The following article is excerpted from "Reason" Magazine, November
1994, pages 20-44.  Reason Magazine is a publication of the Reason
Foundation, a non-profit, tax-exempt organization.  They may be reached
at: 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard, Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA  90034.
==============================================



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
"psychoanalyzing"-not seen in this country since the '6Os 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 frame-work
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 Times, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, and Joe
Klein of Newsweek have all used this mosaic technique. And all have
reached a similar conclusion-that Clinton is "in hiding" (Cohen); that
Clinton is a multifaceted being without a unifying self (Klein); that he
is whatever you happen to be looking at or, as Bury resignedly put it,
"what you see is what you get." Dowd, the most literary, climaxed a
fusilade of contradictions by saying, "In the end, the focus is the
unfocusability." And Rosenstiel will be quoted below.

Not until Bob Woodward's The Agenda could one be certain of the original
template for the mosaic technique. One finds it in the partly quoted,
partly paraphrased views of George Stephanopoulos: "'You've got to
always keep in mind,' Stephanopoulos said to one of his closest
associates, that watching Clinton 'is like a kaleidoscope. What you see
is where you stand and where you're looking at him. He will put one
facet toward you, but that is only one facet.' Every time, the
kaleidoscope would reflect the fragment of stone at the bottom in a
unique way, showing a different facet; every person would see a
different pattern. It was real, but it could change in an instant, as
soon as Clinton turned."

Such descriptions are fascinating to read, but they leave one as baffled
about Clinton after reading them as before. Other journalists have
taken the next disturbing step: They've looked hind the
self-contradictory mosaic and reached the grim conclusion that Clinton
has no "self." In his book, Strange Bedfellows, which describes the
coverage of the presidential campaign of 1992, Rosenstiel writes: "Like
many politicians Bill Clinton is a man of unfinished and contradictory
character-scholarly and shallow, outgoing and shy, principled and
craven, the mood depending on the motive. He possesses extraordinary
talent and a fierce thirst for knowledge and insight, but above all
approval. _One reporter who spent time with him. .. in New Hampshire
found him one of the most outwardly directed people she had ever met-as
if he had little inner sense of self at all_." (Emphasis added.)

When Rosenstiel speaks for himself he creates a mosaic, but when he
quotes the reporter who dived beneath the mosaic he gives no name. If he
did, Anonymous would never get into the White House again.

Journalists with names also have identified this absence of self in
Clinton, but they are not dependent on the Washington media-political
establishment. One is Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's. In the April
1993 issue Lapham described Clinton's response to a group of people:
"[He] roamed across the sound stage like a starved animal, feeding on
the questions from the audience as if they were the stuff of life and
breath." And: "He defines himself as a man desperately eager to please,
and the voraciousness of his appetite-for more friends, more speeches,
more food and drink, more time on stage, more hands to shake, more
hugs-_suggests the emptiness of a soul that knows itself only by the
names of what it seizes or consumes_." (Emphasis added.)

Another description of the self-less Clinton comes from alternative
journalist Sam Smith, author of Shadows of Hope and editor of
Progressive Review: "It was the normal work of the politician, but with
Clinton there seemed too much. Too many hands, too many friends, too
many words, too many hours before he went to sleep, too many hours on
C-SPAN solving the nation's problems with too many industrialists and
economists-and in the end too little else. _It was as though he were
afraid that if he excused himself from the public eye he might no longer
be real_." (Emphasis added.)

Those who see Clinton as self-less are always struck by the deep
dependence on others that is present in those who have a ravenous hunger
for power over those others. Different journalists have sought to
explain the intense response Clinton invokes, occasionally using their
own reactions. Philip Martin, an Arkansas journalist, quotes his own
words, written for a now-defunct alternative newspaper in Little Rock
when he was young: 'He is the Sun King. And if you look too long at him
you will be blind, your senses flooded with his gold-spined brilliance.
As e.e. cummings might have said of him, Jesus, he is a handsome man.
Despite his too-big head and hands and feet and his roomy, rheumy
allergy-ridden nose. There must be some elemental undercurrent here that
generates envy in other men, not just the musk of power but something
pheromonic. Since it is not polite to compare your governor to Mussolini
or even Huey Long, then let's say one of those Kennedy boys, or that
rare thing, a soulful politician."

Martin now considers those "the most embarrassing words of my career."
But he quotes them because he knows they provide insight into others.
Martin had quite unreservedly fallen in love, as millions of others have
fallen in love with Bill Clinton.

Another journalistic worshiper, Phil McCombs, writing in The Washington
Post, holds a mirror up to Clinton as he is absorbing that love: "To
watch this president connect with people emotionally is an awesome
thing. It's a raw, needy, palpable, electrifying thing that happens...
It's as if he's soaking up the people like he's soaking up the sun, with
the warmth pouring deep and direct into his political soul and
recharging him, refilling him somehow once again with his own humanity
and some sense of his role in the destiny of his country."

This is an exceptionally good description of a charismatic politician
feeding on the souls he has electrified. It was quoted in The New
Republic under the sarcastic headline, "Clinton Suck-Up Watch." That was
too limited an observation, although it is true that only a worshiper
would use the language of McCombs. An unusually intense response to a
charismatic politician should not be casually dismissed as a
simple-minded form of complicity. And it also should not be described
with conventional political formulae. We all have been told repeatedly
that Clinton "connects" with crowds, or that he is in his "campaign
mode." But such desiccated language deprives one of the politically
important information that the emotion-laden language of Martin and
McCombs provides.

Writing a decade and a half apart, both tell us in unmistakable terms
that the South has thrown up yet another of its emotionally gifted
demagogues-those eloquent politicians who intuitively exploit the hopes
and fears of mobs, who win their love and legitimize their hatreds. The
new eloquent southerner-his style adapted to the small screen, his
charged emotions unfailingly politically correct-is sitting in the
White House.

Clinton has true charisma. If you have not witnessed that quality
first-hand-I myself have seen it only once-you don't quite know what it
is. It is not just charm. It is a sudden blazing internal radiance
which the possessor learns to produce volitionally and in full,
conscious awareness of its seductive effect. Clinton has the power to
seduce others, to get them to submit to his will. And when they do, they
give him in turn the vision he seeks. What Clinton sees in the faces of
the adoring crowds is the reflected face of the Sun King. Only those
adoring crowds can give this Narcissus the ineffable joy of adoring
himself.

Have any journalists raised questions about the real political purposes
of such a man? Yes, but only couched in terms of sincerity. The
disappointed and angry left, the most radical of the environmentalists,
the iconoclasts who inhabit the edges of the American political
spectrum-all have raised the questions: Is Clinton really moved by a
love of social justice? When he made his pledges to rescue the poor and
the suffering, was he sincere? What does he stand for?

In _Shadows of Hope_, Sam Smith gives his reasons for doubting
Clinton's sincerity: "Clinton often seems a political Don Juan, whose
serial affairs with economic and social programs share only the
transitory passion he exhibits on their behalf." Smith is right. The
programs, the 'issues," are America's obligatory means of political
courtship. But for a Sun King, these are means to his end. And his only
real end is seduction. That is what Clinton stands for.

Sam Smith's language tells the reader that he is aware of this.
Newsweek's Joe Klein, in "The Politics of Promiscuity," (May 9, 1994)
seems for an instant to have suspected it. Christopher Hitchens of The
Nation has been in a cold rage about it. These men have strikingly
different political views. The realization that Clinton is most
fundamentally a political seduction machine is not dependent on ideology
but on sensibility, and on the intelligence to look past his
liberal-altruistic language and to question Clinton's personal values.

Finally, also raising questions about Clinton's psychology are the
pillars of establishment journalism and the academic students of the
presidency. These are extremely intelligent and judicious people who
acknowledge no signs of a Sun King's presence and who judge Clinton by
the standards set by the great American presidents. They are concerned
with psychological issues pertaining to Clinton's mind, above all to
his cognitive competence.

A few examples will do: At the end of Clinton's first year in office,
David Broder of The Washington Post was worrying about Clinton's habit
of launching too many policy initiatives at once, many more than he
could handle, and his tendency to go rushing around in all directions.
Hedrick Smith of PBS was disturbed by a related issue-Clinton's
inability to set priorities. And Fred I. Greenstein, professor of
politics at Princeton University and author of two classic books on the
American presidency, was praising Clinton's "verbal intelligence" but
wanted to know whether Clinton had an "analytical intelligence." This
was an unusual question. The Princeton scholar was actually saying,
Clinton can talk, but can he think?

However different all the questions above may seem to be-from "Does he
have a self?" to "Can he think?"-their similarities are greater than
their differences. All the questions are psychological in nature and
all the questioners are staring fixedly at Clinton's consciousness. Most
of the people quoted above have expressed admiration for Clinton, and
most probably voted for him. But all have clearly worried about one or
another aspect of Clinton's mind.

There is a good deal to worry about.
Thinking

On June 7, 1994, Bob Woodward was interviewed on C-SPAN about The
Agenda. The discussion moved to Hillary Clinton, and Woodward said in
emphatic tones, "I'd go so far as to say she's a part of Bill Clinton's
brain."

That is both the most extreme and the most accurate description
of Hillary Clinton that anyone has yet offered. It is the only reason
for which Hillary Clinton is a significant American figure. She has
been flattered by the feminist movement, which, like New York Times
columnist Anna Quindlen, imagines her to have a "great mind." She has
been abused by certain conservatives who, like Richard Nixon, believe
that such an intelligent, self-assertive woman turns her husband into a
"wimp." Both those characterizations miss the mark. Hillary is a bright
woman lawyer of the kind one sees by the dozens on CNN and C-SPAN, only
they have earned their positions while she has married hers.

Her actual importance lies in one realm alone. She is known to be a prop
to her husband's mind, and her husband is president of the United
States.

To an inordinate degree Hillary Clinton thinks for Bill Clinton.

Specifically, she is Bill Clinton's access to the laws of logic, without
which no thinking is possible. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has
discussed Clinton's blindness to logic on a number of occasions. On
February 1, 1993, he wrote, "The most disturbing quality about
Clinton... is his indifference to contradiction. Not excluding the
political middle by not excluding the logical middle, that appears to be
Clinton's strategy. And so he can hold in his mind simultaneously, and
sincerely, notions that cannot really be held together." And, again in
the July 19-26, 1993 issue: "He lives without the law of contradiction."

Hillary Clinton provides Clinton with certain narrow logical skills of
which he is singularly bereft. This does not imply that she is
Aristotle, any more than a seeing-eye dog is a cartographer. It implies
only that as compared to Clinton, the blazing Bubba, Mrs. Clinton is on
speaking terms with logic, and he cannot function without her.

