Clinton’s “Blind Spots” and “The Rorschach Presidency” (article)

In this introduction to our Special Edition, I suggest that “The Rorschach President” is an appropriate label for President Clinton—and perhaps all Presidents—because people tend to see in the 42nd President what they want to see based

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upon their own hopes, fears, and disappointments. In the following scholarly contributions, many issues are probed including the lifting of the prohibition on talking publicly about Presidential sexuality, Clinton’s character and its defects, images of Republican “cannibalism,” the self-sacrifice of Clinton’s double: Leroy Newton Gingrich, Gingrich’s future prospects, comparisons between Nixon and Clinton and Nixon and Gingrich, Kenneth Starr’s view of the world, Jefferson’s DNA, and more. There are my own thoughts as a Clinton scholar and some references to the 23 articles and letters to the editor included in this issue. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion on the lack of limits in the current crisis in Washington.

Labeling William Jefferson Clinton has been a favorite pastime of watchers of this protean politician who keeps reinventing himself. In Arkansas in the 1980s he was known as “the Comeback Kid” to his admirers and “Slick Willie” to his detractors. Consistent distractors throughout his Presidency have been the vocal talk show hosts, who have spent the last six years denouncing him as a cowardly, draft dodging, dope smoking, lying, womanizing, morally corrupt, valueless, pro-homosexual, tax-and-spend liberal, posing as a moderate “New Democrat.” They have seen him as especially dangerous because he co-opts conservative ideas, such as balancing the budget, NAFTA, law and order (more police on the streets and three-strikes-and-you’re-out sentencing), and welfare reform. To them his liberal agenda includes plans to abort late term babies; socialize medicine; put the US military under the control of the UN; violate the constitution by taking guns away from ordinary citizens under the Brady Bill; save big, socialized government even after its collapse in the Soviet Union; and interfere with the free market and the military. Their contempt for and fear of his wife, Hilary Rodham, seems boundless, and causes her to be kept in the background during part of her husband’s tenure in the White House.

Blacks are vocal and consistent advocates of the President while traditional Democrats are mostly quiet supporters. Women are inclined to be more supportive of Clinton than men in general partly because of his concern for children, education, social welfare programs, abortion rights, and a thriving economy. Political pollsters and many pundits have long emphasized his edge with women voters which often relates to his weaknesses with other groups. For example, conservatives were livid when he publicly declared on several occasions, “I feel your pain,” while many women felt he understood their issues. They also admire his concern for peace and find him handsome in the JFK tradition. Though traditional Democrats and women say negative things about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and his prevaricating attempt to cover it up, few of them see these as impeachable offenses.

Journalists, psychohistorians, and other scholars have not usually been great fans of William Jefferson Clinton the man. Though they may prefer him to the Republican conservatives and have admired his political success and survival instinct, over time they have usually not found his policies or character to be consistent. For example, David Maraniss of the Washington Post, who I found to be the sharpest of the reporters covering Clinton when I read his work and spoke to him during the winter/spring primary campaign season of 1992, has just written an unflattering volume, The Clinton Enigma (1998). This contrasts with his incisive and mostly favorable biography, First in His Class (1995). Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and psychoanalyst, has pointed out some of the serious character flaws of our President including his narcissism. Personally, I have written less on Clinton during the last two years because of my own disappointment in his character, a disappointment which focuses on his lack of core values, his inconsistency, and lack of truthfulness.

“Superego lacunae” (literally, holes in his conscience) is a term I came across in studies of adolescents during my decade of psychoanalytic training, and it has come to mind when I have thought of Clinton in the last two years. My thoughts focus on the ways in which this embodiment of the great American success story from a small town in Arkansas is able to delude himself, and often others, because he just does not “get it” at times. At some moments, in some areas he appears to have normal impulse control; at other moments and in other ways he has an inability to see or respond to warning signals. As various psychological studies have demonstrated, most people lie at times. Most politicians lie and cover up at times, but they seldom get caught in the process, while Clinton has been caught in a variety of questionable situations including avoiding the draft, extramarital sex, and smoking marijuana. In addition, he was caught lying about these actions.

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He just does not seem to have that early warning system, the moral radar, that a consistent and reliable conscience provides.

