We see the changeling again when Bill was an adolescent. His mother Virginia says, " He kept incredibly busy...Bill's crowd enjoyed one another as members of a group...I don't mean that Bill didn't have dates. He did." But Dixie Terrell Kline, his high school classmate writing in The New Yorker says Bill had no dates and was not a ladies' man in high school although he was "bright, well liked, respected...but too involved with music and the school band to go out with girls." Are these two views consistent? Of course they are as they describe an adolescent who was inhibited sexually but creative musically and politically. Also he was stuck in his worrisome but satisfying Oedipal role taking care of his mother and brother Roger who was five when Bill was fifteen while they were threatened by the brutal and alcoholic stepfather.

Bill's sexuality is the Mona Lisa of his narcissism with its in-your-face entitlement, high risk pursuits and kinky venues. So I listen with special interest when Virginia explains, "Neither of my sons got the standard parental lecture about sex...I could never summon up the courage...I couldn't make myself tell them even once...If I'd had daughters, I think it would have been easier...I'd have told them sex could be a sweet and beautiful thing - but precautions had to be taken." There is nothing unusual in this behavior by a more-or-less single mom in the Fifties but it amplifies the meaning of some of Bill's later sexual behavior. Virginia explanation is prescient when she says, "...the lecture doesn't count as much as the values you've instilled during all the preceding years." Bill's high risk extra-marital sexuality is an expression of narcissism reminiscent of his father Bill Blythe and his stepfather's affairs as well as Virginia's flirtations and her love affair described by Dolly Kyle Browning. Local stories about a Virginia who "slept around" are mentioned by David Brock.

Bill's narcissistic wound in infancy creates an adult with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. This is the same Bill who desperately needs approval as he chases after skeptical editorial writers, cynical voters, recalcitrant legislators and attractive women according to biographer Oakley. This is the Bill who seeks affirmation as he takes self-destructive risks in his behavior with women like Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky.

Another high risk behavior which influenced Bill was his family's preoccupation with gambling. Bill was not a gambler but stepfather Roger was and his losses forced him to sell his car dealership in Hope when Bill was six. This led to the family's move to Hot Springs where Roger took a job at the Buick dealership owned by his brother, Ray Clinton. Mother Virginia was a gambler too, who bet daily at the local racetrack. Gambling is excitement displaced from the infantile conflicts about masturbation according to psychoanalytic theory.

What caused Bill's original narcissistic injury? His episodes of separation, the first between one and two years of age and then later on, events of castration anxiety are the visible causes of Bill's narcissistic injury. Another narcissistic injury is his childhood alienation as a fat and clumsy loner. Deeper within Bill's unconscious is the influence of his mother's own unsatisfied narcissistic needs. Bill saw all this reflected in Virginia's "shrine" to Bill on the living room wall which according to Maraniss was covered with Bill's mementos, awards and photos. In psychoanalytic jargon, Bill was a self-object for Virginia.

A self-object is the use of a child to fulfill the unconscious narcissistic needs of a parent. The child is not loved as a separate person but as a part of a parent's ego. These children know unconsciously that they are props for the parents' shaky self-esteem.

Virginia's narcissism envelopes little Bill as he attempts to fulfill it so it is a painful struggle for little Bill to become his own person separate from the qualities that he develops to satisfy Mother Virginia's narcissism. "The original narcissistic wound never has a chance to heal. Such a child has never felt loved for himself," says psychoanalyst Sue Erikson Bloland who studied Bill's life.

Is this the whole story? No, because I've already said that most personality theorists believe there are constitutional, that is hereditary biochemical factors along with the family style issues that contribute to narcissistic injury and the resulting narcissistic personality which are mentioned in the discussion of Slick Willie .

Narcissism which is said to be the leading cultural disorder of the late twentieth century remains a controversial subject. A recent debate about narcissism is whether it is socially or individually determined. Time magazine recognized this when it called psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, "the preacher of narcissism...(who) replaced Freud's tragic vision with an optimistic creed...that man is born good and evil is produced by the culture." Kohut's emphasis on narcissism in a system called Self Psychology has shifted attention away from Freud's oral, anal and Oedipal developmental phases but despite this "whiff of heresy," Kohut remained a Freudian.