Some White House reporters have gradually discovered this dependence.
Initially they saw Hillary as a helpful adjunct to presidential decision
making. Just after the election, Eleanor Clift and Mark Miller said in
Newsweek, "Hillary is Bill's Daytimer, the gentle lash who keeps him
focused, who doesn't mind making decisions and refereeing disputes when
Clinton would rather stall." This description is a bit too soft. Take
out the "gentle" and the "doesn't mind," and you have a clearer picture
of a Hillary who keeps Bill's mind focused, who makes his decisions, and
who resolves his conflicts.

Six months later, in late June 1993, at the peak of the Clintons'
bizarre succession of political catastrophes, Eleanor Clift returned to
Hillary to answer the question, "Has health care kept her from helping
Bill?" Clift's answer was an unequivocal yes: "[Many staffers] blame
Clinton's inability to make up his mind on any number of issues-from
Bosnia to the BTU tax-on Hillary's distance from the Oval Office.
Clinton's decision to delegate health care to his wife disrupted the
delicate balance between the couple. Because Hillary has a real job, she
cannot devote the time she once did to her husband's problems. And he
has suffered as a result."

And nine months later, in March 1994 as the sex and money scandals were
exploding over the Clintons' heads, Time published an article called
"The Trials of Hillary." It was written by Nancy Gibbs, and all impulse
to soften Hillary had vanished. Rather, with the first lady under fire,
it was necessary to make her importance clear. Gibbs cited people close
to the Clintons as the source for a crisp description of the essence of
Bill Clinton's dependency on Hillary: "Their friends observed that he
needs her brains, her logic, her focus..

That is undoubtedly true. But it cannot be the whole truth. One can
readily purchase brains, logic, and focus in the market-place. One does
not have to marry them. For Clinton, a wife with brains, logic, and
focus serves a deeper need. In a particular and important way, Bill
Clinton is cognitively disabled.

There is nothing obvious about that disability, although its superficial
manifestations strike many people immediately: If one concentrates on
what Clinton says, not on his facial expressions and the motions of his
poetic hands, one discovers that he is a phenomenal bore. He is so
monumentally boring that thoughtful people feel compelled to discuss
it.

Tom Rosenstiel of the Los Angeles Times writes in Strange Bedfellows
that he considers Clinton an intellectual and a "scholar" but finds his
oratory flat and lacking in drama and poetry. Historian James MacGregor
Burns says, "Clinton's rhetoric is absolutely lacking in spark and,
well, in style. So much of it is banal." Time's Hugh Sidey says that
Clinton is "tedious to a fault, thorough, bright, highly educated but
excruciatingly dull at times."

And The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier explains why: "His seriousness
seems to consist. in a combination of ambition and pedantry. There is
something spiritually thin about Clinton. Finally, his constant talk-at
last we have a president who speaks in sentences, but all the
time-leaves only an impression of articulateness.  Detail has mastered
him as much as he has mastered detail."

That is the clue to Clinton's cognitive disability. There is only one
thing that will produce this detail-saturated effect, enlivened by no
thinking or creative impulse, and that is the memorization one
frantically engages in before an exam if one is the bright kind who
studies for As.

Is Clinton a memorizer? Yes, indeed he is. And a very unusual one, the
type who could get a job in the circus as a Hans the Talking Horse. He
has a photographic memory, and witnesses to that skill come from every
period of his life. When David Gallen, armed with a tape recorder,
interviewed a few dozen Arkansas journalists, politicians, and friends
and associates of Bill, they all talked their heads off about his
amazing memory for the faces, names, family members, and illnesses of
what seems to be half of Arkansas.

And, apparently, he forgets nothing. In January 1994 David Maraniss of
the Washington Post wrote "Clinton has a nearly photographic memory-he
recently stunned a friend visiting the White House by saying, 'Let's
call your parents!' and then recited a number he hadn't dialed in more
than a decade."

Before he was elected president, Clinton himself liked to show off his
remarkable memory. According to Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The
Comeback Kid, Clinton recited 100 lines from Macbeth that he had learned
in high school to a high school class in the small town of Vilonia,
Arkansas: "I hadn't [recited] it in 20-something years," Clinton said.
"And I started reeling it off, and these kids, their eyes got as big as
dollars. I recited the whole soliloquy."

But this skill is more than a complicated parlor trick. It has played an
important role in Clinton's intellectual life. Clinton has always been
extremely bright, a good student and a voracious reader. But his memory
has greatly supplemented, amplified, and very often substituted for an
intellectual life. His memory is a theme that runs throughout people's
conversations about him.

Arkansas journalist Meredith Oakley, who repeatedly refers to Clinton's
photographic memory throughout her book On the Make: The Rise of Bill
Clinton, says of Clinton, "He was not studious by nature and though he
made exceptional grades-he eventually won a Phi Beta Kappa key he did
so by routinely cramming for exams and relying on a photographic memory.

Clinton's classmate at Yale, William P. Coleman, calls Clinton "the
classic quick study." He studied little, went to few classes. Then
before exams he borrowed the class notes of others and memorized.

Clinton's high school friend David Leopoulos visited Clinton when he was
at Oxford and found that Clinton had suddenly become a fount of
information about painting. Leopoulos told a reporter, "He is interested
in everything and wants to consume everything. He is almost a fanatic
about information. He gathers and retains it better than anyone I've
ever known."

Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post jokes, "That's Clinton:
well-versed in every subject, has memorized the leading economic
indicators for every quarter since the '20s, knows how to say
'fungibility' in Farsi."

Finally, Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid describe
the Clinton of the presidential campaign: "Clinton became known as a
'policy wonk,' a politician who could spout data and statistics nonstop,
a man with a quick answer for every question. Members of the national
press were amazed at his ability to formulate answers to complicated
questions, seemingly without thinking."

It is not "seemingly" without thinking. Very often, it is actually
without thinking. Clinton can memorize as he breathes. But he finds
thinking-analysis, evaluation, reaching conclusions intensely difficult.

And that is the essence of Bill Clinton's cognitive disability, and the
reason for his dependence on his wife.

In The Agenda, Woodward shows that dependence in action.  He describes
Clinton as candidate, surrounded by high-powered advisers. "Everyone,"
writes Woodward, "was throwing ideas at the candidate, who had no system
to evaluate or decide among them." It was Hillary who rescued Clinton,
and in doing so, explained what he actually did with the information
being hurled at him. He had to "come to it in his own way," she said.
Woodward continued: "Hillary insisted he had to 'internalize' the
message and the ideas. He needed in-depth exposure to the alternatives
and lively debate, pushed even to the point of confusion. 'He has to
come to this in his own way,' she repeated." What Clinton needed, she
said, was the time to rest and "internalize."

In effect, Clinton dumps everything into his subconscious, engulfs it,
digests it, and waits to see what will happen. Many people do this at
certain stages of creative work, which is dependent on subconscious
operations. But at some point, the mental super-structure must take
control and process the results with logic.

It is the stage that requires the conscious use of logic that Clinton
finds difficult, or impossible, to reach.

To an extraordinary degree, Clinton functions directly from his
subconscious. It is his almost-photographic memory that allows him to
do so. But he pays a terrible penalty. When ideas are "thrown" at him,
which happens ceaselessly, he "has no system to evaluate or decide
among them." He is paralyzed-until his subconscious finally processes
them in one way or another, and tells him what to think. And if it
doesn't, his wife does. That one cannot buy in the marketplace.

It is true that Hillary Clinton helps Bill Clinton in his presidential
decision-making process. It is true that he needs her brains, her logic,
and her focus. But any formulation that makes her sound like hired help
fails to reckon with the frequency with which Clinton is incapacitated.
Hillary Clinton compensates for that helpless state. She is to Clinton's
mind what a pacemaker is to a heart. She is, as Woodward says, a part of
Bill Clinton's brain. And she has been so for every millisecond of his
political life.

THE FIRST CONFLICT

"Even now, after all these years, I still sometimes work hard instead
of smart. I'm a workaholic, I'm always churning and doing things, and
sometimes I lose the forest for the trees. Sometimes you can do so many
things that you don't do enough... [P]eople may not know exactly what I
want to do as president, because I've got so many ideas.

"My mind is always churning, you know, and I think I need to learn to
focus my comments better so I can learn to communicate with people who
don't know me very well. And I need to always learn that you have so
little time, there is so precious little time, that you have to really
be like a laser beam with your words and your actions. You've got to
really focus and have that kind of mental discipline that sometimes my
workaholic tendencies don't permit me to have.... "I think sometimes I
always think that everything can be worked out, too, you know. Sometimes
you can work everything out. You've just got to cut it. And you've got
to know when to cut it and when to work things out. That's something
I've done a lot of work on, trying to make sure I overcome that
weakness."

-Bill Clinton to Arsenio Hall, June 1992

For some 15 years Clinton has been saying, over and over again, to
people who have repeated it over and over again, that his problem is
that he does "too much, too fast." Simultaneously, he has been
ceaselessly reported to be an astoundingly slow worker who takes months
to make a decision. Both cannot be true. And both are not true. But it
takes a long time to understand the gross contradiction between what
Clinton says of himself and what the press has reported, because the
answer is buried in a mysterious conflict deep inside Clinton's mind.

Above, you will see a long and unfocused description by candidate
Clinton of the workings of his own mind. He offered this information to
talk-show host Arsenio Hall, who had inquired whether Clinton had any
flaws.

A small part of Clinton's incoherent description pertains to his
doing "too much, too fast." The rest, if one strips away the murky
verbiage, is an earnest description of Clinton's difficulty in thinking.
His mind races, ideas rush in on him with great speed; he fails to
distinguish between having an idea and taking an action, between
thinking and doing; he gets lost in details, so he cannot retain his
abstract purposes; and he has great difficulty in reaching conclusions
or making decisions. He even avoids using such terms: He talks of
"cutting it" or of "working things out." This is not the analysis of a
thinker or of one who thinks about thinking. It is the Clinton
subconscious blurting out his difficulties as he experiences them from
within.

Woodward's Agenda-this book is to date the greatest psychological study
of Bill Clinton-portrays Clinton's helpless, conflicted muddle over and
over again. But in one part, there is a short, efficient description.
Political consultant Stan Greenberg traveled to Arkansas to meet the
young governor who might seek the Democratic party's nomination for
president. He found Clinton torn by conflict over announcing his
candidacy:

"[Clinton] set August as a personal deadline for a final decision, but
the deadline slipped. .. He appeared locked in a perpetual debate and
argument with himself and with dozens of friends and advisors. His
thinking never seemed to go in a straight line. He was unable to bring
his deliberations to any resolution. Greenberg was horrified at the
process. It bordered on chaos."

Greenberg is clearly describing from the outside what Bill Clinton
described to Arsenio Hall from the inside.

