Washington,
Jefferson, Jackson, Buchanan, Cleveland, Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Bush, Clinton--adulterers, fathers of
illegitimate children, prostitute chasers, sex addicts.1
Why do Americans so often choose as leaders men who betray and humiliate
their wives with their compulsive sex affairs rather than mature men
who are capable of loving their wives and not betraying them?
It is no coincidence that of the thirteen womanizer presidents listed
above, all but two also commanded major military ventures, while the
twenty-eight other presidents who were not unfaithful were more peaceful.
It is useful to ask the obvious question: might nations, when they
are ready to go to war, unconsciously choose their leaders as some
primitive tribes do--for their ability to conquer both women and enemies?
The consensus
about Clinton initially was that, because he was a "draft dodger"
during Vietnam, he wouldn't take America to war. Yet even before Yugoslavia
this was quite untrue. Clinton, according to Ramsey Clark's book,
The Children Are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq,2
managed through his embargo of Iraq to kill one million Iraqi children--nearly
as many as the number of Jewish children that were killed in the Holocaust!
Clinton's delegated role in America seems to be to provide sacrificial
victims in a way that doesn't stir up our guilt feelings: in Iraq
by his "invisible" killing of children, in Yugoslavia by
focusing on the expulsions of Kosovars that his bombing triggered
and even in the case of his own scandals, where he provided America
for a whole year with himself as a suitable victim to punish for our
sins.
That
Clinton unconsciously volunteered to be a sacrificial victim is clear.
The weeks prior to his starting his affair with Monica Lewinsky were
filled with media reports and late-night staff meetings in the White
House about how the Chief Sacrificial Priest Kenneth Starr was hot
on Clinton's trail for sexual misdemeanors for which he could be convicted.
Staffers warned Clinton daily not to risk another "bimbo eruption"
lest he be caught this time. Yet Clinton, sensing the group-fantasy
of sacrifice was asking him to volunteer as the victim, started the
affair nonetheless, looking out the White House windows while he was
being sexually serviced by her to see if Starr's snoopers were looking
in.
According
to his biographer, Clinton's family role was also as a sacrificial
hero, who was "caretaker and protector of the family" and
of his mother, Virginia.3
His alcoholic stepfather was so violent toward his mother that Clinton
recalls him firing a gun at his mother when he was five, and little
Billy "twice had to stop real violence when Roger threatened
to kill Virginia."4
Clinton's "Family Hero" role was of course what has made
him such a superb politician, being able to sense the unconscious
emotional needs of others and sacrifice his own values for the adulation
he gained. There was little love in his family. His stepfather physically
abused him during his drunken rages, and his grandmother, who was
his primary caretaker in his early years while his mother was elsewhere,
had a "fierce temper" and undoubtedly used "a whip"
on him as she had done on his mother when she was a child.5
Besides this
physical abuse, Clinton was also a rejected child, whose mother left
him as an infant for two years with her mother while she moved to
another city to learn nursing and then routinely left him while she
gambled as he grew up. "I was raised in that sort of culture
where you put on a happy face, and you didn't reveal your pain and
agony," he says.6
Psychotherapist
Jerome Levin attributes Clinton's sexual addiction with hundreds of
women directly to his lonely childhood:
Virginia Kelley [Clinton's mother] looks extraordinarily
like Lewinsky. Kelley's hairstyle, heavy makeup, and the overall impression
are strikingly similar to Lewinsky's. Bill Clinton, the man who had
lost his mother, had found a replacement for her....His legacy as
an adult child of an alcoholic compelled him to fill the emptiness
of his childhood and to repeat the addictive pattern of both his biological
and his adoptive parents...7
That
Clinton repeated his longings for his absent mother with Monica Lewinsky
can be seen when he said to Monica after she was transferred out of
the White House, "Why do they have to take you away from me?",
the same question he had for his mother when she left him as a young
boy. Even Juanita Broaddrick--who accused Clinton of biting, assaulting
and viciously raping her twice--looked very much like Clinton's mother,
and was, in addition, a nurse like Clinton's mother.
Of
course, in addition to restaging the betrayal he felt by his mother,
Clinton's continuous humiliations of his wife over the years can be
seen as expressing his unconscious rage toward his mother for her
early abandonment of him--with the difference that in his affairs
he would reverse roles and he would be the betrayer and his
wife would be the betrayed.