Am I saying that the President is a psychopath who is incapable of recognizing right from wrong? That he is part of the one or two percent of the population who do not have the advantage of the early warning signals that a conscience provides? Certainly not. But I am saying he has significant lacunae, or what people commonly call “blind spots.” For example, having Monica Lewinsky perform fellatio on him did not count as sex in his mind because only intercourse was sex. (After all, he only ejaculated twice according to her testimony, and several articles submitted to us suggested that the sex in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was reminiscent of that of 17 year old boys in the 1950s! H. John Rogers writes that this is little more than heavy petting.)

The taboo prohibiting the discussion of sex and the Presidency, comparable to discussing the sex lives of our parents, has been lifted with a vengeance. Like all taboos, underneath the prohibition is an intense interest, one that becomes exaggerated by the prohibition. Lately the news has abounded with a story about a President having sex with a woman half his age and then having lied about it, only to have the truth exposed by DNA tests. The president was Thomas Jefferson, rather than William Jefferson Clinton, though the intensity of the interest was certainly related to interest generated by the DNA tests of the semen on Monica Lewinsky’s dress which was established to be that of President Clinton.

The case of Thomas Jefferson, whose brilliant contributions are chiseled in the fabric of our society as well as on Mount Rushmore, demonstrates that great leaders also can be very flawed human beings. Jefferson had perhaps as many as seven children by his slave Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his beloved deceased wife, and lied about it while professing to abhor miscegenation. Long before confirmation by DNA testing, Fawn M. Brodie, a brilliant pioneering psychohistorian, was pilloried by the Jefferson establishment for accepting the reality of this relationship and attempting to shed light upon it. (Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, 1973) The Jefferson historical establishment fought ferociously to maintain that this brilliant founding father was a man of pure intellect and character who was incapable of having sex with a slave and then lying about it. Such sexual activity seemed to horrify them more than did his anti-miscegenation views and they did their best to kill the psychohistorical messenger while mostly ignoring the black historians who had long accepted the Jefferson/Hemings relationship on the basis of oral tradition. Some severe attacks on William Jefferson Clinton’s Presidency on the basis of his extramarital sexuality seem to me to be based on as an idealized version of Presidential character as was held by the historians of Thomas Jefferson.

In 1992, Americans elected our 42nd President knowing that he had strayed sexually. Almost as soon as he had become a top contender during the primaries, Clinton had had to confront the issue of sexual scandal with Gennifer Flower’s allegations of a 12-year-long affair. The Arkansan appeared on national television with his wife, who

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had obviously forgiven him and who denounced Flower’s charges as “trash for cash” paid by a scandal sheet. Then came the allegations of Paula Corbin Jones which have continued to haunt his Presidency and which resulted in a four-year-long legal case. Jones—with her lawyers and publicist financed by enemies of Clinton—and would not go away. It was her charges which allowed the Independent Counsel, who has brought no charges relevant to the Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate activities that prompted his appointment, to link his investigation to the liaison with Monica S. Lewinsky. The Independent Counsel focused on what started as a consenual sexual relationship—instigated by the young intern who flashed the President—in his previously unsuccessful drive to find wrong doing on the part of Bill Clinton. (The Starr Report: The Independent Counsel’s Complete Report to Congress on the Investigation of President Clinton, 1998) This new approach saved Starr from having to resign to become dean of Pepperdine Law School without even coming close to bringing down the President. As with most others who have moments of passion in the workplace with people other than their spouses, it was not long before Bill and Monica were lying and covering up their activities in the face of rumors and attempts to publicly humiliate the President.

Monica’s orality is striking. First, she used her mouth to perform fellatio. One wonders what she hoped to suck out of Bill Clinton: Power? Love? A job?—she joked about being made “Special Assistant in charge of Blow Jobs.” Lewinsky talked compulsively about her affair to her “friend,” Linda Tripp, to her mother, and to at least nine other people. Then she hired a lawyer named William Ginsburg who could not stop talking on television and radio until he was dismissed to the relief of tens of millions of eardrums. Lewinky’s flood of words continued to the Starr staff and today she is slated to speak on several talk shows including at least one of the “tell all” television stations for a sizeable sum of money. Her mother, in tears, was intimidated into repeating what she could recall of those conversations about her daughter’s sexuality to the Office of the Independent Counsel. (I wonder what would have happened if she had flatly refused on the grounds of parent-child confidentiality in a matter that does not involve a plot to overthrow the government or something of similar weight.) When I saw a notice for a professional conference on the psychology of orality, I immediately spread the word that I welcomed a paper on the subject relevant to the Lewinsky affair and I received the interesting response from Robert Samuels of George Washington University. Amidst all these words it is worth noting what is not being said or what is lost in the avalanche of verbiage.

