When you look back at 1999, it feels like a fever dream of silver jumpsuits, Britney Spears, and the looming fear that every computer on Earth was about to explode at midnight on December 31st. But if you’re asking who was president in 1999, you aren't just looking for a name. You're looking for William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States.
He was in the thick of it.
Honestly, 1999 was probably the most chaotic year of his entire eight-year run. Imagine trying to run a superpower while your face is on every single news channel because of an impeachment trial. It was a bizarre time. The economy was absolutely screaming—unemployment was at historic lows, and the tech bubble hadn't popped yet. People were getting rich off websites that didn't even sell anything. Yet, the vibe in Washington was pure poison. It’s a year that perfectly captures why people still have such massive, conflicting feelings about the Clinton era.
The Impeachment That Defined a Decade
Most people forget that 1999 actually started with the President of the United States on trial in the Senate. Who was president in 1999 during this mess? It was Bill Clinton, and he was fighting for his political life. The trial began in January after the House of Representatives impeached him in late 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice. It all stemmed from his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
It wasn't like a movie. It was long, it was tedious, and it was incredibly divisive.
On February 12, 1999, the Senate finally voted. They didn't even get close to the two-thirds majority needed to kick him out of office. He was acquitted. But the scars? Those stayed. You can't just go back to "business as usual" after that. It set the stage for the hyper-partisan politics we see today. If you feel like Democrats and Republicans can't agree on the color of the sky now, you can trace a lot of that bitterness back to the winter of '99.
Prosperity on a Knife's Edge
While the politicians were screaming at each other, the rest of the country was basically having a party. The 1999 economy was a beast. Under Clinton’s watch, the U.S. was seeing some of the highest sustained growth in history. We're talking about a budget surplus. Can you even imagine that now? The government actually had more money coming in than going out.
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It was the year of the dot-com.
Companies like Pets.com were worth millions. Everyone thought they were a genius investor. Clinton leaned into this, pushing for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in November 1999. This is a huge deal that people rarely talk about in casual conversation. It basically tore down the walls between commercial banks and investment banks.
- Some experts, like Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have argued this move paved the way for the 2008 financial crash.
- Others say it was just a necessary modernization for the global stage.
Whatever your take, it proves that 1999 wasn't just about scandals. It was about massive, structural shifts in how money works in America. Clinton was the architect of that deregulated world. He wanted America to be the undisputed leader of the new digital frontier, and for a while there, it really looked like he’d pulled it off.
Foreign Policy and the Kosovo Crisis
If you think 1999 was all about domestic drama, you’re missing half the story. In March, Clinton led NATO into a massive bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The goal was to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.
It was a weird moment for a guy who had famously avoided the draft during Vietnam. Now, he was the one ordering the strikes.
The war lasted 78 days. It was a "humanitarian intervention," a term that still gets debated in ivory towers today. It was also a test of the post-Cold War world. Russia was furious. China was livid after the U.S. accidentally bombed their embassy in Belgrade. For a few months, it felt like the world was on the brink of something much bigger and much scarier. But eventually, Slobodan Milošević blinked. The troops came home. Clinton's supporters saw it as a triumph of moral foreign policy; critics saw it as an overstep of American power.
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The Dark Shadow of Columbine
We can't talk about who was president in 1999 without talking about April 20th. The shooting at Columbine High School changed the American psyche forever. It wasn't the first school shooting, but it was the one that felt like a tectonic shift.
Clinton had to find words for a grieving nation.
He pushed hard for tighter gun control in the aftermath. He wanted to close the "gun show loophole" and mandate child safety locks. But the momentum stalled in Congress. It’s one of the biggest "what ifs" of his presidency. If the laws had changed then, would the next twenty years have looked different? He spent a lot of the year visiting communities and trying to figure out what was happening to the "American soul," a phrase he used often. It was a rare moment where the "Slick Willie" persona dropped, and he just looked like a frustrated father.
The Y2K Panic: A Very 1999 Problem
As the year wound down, the vibes got... twitchy. Everyone was convinced that when the clock struck 12 on New Year's Eve, the "Year 2000 bug" would cause planes to fall from the sky and nuclear silos to open.
Clinton took it seriously.
He appointed John Koskinen as the "Y2K Czar." The administration spent billions—and pressured the private sector to spend billions more—to fix the code. Looking back, we laugh about it because nothing happened. But did nothing happen because it was a hoax, or did nothing happen because the Clinton administration actually did its job and fixed the problem before it started? Most tech historians lean toward the latter. It was probably one of the most successful, yet invisible, government mobilizations in history.
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Why 1999 Still Matters in 2026
It’s easy to dismiss 1999 as a vintage year for pop culture, but the political DNA of that year is everywhere now. When you ask who was president in 1999, you're asking about the man who sat at the crossroads of the old world and the digital one.
Clinton’s 1999 was a year of extreme highs and crushing lows. He ended the year with an approval rating in the 60s, which is wild considering he’d just been impeached. People liked the peace and the fat paychecks, even if they were exhausted by the drama.
He was a complicated guy in a complicated time.
He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) earlier in his term, but by 1999, the "Battle in Seattle" WTO protests showed that people were starting to get really angry about globalization. The cracks were starting to show. The wealth gap was widening. The "end of history" that people talked about after the Berlin Wall fell was starting to look more like a new, messy chapter.
Surprising Facts from the 1999 White House
- The First Website: The White House website was still relatively new, and 1999 was when they really started using it to bypass traditional media.
- The Surplus: The fiscal year 1999 ended with a $126 billion surplus.
- The Appointments: Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer earlier, but in '99, his judicial appointments were becoming a massive battlefield in the Senate.
Actionable Insights for History Buffs and Students
If you're researching this era for a paper or just because you’re a nerd for political history, don't just stick to the headlines.
- Dig into the GAO reports from 1999. They give a much clearer picture of the Y2K preparations than the tabloid news of the time.
- Watch the Senate acquittal speech. Notice the body language. Clinton was incredibly skilled at compartmentalizing his personal disasters from his public duties.
- Compare the 1999 budget to today. It is a sobering exercise. Seeing a line item for "Debt Reduction" feels like reading science fiction in 2026.
- Look at the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act. If you want to understand why the 2000s got so weird economically, that’s your smoking gun.
Bill Clinton was the man at the desk while the world waited for the zeros to roll over. He was a flawed, brilliant, and incredibly lucky politician who presided over a moment of transition that we’re still trying to make sense of today.