Indeed,
the Clinton scandal wasn't "all about sex," it was "all
about loss." Clinical studies of sex addicts find they aren't
"expressing their drives" so much as combating desperate
inner feelings of maternal abandonment, impotence and self-fragmentation
through their repeated conquests of women.8
Feelings of impotence, not excess potency, is the source of all sex
addictions. And wars.
Purity
Crusades--like the impeachment of Clinton and the Yugoslav War, which
The New York Times described as a necessary "Cleansing
of Serbia"9--are periodically encountered in history,
usually after periods of peace and prosperity.10
They are usually conducted against "too much sexual freedom,"
with various designated sacrificial scapegoats. The most famous took
place prior to WWI, with a hysterical Vice Commission closing down
brothels and regulating dance halls. Before the Civil War, reacting
to the feminism and new sexual freedom of the 1850s, purity reformers
suddenly decided to "protect the sexual purity of America"
by starting a civil war to clean up the "one vast brothel"
in the South. Before the Vietnam War, following the first legal publishing
of Henry Miller's books, Citizens for Decent Literature conducted
nationwide letter-writing campaigns and harassed drugstore chains
to stop the distribution of "obscene" literature. Time
even ran a cover story in January 1964 on "Sex in the U.S.,"
full of shocked prose on how America had become "one big Orgone
box of Freudian" pornography and promiscuity. America's Purity
Crusade during Clinton's secnd term wasn't justabout Presidential
sex.From New York to California, cities were attempting to close down
X-rated video stores, politicians were "outed" as adulterers
as "the sex police runs around Washington checking everyone out,"
and television programs featured specials declaring "The whole
nation needs to repent!"11
That impeachment
of Clinton functioned for a time as what columnists called "a
renewal process" and a "cleansing of America"12
seems odd until it is considered as an age-old device for purification
of a nation for its hubris, its prosperity, its sinfulness.
In ancient Mesoamerica, when the state became convinced its prosperity
had made it too sinful, the Chief Priest would tear out the heart
of its best football player on a sacrificial stage and present it
to the bloodthirsty goddess, who might otherwise punish all the people
by not raising the sun the next day.13 The "Sacrificial
Hero" was turned into a god himself since he, like Clinton, had
willingly volunteered to be sacrificed. Thus Clinton's polls, which
had been sub-par until his affair was revealed, soared to over 70
percent approval "for the job he was doing for his country"--in
other words, for being a sacrificial scapegoat, a poison container
for our guilt--an approval level never before reached by a peacetime
president.
That nations
sometimes choose their leaders because of their personal emotional
dysfunctions seems an odd notion. Of course, other nations
often choose dysfunctional leaders--like Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein--who
have serious emotional problems, starting wars that end by costing
the lives of millions. But we usually think: "not us." Yet
I wonder. Many historians, for instance, now argue that America chose
John F. Kennedy for his phallic cold war personality, so it should
not have surprised us when he ordered the Cuban invasion and risked
incinerating millions of Americans with Russian nuclear missiles during
his Cuban embargo, saying, "If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose
in the dirt, it's all over."14 In fact, it turns out
that it was Kennedy's taunting of the Russians with a 1962 "practice
invasion" exercise near Cuba that actually pushed Khrushchev
into putting his missiles into Cuba in the first place.15
With Kennedy, there was an intimate emotional link between his sexual
addiction--requiring almost daily conquests of mistresses and prostitutes--and
his equally compulsive need for military conquests. The same is true
of Clinton. He has many of the characteristics of what Robert Tucker
calls the "warfare personality"--self-dramatization, extreme
narcissism, repeated feelings of conspiracies against him by enemies
and an ability to call for a great Crusade that will defeat Evil abroad
and cleanse the world of its sinfulness.16 I would only
add to these: a deep well of loneliness, frequent revenge fantasies
and an ability to dissociate.