In therapy it is often helpful to examine what the client/patient is not talking about. During this crisis it is noteworthy that the flood of words coming out of Washington proportionately has had little to do with the passing in October of a budget of 520 billion dollar. This budget was negotiated by such a small number of Republican and Democratic leaders that prominent senators and congressmen complained that they had to vote without knowing what they were voting for in this grab bag type of budget—loaded with pork barrel legislation that could not have survived public scrutiny. Even though the public was annoyed by the constant political advertisements, few words addressed the flood of special interest money used by Republicans and Democrats in the campaign in violation of the spirit and sometimes the letter of the last campaign finance “reform.” Public scrutiny has not been directed on the health care bill of rights or the phony balanced budget deal. It turned back to Iraqi violation of the arms inspection agreement with the United Nations only after the pro-impeachment forces suffered a setback at the polls on November 3. Clinton had to demonstrate that he was stronger at home before he could get Saddam Hussein to cooperate, however temporarily.

The November 3rd election represented a major disappointment for congressional Republicans whose leader had pumped an extra ten million dollars into last minute electoral advertising that sought to point out Clinton’s moral leadership problems. The disappointed expectations brought about by the election would prove to be the downfall of Gingrich rather than Clinton. Since the Lewinsky Affair became a public issue, Republicans expected to win a veto-proof majority in the Congress. Instead, they lost five seats in the House of Representatives and saw Senator Alphonse D’Amato, a leading Clinton critic, defeated. Disappointed hope is a terrible thing, and the most conservative Republicans were determined someone had to pay. Since they were unable to feast on a weakened Clinton, they turned to devour his greatest rival who became their scapegoat.

Leroy Newton Gingrich did indeed feel

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that he was facing a group of cannibals according to the information sent me from the Drudge Report—“a Republican leaning Internet news service”—forwarded to me by James Sturges of the Psychohistory Discussion List. Note the language that Gingrich selected when he told his fellow Republicans that he was blackmailed by Republicans who are “hateful. They’re cannibals…. This will give us a chance to purge some of the poison that is in the system…. I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.’’ The Speaker’s resignation comments bring to mind the resignation speech of former Speaker James Wright, who, upon being brought down by Newt Gingrich, declared that the Georga Republican would be destroyed by his very own “mindless cannibalism.” (Allen R. Myerson, “From One Fallen Speaker to Another” New York Times, November 12, 1998: p. A24)

The fall of Gingrich does not really change the leadership in the country which since 1994 has been amazingly Southern: Clinton (Arkansas), Gore (Tennesse), Gingrich (Georgia), Armey (Texas), etc. When, in 1996, Dole of Kansas resigned to run for the presidency and Trent Lott from Mississippi defeated his fellow Mississipian for the leadership of the Senate, this Southern—all Baptist—domination seemed complete. The forced resignation of Gingrich soon led to the selection of Bob Livingston of Louisiana as Speaker of the House.

Though he grew up mostly in New Orleans with a struggling single mother, after his alcoholic father went off to Spain to avoid paying alimony, Livingston is from a family with a sense of history and without roots in the South. Nor is he a Baptist. Robert Linlithgow Livingston, one of 63 Robert Livingstons and the fourth with the middle name, Linlithgow, is from an Episcopalian blue-blooded, pre-Revolutionary, New York State family. Despite his bad temper, his colleagues say he is the type of leader who will allow House Republicans to publicly have Democratic friends, as was not the case with Gingrich.

It should also be noted that Julius Caesar (J.C.) Watts, Jr., of Oklahoma, the only Republican black in the House, was elected chair of the Republican Conference in an attempt to save the Party of Lincoln from appearing all white to an increasingly multi-colored electorate. Nor are the Republicans doing well with Jews. In the newly elected congress, Jewish Republican representation was reduced to one each in the House and Senate as compared to 21 Democratic Jews in the House and 10 in the Senate. But let us return to the Clinton/Gingrich connection.