·Bill's Conscience and Guilt

What about his conscience or superego? The development of Bill Clinton's conscience begins with castration anxiety, the fear of the loss of the penis as he learns that he can't kill his stepfather and possess his mother. His infantile world is one of castration fears from threats about masturbation and the vision of a primal scene which interprets the female genitalia as having lost a penis. The broken leg when he was tripped by his kindergarten classmates is an icon for castration anxiety but fear alone isn't a conscience.

The guilt-producing part of the mind, Bill's superego came into existence with grandma's flash cards at three when he was already able to read. She trained him in guilt by using the power of reward and punishment for the recognition of the alphabet on the flash card. His mother's book tells us that this family's system of control and authority was driven by guilt and Bill learned quickly and well. This was the same training that led to the demand for Virginia's conformity earlier by Edith, Bill's grandmother so we have a family pattern of strict superego development. Virginia explains, "Mother had always been very strict, very protective...trying to control my life."

Bill's public promises not kept, his political manipulativeness and his extramarital affairs argue against an effective conscience or a full quota of guilt. After all, he resolved his castration anxiety by besting the unstable alcoholic stepfather in the contest for his mother's love although there never really was any question of her loyalties. Bill felt guilt about his idealized real father's death which happened before Bill was born so it was both harder to hate him and to resolve it by identification with him. His stepfather whose last name he used when he began school was weakened as a person and as a symbol by his alcohol addiction while his powerful uncle Ray Clinton was a more distant part of the family.

Bill's superego or conscience is deformed by the wound that determines his narcissistic personality. The resulting superego deficit encourages impulsive action about the choice of sexual partners in high-risk situations. Not all the bad choices are about impulsive sex, some are about Big Macs when the problem is food addiction.

But it was also Bill's superego that determined his achievement in school classes and in saxophone practice for band and in his high school political leadership. This was the conscience that was elaborated during his teens into an ego-ideal with its models, John Kennedy and Arkansas Senator William Fulbright. Bill took the initiative to please his mother and his teachers and so he avoided guilt, the internal pain of self-punishment from his conscience. Bill's conscience internalized his mother's behavior and aspirations. Mother Virginia wanted to be at the top so we see her photo in her book at the apex of a pyramid of teen age bathing beauties. Later as a nurse and single mother, she trained to became an anesthetist, a solo practitioner in a specialty that was dominated by male doctors.

The conscience or superego includes the moral and religious system with its reward and punishment in heaven and hell. Interestingly in this culturally Baptist family, Bill was the only one who was a churchgoer. Guilt is the trigger of the conscience, an internal sense of right and wrong. Much of this is unconscious although its expression reflects the personal, family and religious beliefs. Bill Clinton's religion is a sublimation of infantile incestuous and murderous wishes as a response to a fear of the punishment of castration. (Yes, I know Jung wouldn't accept this characterization of religion as a defense.)

The superego requires some activities while others are forbidden. A desire to be liked by everyone during his school years is prominent in the Clinton story and is said to be compulsive during his political career when agreeable legislators were the key to a Governor's and a President's success. David Gallen, a Clinton biographer notes that "...Bill needs constant reassurance," quoting a staffer in the Governor's office. Another expression of this psychic energy is FOB, the Friends of Bill mystique, a clique of admirers.

Bill's chase to success is the rule of his internalized superego or conscience. The superego represents the parents and Bill Clinton's superego is his mother's behavior speaking to him. She describes herself as "street smart...tough...never ruthless..." so this becomes his style, mostly. This is not exactly the Golden Rule which Virginia said Bill learned from his nannies. Perhaps Virginia thought she couldn't teach it to Bill herself because she lived according to the talion law of the Old Testament, "a fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

When I read about Virginia's struggle in the competitive medical world of Hot Springs, I heard the echoes of Virginia's use of Leviticus rather then the Golden Rule. Virginia had to overcome a monopoly by two nurse anesthetists when she first came to Hot Springs. She established herself as a professional yet for thirty years she fought "...against the men who because they were M. D.'s and I was a lowly nurse anesthetist expected to walk into town and have me work for them...I began to retaliate...the weapon of choice was innuendo." Eventually new hospital standards required M.D. control of anesthesia and two malpractice cases against Virginia had been filed. Meanwhile the atmosphere of the Hot Springs medical community was poisoned and Virginia admitted "...that it was a poison I had helped to inject." Her street smarts and her "tooth and nail" struggle were a part of Bill's legacy. They passed from Mother Virginia's mind and life into Bill's superego. Bill used this Lex talionis as he came to favor the death penalty, bombed Iraq and Yugoslavia, struck the Sudan and Afghanistan with missiles and required workfare for welfare mothers.

