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Bill and Hillary in Group Therapy
Interpersonal psychoanalysis is the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, the
American psychoanalyst who led Freudians to view the mind as an appendage
of its relationships with people. Freud's paraphernalia of id, ego,
superego and psychosexual stages remains but Sullivan explains that the
mind of the infant grows because of its relationship to significant people
and to their mental representations. These life long influences which form
the mind are called dynamisms. An interpreter of Sullivan says, "We are our
experiences." Sullivanian psychoanalysis looks at the interpersonal as a
significant measure of mental health and so has a special interest in
family and community systems.
Bill and Hillary must be examined by this interpersonal yardstick. Our
resources include the political books about Bill by friends who knew him
for many years like Robert Reich and Dick Morris. They were well acquainted
with Hillary too. It was Hillary who often called Morris to help Bill with
election campaigns. Reich knew Hillary before he met Bill in 1968 on the
boat going to England for their Rhodes scholarships at Oxford. While
these books are positive about the Clintons, they also offer useful
critiques.
Reich who served as Secretary of Labor during Bill's first term left in
1996 to resume teaching, spend more time with his family and recover from
the burnout of being Locked in the Cabinet, the title of his book. He
says Clinton wanted him to stay for his second term. He is four feet ten
inches, an attorney, a professor of public policy and an activist for
workers' rights. He was on the left in the Clinton inner circle along with
Hillary and Harold Ickes during the internecine warfare with Clinton's
right of center cabal, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, the Federal
Reserve's Alan Greenspan and Dick Morris.
Morris sometimes called a spin doctor was a campaign consultant who helped
Bill with polling voters and formulating campaigns and issues beginning in
1980 when Bill lost the Arkansas governorship after serving his first term.
Morris who continued to work for Clinton in Arkansas and Washington
resigned as a consultant during the 1996 Democratic convention when his
relationship with a prostitute became public.
Another kind of book is also helpful, the kiss-and tell. Gennifer Flowers
tells the story of her twelve year affair with Bill which ended in 1992
while Dolly Kyle Browning wrote a novel "loosely based on a true story"
about their thirty year relationship from 1962 to 1992. The affair with pop
singer Flowers was denied by Bill and Hillary during the 1992 campaign but
in 1998 Bill was reported to have acknowledged it during his deposition in
the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit. Attorney Dolly Browning's love
affair first received public attention when she was also deposed in the
Jones case. The details of these books cannot be verified but they are from
Bill's widely known Kennedy-pattern womanizing. Jack Palladino, a private
detective tells The New Yorker that he "was hired by Clinton's 1992
campaign to check out the credibility of Gennifer Flowers and that of
twenty-six or so other women" who could say they slept with Bill Clinton.
What can we learn from these four tales of Hillary and Bill? Of course, the
authors' creditability is the first question in the mind of the reader.
These books like all books are self serving, milestones for these four
career minded authors, Bill and Hillary's peers. Their relationship to Bill
Clinton gives them a unique audience so their words are shaped carefully.
But in a real sense the authors are all frustrated by the Clinton
Presidency. The two women each say that Clinton's election meant they lost
their connections to Bill as a lover. Morris left the White House in
disgrace although he hopes to come back while Reich failed to achieve many
of his goals for social change and so he laments his lost main chance. The
books are each protestations of sincerity, passionate statements of the
author's achievements, the ties to Bill and their future hopes. Each
presents the mind of Bill and Hillary with a perspective that we can't get
in any other way. The men, Morris and Reich are FOB and FOH while the
women, Flowers and Browning are FOB but not FOH although they certainly
don't ignore Hillary.
During his twenty year relationship with Bill, Dick Morris works to
increase Bill's popularity and electability by taking polls about his
campaigns and policies in Arkansas and then nationally as he runs for
president in 92 and 96. Morris' idea of a continuous campaign requires
constant polling for each policy decision, speech, legislative session and
election. Bill is constantly concerned with his image among voters and
looks to Morris for answers. He wants approval about everything from
policy issues to where he should take his vacation and whether a swimming
pool should be built in the governor's mansion.