That Clinton
dissociated and distorted reality when he began the bombing of Yugoslavia
is little reflected in the media, since Americans overwhelmingly have
dissociated along with him on the key facts of the outbreak of the
war. Virtually everyone tacitly agrees by now that the NATO bombing
began because Kosovars were being killed, raped, and forced out of
their homes. But that wasn't what in fact happened. Even the head
of the CIA told congressional leaders the bombing would cause the
Serbs to attack, for "military action could include the chance
of ethnic cleansing...[since] if we stuck a stick in this nest, we
would stir it up more."17 Richard Holbrooke agreed,
warning that bombing would undoubtedly trigger ethnic cleansing. The
following report from the Princeton University student newspaper was
the only one that gave the true figures about the actual lack of violence
before the bombing began:
Key members of the U.S. Senate sat slack-jawed through a
confidential briefing last Thursday from the Clinton administration
foreign-policy team...After
the foreign-policy wise men asserted that the United States has a
moral imperative to stop the murderous Serbian president, Slobodan
Milosevic, one senator asked: How many Albanians have Milosevic's
troops massacred this year? The president's emissaries turned ashen.
They glanced at each other. They rifled through their papers. One
hazarded a guess: 'Two thousand?' No, the senator replied, that was
the number for all of last year. He wanted figures for the last month--or
even the year to date, since the president had painted such a grisly
picture of genocide in his March 24 address to the nation....Nobody
knew. As it turns out, Kosovo has been about as bloody this year as,
say, Atlanta. You can measure the deaths [prior to the bombing] not
in the hundreds, but dozens.
That the
Serbs then used the NATO bombing as an excuse for the expulsion of
a million Kosovars is not the same as proving it would have happened
without the bombing. Any local sheriff knows that when a crazy bank
robber has a bank full of hostages, one doesn't start bombing him.
The bombing obviously triggered the expulsions, not the other way
around. And a ground war is likely to trigger even more needless horrors.
But the time is ripe in America after the recent years of peace and
prosperity for a new war, a new Purity Crusade, a new sacrifice to
cleanse us of our sins. Milosevic is an ideal Hitler-substitute, the
Serbs, products of generally brutal childrearing, are ideal enemies,
and NATO, as Madeleine Albright once told Colin Powell, is an ideal
instrument of war, saying that, after all, "What is the use of
this marvelous military force if we can never use it?"18
We have entered a new war trance; the ritual sacrifice may now begin.
Lloyd
deMause is director of The Institute for Psychohistory, editor
of The Journal of Psychohistory and author of Foundations
of Psychohistoryand Reagan's America.
1. Wesley O. Hagood, Presidential Sex: From the Founding Fathers
to Bill Clinton. New York: Citadel Press, 1996.
2. Ramsey Clark, The Children Are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions
on Iraq. New York: World View Forum, 1996.
3. David Maraniss, The Clinton Enigma. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1998, p. 49.
4.
Nancy Collins, "A Legacy of Strength and Love." Good
Housekeeping, November 1995, p. 115.
5. David Maraniss, First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 22.
6. Newsweek, March 30, 1992, p. 37.
7. Jerome D. Levin, The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the
Self-Destructive Nature of Sexual Addiction. Rocklin, Calif.:
Prima Publishing, 1998, p. 19
8. Patrick J. Carnes, Don't Call It Love. New York: Bantam
Books, 1992.
9. The New York Times, May 9, 1999, p. D1.
10. Lloyd deMause, "American Purity Crusades." The Journal
of Psychohistory 14 (1987): 346-347.
11. MSNBC-TV, August 19, 1998; WABC-TV, September 18, 1998.
12. MSNBC-TV, December 19, 1998, The New York Times, December
11, 1998, p. A35.
13. Vernon L. Scarborough and David R. Wilcox, Eds., The Mesoamerican
Ballgame. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991
14. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; Theodore C. Sorensen, The Kennedy
Legacy. New York: Macmillan, 1969; James N. Giglio, The Presidency
of John F. Kennedy. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
1991.
15. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, "One Hell of a
Gamble": Chrushchev, Castro & Kennedy, 1958-1964. New
York: Norton, 1997, pp. 166-170.
16. Robert C. Tucker, "The Dictator and Totalitarianism."
World Politics 17 (1965): 555-583.
17. Stephen R. Shalom, "A Just War?" Z Magazine September
1999, p. 28.
18 Z Magazine, May 1999, p. 32.
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