The Clinton-Starr Show

“His store of pleasures must be sauc’d with pain.”

– Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s
             The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus

When faced with a bewilderingly unique situation in American political life, pundits often search for linkage in fiction’s more familiar storehouse. Thus, Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has been associated with Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor as well as Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and his fire-breathing fundamentalist, Elmer Gantry. For me, the peculiar pairing of Clinton and Starr (always together yet never in each other’s company) evokes the uneasy bond between Faust and Mephistopheles. Although Faust is usually portrayed as an archetype of Scientific Man, whose joining of knowledge to power is achieved by selling out to the Devil, his agenda was considerably more kinky. He wanted power, yes, but to launch space-time travels in order to enjoy quality time with Helen of Troy (“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships…?”). In celebrating beauty’s power, Faust was a libidinal voyager, transgressing boundaries and thus given over to such wishes from the depths of the self as can only be negotiated by an extraordinary facilitator. The ultimate role of Mephistopheles, however, is of moral enforcer, reminding Faust that everything that goes around comes around. Like the primitive superego in intimate proximity to the id, he may be temporarily and willingly bribed by the pleasure principle, but ultimately he is not appeased until his deadline is met.

As is often the case, ostensible oppositions conceal underlying affinities, at least up to a point. In “Dueling Sons of the South,” Peter Applebombe notes the two adversaries were “born months apart in Hope, Arkansas, and Vernon, Texas. Both were bright and ambitious, headed to Washington for college, went on to law school … [and] share a conspicuous religiosity,” and display the “sort of compulsive accent on manners that still defines the South.” (New York Times, September 13, 1998) But, Applebombe continues, while both stem from Protestant stock focused on human sinfulness, Clinton’s Southern Baptist style fosters grace and forgiveness, while Starr’s Church of Christ favors a sterner and more judgmental Calvinism.

As well as religious differences, there are profound psychological ones between them as well. The constant theme that plays through the often discordant melodies of Clinton’s childhood and earliest relationships is a confusion over boundaries and subsequently over self-identity and roles. His putative biological father, W.J. Blythe, a traveling salesman from Texas, practiced serial marriage with impunity. Virginia Cassidy, Clinton’s mother, was his fourth wife. For Blythe to play his part in conception before being shipped overseas by the Army, her pregnancy had to be cut short a month. (David Maraniss, First in His Class, 1995, also the source for the following biographical data) After the war, Blythe died speeding home to his pregnant wife, Virginia. William Jefferson was thus born a posthumous child.

As a nurse, Virginia was easygoing and notoriously flirtatious. As a mother she was intensely possessive, and when she brought Bill home to share his raising with her parents, an intense rivalry arose with her own mother, also a nurse and also flirtatious. Clinton’s grandfather, who had been an iceman, enjoyed a reputation in Hope congruent with the iceman’s easy accessibility to local residences (and later he ran an easy-credit grocery store). Clinton’s early years were thus spent among doting women and an undemanding paternal figure. He also suffered maternal abandonment in his second year when Virginia returned to her studies in New Orleans.

Against family advice and in the face of custody threats from her mother, Virginia in 1950 married a womanizing car salesman, Roger Clinton, who was abusive, alcoholic, and extremely jealous. By age fourteen, Bill was performing active oedipal roles in standing up to

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Roger and testifying against him in divorce court. Once Roger was out of the house, Bill took the improbable step of assuming the excluded and disgraced stepfather’s name, ostensibly to affiliate with his half-brother Roger, Jr. But as a family portrait places elder son Bill dominant over Virginia and little Roger, Bill Clinton had staked his legal claim to his mother as wife. “I was the father,” he said of those years (Maraniss, p. 40); but inscribing the father’s name could only be a poor substitute for internalizing the paternal role. Roger, Sr., moreover, did not cooperate in his own obliteration and, after hanging around outside the house for extended periods, prevailed on Virginia to remarry him within months of the name change.

Growing up with boundary confusion and generational role-reversal, Clinton evidently experienced high levels of maternal stimulation and libidinal entitlements without the counterbalancing restraints and guilt feelings negotiated through on-site, good-enough fathering. Clinton’s furtively kissing Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office with his eyes on the door captures this condition of an external or externalized conscience. Enter Starr, figuratively if not literally, at that kissing moment, for it is into this vacuum that Clinton’s Mephistophelean double strolls, and it is Starr’s authority, despite evasions and occasional protests, that Clinton is forced to concede.

As Clinton’s externalized conscience, Starr has been on the job almost as long as Clinton has been in the White House and promises to hang on indefinitely. Clinton may infer that Starr’s apparent ineptitude enables him to pursue his libidinal entitlements as before, under Starr’s distracted gaze. For Starr, having been around his Faust for too long, has begun reversing roles. In moonlighting his services, according to Frank Rich, (New York Times, June 6, 1998) he has sold out to the tobacco interests, whose goals are to impede justice and avoid accountability. Others closer to Clinton have maintained he had a closed-minded agenda to get the President from the outset, and in this sense the image of justice he embodies suffers not so much from blindness as from tunnel vision. As Independent Counsel, his loose policies on issuing subpoenas and leaking secrets to the press play the Faustian knowledge-is-power game; above all, he has been lured from his original Whitewater mandate to wander far afield after his subject’s Trojan beauties, displaying the child’s voyeuristic fascination in his subject’s primal scene.

Was Monica’s the face that launched a thousand subpoenas? Both men appear to have set their gaze elsewhere than inward—if not on Monica, then on each other. The predicament leaves Clinton without an adequate superego attachment. If he needs an authority to reign in his transgressions, Starr has succumbed to overkill; if he needs to convert Starr into a libidinal co-conspirator, his own political energies are being dissipated in dangling erotic bait before Starr’s gaze. Either way, Starr so far seems willing to comply, and Clinton is left to settle for the masochism of repeated public confessions, shaming exposures, and humiliating punishments. Congress, phalanxes of lawyers, the media, the clergy, the mental health community, and the American public are now called upon to function as substitutes for psychic agencies that either were not instilled or were subverted. In the end, while we may never fathom what motivates Clinton or Starr, we are unable to avoid dealing with the consequences of those motives.

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