George Bush himself tried almost pathetically to impute something subversively, unpatriotically sinister to Clinton’s 1969-70 trip to Moscow or his role in antiwar rallies demanding that Clinton tell voters “how many demonstrations he led against his own country from a foreign soil.” [Others claimed that Bill Clinton] was a full-fledged CIA “asset,” who informed on his American friends in the peace movement in Britain.

Source: Partners in Power, by Roger Morris, p.102-103 Apr 25, 1999

The above quotations are from Partners in Power The Clintons and Their America, by Roger Morris, published April 1999. Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of Bill Clinton. Click here for Bill Clinton on all issues.
*Bill Clinton on other issues:*
Abortion Budget/Economy Civil Rights Corporations Crime Drugs Education Energy/Oil Environment Families Foreign Policy Free Trade	Govt. Reform Gun Control Health Care Homeland Security Immigration Jobs Principles/Values Social Security Tax Reform Technology/Infrastructure War/Iraq/Mideast Welfare/Poverty
Please consider a donation to OnTheIssues.org! Click for details -- or send donations to: 1770 Mass Ave. #630, Cambridge MA 02140 E-mail: submit@OnTheIssues.org (We rely on your support!)

Page last updated: Feb 20, 2019