About the Project
The Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia are partners in making the William Jefferson Clinton History Project interviews available to a global audience through their respective web sites.
Dr. Andrew Dowdle is the Clinton History Project Coordinator.
President Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, three months after his father died in a traffic accident. When he was four years old, his mother wed Roger Clinton, of Hot Springs, Arkansas. In high school, he took the Clinton family name.
He excelled as a student and as a saxophone player and once considered becoming a professional musician. As a delegate to Boys Nation while in high school, he met President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden. The encounter led him to a life of public service.
We have chosen to call this group of twenty-eight interview transcriptions Phase One—The Hope and Hot Springs Years. They bring Mr. Clinton—“Bill” or “Billy” in his youth—and the small Arkansas towns of Hope and Hot Springs alive through the memories of family members, childhood friends, schoolmates, neighbors, teachers, and other participants.
Mr. Clinton went on to graduate from Georgetown University and in 1968 won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He received a law degree from Yale University in 1973, returned to Arkansas as a faculty member at the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville, and soon entered Arkansas politics.
As the Clinton History Project proceeds, interviews from other periods in Mr. Clinton’s life will become available at this location, at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, and at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in Charlottesville.
(Adapted, with additions and edits, from a public domain short biography which appears on the official White House website.)
About Dr. Andrew Dowdle
Dr. Andrew Dowdle is the William Jefferson Clinton History Project Coordinator for the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History and an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Tennessee, earned his Master’s degree from the University of Iowa and his PhD from Miami University of Ohio. While at the University of Tennessee, he also served as editor of the campus newspaper The Daily Beacon.
His work has appeared in a number of journals including Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Political and Military Sociology. Before coming to Arkansas, Dr. Dowdle taught at Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Abraham Baldwin College in Tifton, Georgia. He has also worked at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School as a Doctrine Development Analyst for the Civil Affairs and Civil-Military Operations Division of the U.S. Department of the Army.
