President Bush had signed the agreement with Mexico and Canada. American labor unions and environmental groups opposed NAFTA. But Congress approved it, and President Clinton signed it into law.

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Personal issues from Bill Clinton's past in Arkansas became part of his future as president of the United States.

In the late nineteen seventies, he and Hillary Clinton had invested in a land development company in Arkansas called Whitewater. Others involved with Whitewater were in legal trouble by the time Bill Clinton -- a former governor of Arkansas -- became president.

A former judge who owned a savings and loan bank accused Clinton of pressuring him to make illegal loans to help the company. Clinton denied that. And there were questions and accusations about Hillary Clinton from the years when she worked as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In January of nineteen ninety-four, after a year as a president, Bill Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent investigator. The attorney general named a Republican, Robert Fiske, to look into the activities of the Clintons. But critics accused him of being too friendly to the administration. In August, three federal judges replaced him with another Republican lawyer, Kenneth Starr.

Public opinion was divided about the situation. Some people thought the president and his wife were corrupt. Others thought any accusations of wrongdoing were nothing more than political attacks.