The relationship of these hightly successful, controversial, Southern, marijuana-and-cigar-smoking, draft-dodging, womanizing, Baptist, politicians from dysfunctional families is worth noting. (See my article, “Taking Conservatives Seriously: Childhood, Punishment, Anger, and Rage at Politicians,” Journal of Psychohistory Vol. 26 No. 3: pp. 269-275.) The success of the Gingrich-led so-called “Republican Revolution” in 1994 resulted in the Speaker from Georgia being called in 1995 the most powerful man in the country. The media was soon referring to these two Southerners as twins: Bill as the “give-away-the-store” liberal Democrat, the too good twin, and Newt as the “starve-welfare-children-and-mothers-in-the-name-of-balanced-budgets” ideological bad twin. Gingrich arguably became the most hated man in America after his unsuccessful attempt to shut down the government to force the Contract for America on the Democrats and President. But until November, 1998, he remained popular with the Republican Party stalwarts for making them the congressional majority, and for being their most inspirational leader. In trying to weaken Clinton’s Congressional allies, he brought about his own downfall as speaker.

Is Gingrich politically dead? Should I toss out my folders and news clippings on Leroy Newton Gingrich? Many journalists did this with their Richard Milhous Nixon files after he lost the race for governor of California in 1962 and angrily told them that they would “not have Nixon to kick around anymore.” My answer is, “No.” Like Nixon, Gingrich can give a rousing speech to the party faithful and he has a better financial base than did Nixon. Unlike Livingston, but like Nixon, he has a vision of America he can communicate very well. Goldwater’s disastrous run for the Presidency in 1964 and the split of the Democrats over the war in Vietnam gave Nixon his opportunity, and Gingrich may hope that those galvanized by the Contract for America may miss their ideological North Star and long for his return. Perhaps essential to his chances is the Democrats’ holding onto the White House in the 2000 election since it probably will take him more than two years to rehabilitate his reputation and a two-term Republican President might leave him, in the public’s perception, as a man from another era.

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But Gingrich is 55-years-old, six years older than Nixon was when he went into the political wilderness; moreover, today instant communications gives a much greater advantage to the political unknown than was the case in 1968. It will be interesting to see what transpires.

It is time to turn to why I have labeled Clinton the Rorschach President in this introduction. In examining the responses of the country to a national drama associated with the Lewinsky affair, as well as the 28 articles and letters submitted to us for publication, I noted that these responses often said more about their source than they did about the actual subject.

Within the country, Clinton’s grand jury testimony and his acknowledgment of having been less than candid, set not only the talk show hosts, Republican critics, and the commentators talking, but also a large part of the citizenry. Much of the country reveled in the salacious facts released and the media searched for people who would publicly question Clinton’s moral right to remain in office. Considering the volume of words and their intensity, little of consequence was said. People seemed to find in Clinton’s behavior what they wanted to find, much like people taking a Rorschach Test. At times they seemed to be speaking of different Clintons, looking at his life as if it were as ambiguous in nature as cloud formations or ink spots. Liam Harte, an Englishman in America, even referred to him as a “chameleon” and the “Rorschach president.” Though for years I have been referring to Clinton as being like a Rorschach test into which people project their own needs, it was only when I read Harte’s piece that it became clear to me that “Rorschach president” was an important part of my title. This author’s facile way of viewing Clinton as described by his enemies also brought more clarity to my thinking and reminded me of an article I wrote demonstrating just how much Nixon was defined and motivated by his enemies. (“Richard Milhous Nixon Revisited: The Haldeman Diaries,” The Psychohistory Review Vol. 24: pp. 99-111) In this case, hating Clinton helps to define the men and women who hate him, just as my hatred of Nixon helped to define me as a young man.

Providing a sampling from some of the fascinating articles which we were unable to publish may be helpful as part of an overview. A psychologist sent a fine article on shame without saying much about any shame Bill Clinton actually experienced. A retired psychiatrist/ psychiatric professor delved into the Clinton marriage, finding sadomasochism as a central organizing principle. A mid-western professor had an interesting historical perspective on the rhythms and rhymes of witches and witch hunting in the 20th century. A professor from the Great Lakes region denounced, as an authoritarian fetish, the impulse of many to defend the Office of the Presidency. A prospective graduate student from Virginia sent us a very good, though non-psychohistorical, study of public reactions in Washington and rural North Carolina. An Argentine asserted that Clinton’s actions were caused by his reaction to being circumcised, but really provided no reliable evidence that he was, in fact, circumcised. A Jungian professor with more brilliance than focus roamed from the fall of the Roman Empire to Marilyn Monroe. A West Coast university psychologist drew interesting and sharp distinctions between the reactions by baby boomers and the political pundits to Clinton as the first Baby Boomer President. The credentials of the authors were usually quite impressive, with submissions we were unable to utilize—due to the decisions of our referees—coming from various institutions including Brown, Central Washington, Loyola, Missouri State, and Wayne State.