The rambling speech that Clinton made to the talk-show host is a
template both for Clinton's endlessly reiterated lament that he does
"too much, too fast" and for the chaotic mental processes that wander
off in meaningless directions and culminate in paralysis. To describe
what it might feel like to be engaged in both kinds of mental
activities, one must conjure up an impossibility. It would be like
driving at full speed with one's feet jammed hard on powerful brakes.
Clinton's mind races perpetually while it simultaneously maneuvers
itself into a catatonic motionlessness.

Clinton has a short phrase to describe only the speeded-up process: It
is doing "too much, too fast." He has no descriptive phrase for the
blocking process, so I'll give him one: It's "I can't move."

He presses his speeded-up problem on everyone he talks to at any length,
so it is widely known. He allows others to discover the blockage problem
all by themselves. But, of course, that problem is widely known too.
The press discovered it soon after he was elected president. In fact, to
a considerable degree, Clinton's relationship with reporters has been an
attempt to seduce them by stressing "I do too much, too fast" while they
have tormented him by chasing angrily after his "I can't move." To visit
Clinton's mind, one must take these aspects of his mental processes one
at a time.

"Too Much, Too Fast"

Clinton began to complain publicly that he tries to do "too much, too
fast" when he lost the governor's race in 1980 after one term in office.
In his first interview after this defeat, he named the problem as a
cause.

But when one reads Meredith Oakley's biography On the Make, one
discovers that Clinton had the "too much, too fast" problem long before
the traumatic expulsion. Oakley places no significance whatsoever on
this fact. But it is clearly important.

Right after he was elected governor for the first time and before he
had even moved into his office, says Oakley, Clinton made a curious
pledge to the electorate. It was reported by the Associated Press and
she summarizes it as follows: "He said he planned to take a judicious
approach to governing and to try not to do everything at once."

Neither the AP nor Oakley thought to ask Clinton why the impossible
notion of doing everything at once had even occurred to him and why he
would "try" not to do this impossible thing. Would the impossible thing
happen anyway if he did not "try"?

On the surface, the new governor of Arkansas never kept his pledge. The
biographies record that he always governed in Arkansas with all flags
flying and an agenda as long as his arm. But the primary purpose of the
enormous agenda was to create the illusion of immense achievement
through nonstop activity. Clinton scheduled matters, says Oakley, so
that he could launch one initiative a week and keep his name in the
headlines. Many, if not most, of those achievements never materialized,
or they were drastically altered by the Arkansas legislature.

After Clinton was defeated, he made such a big issue out of "too much,
too fast" and apologized so humbly to the people of Arkansas for his
mistake that, when years later he ran for the presidency, the phrase was
still on people's lips. David Gallen, researching Bill Clinton: As They
Know Him, heard it frequently. Brownie Ledbetter, a prominent activist
in Arkansas reform politics, told Gallen about the warning that Betsey
Wright had delivered to Clinton. Wright, who organized Clinton's
campaign for reelection to the governorship, told Clinton, "You will
pick three things and that's it. You're not going to do a hundred and
fifty things. And you've got to be focused."

When Clinton ran for the presidency he again set out with great brio to
do "too much, too fast." He hit Americans hard with a 49-point plan for
economic revival-adding 10 new planks to a platform he filched from
Dukakis.

And, once elected, Clinton not only wanted to show Americans that he
could do everything at once-he wanted to show them that he could think
about everything at once. He held the famous economic "summit" where,
surrounded by television cameras and legions of properly respectful
economists, policy specialists, and business executives, Clinton
demonstrated that he knew as much about each of their specializations as
they did. He had learned and spat out a fragment of each. The public was
impressed. The press was impressed. Hillary was impressed. She took
notes.

And there began the regime of Clinton I, which was for many months
thereafter to lurch around in drunken confusion, because the man who
could do everything at once and could know everything at once had just
arrived from a tiny, almost-feudal state that he could govern with a
Rolodex of 100 names, and had no idea what it meant to be president of
the United States of America.

Throughout all the lurching and crises and embarrassments, however,
Clinton kept proliferating proposed programs and issues and trying to do
"too much, too fast." Finally, a clever journalist noticed that the
issues were a cave in which Clinton was hiding. In Newsweek, February
15, 1993, Eleanor Clift observed:

"As the political hurricanes raged around him, Bill Clinton sought
safety in substance. Let the media talk about Kimba and Zoe and gays in
the military. Clinton was busy with issues, at least one a day. That is
his way of changing the subject. .. .But the issues may not provide safe
haven for long. Now he must turn his attention to the thorniest issue of
all, [the economy,] where he faces seemingly contradictory goals."

In fact, Clinton's relentless multiplying of issues began to seem
comical to some. A few months later, The Washington Post Weekly
published a Margulies cartoon on that theme. It was drawn in two boxes.
Box 1 showed Clinton seated in front of a desk piled with documents,
saying, "Maybe I have been trying to do too much..." Box 2 showed
Clinton saying, "So I'm appointing a 60-member commission to hold six
months of hearings and issue a 12-volume report on rescuing my
presidency."

Now here you can stop for a moment, because Clinton stopped for a
moment. For some months, all the issues came in great baskets called
the budget and NAFTA and Japanese trade and so on. Since politics is an
epiphenomenon in this article, we will skip over what was a reasonably
pleasant period in which a newly hired Republican spinmeister, David
Gergen, who had helped to create and peddle the New Nixon, was now
creating and peddling the New Clinton.

At the end of 1993, it came time for leading journalists to ponder the
year's events and to ask Clinton to ponder the year's events. An
interview with Clinton was conducted by Eleanor Clift, Bob Cohn, and
Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and published December 13, 1993. About that
same time, David Broder in The Washington Post (December 12, 1993)
reported on a group interview with Clinton assembled at Blair House by
Godfrey Sperling Jr. of the Christian Science Monitor. These able and
sophisticated journalists were genuinely interested in finding out what
Clinton-the New Clinton-had learned during the year.

The group interview published in Newsweek occupied a full page. Nine
questions were published, three of which asked Clinton to comment on
declining public support and on criticisms of his character, his temper,
and his performance. He evaded the criticisms. Instead, he defensively
introduced and elaborated on these ideas:

  -"[W]e were trying to move very quickly to push the agenda
of change."

  -"I tried to do so many things at once that I didn't take time
to do one of the President's most important jobs, and that is to
consistently explain to the American people what we were doing
and why."

  -"What upsets me is when I think we're not doing the best we can
for the country. When I lose my temper it's mostly because I think
we all have an obligation to make every day count."

The sympathetic headline printed along the top of the Newsweek page
was: "I tried to do so many things."

Broder devoted his complete Post column to what Clinton had told the
journalistic group at Blair House. Under the triumphant title 'Clinton
Finds His Voice," Broder wrote: "In a recent interview in which I
participated, Clinton said that because the nation is now 'awash in
news,' he must work harder at this task than presidents of the previous
generation had to do. That means, he said, that he must figure out what
are the 'five or six things or two or three things the American people
have to know and feel' and 'not do or say things that get in your way'
in communicating on those topics. And it means that he must be willing
to return to those topics time and again, until he hits the moment when
'You can break through. When you can register on people."'

Broder was impressed. He said, "For a president who is as hyperactive as
Clinton, this is a remarkably disciplined set of self-instructions....
[T]he lesson of this first year-which Clinton seems to have absorbed-is
that you cannot do everything at once."

The New Clinton was the Old Clinton. The two sets of interviewers had
all been listening to the same strange recording in Clinton's head,
unreeling slowly, slowly, upon demand, producing the same verbal
patterns that had been emerging from Clinton's mouth for at least 15
years.

Any idea that a human being feels compelled to repeat robotically for at
least 15 years means something important to that person. But what "too
much, too fast" means is not what Clinton says it means. And there is no
evidence that he knows what it means. It is clearly a defense of some
kind. But a defense against what?

 It may become clearer if we turn now to the Clinton who cannot resolve
conflicts, the Clinton who is blocked, the Clinton who gets paralyzed
while trying to think. What the racing, speeding Clinton cannot tell us,
perhaps the paralyzed Clinton will.

"I Can't Move"

The Clinton who "can't move" is, of course, Clinton the potential
Democratic party nominee who revealed to political consultant Stan
Greenberg that he couldn't "think in a straight line," and couldn't
resolve conflicts or reach conclusions. It is Clinton the presidential
candidate who told Arsenio Hall that he had these strange thinking
problems he was "working on"  that he often couldn't "see the forest for
the trees"; that he often didn't know when to "cut it" and when to go on
trying to "work things out"; and who revealed to Arsenio that he didn't
differentiate between thinking, saying, and doing "things."

Why there was no uproar among American journalists after Clinton's
confession to Arsenio Hall, I do not know, since I personally fell off
the couch when I heard it. But it is only fair to say that it was
difficult to understand on the fly. Clinton's use of language reveals a
determination to conceal the operations of his mind in a cloud of squid
ink. By his fifth month in office, however, there was widespread
awareness that something was the matter with Clinton's decision-making
process. The New York Times developed a fixation on his lack of "focus."
Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham, who counts things that annoy him,
reported that in the month of May the words Clinton and focus appeared
in The New York Times 102 times.

In the May 31, 1993 issue, The New Republic published an analysis of
Clinton's decision making. The editors were trying to account for
Clinton's paralysis and, interestingly, contradicted Clinton's claim
that it was due to "too much, too fast":

"The incorrigible Eugene McCarthy put it best, in a recent trip to these
offices. The Clinton administration is turning out to be all gerunds;
there are no nouns or verbs. Everything is process: happening,
formulating, consulting, negotiating, evolving... [T]he only moment when
the president actually seemed to do something that had a beginning, a
middle, and an end was his signing of the executive orders liberalizing
abortion. And what a long time ago that seems....

"It is not that he has tried to do too much, as he [has] somewhat
lamely claimed. Far from it. .. .It is that he has failed to find a
distinction between constructing a policy and implementing it. It is one
long, seamless process of negotiation-intellectual and political-in
which there seems to be no firm stopping place."

The New Republic had discovered that Clinton could not distinguish
between thinking and doing and could not resolve his deliberations.

It was not, however, until one year later, in the publications I read
regularly, that someone almost reached Stan Greenberg's horrifying
conclusion. On May 17, 1994, Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington
Post that Clinton left "the unmistakable impression of a president who
cannot state a goal and then simply march to it." Cohen was still a bit
unsure of his own discovery that Clinton could not think purposefully.

