Bill Clinton: The Dual Character of a President Impeached

History will make little sense of the misconduct and political struggles of the 42nd President of the United States without recourse to Bill Clinton’s character. Academically, the unforeseen legacy of the Clinton Presidency may well be psychohistory’s place of prominence alongside more customary approaches to presidential scholarship.

What have we learned about the President’s character in the course of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the Lewinsky matter and the ensuing impeachment proceedings? To address this question I focus on three landmark events in the impeachment saga that illustrate the remarkable cross-situational consistency and temporal stability of President Clinton’s personality pattern: his August 17, 1998, grand jury testimony, his January 19, 1999, State of the Union address, and his February 12, 1999, post-acquittal statement to the nation. To set the stage, I offer two converging commentaries on Bill Clinton’s character: the media perspective and my own empirically based personality assessment.

Media Representations of Bill Clinton’s Character

In cracking the code of Clinton’s character, an emerging consensus in the media is the President’s duality. As journalist David Brooks has written in The Weekly Standard, “…there are two sides to Bill Clinton. There is the Yale and Oxford side, all policy talk and high aspiration. But then there is the Elvis-loving and Hot Springs side, “Clinton’s… appetites for fame, sex, and approval, and his willingness to trample others to serve himself.” (“Hollywood Beats Harvard,” Oct. 5, 1998: p. 19) Part of the contradiction here is between a public persona and an undisciplined, self-indulgent inner self.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, too, has

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commented on Bill Clinton’s dual nature: one, responsible, solid, cautious, and supersmart; the other, heedless, squalid, reckless, and superdumb. (“The Two Mr. Clintons,” Aug. 24, 1998: pp. 20-24) Former Clinton consultant Dick Morris has dubbed the two faces of the President “Saturday Night Bill” and “Sunday Morning President Clinton.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has mocked the President’s duality, pointing to pop culture multiple personality icons “Eve” and “Sybil” in characterizing Bill Clinton as a President who “has raised his personality disorder to a management style.” (“Sex and Balances,” Jan. 20, 1999: p. A31) If nothing else, Dowd’s caricature offers an ironic sequel to Bill Clinton’s 1992 election promise to give us “two for the price of one.”

An Empirical Assessment of Bill Clinton’s Character

My own research (Leadership Quarterly, vol. 9, 1998: pp. 335-366) suggests that Bill Clinton’s character is composed primarily of narcissistic (ambitious, confident) and histrionic (gregarious, outgoing) elements. Personality theorist Theodore Millon (Disorders of Personality, 1996) has asserted that in the realm of ego defenses, the narcissistic pattern is associated with rationalization and the histrionic pattern with dissociation.

In the case of Bill Clinton, the hidden hand of rationalization is revealed in the habitual fabrication of technically plausible explanations for less-than-admirable behaviors, and frequent recourse to alibis that put a positive spin on conduct unbecoming. It provides the psychodynamic underpinnings for President Clinton’s propensity to parse his words and shade the truth.

The self-protective dynamics of dissociation are revealed in Bill Clinton’s penchant for frequently altering his self-presentation to create a succession of socially attractive facades: “I did not inhale” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Dissociation provides the psychological underpinnings of, in Beltway vernacular, the President’s “compartmentalization” and accounts for President Clinton’s ability to maintain his self-confidence and composure in the face of adversity.

The predictable expression of these personal dynamics is a recurrent theme in the past year’s political crisis, permitting some reliability in anticipating the President’s moves. This is precisely what I attempted in three unpublished reports documenting my personality-based predictions of President Clinton’s performance under pressure: his August, 1998, grand jury testimony, his 1999 State of the Union address delivered in the wake of his defense team’s opening arguments in the impeachment trial, and his brief February, 1999, response to his acquittal.

The Grand Jury Testimony

The days preceding President Bill Clinton’s appearance before the grand jury in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation were marked by intense speculation about the President’s likely testimony. I based my own analysis on Bill Clinton’s personality, his past behavior, and compelling situational constraints.

Personality Narcissistic characters are ambitious, competitive, and self-assured. They are audacious and clever, display an interpersonal boldness, believe in themselves and their talents, and have sufficient charm to win others over to their causes and purposes. They have an expectation that others will recognize their special qualities and cater to them, but they lack social reciprocity, and feel entitled. Histrionic characters have a need to be popular, believe they can readily charm and influence others, and are skilled at manipulating others to meet their needs.

Situational constraints Bill Clinton is the consummate political animal. Given this context, I anticipated that his testimony would be guided by considerations of political expedience, including the survival of his Presidency and the protection of his legacy. It seemed likely that he would heed the advice of his lawyers on matters such as the need to avoid a perjury trap, and exploit the opportunity to bolster his public image as a buffer to the outcome of a potential impeachment inquiry.