The writings we do include are by a talented group of psychologists, political scientists, psychotherapists, and historians as well as literary and independent scholars from Hong Kong to Manhattan. We will let them speak for themselves. I will now turn to one of the emotions associated with observing the events in Washington.

Schadenfreude is a German word which can cast considerable light on feelings which came to the fore in the Lewinsky affair. It means the pleasure one feels at the displeasure of others—in this case, the pleasure many conservatives, liberals, Republicans, and voters in general had in catching Clinton literally with his pants down and then having to admit to lying. After all, they have felt lied to by politicians in general and many especially felt lied to by Clinton who is a master at being all things to all people. At first, watching him squirm felt good to many, and to some it still feels good. It is the pleasure felt by grade school children who laugh when their classmate trips in front of everyone—half the laughter is based upon relief that it is someone else who tripped up. (As adults many felt great relief that it was Clinton’s affair and not their real or imagined affair that was exposed.) But just as some of those children feel

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guilty when the teacher proclaims it not nice to laugh at the displeasure of others, so some of the public felt that “we” are engaged in inappropriate behavior in laughing at Clinton. So the story shifted somewhat to how children and grandchildren are being hurt by the salacious behavior of the President. Then it shifted to how the media is hurting the children with these salacious materials and how we should focus on the important Constitutional issues involved rather than the sex, with some pundits continuing to make the point that if the President cheats on his wife, won’t he cheat on the voters and the country?

Throughout all this, stand-up comics and cartoonists are having a field day lampooning Clinton, Lewinsky, Ginsberg, Hyde, Starr, and whoever else was the main actor in the day’s drama. Republican politicians were thrilled by Clinton’s discomfort and the initial slowness of the White House staff and, especially, the Democratic congressional leadership, to defend the President from Hope. Democrats were equally pleased by the revelation that Henry Hyde of the Judiciary Committee and some other prominent Republicans involved in the attack on Clinton’s sexual adventures outside of marriage were exposed as having or having had extramarital affairs. After comparing Watergate and the Clinton accusations, let us then turn to Kenneth Starr.

A well-known thought from Karl Marx fits perfectly here. He declared that events in history have a way of happening twice, the first time as high drama, the second time as farce. So, Napoleon the conqueror of Europe gave way to Napoleon III who brought France to its knees before the armies of Bismarck. A modern application of the same idea is a comparison of Watergate with Whitewater/Travelgate/Filegate/Lewinsky. The first comes across to many of us as a high drama and a fitting subject for Greek tragedy while the latter comes across as appropriate materials for a soap opera. Watergate started out as a minor burglary and rose to the level of a Constitutional crisis while the Whitewater/Travelgate/Filegate/Lewinsky scandals seem destined to remain at the level of soap opera. There are many acts, but no great scenes.

Most Americans, even the majority of the 38% who just voted, seem not to have greatly changed their opinion of William Jefferson Clinton. They are less surprised by all the events in Washington than the media would make them out to be. After all, they know they elected a womanizer, and think that all politicians promise more than they can deliver and sometimes lie. As a group they are not enthusiastic about a witch hunt in the name of a purity crusade; after all, they know that they and their loved ones are less than perfect.

In conclusion, a few paragraphs on Kenneth W. Starr seem appropriate. The Office of the Independent Counsel under Starr has turned out to be the Office of the Independent Prosecutor, or, in the eyes of the less generous, the Office of the Republican Special Clinton Prosecutor. Starr, after getting much bad press for his handling of the Lewinsky affair as well as other things, was given an extraordinary opportunity to make his report to the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Henry Hyde. Though his presentation and response to questions was cheered by the applause of the majority Republicans, its prosecutorial nature led to the resignation of Starr’s ethics advisor, Sam Dash of Watergate fame.

Starr, who has plenty of political motives, also has personal ones. He is a talented lawyer with the instincts of a prosecutor who divides the world into the moral and the immoral. So, Clinton is immoral to him and he sees everything Clinton does with the zeal of the moralist turned prosecutor working under the banner of Independent Counsel. What many others see as an inept cover-up of personal behavior on Clinton’s part, he sees as a well-coordinated plan. This true believer is bound and determined to bring Clinton to the bar of justice—no matter what the cost to the nation. As he demonstrated at the end of his November 19th testimony, he sees himself as a public servant persevering at the cost of his own career. He appears oblivious to the many people he hurts in his intense drive to get Clinton. He seems totally cut off from his own, intense competitive feelings towards Clinton and the President’s associates.

