Chapter One: 'My Life' by Clinton

June 22, 2004 -- Bill Clinton recalls some of the darkest moments of his life — from his troubled childhood in Arkansas to his marriage problems in the White House — in his memoir My Life.

In his new book the former president recalls his early years with an alcoholic stepfather and the effects his childhood had on his behavior later in life.

The first chapter of My Life reveals the details behind the loss of his birth father and the early years of his political career.

Chapter One:

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clearsky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the JuliaChester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwestArkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father,William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer inSherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According tohis sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up tobe a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was trainingto be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tellme the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a datewith some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working,and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated.On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she waswearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married.