George Washington
At the end of his second term, Washington retired for personal and political reasons, fatigued and disgusted with personal attacks, and to assure a truly contested presidential election could be held. He did not feel bound to a two-term limit, but his retirement ultimately set precedent. The two-term limit to the presidency was formalized with the 1951 adoption of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Washington is often credited with setting the principal of a two-term presidency, but it was Thomas Jefferson who first refused to run for a third term on political grounds.
Bill Clinton
Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history and signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, but failed to pass his plan for national health care reform. In the 1994 elections, the Republican Party won unified control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years. In 1996, Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to a second full term. He passed welfare reform and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as financial deregulation measures, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice following allegations that he committed perjury and obstructed justice to conceal an affair he had with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year old White House intern. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in 1999 and completed his term in office. He is only the second U.S. president to ever be impeached, the first being Andrew Johnson. During the last three years of Clinton's presidency, the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus, the first such surplus since 1969. In foreign policy, Clinton ordered U.S. military intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, signed the Iraq Liberation Act in opposition to Saddam Hussein, participated in the 2000 Camp David Summit to advance the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and assisted the Northern Ireland peace process.