Of course, the structure of the conscience and its power are separate from its contents so a "bad" goal may be pursued just as avidly as a "good" goal. Bill does feel guilt but it may not be in the same value system as the observer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The compulsive performance of success-driven Bill is based on his superego which cannot be measured because it is buried in the unconscious along with the id. One of the unsolved paradoxes of psychoanalytic theory is the close linkage of the libido of the amoral id and the conscience or superego, in fact we're told that the id energizes the superego and that the ego, our conscious self is at the mercy of this balance. Freud said, "The superego dips deeply into the id."

Stay here with me during the journey through the Freudian jungle of jargon.

·Bill's Southern Ethos

The South as the mythic and cultural context of Bill Clinton's psychology demands special attention. Arkansas was a slave state and a member of the Confederacy that was defeated in the Civil War and it remained monocultural: rural, poor, Protestant and untouched by the European immigration after the Civil War. The individual psychology of white Southerner in the modern era is affected by the ways in which the mythology of the South is different then the rest of the United States and also from the African Americans who often left the South for the Northern cities.

Bill Clinton's ethos or collective unconscious was the poverty of the South, Protestant fundamentalism, the military and rural life. Of course Bill was not poor, avoided the military, never was a fundamentalist and grew up in the second largest city in his state, Hot Springs but the powers of myth reside in the unconscious.

Beneath the Southern brag and boast of the good ol' boys and their ladies is a fear that you are really white trash, that you are irreparably inferior. Why? The South lost the Civil War and afterwards was punished by a hundred years of regional poverty compared to the industrial, banking and railroad wealth of the North. The nexus of the South was country life, Bible Belt religion, violence, guns, the military and patriotism again in a formula that differed from the rest of the country. The preeminent Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward says, "...the Southern heritage is distinctive. For Southern history, unlike American, includes large components of frustration, failure and defeat. It includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life."

The burden of the white Southerners, at least those not descended from planters or aristocrats was the dread of being considered white trash, shiftless and worthless so well described by Dorothy Allison in Bastard Out of Carolina and by William Faulkner in his sagas of Yoknapatawpha County. But the core of the white trash image is the unspoken and unconscious belief that inside you are really a Black, a changeling who should be reclassified even lower in the white South's traditional hierarchy. This mythology explains some of the psychological force of the South's racism, the Klan, lynching and segregationists like Arkansas' Orval Faubus.

The racism of the Northerner is just as destructive but is not fueled by this mythology since Northerners lived separately from Blacks mostly in cities populated largely by the post- Civil War often Catholic immigration from Europe. New Orleans with its Cajun Catholic culture is the exception to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant South which received few immigrants after the Civil War until the 1970's and 80's when Cubans came to Miami and a few Vietnamese fisherman moved to the Gulf Coast.

All of Bill Clinton's grandparents were poor share croppers according to his biographers even though his maternal grandparents eventually owned a country store while his father Bill Blythe was a salesman and his mother, a health professional. The culture was fundamentalist although Bill's mother and stepfather spent little time in church and Bill's mother says that her values were in opposition to the conservative Pentecostal preacher who lived next door in Hot Springs.

This is worth explaining since the Southern ethos and its myths are part of Bill Clinton's ego identity, that is the ideas and values of adolescence that form the content of the adult personality. Despite Clinton's handshake in the Rose Garden with John Kennedy at 17, the tribal models for Clinton's inner self are the Southern presidents, Truman, LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

The ability of Clinton to offer racial reconciliation and civil rights is inherent in his Southern ability to tap into his white trash-black identity. This link between the white and Black Southerners is explained in W. J. Cash's classic Mind of the South which says that the South's emotionalism, hedonism and romantic imagination is connected with a "Negro entering into (the) white man" and vice versa. It was Helena in Arkansas' Mississippi River Delta that gave us the blues of legendary Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broozy and the country music of Johnnie Cash.