Polling wasn't developed by Morris and Bill Clinton isn't the first
candidate to consult polls. Nor is Clinton the only Governor or President
to feel insecure and need affirmation. But the overriding importance of
Governor Clinton's greeting, "How am I doing?" is its origin with his
childhood self image as a fat, clumsy sissy who is jeered by his classmates
in kindergarten when he is tripped while jumping rope breaking his leg.
Clinton was five when his stepfather Roger fired a gun during an
alcohol-fueled argument with his mother. Bill recalls, "That bullet...could
have killed me." In the same interview by Nancy Collins, he describes how
he was a "loner" in childhood because of a dysfunctional home. By fourth
grade, Bill is remembered by a friend as the smartest kid in class and
"running the school" but another classmate says Bill felt "fat and
rejected." These selves coexist: the glass that is half full is also the
glass that is half empty.
Morris' continuous polling represents Bill's unconscious need to enter into
a popularity community from which he felt excluded. Another impetus for
the questioning was to get the answers that he lacked about the earlier
family turmoil: Virginia vs. grandmother Mawmaw when Bill was a toddler,
Virginia vs. stepfather Roger during Bill's youth, Virginia the racy
iconoclast vs. the local bluenoses and Virginia vs. Bill when he decided
to marry Hillary. Bill's politics of approval leads him away from the
politics of leadership as practiced by some presidential candidates like
Pat Buchanan on the Republican Right and Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson
on the Democratic Left.
Clinton uses Morris to edit speeches and develop policies in accordance
with polls but he also fights against control by Morris. I picture Bill
struggling to maintain his independence against this powerful genie called
up by a Faustian bargain. It is as though Bill's opportunism is unleashed
by Morris with unforeseen consequences that Bill's ego can't control. When
Bill feels anxious, he calls for Morris who arrives on the scene before or
after electoral crises; at other times only Hillary is strong enough to
call Morris to the rescue as she did in Arkansas in 1980 and in Washington
in 1994. Sometimes Morris' consultations are hidden from the public and at
other times even Clinton's own advisors don't know about Morris' role.
Clinton's guilt about his loss of self confidence leading him to call on
Morris for help is like shame about masturbation.
The president's shame is the focus of an appropriately named movie, Wag
the Dog in which a Morris character is an anti-hero who is concealed in a
White House basement. The embarrassed president is almost entirely absent
from the film. This is a black comedy about a clandestine and anonymous
consultant who creates a pretend-war on Albania as a pageant to seize the
headlines after the President makes a newsworthy pass at a Firefly girl. So
life imitates art as the threat to bomb Bagdad took the headlines away from
the Monica Lewinsky scandal for a while.
In the contest for control between Bill and Dick, Bill is easily angered
and in 1990 he is reported as hitting Dick. Clinton apologizes immediately
although both deny the story. Dick leaves him but not for long. This story
highlights Clinton's rage and his obsessiveness about voter and media
approval. His narcissism emerge as he asks Morris where he will rank among
America's presidents. Morris is a kind of a gratification to Bill's wounded
narcissism as Morris' own injured narcissism is salved by being the
Presidential advisor.
Bill's Games
The feuds and confusion within the Clinton Presidency are discussed by both
Reich and Morris. This turmoil of style and substance mirrors Bill's own
internal conflicts of left versus right, passivity vs. activity, caution
vs. risk, suspicion vs. certainty and perfection vs. compromise. This
dissonance within Bill's official family is like Uproar, a Game described
by transactional analyst Eric Berne where the players enact ritualized
roles that meet emotional needs rather then find solutions. Uproar is a
family game played between a father and a daughter and is watched by a
hovering mother so perhaps the Clinton White House staff game should be
named Confusion. The games identified by Transactional Analysis are hidden
unconscious maneuvers with a Payoff, the predetermined repetitive dramatic
outcome. This is different from straightforward conscious rituals,
procedures and pastimes.
Games originate in childhood and are substitutes for failed attempts at
intimacy but the key to their understanding is the Payoff. Every White
House staff (and other staffs too) plays Confusion but the question is,
what's Bill's role? The Payoff is that he ends a problem and is Hero. There
are similarities to the Game played in Bill's childhood with the alcoholic
angry stepfather, the defensive mother and the innocent child. Now Bill is
an instigator with a defensive staff and a public of innocents.