If I read him correctly, Starr not only splits the world into “our team” and “their team,” the good and the bad, but he also shows signs of a reaction formation. By this I mean a very early cover up of feelings that leads him to not understand his own underlying feelings. Jimmy Carter has such a reaction formation—it causes him to smile nervously at times when he is quite angry as well as to look for ways of avoiding war since he is quite uncomfortable with his own aggression. Note that I am not saying that a reaction formation is in itself good or bad, just that it is a factor in analyzing a person’s personality.

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Kenneth W. Starr’s handling of what many Republicans called Sam Dash’s betrayal is a point in case. The facts are that at the pinnacle of Starr’s career, his ethics advisor publicly denounced his appearance before the Congressional Committee as inappropriately, and aggressively, prosecutorial. Instead of denouncing Dash, Starr publicly thanked him, declaring, “Sam Dash is a man of total principle. I love Sam, I respect him, I admire him, I think he’s a total man of principle.” In responding this way to the older man, he denied all of his own feelings of anger at what his staff called a betrayal and instead focused on his affection in a way Americans seldom do—as one man loving another man. This is not what is usually done in Washington. Sam Dash’s connection to the Watergate hearings—incidentally Hilary Rodham was a staff lawyer as well—reminds me that we should not forgo a Nixon/Clinton comparison.

The Nixon impeachment hearings loom over the activities of the House Republicans. Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and for awhile some Republicans hoped that Clinton would do the same. But a comparison of Nixon and Clinton’s psychodynamics and political situations reveals radical differences. Nixon was far more self-defeating than is the risk-taking Clinton, and Nixon’s cover-up, which was far more orchestrated than Clinton’s, involved a political rather than a personal act. When Nixon had driven away his closest allies he felt trapped and abandoned—and at that point he assumed the role of martyr in the summer of 1973. Bill Clinton, after apologizing to everyone who would listen in late August and September, has never felt as guilty, abandoned, without major allies, or caught up in a wave of popular enmity as Dick Nixon felt. Furthermore, the country was torn by Nixon’s rear guard efforts to continue the Vietnamese war as long as possible after being elected with the promise of ending it.

Other comparisons with 1973 are in order. As I write these words I hear an interview with former New Jersey Representative Peter Rodino who headed the committee overseeing the question of the impeachment of Richard Milhous Nixon. He describes having joint responsibility with the ranking Republican minority member on the Committee and having adopted the rules of evidence and procedure unanimously. This is totally at odds with the way in which 1998 Republicans have used their majority on the Judiciary Committee to force their will on the Democrats while claiming to be bipartisan and fair. Rodino said that, on the basis of the facts thus far before the Committee, the evidence does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. He also describes, upon having led the House to vote for impeachment, brushing everyone aside and going off to privately weep as he spoke to his wife on the telephone. Today, no such reverence for the Office of the President appears to exist. Instead, Republican strategy seems dominated by the right wingers who will only settle for Clinton’s demise.

In psychotherapy, patients learn how to better understand themselves and reality and to take responsibility for their own lives. The careful setting and keeping of limits of time and appropriate behavior is a central value of therapy that yields long term benefits in helping to achieve these goals. One of the most disturbing aspects of the entire crisis in Washington is the failure to accept limits. President Clinton would not accept the limits imposed by his office. He failed to ignore or laugh off a seductive intern. He then failed to stay within the limits of truth and had his staff lie for him on what was a personal matter that he should probably not have spoken about on the grounds of personal privacy. The bonds of friendship have been broken by Linda Tripp and others. Likewise, Ken Starr sees nothing wrong with ruthlessly hounding people, trying to get them to turn against the Clintons to save their own skins. Witnesses have been threatened, a mother has been forced to testify against her daughter, a therapist has been called in to speak about what was said in session. (Dr. Kassorda with Monica’s permission) Paula Corbin Jones does not accept the limits of her case being dismissed by Judge Johnson for lack of limits and recently was granted $850,000 by Clinton’s lawyers so she would stop appealing it. While this kind of thing may be the case in all scandals and witch hunts, Washington politics is sounding more and more like our television exposé programs while the business of the nation is ignored. We hope the reader will take away a deeper sense of understanding after reading the many articles and letters by our authors. After all, there really are no limits to what we can learn from the folly of humankind.

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