In 1998 Toni Morrison announced that Bill Clinton was the first African American president citing his cultural identity to blackness, born to a single parent, poor and working class, saxophone-playing, a McDonald-and junk- food loving boy from Arkansas. "Black Bill" was the pejorative some Arkansas whites used for Governor Clinton. These perspectives go beyond Clinton's conscious moral and legal beliefs. The voters of all races are influenced by Clinton's racial attitudes about integration and affirmative action which are received as either positive or negative according to their own value systems.

An unexpected confirmation of Bill's biracial identity came with his announcement midway through his second term that he was part Indian because his maternal grandmother was a quarter Cherokee. He mentioned this during a meeting of his commission on race perhaps to counter the criticism that it was limited to a black-white dialog. The ego defense of denial kept this factoid from the biographers and journalists but in 1998 he called up a biological identity with Americans of color.

·Bill's Death Instinct

Does a death instinct operate in Bill Clinton? Freud formulated his ideas about the death instinct which he called Thanatos after witnessing the human and psychological destructiveness of the First World War. Nowadays most American psychoanalysts don't believe there is a death instinct and consign it to the realms of philosophy and biology rather then psychology but I believe that it should be resuscitated to help understand Clinton. The death instinct was renamed the Death Fear by psychoanalyst Otto Rank and so it was removed from the controversy about the biology of the instincts to the psychology of fear.

Thanatos is an expression of human self-destruction, a return to the inorganic which is paired with Eros, the life instinct, sexuality and the preservation of the species. The Nirvana Principle is a metaphor for Thanatos, the need of life to return to its source. The libido's aggressive instincts are thought to have an origin in Thanatos. There is an echo of this in Hindu cosmology where the main Gods are Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. A blend of the instincts reach their goals from the unconscious indirectly through the flow of psychic energy usually called libido into love and sexuality but sometimes also toward destructiveness and aggression. Casanova tells of a woman who allowed him to have his way with her while they watched an especially nasty execution in a public square through an open window.

Clinton supported the death penalty during the 1992 presidential campaign when as Governor of Arkansas he refused to halt the execution of a mentally defective inmate and underlined his action by a flight back from New Hampshire to Little Rock to announce this decision. Rickey Ray Rector was a convicted murderer whose intelligence was so diminished by a brain injury that he saved the desert from his last meal to eat later on. This was a personal as well as a national endorsement of capital punishment from Presidential Candidate Bill who over a decade earlier during his first term as Governor had refused to set execution dates.

Death penalty doesn't mean death instinct but it does suggest that Clinton and many other citizens are receiving new aggressive libido from their fear of crime, hatred of the criminal and a desire to solve the problems of murder by the death of the killer. Why? Pleasure from the destruction of others, sadism often hides its opposite, pleasure in suffering, masochism. Both are involved in the response to executions which allow identification with the killer, the executioner and the victim. Execution is a spectacle like the public hanging from another era that permits a communal emotional catharsis that is absent in a life sentence.

President Clinton is preoccupied with crime and punishment although the crime rate was falling before he entered office and this decline continues. His Crime Bill in 1994 was opposed by fiscal conservatives because of its cost and by civil libertarians because of First Amendment problems and included controversial Federal three strike provisions. He continued with an anti-terrorism bill that again compromised constitutional safeguards and many said offered no real shield against terrorists. Automatic weapons control was supported by Clinton and the police chiefs in a confrontation with the National Rifle Association. Clinton's death instinct chooses a political preoccupation with violence, death, crime, guns and a need to strike back.

It's a gross oversimplification to say that Thanatos jumps out of the ego of an adult and makes him do things. But it or something in his psychology energizes Clinton's preoccupation with death, crime and murder. At the end of his second term, Clinton spoke openly of his fears of terrorist attacks, computer viruses, bombs on New Year's Eve and global warming in "...a somber and foreboding address at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy..." The self-destructive tendencies of the death instinct are often manifest by both fear and aggression.

These are the facts from the mainstream about Clinton and the death penalty and Clinton and crime and guns as viewed through a psychohistorical lens. Meanwhile the underground sees a Clinton conspiracy in "A Blood-Spattered Trail," from the Ozarks to the Potomac according to George Carpozi, a Clinton biographer. The hate-Clinton movement speaks of a "Clinton Body Count ...A list of dead people connected with Bill Clinton." There are lists of 40, 41, 61 or 90 deaths that "require further investigation." There is a "Clinton 'Death List' " of F.O.B.'s who have died under mysterious circumstances because they were on Clinton's "hit list." There are several sources but Sam Smith's Progressive Review presents this data on the Web.