In the year in between, journalists zeroed in on Clinton's inability to
reach a final decision-his last-minute "flip-flopping." And they
trumpeted their observations to the skies. This criticism produced a
dramatic and informative clash between Clinton and the press. On June
14, 1993, after three months of changing his mind about a Supreme Court
nominee, Clinton finally succumbed to the forces advocating Ruth Bader
Ginsburg and presented her to guests and press in a televised ceremony
in the Rose Garden. Clinton spoke. Judge Ginsburg spoke. Clinton then
turned to the press. Brit Hume of ABC rose to his feet and asked a
question: What had caused the protracted "zigzag quality" in the
nomination process? Hume knew, the press knew, Clinton knew, and an
untold number of citizens knew, that Hume was actually asking Clinton a
personal question: Why are you so indecisive? Clinton displayed a cold,
controlled anger, chastised the press for being more interested in
"political process" than in "substance," and abruptly terminated
the press conference, leaving Hume standing there, six feet tall
and bright red.

The next day, the country was informed that the president had more to
say. Wolf Blitzer, CNN's White House reporter, told his worldwide
audience that the president was going to hold a press conference at
which he would discuss his achievements to show that he'd been "decisive
and in control." The press conference began. Clinton appeared. He listed
some legislation and announced to the nation-in the hearing of the
world-that his had been "the most decisive presidency you've had in a
very long time, on all the big issues that matter."

The reporters of course knew that this was a lie, whether they said so
or not. It was not clear that they had understood the important truth
that Clinton was telling them by lying-that he could not endure any
mention of his indecisiveness.

It seems unlikely that they understood that truth, because there was no
muting of the crescendo of criticism of Clinton's indecisiveness. During
May, June, and July 1993, the criticism came from voices at every point
on the establishment spectrum-from such journalistic luminaries as
Cokie Roberts, Elizabeth Drew, Anthony Lewis, Hobart Rowen, and Judy
Woodruff. Even The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne, who normally would
not notice if Clinton turned into a werewolf, conceded in the 16th
paragraph of a 17-paragraph column that Clinton was indecisive.

On September 17, 1993, David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles
Times, criticized the press for unfairly berating Clinton for his
indecisiveness. Nevertheless, Shaw himself described that
indecisiveness with disdainful accuracy: "Decision making is an
excruciating process for Clinton. He almost invariably seems determined
to delay a final decision for as long as possible. He likes to ponder
publicly all his options, consult people, make a decision, consult
anew, change his mind, then change it again. He's a veritable symphony
of equivocation.

America's leading journalists were agitated by the very idea of an
indecisive president. Since deciding things is nine-tenths of what an
American president is supposed to do, their agitation was
comprehensible.

A few people, however, thought the president's indecisiveness was funny.
They were politically mismatched. One was Jeffrey Klein, editor in chief
of the leftist Mother Jones and a Clinton supporter. He erupted in a fit
of charming giggles when, invited by C-SPAN to comment on Clinton, he
heard himself saying that "Clinton never makes up his mind." Another was
Paul Greenberg, conservative editorial page editor of the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazete and the creator of the sobriquet Slick Willie. Greenberg
was not a giggler, but he was consumed by dry humor. He, too, appeared
on C-SPAN to twinkle his eye and to state enigmatically that he had not
expected "it" to happen so soon.

He explained what he meant in a column which appeared in The Washington
Times titled "Deja' Vu All Over Again." Greenberg discussed the
astonishment and indignation of both Democratic congressmen and
journalists over "the Clinton two-step." It was "still a novelty in
Washington," he said, but was quite familiar to anyone who had spent the
last two decades in Arkansas. "They don't understand," he said. "This
may be the first time they've seen Bill Clinton step out boldly, then
fade away while explaining how decisive he's been."

And somewhere in Arkansas there was a horse laugh, possibly
attributable to former Gazette columnist John Brummett, who had said
during the campaign that Bill Clinton was not presidential timber, that
he was "timid, indecisive, wishy-washy, and a chameleon who tries too
hard to get everyone to love him."

There is no evidence that the liberal establishment press learned from
their Arkansas colleagues that Clinton's indecisiveness was a problem
of at least 20 years' duration. Had they learned that, their question
would have been, "Why?" not "What?" But they chased diligently after the
what. Newsweek's White House correspondents, writing in different
combinations, took turns describing the phenomenon:

- In May 1993, Clinton was described as a "policy wonk" who wallows in
details. The writers added, "Clinton will revisit a decision so often
that at times he seems like a gardener who uproots his plants to see
how they are growing."

- In early June, Newsweek writers referred, with a mixture of
friendliness and harshness, to Clinton's "love of detail and obsessive
inability to make final decisions."

- At the end of June, Bob Cohn devoted an entire article to the subject.
It was called "Decisions, Decisions." In it, Cohn summed up Newsweek's
now-clear dislike of the phenomenon: No one can undecide a decision
quite as often as Bill Clinton... Clinton has had to abandon his grand
ideas because he lacks the discipline to make hard choices. The
president's three-month search for a Supreme Court justice typifies his
tendency towards vacillation. It is more than yet another bungled
appointment, it is a case study of the overreaching and dithering that
has left Clinton's friends dangling and disappointed his followers."

Newsweek, of course, was not unique. The entire country was being
deluged with journalistic criticism of Clinton's indecisiveness. As
June turned into July, various polls revealed that, as Bill Schneider of
CNN put it, "Clinton's image was wavering and indecisive."

Just as it had become universally known that Clinton tried to do "too
much, too fast," so did it become universally known that Clinton was
indecisive.

Deja Vu All Over Again

And what happened when everyone in the country knew this? Everyone in
the country forgot it. Just as "too much, too fast" vanished at this
time, so did indecisiveness vanish. The New, ostensibly decisive,
Clinton had arrived. Frightened to death by the possibility of
rejection, Clinton begged and bribed Democrats shamelessly to pass his
budget. When it passed by one vote in the Senate he declared: "The
margin was close but the mandate is clear." He wrapped himself in a
protective cloak woven of living presidents and, rejected by a majority
of liberals, passed NAFTA with the help of Republicans. How much more
decisive could a liberal president be?

A lot more, it turned out. By the end of the year everyone rediscovered
Clinton's indecisiveness. His new spinmeister David Gergen apparently
leaked the fact that a new, ingenious way of solving Clinton's
indecisiveness problem had been found. The December 13,1993 issue of
Newsweek reported dryly, "Most of the requests for private time with
Clinton will not be granted, says a top aide, for fear that the
president might reverse himself."

Then it was time out for frenetic coverage of Clinton's sex and money
scandals before the issue of decisiveness returned. In May 1994, the
press discovered to its astonishment that it was observing essentially
the same phenomenon it had observed in May 1993.

- On May 14, 1994, when Clinton seemed incapable of nominating another
Supreme Court justice, Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal declared
irritably on CNN, "Clinton has known for 134 days that he had to replace
Blackmun." And Hunt sounded off about Clinton's "vacillation,
indecisiveness."

- On May 23, Newsweek portrayed the absurdity of Clinton's "waffling" in
greater detail than ever before. It gave the readers a three-day
scenario: "On Wednesday the president had been about to nominate
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt when he suddenly changed his mind. On
Thursday, his choice had been an old Arkansas friend, Judge Richard
Arnold, but by Friday, Arnold was out and [Judge Stephen] Breyer was in.
'Let's go,' Clinton announced after yet another last minute phone call,
and his staff, stung by a rash of media stories about White House
dithering, rushed to carry out the presidential command. But before they
could get out the door, Clinton hesitated. Maybe, he mused, he should
put Maryland Sen. Paul Sarbanes on the court. That way he could elevate
Baltimore's promising young black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, to the Senate."
This, Newsweek reported, caused the president' s legal counselor, Lloyd
Cutler, to grow "exasperated" and to insist that Clinton decide there
and then. And thus did Breyer emerge triumphant from Clinton's
"maddening" decision-making process.

- In early June, Clinton again felt impelled to defend himself from the
charge of indecisiveness. But this time he got someone else to do it for
him. Who better than legal counselor Lloyd Cutler? So there was Cutler,
who had been privately "exasperated" by Clinton's indecisiveness,
explaining publicly in a long op-ed piece in The Washington Post that
the president had not been indecisive at all, that, on the contrary, he
had been wonderfully decisive.

And again a whole raft of foreign-policy issues provoked the same press
charges of Clinton's indecisiveness: Bosnia had turned into Somalia had
turned into Haiti, with Clinton changing his mind every hour on the
hour.

Now the national press, too, realized that it was deja' vu all over
again.

In June 1994, Woodward's Agenda appeared with a shocking passage in it.
Leon Panetta, writes Woodward, had been told by campaign aides that
Clinton was "deadly slow to make decisions." And then George
Stephanopoulos told Panetta something far more troubling: "The worst
thing about him," said Stephanopoulos, "is that he never makes a
decision." Never? There it sits on page 86 of The Agenda. Never.

Finally, in July 1994, Michael Kelly in The New York Times Magazine
wrote: "[I]t is no longer surprising to hear the president spoken of
with open and dismissive contempt. In main-stream journalism, and even
more so in popular entertainment, President Clinton is routinely
depicted in the most unflattering terms: a liar, a fraud, a chronically
indecisive man. Kelly considers some of this vicious and unfair, but
he does not challenge Clinton's indecisiveness. By now, not only every
journalist and comic in America knows that Clinton is indecisive but
dogs know it; cats know it; the readers of this magazine know it.

So why am I telling you what you already know? Because you don't
already know it. You know a concept, "indecisive." And you know a
false implication, that indecisiveness is a self-contained
phenomenon, that it is like an epileptic seizure-a powerful but
limited mental event which suddenly knocks Clinton out at the end of
the decision-making process. But it doesn't start at the end, it
starts at the beginning. And it is not a decision-making process, it
is a decision-killing process. It has six component parts. At one
time or another every one of them has been described, but only
Woodward has integrated most of them, and that was not his primary
purpose. I'll list them, elaborating on components described only by
Woodward:

1. Clinton possesses a perfectionism that interferes with the completion
of his projects because his standards are never met. According to
Woodward, Clinton always wants to produce a solid piece of work. The
sight of aides knocking out a document at high speed frightens Clinton
because he knows it will not produce intellectually serious work. He
wants each aspect of a project to be checked, he wants to consult people
he deems to be authoritative sources, and he wants to consider a very
broad range of opinion and debate.

Clinton is never satisfied with the work at any stage. Woodward
describes Stephanopoulos' s reaction to Clinton's unending demands: "He
had seen Clinton act like this before, disliking, discarding, or wanting
to change what he read. His initial reaction was always to resist, to
say no, to force more discussion and debate." What is most irritating to
his political advisers is his responsiveness to arguments he has not
considered or to which insufficient attention has been paid. He will
always want to incorporate them into his project even if they come from
a political opponent.

No scholar could object to such standards. But in practice Clinton's
standards are never met. The passages in The Agenda that portray
Clinton's standards are reported by Lloyd Bentsen and by Stephanopoulos,
both of whom see Clinton's unrealizable perfectionism as an expression
of what Bentsen calls his intellectual "doubt."

