Can the president think?

• Author: Efron, Edith

On June 7, 1993, after Bill Clinton had been in office five months, a very peculiar "media conference" was held at George Washington University and filmed for C-SPAN viewers. It was peculiar because of its theme and because it was thoroughly exasperating.

The theme was "The Politics of Illness in High Office." Among its participants were such journalistic eminences as Richard Harwood of The Washington Post, Marianne Means of King Features Syndicate, and Charles Bierbauer of CNN. These are smart and experienced people who under ordinary circumstances would not be dull either singly or collectively. But on this occasion, they all seemed to be wearing baskets on their heads.

Here's roughly how it went:

Q: Does the public have a right to know whether a president has physical illnesses, such as medical emergencies or chronic degenerative diseases?

A: Sure. The public does. The days of covering up the diseases of presidents such as FDR and JFK are over.

Q: How about mental illness, psychological or emotional disorders?

A: Well, that is a problem. The prospect of an "emotionally unstable leader" with his finger on the button scares people. Even consulting a psychotherapist has a stigma. It causes inhibition in consulting a doctor when one should. Nervous joke: You have to be crazy to run for president anyway. Ha, ha, ha.

Q: Does the public have a right to know if a president suffers from a mental disorder?

A: Yes, but only if it affects his work as president.

Q: Will future presidential candidates and presidents be required to reveal their medical and psychiatric records if any?

A: Probably, possibly, yes, no, mumble.

And? And nothing. Just that, exasperating. A brand new president was staggering around in Washington, falling repeatedly on his face. Nobody but that staggering, lurching president was on everybody's mind. And it was that president whose medical records were sealed. Did the panelists want to know what was in them? They didn't say. Were they thinking, perhaps, that Clinton might be suffering from a psychological or emotional disorder? They didn't say. Was it possible that psychological difficulties might be related to his political difficulties? They didn't say.

To stress what was not discussed at this conference in early June 1993 implies that there was information about the psychology of the new president that should have been or could have been discussed. Was there?

Of course there was. Since the primaries, the press coverage of Clinton had been bristling with reports on his psychological attributes, although the word psychology was never used. For more than a year, reporters had been in a competition to discover interesting details about Clinton' s mental processes and his emotional and behavioral patterns--which is to say, about his psychology.

By the time Clinton had been in office for five months--when the conference was held--the psychological details gathered by journalists had already coagulated into little clusters, or patterns, which demanded explanation. By the time Clinton had been in office for a year, when the conference was already a faded memory, he had been besieged by so many political and personal problems--some contemporary, some relevant to his past--that his psychology was a staple of conversation in the political and media worlds. And by the time Clinton had been in office for two years, he had become a human puzzle that journalists and academic students of the presidency were trying to solve.

Today, psychiatric terms, diagnostic categories, are sprinkled about like salt and pepper, seasoning the political prose written about Clinton. Headlines have appeared containing psychiatric jokes and puns. At least two psychiatrists and a clinical psychologist have expressed their opinions about Clinton in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Yet other psychiatrists have opined about Clinton in the pages of Time. Clinton's psychology is discussed in political science journals devoted to studies of the presidency. And in the first crop of commercial books about the Clintons one finds the same phenomenon: Save for Clinton's mother, in her autobiography Leading with My Heart, all the authors are concerned with Clinton's psychology.

It is an odd fact that this epidemic of long-distance "psycho- analyzing"--not seen in this country since the '60s and '70s--has been going on even as various journalists and social scientists have been trying to declare the issue of Clinton's "character" outside the boundaries of respectable journalism. It is, of course, Clinton's character which has caused the wave of psychological thinking.

There is precedent for such attention: As political scientist Michael Beschloss has observed in The New Yorker, it was the characters of John F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, and Richard Nixon which led to the long-distance analysis of presidents and presidential candidates by psychiatrists, the explosion of political psycho-biography in the 1970s, and the now-standard inquiries into presidents' psychologies by students of the presidency.

Clinton is the first president since that stormy period to display character flaws and neurotic qualities so significant that the impulse to conduct psychological excavations has arisen anew. And this time, journalists are not waiting for the historians. There is no reason why they should, since historians get much of their information from the press. The academic monopoly on telling us what is wrong with our presidents after they are all dead and we can do nothing about it is broken.

Freed from that academic monopoly, journalists are floundering around trying to test the limits of their freedom, and the task is particularly difficult, given the nature of our current president.

Some journalists realize they are lacking an analytical tool when they write about Clinton; they just don't quite know what it is. For an article about press coverage of Clinton's "decision-making style," David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered both the Clinton campaign and the White House. Birnbaum had this to say about Clinton: "You almost have to come up with a new language to describe how he operates."

Psychology provides such language, above all when it is psychological language Clinton has used about himself. Using it can help journalists and citizens who have been struggling to integrate the information they already have about a seemingly unintegrated man. In this article, relying only on published or televised information, I have attempted such an integration. The result is a psychological profile of Bill Clinton.

I should say a word about the propriety of this enterprise. If Clinton's psychological problems were of an entirely private nature and had no influence or impact whatsoever on his work as president, discussing them would be a manifestation of what Sidney Blumenthal has criticized as "psychological reductionism." This, says Blumenthal in The New Yorker (June 20, 1994), is the assumption that "the true self is a hidden self--that the public self is merely a deceptive mask."

By "psychological reductionism," Blumenthal really means sexual reductionism. His article, "The Friends of Paula Jones," deals solely with the exploitation by individuals and groups in the religious right of Clinton's real or alleged sexual behavior.

Blumenthal's point, however, remains valid. The "true self" cannot be reduced to a "hidden self," and the "public self" of a political figure, above all of a president, is immensely significant. Clinton's psychological problems are important precisely because of their impact on Bill Clinton's "public self." They could scarcely be more public.

In this article, the subject is not Clinton's sex life but his mind--as it has been reported on by journalists and authors of books. And what one discovers from their reports on Clinton's mind is of overwhelmingly greater public significance than any details about his sex life.

To follow Bill Clinton's lead and explore the psychological issues he himself has talked about, and to see how the press has been incessantly preoccupied by his psychology, is to acquire great insight into Bill Clinton, his presidency, his conflicts with the press, and the political events of the past two years.

It is also to understand, however, that psychological problems must be analyzed in psychological terms and that political reductionism is also an error. Psychological problems cannot be explained in political terms. I refer to specific political events occasionally in this article but only to provide a temporal framework for the analysis. The purpose of this article is to present a close-up view of Clinton's mind, not of his policies.

The Questions

Throughout most of Clinton's term in office, there has scarcely been a political development that has not generated questions about his psychology. Many have pertained to trivial matters. Many have been expressions of heightened conservative hostility to Clinton. But a surprising number of other questions have addressed psychological fundamentals and revealed that many serious liberals no longer feel they understand the man for whom they voted. Who is Clinton really? Does he have a "self"? What kind of a politician is he--why does he pursue power? What is the nature of the strong response to him? Is he a sincere advocate of social justice? What kind of mind, what kind of an intellect, does he have?

Those who ask the question, Who is Clinton really?, are usually journalists preoccupied by Clinton's self-contradictory nature. They tend to explore it with a similar technique. The writers offer little bursts of contradictory phrases, little vignettes of contradictory actions, little insights into contradictory emotions, and arrange them deftly to form an unintelligible mosaic called "Clinton."

Tom Rosenstiel of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Bury of ABC, Maureen Dowd of The New York...