Past behavior Assuming that Bill Clinton’s evasiveness with reference to his marijuana experimentation, his Vietnam draft status, and the nature of his relationship with Gennifer Flowers represent the expression of an underlying disposition, it seemed safe to expect — based on the consistency principle of personality — that President Clinton’s testimony before the grand jury would have a similar tenor.

Formulation Based on personality, past behavior, and situational constraints, I predicted that the President’s grand jury testimony would be “evasive rather than forthright, vague rather than

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precise, and ambiguous rather than explicit.” I also noted that Bill Clinton has displayed a pattern of “initial denial followed, under duress, by measured honesty, carefully calibrated truth-telling, and — ultimately — feigned contrition.”

Resolution As predicted, the President’s grand jury testimony was evasive, though on the face of it “technically truthful,” to use the President’s turn of phrase. Also as expected, the President avoided legal jeopardy by acknowledging an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but offered no unequivocal “mea culpa” as many political analysts had predicted. Subsequent public admissions of wrongdoing and expressions of contrition were incomplete, unconvincing, and transparently dictated by political motives. In general, President Clinton’s performance was consistent with a personality style that relies primarily on the regulatory mechanism of rationalization for self-protection.

The State of the Union Address

Dick Morris predicted that President Clinton would use his State of the Union address as a forum to express contrition for his conduct and to acknowledge the reality of his impeachment trial. I found these speculations by a former Clinton insider notable by virtue of their incongruence with my assessment of the President’s character.

In the confluence of character and circumstance I expected nothing less than an ambitious policy agenda to lay the foundation for a rehabilitated legacy and prevent the erosion of public approval — in other words, a calculated plan by the President to buttress his defense against charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. In short, rather than Morris’s predicted Presidential bending, I anticipated an unrepentant President craftily wielding his “people power.”

As reported by the New York Times, the President “ignored the trial,” “coupled a rosy appraisal of the nation’s state with an urgent appeal for action,” “left it to his lawyers to attack the charges that he broke the law,” and seized upon his State of the Union message “as his most potent defense.” (“Unbowed, Clinton Presses Social Security Plan,” Jan. 20, 1998: p. A1)

From a psychological perspective, the most striking aspect of the 1999 State of the Union address was its congruity with Clinton’s character. More specifically, it revealed a personality style that adaptively employs dissociation to present a pleasing public facade or, in Maureen Dowd’s more disparaging view, a “tour de farce” by a “compartmentalizing” President with an unprecedented capacity “to wall himself off from himself.”

The Post-Acquittal Statement

My general expectation was that President Clinton’s response to his acquittal would combine the essential features of his August 17, 1998, address to the nation following his grand jury testimony and his 1999 State of the Union address: a carefully crafted expression of contrition without full acknowledgment of personal responsibility for any wrongdoing, punctuated by an undertone of defiance and underscored with his agenda for the future.

The President’s five-sentence statement was notable for its classic Clintonian ambiguity as much as for its brevity. Its key element was encrypted in the phrase, “I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events [the impeachment proceedings] and the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and the American people.”

In parsing the meaning of these words, it is patently clear that the President admitted to no specific wrongdoing; there is no elaboration on what, exactly, it is that he “said and did.” More striking, however, is the President’s use of the word “trigger,” which cleverly connotes diminished responsibility. The plausible subtext, given Bill Clinton’s way with words, is that his private misconduct distally triggered an independent counsel investigation and a partisan prosecution, which in turn served as proximate causes for “the great burden” imposed on the nation.

With reference to his agenda for the future,

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the President limited his remarks to a general appeal to “rededicate ourselves to the work of serving our nation and building our future together.” However, in a more comprehensive contemporaneous message to his White House staff, released to the press, he said, “Now, together we have much more to do to meet our obligations to future generations. We have set our goals before the American people: from saving Social Security and Medicare, to strengthening education and health care, to advancing peace and security around the world.”

Conclusion

How did we get to this ignoble juncture in the history of the American Presidency? For the record, Bill Clinton is psychologically far removed from Richard Nixon, the only other President this century to have faced impeachment. That said, I submit that in the character of Bill Clinton the seeds of its own undoing germinate abundantly in the fertile fields of Presidential power.

The failings of the narcissistic-histrionic character extend predominately to self-indulgent excess, including sexual intemperance. More important, when these personalities land themselves in trouble, it is generally with absence of malice. Their instincts are self-serving rather than malevolent. In their benign arrogance they overlook their vulnerabilities and take unwarranted risks, including self-protective lying and duplicity. When entrusted with the high office of the Presidency, such individuals, without posing an undue risk to constitutional democracy, may nonetheless exploit their privileged position to bring disrepute to the Presidency and compromise the public trust.

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