2. Clinton is preoccupied with details to the extent that the major
point of his activity is lost. This is precisely what Clinton means when
he says he often can't "see the forest for the trees." It is what
everyone means when he uses that expression. It means he cannot arrive
at or retain the abstract purpose of a project because he is so
immersed in the details.

So long as reporters admired Clinton's grasp of details, so long as they
described him as "loving" the details, they did not recognize that his
preoccupation with details is an epistemologically morbid attribute and
assumed that the paralysis comes later on. But it is often, perhaps
always, at the very beginning of a project that Clinton loses contact
with his abstract purpose.

Of the writers I have read, only Woodward seems to understand clearly
that Clinton cannot hold on to the connections between his abstract
purposes and the concrete details which are his daily preoccupation. One
of the most dramatic sections in The Agenda illustrates the severity of
this problem. Almost all reviewers relayed the political story without
paying attention to Woodward's accompanying epistemological analysis. To
put it simply, Clinton was so preoccupied with the details of the
deficit-cutting aspect of his budget that he forgot the rigorous caps
that Congress had placed on the "social investment" part of his budget.
It was a budget resolution which, says Woodward, the president dealt
with every day, but he "didn't grasp what had happened." An aide had to
tell him: "Slamming his fist down on the end of his chair, Clinton let
loose a torrent of rage and frustration. . . .Why hadn't they ever had a
serious discussion about the caps? Day after day, in dozens of hours in
the Roosevelt Room going over the smallest programs and most trivial
details, there had been no meeting, no discussion of the caps? The
president turned red in the face. Why didn't they tell me? he asked.
This is what I was elected for, he said. This is why I am here."

Much later, when Clinton had calmed down, he realized that he bore some
responsibility in the matter: "Clinton indicated that he had never quite
connected the earlier discussions of that seeming abstraction, 'caps on
discretionary spending,' with their impact on his investments. He had
never really fully grasped the relationship."

The "investments" were Clinton's most important purpose. He had let that
abstraction float away while he was preoccupied with the "most trivial
details." Clinton had been paralyzed by the harsh caps on discretionary
spending, but the paralysis started the instant, the millisecond, that
he severed his abstract purpose from the concrete details in which he
immersed himself.

3. Clinton is unable to set priorities among his projects. Indeed,
journalists and scholars have clamored incessantly that Clinton cannot
set priorities. Asked Princeton scholar Fred Greenstein in Political
Science Quarterly, "Why does an intelligent, politically aware leader
who knows in his heart that he should 'focus like a laser' begin his
presidency in a fashion more reminiscent of a cluster bomb?" Or, as Judy
Woodruff put it anxiously to Vice President Al Gore, "Why can't he
prioritize?"

This is actually the same problem as the one above but writ large. To
know one's priorities, one must know their relationship to one's
abstract and overarching purposes. In the case of President Clinton, he
would have to know the relationship of his multiplicity of projects-all
of them-to the overarching purposes and themes of his presidency. But he
forgets them, too.

Woodward shows how it was Clinton's political consultants who realized
that "Clinton's presidency was off the tracks in a fundamental way."
Stan Greenberg grasped it first and prepared a memo for Clinton, first
reviewing it with political consultants James Carville, Paul Begala, and
Mandy Grunwald. The memo was dated April 20, 1993, just before the press
clamor started. It warned Clinton, says Woodward, that he "had failed to
communicate both the central values of his presidency and an
organizing idea for his economic program. Side issues such as gays in
the military were still getting in the way." The memo recommended that
Clinton return to the plan with which he campaigned, and "recreate the
vision of jobs, work and responsibility."

But Clinton, Woodward shows, did not know how to emerge from his
concrete-bounded world to establish those priorities and goals for his
administration or how to focus his thinking on them. Once again Woodward
describes a dramatic and terrible moment. After the political
consultants gave their analyses in turn to Clinton, the president
erupted. "'I know what's wrong!' Clinton finally screamed. 'Give me a
strategy."' He wanted an outline, a plan with instructions: one, two,
three. The consultants, Woodward says, continued to talk about
"abstract themes, communications, values and ideas." Clinton kept
snapping angrily that all he was getting from them was "analysis." What
he wanted was a "strategy," a "plan." Says Woodward, "Clinton wanted
some-thing concrete."

It is a remarkable fact that the political consultants to President
Clinton think far more abstractly than he does and can easily explain
his priorities to him. But to Clinton, only the concrete is real,
abstractions have no reality-and that is to say that his presidency's
themes and goals have no reality. But without them he cannot rank his
projects in importance. He cannot set priorities.

4. Clinton's decision making is avoided, postponed, or protracted. This
is the phenomenon that draws the journalistic crowds. But as we have
seen, the press has been primarily concerned with the end of the
drama-the last two or three days, even the last two or three weeks, of
vacillation and indecisiveness.

But the entire period of time, often many months, spent in avoiding and
postponing a decision, the time spent in sheer procrastination, cannot
be severed from the phenomenon of indecisiveness.

Clinton is a spectacular procrastinator. And occasionally, in different
political contexts, journalists have expressed amazement over his
capacity to avoid accomplishing anything at all. Even Mary McGrory, who
is a dedicated member of the choir, has expressed profound irritation
over this quality. Under the headline, "Hail All Hail 'William the
Procrastinator' McGrory wrote in The Washington Post (May 20, 1993),
"He's too compulsive not to know what's going on and too smart not to
know how it looks... Connect the dots... and what you get is a picture
of a president who hates to make up his mind... If he were an English
king, they would be calling him 'William the Procrastinator."'

Two weeks later in the same publication, Ann Devroy and Ruth Marcus
interviewed a series of nameless White House officials about Clinton's
decision-making process. Even officials who were "reluctant to blame
Clinton himself... cite as fundamental problems the president's
propensity to avoid decisions." Clinton, the aides assured the dubious
reporters, had agreed that he must change.

Despite talk of change, nothing changed. A year later, Clinton was still
procrastinating. A Washington Post editorial titled "Appointments
Dithering" discussed his approach to various appointments and asked
irascibly, "Why, in this administration, does it have to be so
protracted. a process? Why can't the president just do it instead of
making such a production out of it?"

From books, one learns that procrastination is in fact characteristic
of every aspect of Clinton's political life. In Bill Clinton: As They
Know Him, David Gallen reports that during his campaigns Clinton's
tardiness was almost institutionalized; he was consistently an hour
late. In On the Make, Meredith Oakley tells us he was 40 minutes late to
the first joint session of the Arkansas legislature a week after his
inauguration. In Strange Bedfellows, Tom Rosenstiel writes that during
the presidential campaign everyone campaigning for Clinton managed to
be on time for local satellite interviews-Mario Cuomo did 100 of
them-but Clinton himself did very few: "To do local satellite
interviews you had to run on time. Clinton never did." And Rosenstiel
also reports that on election night, "the rejected president came out
after 10 o'clock and said all the right things," but that "Clinton made
them all wait past midnight, late for his own victory speech." And once
in the White House, Clinton continued to be chronically late. George
Stephanopoulos, to be funny, wore a black and white sticker around the
White House saying, "He's running a few minutes late."

5. Clinton's time is poorly allocated: The most important tasks are
left to the last moment. You have surely read two dozen descriptions of
Clinton's wild last-minute rush to decision and action when the clock
or the calendar will tolerate no delay.

You may also have witnessed one such race with time. In September 1993,
Clinton delivered a speech to Congress in which he presented his plan
for health-care reform. He arrived at the last conceivable moment. When
he began to speak, the Tele-PrompTer gave him the wrong speech. He had
been revising, changing, writing, and rewriting his speech all day and
had been deciding and undeciding what it should say until time ran out
and frantic aides rushed him to the Congress. In the agitation, an aide
running the TelePrompTer hit the wrong button, merging the new speech
with another.

Before the mistake was corrected, Clinton spoke without the correct
text for seven long minutes. His delivery was only slightly marred.
He greatly impressed everyone who did not know that he was relying
on an almost photographic memory.

This perpetual leaving of crucial work to the last minute is yet another
integral part of Clinton's pattern of paralysis.

6. Clinton insists that others submit to exactly his way of doing
things, and is reluctant to allow others to do things because of the
conviction they will not do them correctly. In the first month of
Clinton's administration, the press learned that Clinton refused to
delegate authority. David Broder analyzed Clinton's first appointments
and quoted "Clinton insiders" who observed, delicately, that the choices
revealed "Clinton's intent to keep the policy reins firmly in his own
hands."

Five months later, in June, Newsweek investigated managerial problems
in the White House and reported that Secretary of State Warren
Christopher and attorney Vernon Jordan had "told Clinton that the
problem began with him" and urged him to delegate some of his
decision-making power.

Five months after that, in November 1993, Ann Devroy re in a context,
and it is not static. It affects others, it affects Clinton ported in
The Washington Post: "Clinton, by most accounts, wants only one person
to be in charge: himself."

And Al Hunt in The Wall Street Journal observed that "the White House,
taking its cue from its leader, is a managerial nightmare." Hunt
further reported: "One of the smartest Democratic hands in this city is
appalled by the president's style. 'He lacks any discipline, he hates
planning or strategic thinking, and he doesn't want to be surrounded by
bright, independent-thinking people."'

A half year later came The Agenda, in which Woodward relayed the exact
words Lloyd Bentsen had addressed to the president when he implored him
to delegate more power: "I've sat beside you when somebody else is
talking at one of these meetings, and I watch your eyes just fog over."
Bentsen told Clinton he was passing out at meetings because he was
trying to make all decisions and to go without sleep. The older man told
the younger he simply had to stop. Clinton agreed sorrowfully, says
Woodward, but things did not change.

Clinton's refusal to delegate authority is the final component in his
paralysis. By distrusting others to live up to his standards, by
insisting on holding on to all power, he turns his own disordered and
exhausted consciousness into a bottleneck through which all decisions
must pass and he does this even as he flees constantly from the burden
of making decisions. His mind is like a Rube Goldberg machine set to
throttle itself.

This is the Clinton who, even as he complains that he does "too much,
too fast," even as he blames public rejection on his "doing too much,
too fast," even as he vows year after year that he will stop "doing too
much, too fast," senses in some unacknowledged realm of his being that
he is paralyzed and cannot move.

It is unsurprising that Clinton desperately needs Hillary' s "brains,
logic, and focus." He is too damaged to function without an
epistemological crutch. And it is unsurprising that, while she was
preoccupied with her health-care project, Clinton had another
epistemological crutch with him all day long: George Stephanopoulos. In
a Time article, April 4, 1994, Stephanopoulos's function as an
epistemological support system to Clinton was clearly described. Writer
David Van Biema quoted Kiki Moore, a former aide to Clinton, as saying,
"George has an innate knowledge of the president's thought process."
And Van Biema reported that Stephanopoulos was the president's "policy
body man" who hovered near the president all day, "providing continuity
and calculating each issue's relative importance."