Bill's Lovers Look at Him
Bill's two lovers, Dolly and Gennifer chronicle long, intermittent and
satisfying love affairs. Dolly's story begins when she is eleven and meets
thirteen year old Bill at a golf course. She is smitten for the next thirty
years which end in 1992 as Bill becomes a candidate for President. During
their affair Bill is ambivalent and distant at times despite his sexiness
and ardor in bed. Her story describes the inhibitions to be expected in a
man with significant castration and separation fears. They begin with
Bill's refusal to make love to Dolly the night of the Senior Prom because
of his feeling of sexual inadequacy and go on to his failure to give her
the attention and time that she deserved. Then she excuses him by saying
that he was "afraid to let me touch..." and this is because he was "pure."
She repeats this in a higher octave when she says to him, "...you can't or
won't receive what I have to give." There is a kind of echo from Gennifer
Flowers, a less critical mistress who speaks of Bill as a wildly successful
lover but not especially well endowed.
Is this a case of Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars? Of course
and that is a reason the women offer a unique and important perspective
about Bill's mind. Wouldn't stories by Lyndon Johnson's or FDR's mistresses
offer unique insights into these presidents? Yes, but it's worth a reminder
that although not everything in a leader's life is politically significant,
all the experiences are important for biography and especially for
psychobiography.
Hillary as Cinderella
The mind of Hillary emerges from the account of these four writers too.
Hillary tells Robert Reich to communicate with Bill about his agenda on
worker's rights via private memos to her on blank paper with only a date
and his initials. This is Hillary, the secret manipulator who uses a back
channel to control policy as she did in manipulating Daddy Hugh. I believe
Mother Dorothy manipulated Hugh too and I'm sure Hillary will tell us about
it in her autobiography. By the time Hillary was First Lady of Arkansas,
she was really in control of the Rodhams so Daddy Hugh and Mother Dorothy
and her brothers moved to Arkansas from Illinois.
Dick Morris also allies himself with Hillary's strengths in the White House
as he contends for Bill's ear and policy decisions. He decides to meet with
Hillary's staff, "the girls" in addition to his meetings with Bill's staff,
"the boys." Another time when Hillary stops going to Bill's policy
meetings, Morris briefs her on policy issues in separate sessions.
Reich's book helps us understand Hillary as the little girl who shows
"hurt and anger...just beneath the surface... covered by an aloofness
"that "can't take sympathy well." Reich sees her as a vulnerable "rabbit"
after Hillary "chaired the health plan... a mistake." Hillary's
defenselessness is like Mother Dorothy's weakness in the face of Daddy
Hugh's bullying. It is a paradox that Hillary the manipulator is also
Hillary the fearful. But why was Hillary's vulnerability concealed, Reich
asks when it could have served to humanize Hillary, the "strong woman" who
needed friends in the press. This little girl weakness is deeply repressed
and here we leave Reich's sympathetic understanding of Hillary for the
cruel words of the Wicked Stepsisters, Gennifer and Dolly.
Dolly Kyle Browning portrays Hillary whom she renames Mallory as a
Cinderella, "...dowdy-looking... wearing a misshapen brown dress-like
thing...to hide her lumpy body..fat ankles and thick calves covered with
black hair...wide feet...hair on her toes...a definite odor of
perspiration...greasy hair...eyes bulged out of focus... dark thick eyebrow
which crossed ...her forehead..." Gennifer describes Hillary as, "...a fat
frump...hair hanging down...big thick glasses...ugly dress...a big fat
butt...behaving oddly...buzzing around." Bill's mother Virginia, another
rivalrous Southern woman had a similar if more muted response when she met
Hillary, "No makeup. Coke-bottle glasses. Brown hair with no apparent
style."
This is Cinderella before the arrival of the Fairy Godmother and Prince
Charming when the dirty and ragged char girl is transformed into a
Princess: influential attorney, policy leader, cultural icon, intellectual,
author, mother and a styled First Lady. Why dredge up the sludge then?
Because beside the Oedipal, sadomasochistic, frigid and over controlled
Hillary is the needy little girl, beautiful and worthy who is searching for
love. Of course, the two contradictory Hillarys are a paradox but both need
to be acknowledged.
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