Why politicians tell all those lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 23, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

Lawrence was buried in Arlington based in part on the Clinton administration's claim that he was a World War II hero who had been severely wounded as a Merchant Marine aboard the USS Horace Bushnell in 1945 off Murmansk in the USSR.

That was pure fiction. Lawrence, it turned out, had been a student at Wilber Wright College in Chicago when he was supposed to have been wounded in war. But the creation of a new Larry Lawrence didn't end there. As subsequent investigation showed, the man claimed to have been a graduate of the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago Law School, both lies. But he also claimed (dishonestly) to have been a rodeo star, a player in the National Football League and what is surely the oddest assertion of them all, to have been vice chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Commission.

It is relevant that Lawrence's inability to tell the truth stretched even to the San Diego hotel he owned. In its official history the Hotel Del Coronado claims to be the place where the Duke of Windsor first met Wallis Simpson and where Frank Baum penned The Wizard of Oz. Neither "fact" is true and, what's more, each is easily disproved by anyone with a half-hour or so to kill.

And what about Clinton's oft-noted inability to stick to the truth, a Clinton characteristic even described by sympathetic biographers such as Washington Post reporter David Maraniss in his 1996 biography of the president, First in His Class?

No professional psychologist has looked more deeply into Clinton's behavior than Paul Fick, a Californian who treats such problems as anorexia and sexual compulsion. More to the point, Fick has had extensive clinical experience with the problems of a group of people psychologists label adult children of alcoholics, or ACOA.

Fick, who is in private practice in Laguna Niguel, Calif., authored the 1996 book, The Dysfunctional President: Inside the Mind of Bill Clinton, an analysis of the president's behavior that drew a great deal of criticism because Fick has never met Clinton personally -- which would seem necessary, at least normally, before any serious commentary on anyone's psychological problems could take place.

Still, much of what Fick has to say has the ring of accuracy. He tells Insight that his interest in Clinton's mental makeup springs from the time he first saw the president on television: "His behavior and communication patterns were characteristic of adult children of alcoholics," he says. Intrigued, Fick began to study Clinton biographies and the vast material available on the president, an investigation that ultimately encompassed interviews with people who know Clinton well and have worked with him. (Somewhat hypocritically, Fick cautions others against trying to diagnose behavior without the physical presence of the subject.)

An element that struck Fick hardest was the home life experienced by the young Bill Clinton. Roger Clinton, the president's stepfather, was an alcoholic. He'd promised Clinton's mother he'd stop drinking when he married her, but he didn't. Often he would go on violent sprees when drinking, at one time firing a gun in the presence of Clinton's mother and young Bill. At other times, he'd be calm and fatherly in stark contrast to his earlier violence and anger.