This interesting job consisted of providing Clinton with the logical
integrations he cannot perform and with the priorities he cannot
identify.

Van Biema also interviewed press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who said of
Stephanopoulos, "He's the place where all things come together. He is
the one person. who doesn't lose the forest for the trees."
Stephanopoulos has been one of the solutions to the problem Clinton
confided to Arsenio Hall.

Chaos

Clinton's cognitive paralysis does not exist in a void. It exists
himself, and ultimately it affects his presidency. The most visible
effect, which has appalled the political-media establishment, is the
disorder that reigns at the White House. In the course of the publicity
debut of The Agenda on 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace said incredulously to
Woodward, "Chaos?" And Woodward replied unsmilingly, "Chaos. Absolute
chaos." It was not that Wallace or his audience had not heard something
like that before. Clinton's White House had already been advertised by
Al Hunt in The Wall Street Journal as a "managerial nightmare." But
chaos is a far more terrible word, with metaphysical and evolutionary
repercussions: It is reality before it has been ordered by
consciousness. And that is what Woodward intended to convey. Embodied in
a political narrative, The Agenda is a primordial drama in which
crippled consciousness cannot create order.

One can fix "a managerial nightmare." One cannot fix crippled
consciousness. One cannot fix Bill Clinton.

It appears to calm the nerves of the editors of The Washington Post to
analyze the Clinton White House as though the Post were a management
consultant and the White House a client. Its editorials set forth
simple organizational errors and recommend sound changes-all in a
disturbed, even irritated, voice. Clinton, they say, "seemed to
countenance-and, thus, authorize-the unstructured, fragmented, weak-
accountability, free-form professional lifestyle that has marked his
White House."

But editorials are too short to convey the magnitude of the problem. So
on March 28, 1994, Post Editorial Page Editor Meg Greenfield used her
column in Newsweek to describe it in detail. And the details are deadly.
One can only list some of the subjects Greenfield discusses-all of them
manifestations of grotesque irresponsibility.

After making her devotions before the altar of "balance," Greenfield
considers:

- "The tendency in the Clinton White House to finesse accountability
for much of what goes on.

- The "almost blithe disregard of the importance of establishing lines
of responsibility for actions in government."

- The role of Mrs. Clinton, "who wields enormous derivative power
without any visible institutional check on it."

- The existence of "endless White House aides, the swarmers, who are
more or less into everything but held to account for nothing."

- The meetings with "large hodge-podges of wanderers in, of kibitzers
from down the hall."

- The "awful lot of important people who are known as 'in and outers'
friends, consultants and so forth.. who come and go and who have a
considerable influence over decisions the government then makes-but who
in no way have to deal with the ill effects (or ill repute) when what
they counsel goes wrong.

The White House is presumed to be the brain and central nervous system
of the presidency. As portrayed by Greenfield in Newsweek, the Clinton
White House is the brain and central nervous system of an idiot.

Greenfield reaches the conclusion that only Clinton "can fix this,
because it couldn't occur if he didn't let it happen." In saying that,
Greenfield is looking reality in the face. Then, a few sentences later,
she flinches and looks away. She advises Clinton "to intervene," as if,
somehow, he were separate and separable from the chaos.

But Clinton is not separable from the chaos. It is his chaos. Left to
his own devices, Clinton always generates chaos around him.

That is what young Hillary Rodham discovered when she joined young
Clinton in Arkansas as he was campaigning in his very first election in
1974. All biographers tell the same story in greater or lesser detail.
Norman King, in Hillary: Her True Story, writes: "Hillary was stunned
at the absolutely anarchic lack of discipline at Clinton's
headquarters. Instinctively, she stepped in and began turning things
rightside up. Soon enough she was barking out commands. The words
'Hillary said' became a cry that everyone heeded."

This has been Hillary's function from that day to this. It is her
consciousness that has always imposed order on Clinton's chaos.

There are actually two islands of order suspended in the primordial
Clinton mess: the self-contained universes of Vice President Gore and
of the first lady. In a foray into comparative epistemology, Eleanor
Clift writes in Newsweek (September 13, 1993) that where Clinton runs a
meeting "throwing out ideas and endlessly circling the subject," Gore is
linear. Linear, of course, is the post-Marshall McLuhan word for
purposeful, logical thinking. Gore is intellectually organized, says
Clift; he is "focused," and so is his operation.

The other island of order is Mrs. Clinton's. She has a bigger staff than
does the vice president, and it is the very model of efficient
organization. In Time (March 21, 1994), Nancy Gibbs transmits a
description of Hillary' s work universe from Ann Wexler, a career
Democrat who was a "senior officer" in the Carter White House. Said
Wexler: "[Hillary's] operation is the most organized, the most focused,
the most coordinated, and the most disciplined in the White House."

Gibbs says two other significant things:

- Mrs. Clinton moves throughout the various activities of the Clinton
White House at will: "Hillary functions in the White House rather like
the queen on a chess board. Her power comes from her unrestricted
movements."

- And conversely, Clinton and his staff always consult Hillary. Staffers
"chart her moves and interests with as much care as his. Few were hired
without an audience with her; when the President has a question about
almost any sensitive issue that arises the refrain is the same: 'Run
this past Hillary."'

Time is supplementing Greenfield's analysis. In Time, the brain and the
central nervous system of the White House is not exactly the brain of an
idiot. It is the brain of Hillary Clinton, which she shares with her
cognitively crippled, acutely dependent husband. As Woodward put it,
she is part of Clinton's brain. As Woodward didn't put it, this does not
add up to one single, decently functioning mind.

Now, a brief look at the impact of Clinton's cognitive damage on him.
Specifically, we will look at how he responds emotionally to his
predicament. The most important and least surprising fact about
Clinton's emotional state is that he is in pain. As he circles
endlessly around his unresolved policy conflicts, he lives in an
epistemological hell. In all the publications and books I have read, I
have found only four people who see him as a real human being who is
suffering. David Gergen, quoted by Woodward, describes Clinton as being
in "psychological anguish." Lloyd Bentsen, cited by Woodward, describes
Clinton as revealing intellectual "doubt." At the very end of a long
article about Clinton, Joe Klein of Newsweek, with no contextual
preparation, drops in a single word, "tortured." And when David Shaw of
the Los Angeles Times wrote about Clinton, he said that decision making
for Clinton was an 'excruciating" process-which clearly implies pain or
suffering. These are insightful and deeply sympathetic reactions to
Clinton, but this perspective is rare.

By contrast, Clinton's defenses against pain and suffering are almost
universally observed. Because all are tied to, if not solely caused by,
his cognitive deficiencies, and because they have had dreadful effects
on his presidency, I'll list three of them. You know them already:

- Clinton values work and productivity, but only as a means to status
and power. By his own say-so, he has valued nothing more than status and
power since he was young. He is always aware of his relative status in
power relationships. And he is extremely sensitive to criticism,
especially if it comes from people with high status and power. His
record of "caving" under pressure, of betraying both principles and
people, is due most fundamentally to his lack of confidence in his own
mind. In the face of an array of power, he capitulates. He has betrayed
every significant group in the Democratic party and numerous friends to
win favor with their enemies. The loyalty he commands from his natural
political allies is paper thin.

- Clinton's mind is out of control. He has an unusually strong need to
be in control of factors outside of him. When he is unable to control
others, he grows angry, although the anger is usually not expressed
directly. His entire relationship with the national press has been a
covert battle for control, and it has been far more intense than you may
know. See Tom Rosenstiel's Strange Bed-fellows for a shocking report on
the spying by the Clinton campaign on the national press during the
presidential campaign.

- Clinton's perfectionist demands, which delay and inhibit his decision
making, are due in great part, as Lloyd Bentsen says so diplomatically,
to his intellectual "doubt." Clinton is inordinately afraid of making
mistakes. He is in so far over his head, over his capacity to do the
work required for the presidency, that he exists in a state of terror.
It apparently builds up in the night, and, according to Woodward, the
next morning he vomits out the accumulated terror all over George
Stephanopoulos in the form of uncontrolled explosions of rage. Clinton's
eyes bulge, his face grows scarlet, he yells, he screams, he shrieks.
While Clinton is quite capable of controlling this rage and conceals it
from the public-it has only been glimpsed by accident and briefly-he
does not control it in private. According to Meg Greenfield, he
takes his rage out on vulnerable members of his family and on
employees-on those over whom he has power.

Stand back and look at all these defenses against pain and fear: Clinton
is traitorous. Clinton is a devious manipulator. Clinton grovels before
the powerful. Clinton bullies the weak.

These are the attributes of Clinton that are known in both his public
and his private life to those he has conned and betrayed. They co-exist
with what Joe Klein calls "his relentless huggy, weepy emotionalism"-and
relentless is a significant word. Huggy and weepy in this pale-eyed man
with the eternally crooked smile are also manipulative weapons.

These do not begin to exhaust Clinton's defensive repertoire. But they
are enough to explain waning political support. All of the
epistemological problems and all of the emotional defenses listed under
"I Can't Move" and "Chaos" are too well known for Clinton to win
sustained respect.

There is only one Clinton defense mentioned so far that does not fit
this pattern. It is the mysterious one-the strange robotic repetition of
"I do too much, too fast," that broken record that Clinton plays in all
ears, especially when public approval drops and when important people
criticize him.

Do we have a better idea now of what this half-boast, half-lament might
mean? We are certainly in a better position to speculate. Clinton, to
repeat, prizes work and productivity, almost to the exclusion
of pleasure and interpersonal relationships. He knows they are the
crucial means to his end: status and power. But the subject of
productivity fills him with dread, because he is cognitively paralyzed.
When he recites monotonously that he tries "to do too much, too fast,"
or that he sometimes "works hard but not smart," he is actually saying,
"I am very intelligent. I work terribly hard. I am not slow, I am fast.
I think and I work with great speed." It seems painfully clear that with
those words Clinton is denying his cognitive paralysis and is asserting
his self-worth.

And he has been doing this over and over and over again for more than 15
years.

But in one way, the "I do too much, too fast" phenomenon still remains
mysterious, because that mechanically recited formula is both a boast
and a lament. It is as if Clinton, in robotically asserting pride, is
also robotically confessing shame. It reminds one of that strange pledge
he made before entering the governor's office in Arkansas, that he would
"try not to do everything at once. He seems to be saying that he is
under some kind of compulsion to do something irrational-something
involving intellectual scattershot, something involving speed.

It is not surprising that of all the questions asked at the beginning
of this article, and all the questions answered, that this one endlessly
reiterated formula of pride, of shame~f helpless, disintegrating
racing-remains the code that is hardest to break.

