Clinton & Nixon: to find Bill Clinton's prototype, we have to go past Tricky Dick - way past

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by Richard Brookhiser

To find Bill Clinton's prototype, we have to go past Tricky Dick-way past.

If Bill Clinton shares Richard Nixon's fate, it will not be because he shares his character.

Richard Nixon was marked by an acute self-consciousness. The self of which he was conscious was always contending: with Communists, liberals, history, reporters, Kennedys, destiny. One of his favorite quotations was Theodore Roosevelt's paean to the "man in the arena": "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but [whose] place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Win or lose, the struggles strengthened him. This was the theme of his first memoir, Six Crises--which were not crises in history, but crises in the history of his own soul. Nixon's credo could have been Nietzsche, via Arnold Schwarzenegger: Vad does not desdroy me makes me stronger.

Thus the official Nixon. Missing from this picture (though evident to almost everyone else) was the fact that the man in the arena was tormented by anxieties, fears, and grudges. Nixon's poverty played a role in this, especially when he fought the rich or the genteel (Hiss, JFK). But not all ex-poor boys become Richard Nixon (Ronald Reagan didn't). Whatever the sources in lost family history, Nixon was a damaged self. The gap between his damaged self and the self he put forward was signaled by the sweat on his lip.

Bill Clinton has also been damaged. The floozy mother, the brutal stepfather, being fat in Arkansas and a hick at Oxford--all, like rotten pilings, underlie his energy and charm, and his various bingeings. But this President is not a damaged self. He is someone with no self at all. This is what distinguishes him, both from Nixon, and from normal people.

"I just try to put it over in a little box," the President said of his troubles, as Hurricane Monica was approaching land. "We do box it off," the First Lady chimed in. The phrase comes straight from Leading with My Heart, the memoirs of Virginia Kelley, the President's late mother: "Inside my head, I construct an airtight box. I keep inside what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black." The only amendment to be made to these statements is that the President is not limited to one mental box, containing good or bad things. Everything he does or thinks occupies its own box. His life is a collection of discrete events. This explains why his lies are not lies as others understand the term. The President means everything he says at the moment he says it, and because no thing or moment is connected to any other, everything he says is sincere. Some part of Richard Nixon knew he was a crook, even as he denied it. Since there is no other part of President Clinton besides the part that is speaking, there is no deception, and no guilt.

The term for this state of mind (or minds) is narcissism. Popular language associates Narcissus with beauty and self-regard. But the psychological key to the myth is that it is all about surfaces. Narcissus is riveted by his image in the pool because his image is all he has. There is no one home. Narcissists are like billiard balls, their lives a series of clicks off the other balls on the table. Narcissists need the click of encounter, because it is the only thing that reminds them that they are alive. If a narcissist is beautiful, he will live for the attention his beauty attracts. If geniality is his strong suit, as it is for the President, he will play to that. The alternative is extinction.

The famous American Clinton most resembles is not Nixon, but Aaron Burr--also charming, also a ladies' man, also a liar. What was his "rare attraction," someone once asked an acquaintance, who replied: "In his manner of listening. He seemed ... to find so much more meaning in your words than you had intended; no flattery was more subtle." Burr didn't work at it; he was just a narcissist, trying to stay alive.

Aaron Burr didn't go quietly, which bodes ill for the current crisis. Thomas Jefferson wanted to hang him for treason, but Burr got himself acquitted. In his eighties he married a rich widow (a former whore), and proceeded to run through her money while cheating on her. Talk about the Comeback Kid.

Should we be gleeful about all this? Early in the scandal, I caught up with Wag the Dog, the movie about the White House racks who simulate a war to distract from a sex scandal--an obvious satire on President Clinton, but much more obvious now than the filmmakers intended. Some of the bits--the movie sex occurred next to the Oval Office; one handler says, "Deny, deny, deny"; Jay Leno appears, making a joke--were straight from life. "That's not funny," a lady down the aisle groaned. No, and yes.

But the movie, in its sour and cynical fashion, was also about the whole system of media politics, of emotions that are faked and unearned and amplified with all the voltage of pop culture. A scene of Willie Nelson conducting a "We Are the World"-like ballad of pseudo-patriotism was so parasitic of the real thing, I felt sick; I almost walked out. Bill Clinton isn't the problem. Everyone since the invention of television has more or less dirty hands.