Obsessive Compulsive

In a New York Times Magazine article (March 8, 1992), Peter Applebome
reports the following information: As a result of Roger Clinton's jail
sentence for drug trafficking, the Clinton family went through
counseling sessions in which Bill Clinton participated. Clinton told
Applebome that his principal discovery about human relationships was
this: "I finally realized how my compulsive and obsessive ambition got
in the way."

There is no reason to doubt that Clinton was diagnosed as being
"compulsive and obsessive," since that is what journalists have been
documenting since Clinton entered the White House.

All of Clinton's thinking problems and emotional defenses described in
this article are symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder
as identified by the American Psychiatric Association. (See Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition revised, pages
35~356.) In fact, I have used their words to introduce each
psychological trait and I have italicized them to call them to your
attention. You will recognize them from my text.

The diagnostic literature says that at least five of the criteria of
Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder must be present to identify
someone as suffering from this disorder. Here are five that describe
Clinton:

 1. Perfectionism that interferes with task completion, e.g.
inability to complete a project because [the person's] own overly
strict standards are not met.

 2. Preoccupation with details... to the extent that the major point of
the activity is lost.

 3. Unreasonable reluctance to allow others to do things because of a
conviction that they will not do them correctly.

 4. Excessive devotion to work and productivity to the exclusion of
leisure activities and friendships.

 5. Indecisiveness: decision making is either avoided, postponed, or
protracted, e.g. the person cannot get assignments done on time because
of ruminating about priorities.

Here are additional characteristics found in people with this disorder,
which also describe Clinton. They are taken from a long, repetitive, and
badly written piece of narrative prose. Again, you will recognize them
from my text:

 1. No matter how good an accomplishment is, the person does not feel
it "good enough."

 2. The person allocates time poorly; the most important tasks are left
to the last moment.

 3. The person usually keeps postponing the pleasurable activity, such
as a vacation, so that it may never occur.

 4. The person may avoid or postpone decision making because of an
inordinate fear of making a mistake.

 5. The person may experience considerable distress because of the
indecisiveness.

 6. The person has an unusually strong need to be in control. When
unable to control others, he often ruminates and becomes angry.

 7. The person is often extremely sensitive to social criticism,
especially if it comes from someone with considerable status or
authority.

I have omitted several symptoms about which I have read nothing or which
clearly do not describe Clinton, but the vast majority do describe him.
That is why the clinical language readily served to introduce
journalistic observations.

These psychological classifications are not fixed. Their boundaries are
not absolutes. But they are not tone poems or impressionist paintings
either.

What journalists have been observing about Clinton for two years, what
Clinton calls "my compulsive and obsessive ambition," conforms
strikingly to the clinical descriptions above.

Personality disorders range from the mildest of cases to the acutely
severe. And there are also psychotic forms of these disorders. Clinton
clearly is not psychotic-he is not "crazy." But his problem is
nonetheless severe.

Its severity is captured by its duration, by his dependence on his wife
and on Stephanopoulos, and by the fact that he has found it impossible
to conceal the problem from the press. And it is captured most
shockingly by the word Stephanopoulos uttered to Panetta: never. To say
that Clinton "never" makes a political or policy decision may be
exaggerated. But even if exaggerated, it communicates the intensity of
the problem. Only acute distress over Clinton's cognitive paralysis
could inspire Stephanopoulos to use the word never.

It is important to remember that Clinton's indecisiveness-his
paralysis-is not consciously acknowledged. He is literally unaware of
it. It is surrounded by a Chinese wall of rationalization,
reinterpretation, and evasion. He does not even have language to
describe it. He only knows that he tries "to do too much, too fast." "I
can't move" is the expression I have given him.

And he surely does not know that beneath this Chinese wall, yet another
psychological conflict lies buried. It, too, first presents itself in
an incoherent confidence to an interviewer and it too must be decoded.
But this time, you will see, the voyage into Clinton's conflicts comes
to an end, leaving only the consequences to contemplate.

THE SECOND CONFLICT

 "It's a very difficult thing to be raised with a myth. All of my
relatives tried to make it a positive rather than a negative thing. But
I think I always felt, in some sense, that I should be in a hurry in
life, because it gave me a real sense of mortality.

"I mean, most kids never think about when they 're going to have to run
out of time, when they might die. I thought about it all the time
because my father died at 29 before I was born. By the same token, I
feel as if I've had a very full life. I mean, whatever happens to me,
I've already outlived him by years. And I think it's one reason I was
always in such a hurry to do things-which is both good and bad.

"But any way, I think when I was younger that's one of the reasons I was
always in a hurry. And I also think I thought I had to live for myself
and for him, too. I sort of had to meet a very high standard of conduct
and accomplishment, in part because of his absence."

- Bill Clinton discussing the death of his father before he was born, in
an interview with Charles Allen, March 15, 1991

We clearly see here the roots of one theme in Bill Clinton's psychology
that we have already encountered in a different form: "hurry," the
rapid, racing, staccato theme of "I do too much, too fast." But there is
a second theme here: "death." When a child ruminates about his own death
"all the time," the first thing one thinks of is depression. And
depression, which immobilizes people, seems to evoke the second
familiar theme-"I can't move."

As Bill Clinton experienced them in childhood, the themes of
inertia, his "I can't move," and of action, his "too much, too
fast," were originally "I'm going to die when I'm young" and "I must
hurry to do things." I foreshorten them here to "death" and "hurry."

"Death"

Clinton has not identified depression in himself as far as I know. That
has not kept people from continuously talking about it and writing about
it. What kind of depression we do not know-there are many kinds-but
Clinton seems to have had sleeping and eating disorders since he was
young, with intermittent periods of crashing self-esteem. These
symptoms show up in all types of depression.

Childhood

In addition to thinking about death "all the time," Clinton ate too much
as a child: Soon after he was elected, this psychology-conscious
president staged an encounter session with formal "facilitators" at
Camp David to encourage his new cabinet members to "bond" with each
other. The session leaked, and Newsweek on February 15, 1993, published
the following item: "[Clinton] talked about how he was a fat kid when he
was 5 or 6 and how the other kids taunted him."

Georgetown

In college, classmates noticed that Clinton didn't sleep much. His
roommate Tom Campbell repeats what Clinton told him: "During freshman
year, he developed that habit, he says, of sleeping only four hours a
night, and then taking a couple of 20 minute naps during the day."
Campbell says Clinton also told him that he had a deliberate policy of
not sleeping, because "Napoleon and all the great leaders" got by on
very little sleep.

Clinton was glamorizing his insomnia.

Oxford

In his early 20s, Clinton entered into correspondence with his draft
board, writing the letter which has been so highly publicized. A
section in Clinton's letter to Col. Eugene Holmes dated December 3,
1969, says: "At that time, after we made our agreement and you had sent
my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of my
self-regard and self-confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks
and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion
brought sleep." In this letter, Clinton does not compare himself to
Napoleon and other great leaders but reports, in adult language, on a
crashed self-esteem, severe insomnia, and "eating compulsively."

Arkansas 1980

By this time, the Sun King had made his appearance, the man who was
ravenously hungry for adulation. It was the Sun King who was expelled
from the Arkansas governorship after one term. The massive rejection was
a frightful blow to Clinton, and his reactions as he grasped what was
happening to him are painful to read.

Kathy McClanahan, a childhood friend of Clinton, told David Gallen about
Clinton's hysterical weeping when he realized he was losing the
election, and how he hid in the bottom of the back seat of her car so
that no one could see him. It was an extraordinarily appropriate
reaction for a man whose sense of reality is dependent on the
perceptions of others.

Some biographers after interviewing his political friends report that
he rebounded briskly from the shock of defeat. Some biographers tell a
different story  that following his defeat, Clinton withdrew into
partial seclusion and suffered for a few months from depression. Some
say it was severe and even dangerous; some say it was mild. There is no
earthly way to know.

What one can know, because Clinton has described it, is the depth of his
despair during that period of defeat. In a May 1992 article in Vanity
Fair, Gail Sheehy reported that "Bill remembers during this dark period
being. . .haunted by a sense of imminent death."

That "sense of imminent death" could not be seen from the outside, but
what could be seen is appalling to read about. It was the hysteria of
the Sun King trying frantically to understand the loss of the highest
value of his life, and his struggle to find a way to get it back.
Clinton abased himself before the Arkansas electorate: He pleaded, he
begged, he apologized, he groveled. He tried to clasp the hands of
everyone in the state of Arkansas to ask forgiveness. It is quite clear
that Clinton's self-esteem had crashed.

Of all the published interpretations of this period in Clinton's life,
by far the most interesting and important comes from Charles Allen, an
Arkansas educator whose Ph.D. thesis became The Comeback Kid, and
Jonathan Portis, with whom Allen wrote the book. Portis is a former
editor at the Arkansas Gazette and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis and
has observed Clinton in action since the 1970s: "Clinton is a captive to
his fear of losing... [His loss in] 1980, when he was tossed out of the
governor's chair for two years, crushed Clinton's self-esteem and sent
him into an emotional tailspin. He became withdrawn, muttering to his
friends that Arkansas didn't deserve a man of his ability. He now
professes to believe that he learns more from tough times than from easy
experiences. What he learned in 1980 is that a political loss,
especially one that threatens his career, hits him deep in the psyche.
Losing made him terrified of losing." (Emphasis added.) It was for this
reason, say Allen and Portis, that Clinton will do anything and say
anything to win-that is to say, he will do anything and say anything not
to lose.

The Presidential Campaign

Here, representatives of the national press got their first close look
at Clinton. In between the political coverage and the coverage of
Clinton's most striking lies  about the draft and about
adultery-reporters learned about some of Clinton's symptoms: the nonstop
eating, the nights with only a few hours of sleep, the explosions of
rage. Some of this, particularly the eating, which was visible, trickled
into the news coverage. Most of it did not.

ABC correspondent Chris Bury, interviewed by David Gallen when the
campaign was over, knew he was looking at psychological difficulties:
"Everybody in the press bus thought that [Clinton] performed poorest in
the morning and that he was kind of sluggish. I don't know if depressed
is the right word, but he was often off and he didn't really get going
until late in the day when he gave his best performances.

"He's an extraordinary performer and if he was able to mask depression
and anger and other emotions which might leave others with a negative
perception, I think he did a good job of it."

Bury, who found Clinton to be a "masterful politician," was most
afflicted by Clinton's dishonesty: "I think.. .he's got a terrible
problem with the truth..." As Tom Rosenstiel shows in Strange
Bedfellows, many, perhaps most, journalists who covered the Clinton
campaign knew that Clinton had told serious lies. But the most astute
among them also came away from the campaign with the uneasy sense that
Bill Clinton seemed to be suffering from and "masking" some kind of
depression.

The Presidency

After his first six chaotic months in office, during which Clinton
lurched from one self-made crisis to another and the public opinion
polls dropped like stones, a rumor sped from the White House to the
press. Frightened aides were whispering to reporters: "He's lost his
confidence."

Margaret Carlson in Time reported, "His downward spiral in popularity
and his shift in positions are creating a sense of public vertigo. More
than ever, Americans regard their new president with two nagging
questions: Is he up to the job? And, What does he stand for?. One
long-time friend who spoke with the president by telephone last week
reported that he never sounded 'so sad in his life.'"

And then, after the president named Gergen as his adviser, the story
changed. Dan Balz and Ann Devroy of The Washington Post wrote, "The
impact on Clinton [of Gergen's appointment] has been noticeable to his
advisers: 'He had become so uncertain that all the political
surefootedness that he used to be known for was gone, says one. That is
starting to turn around."'

This is the same period when the New Clinton had suddenly become
decisive and had suddenly stopped doing "too much, too fast." Now he had
suddenly become self-confident. The reporters had no idea just how
fragile was the president's self-esteem.

But the Gergen solution didn't last. By August 1994, Clinton's
administration was again in a chaotic state, again facing a hostile
Congress, again in danger of losing on its major initiatives. The polls
again crashed, this time to their lowest level to date. And reports of
black emotions again began to leak from the White House. Again, Clinton
confronted the possibility of political death, and again it hit him
"deep in the psyche."

Jack Nelson and John M. Broder of the Los Angeles Times (August 26,
1994) said the president and first lady were describing the political
hostility they encountered as a "surreal nightmare." Depicting "an
intensely frustrated Clinton," Ann Devroy and Dan Balz reported
(Washington Post, August 14, 1994): "Associates describe Clinton as
having struggled through a period of intense anger and bitterness,
combined with a belief that no other president had been as mistreated by
the news media and by partisan opponents."

One "associate" said Clinton has compared the situation to his loss in
Arkansas-the loss that left him, in Gall Sheehy's paraphrase of his
words, "haunted by a sense of imminent death."

We cannot know his present state. All we know is that a panic-stricken
Clinton, who will do anything not to lose, has for the first time agreed
to delegate authority. He has ceded unprecedented power to his new
chief of staff, Leon Panetta.

 Clinton has also communicated his despair with an analogy. Nelson and
Broder report that he has been "comparing himself to Ahab, locked in a
death embrace with Moby Dick in the form of an unruly Congress. The
beast keeps dragging him under... and he can barely catch his breath
before another dive carries him down again."

"Hurry"

When a well-known person tells a preposterous lie about him-self-the
kind of lie that everyone who knows him or who has worked with him or
for him or has read about him knows to be untrue-there is always a
strong possibility that he does not know he is lying and that he is
denying something about himself that he cannot endure to allow into
consciousness. There is something about Clinton's "hurry"  -his "hurry
to do things" because he might die young-that caused him to tell such a
lie.

In the same long interview with Charles Allen on March 15, 1991, in
which Clinton communicated his incoherent and childish "hurry" problem,
he also gave an adult name to that problem. He described himself as
"compulsively overactive." He told Allen proudly that he was the kind of
person "who just likes to organize every minute of the day," immediately
serving that he is "compulsively overactive."

Clinton's portrayal of himself as superlatively organized was a
staggering untruth. Clinton has always been supremely disorganized. He
has always functioned in chaos. He has never adhered to a schedule. And
his chronic lateness is measured by intervals of half hours and hours,
not minutes.

In making that statement to Allen, Clinton was violently denying some
of his most obvious and politically damaging characteristics.

The strange statement is also reminiscent of something we have seen
before. Like "I try to do too much, too fast," it is a boast combined
with a lament. Clinton was proud of his "compulsive overactivity" but
by redefining his compulsion as organization, he was revealing shame.

For Clinton, the entire phenomenon of "hurry" contains some component
over which he is in deep conflict.

Before we can begin to fathom the meaning of that conflict, however, we
must understand the nature of Clinton's "compulsive overactivity." The
symptoms are so obvious, and so disturbing, that they have generated
whispering within the administration and, startlingly, a diagnosis
among psychology-conscious members of the public.

 Based on the few scattered memories of the young Clinton in print, it
seems he has been compulsively overactive, has been hurrying, all his
life: He and his mother report that, as a child, he got a D in conduct
for talking too much and not giving the other children a chance to
answer the teacher's questions; he says, "I could never keep my mouth
shut"; a high-school friend recalls that "it was hard for him to relax
really, and just take it easy"; while at Oxford, he wrote to a friend
that aside from the "unavoidable" library work, he was "continuously on
the move"; he later recalled that he spent his first two weeks at Oxford
walking 14 hours a day.

More detailed observations start with Clinton's entry into public
life, when reporters began to observe him. One of the first things they
discovered was his extreme distractibility.

Arkansas news reporter Anne Jackson, speaking to David Gallen, has many
memories of Clinton as governor. Talking about Clinton's chronic
lateness, she says, "Clinton is one of those people who is distracted by
people, and by stories, and by things. I mean, he's like a kid in a
candy store about the environment around him. He'll see something, and
if it gets his attention, he's gone. There's no clock in his head."

A particularly striking description of Clinton's distractibility, but
one in which Clinton-now a presidential candidate-is avidly pursuing
such distractions, comes from former UPI correspondent Steve Buel. Buel
describes what he saw at 11:30 p.m., after a "grueling day" of
campaigning: "I went to the gift shop looking for a copy of the Sunday
New York Times. and suddenly,... I felt almost like there were too many
electrons or something. Clinton had come in. He's looking at the
shelves and browsing... .[H]e's been at it nonstop for 18 hours and my
butt's kicked, but he's wired, walking the edges of this gift shop,
picking up magazines and flipping through them and picking up Sidney
Sheldon-type novels and picking up North Carolina tourist curios and
it's like he's eating the wall of the place. He's just picking the stuff
up. . and it doesn't satisfy his need for stimulus. . . .He's the
ultimate stimulus junkie; at 11:30 at night.. he needs more. He's almost
like one of those Japanese monster-movie characters that the more people
it eats, the bigger it gets....I buy my newspaper and flee."

The same kind of information emerged from the White House once Clinton
was president. He boasted to a C-SPAN reporter who interviewed him in
the Oval Office that "sometimes I read four or five books at once,"
adding "I never finish them but I get the gist of them."

And Newsweek reporters Eleanor Clift and Bob Cohn, with Jonathan
Alter and Joe Klein, spent a week at the White House "to chronicle
seven days in the life of a president" and reported in the July 12,
1993 issue: "During the campaign, his advisers observed that Clinton
seemed most in his element when he was watching two TVs, conducting
three conversations, playing cards, and eating-all at once. The
challenge for his aides-and particularly for his wife, Hillary-has
always been to slow him down and make him focus on one thing at a
time."

It appears that even when Clinton relaxes he tries to do everything at
once.

His most striking activity, however, is talking. As Leon Wieseltier
observes, Clinton has "a horror of silence." His capacity for talk is
legendary. During the presidential campaign, Clinton customarily talked
for 12 to 16 hours a day, leaving his entourage of reporters,
photographers, chauffeurs, and pilots dropping in their tracks. As
governor of Arkansas, Oakley reports, he was given to regaling the
press with half-hour-long "stream of consciousness monologues" until his
own press officer dragged him away. Woodward also reports on Clinton's
"monologues" and describes him as "rambling on inconclusively," or as
holding "endless, rambling policy seminars." David Broder says that
Clinton has a "penchant for talking issues to death." Jonathan Alter in
Newsweek reports that Clinton "thinks out loud in endless meetings" and
that he can "talk for seven hours and not notice the time."

Clinton not only talks all day, but even when he is alone, he talks into
the wee hours of the night. He telephones people late at night, when
they are asleep or going to sleep, with no awareness of their possible
discomfort.

Occasionally, a reporter grasps that something strange, something
irrational, is going on. Meredith Oakley writes, "[Clinton] becomes very
restless when left alone and seeks out conversation, however mundane or
inconsequential." And later, "He is almost compulsive in seeking people;
many of those midnight telephone calls for which he is famous have no
bearing on politics or business of any kind. Sometimes he has no more
in his mind than contact with another human being."

Clinton's continual talking has caused him immense political trouble,
both at home and abroad. And journalists, among others, have criticized
him sharply for the results. Thus, Murray Kempton wrote in the Los
Angeles Times when Clinton had abandoned his pledges to the Bosnian
Muslims: "William J. Clinton is an undisciplined and inveterate babbler.
That habit, while tiresome, is comparatively harmless in the ordinary
realms of life, but grievously damaging to any president who cannot
shake it off. The loosest-lipped of us might be wary of babbling if we
remembered that words have consequences inescapable for an American
president, for Clinton occupies an office from which no babble can
emanate without carrying the risk of being mistaken for a statement of
fixed intention."

And, on the domestic front, the awareness of Clinton's "babbling" is
repeatedly identified as a threat to his dignity and authority. Thus,
Ann Devroy writes in The Washington Post (May 22, 1994), "For Clinton,
there is virtually nothing he won't comment on, and a normal day for
him brings a gush of speeches, statements, remarks, and photo session
interviews. Even some of his own aides lament, as one did recently, that
he has 'cheapened the currency' of the presidency this way."

Such observers are making valid points. But after chastising Clinton
and, effectively, telling him to shut up, they do not ask why he
babbles, and why, even when the entire national press corps seems
dedicated to the goal of telling him to shut up, he keeps on talking.

Every once in a while, however, a journalist reveals an awareness of a
deeper problem. Matthew Cooper, reporting on the summit in Tokyo for
U.S. News & World Report, July 19, 1993, writes: "[N]ot every moment in
Tokyo was enjoyable for Bill Clinton. On a personal level, he had to
endure his own version of hell: sitting silently.

"At the first meeting of the heads of state, he was surprised to find
out that all the leaders. . were to speak one at a time. Clinton sat
listening to interminable speeches, especially from French president
Francois Mitterand, before he got to chime in.

"'He found it extremely confining,' says an aide."

The teacher who gave the young Clinton a D in conduct because he would
not take turns and give the other children a chance would not have been
surprised. Nor would the legions of people he has torn out of deep sleep
to talk to him. Sitting silently has always been Bill Clinton's "version
of hell."

But it is only in silence that one can concentrate and that one can
think. And, repeatedly, those who are politically closest to Bill
Clinton-those who feel able to advise him-have implored him to take
time off from the incessant talking so that he can find the time to
think. Whenever Clinton agrees, it is considered news, though the
adviser usually does not speak to the press directly about it. But at
least once, a major political figure, Vice President Al Gore, has told
the press what he advised Clinton to do.

Kenneth T. Walsh reported in U.S. News & World Report on July 19, 1993:
"White House advisers say Gore brings to the White House several
important traits that the president lacks, including self-discipline...
and in a strange twist, Clinton has begun emulating Gore... .As
Clinton's appro