An aura of death and murder in Bill's unconscious resonates with the Clinton crazies who translate it to events like the death of Vincent Foster, drug wars and murders over the cocaine smuggled through the airport at Mena, Arkansas, the death of Kathleen Willey's husband and even the suicide of Admiral Borda. The facts in Bill Clinton's life lead to his unconscious where the mythos includes Thanatos or the death instinct. The American national mind with its own unconscious Thanatos shares in this Death Clintonia. This is explained later in Clinton's Equivocal Decade with references to sexual repression, environmental destruction and political nihilism. What about Bill Clinton and war? He avoided this at first withdrawing from Somalia after the death of American troops, entering Haiti cautiously and acting as a peacemaker in Korea, Ireland and the Middle East. Nonetheless, American forces are in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and the Persian Gulf. Other dangers and temptations remained so American missiles were fired at Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 after terrorist bombings of U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Both Iraq and Yugoslavia were bombed by the U. S. Armed Forces in 1999 and the bombing of Iraq continued in 2000.

The bombing campaign against Yugoslavia was conducted without ground troops despite the judgment of the hawks in Congress and in NATO like England's Tony Blair that ground forces would be needed to win. This military action started after the diplomatic failure to resolve the question of Kosovo and its Albanian population. There was a debate about whether the United States had already been too patient with Milosevic's failed pledges of nonviolence in Kosovo or whether the negotiations finally broke down at Rambouillet when we delivered an ultimatum that demanded the virtual military control of Yugoslavia. In any event, the Balkan politics and NATO policies that led to the bombing itself were filtered through Bill's mind with its psychological defenses based on his active death instinct.

Why were no combat troops in the Balkans like those fielded by Old Soldier Bush in Desert Storm against Iraq? Clinton's avoidance of military service because of his fear of death in the Vietnam war is an expression of castration anxiety and this is the personal factor in his fear of using ground troops. Of course the polls, consultants, Congress and military advisors played their roles. Clinton's aggression produced by his death instinct and his castration anxiety were now in conflict so we had a 78 day air war during which both the peacemakers and the generals expressed frustration.

A ground troop option of at least 150,000 men was argued during the advent of the Balkan winter. Everyone was worried but the debate occurred without the presence of NATO's American commanding general, Wesley Clark. "The Pentagon told him not to come," Jane Perlez says in the New York Times. As I read this I wondered if the generals's name was even mentioned at Bill Clinton's June 3, 1999 White House war council but I knew that a character named Denial was on the stage in this theater of diplomacy.

By the end of his second term, Clinton revived the plan for a missile shield in space often called Star Wars which began during the Reagan administration. The tests showed it wasn't effective as a defense weapon although its development and tests had cost billions. It was regarded by Russia as a hostile violation of the Antiballistic Missile treaty of 1972 and so it endangered the foundations of nuclear disarmament.

·Bill's Sadism and Masochism

Bill as a masochist receiving pleasure from pain is less visible then the sadistic Bill who gets pleasure from inflicting pain. Still we witness Bill as a marital masochist when he is seen with deep cuts on his neck (see Hillary's Sadism and Masochism) inflicted by Hillary and he was the target of keys and books thrown by Hillary in the Arkansas state limousine. Bill's unconscious pleasure in this pain is from the dynamics of Mother Virginia's sadomasochism with Stepfather Roger and Grandmother Edith.

"...Sadistic behavior may hide unconscious masochistic aims," psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel explains. Bill's masochistic impulses are more covert then his sadism as we study his political life and his public sexual life. I recall that Gennifer Flowers wouldn't let Bill Clinton tie her up in a sex game with Bill playing sadist although he let her tie him up so he could play masochist.

I started thinking about this as I realized that many of Bill's love affairs ended on an angry and threatening note. Both Dolly Browning and Gennifer Flowers felt intimidated and frightened by Bill after he became a candidate for President. During the media frenzy about her relationship with Bill in 1992, Gennifer said, "I could have been killed..." Dolly tells us that when her tabloid exposure seemed imminent in 1992, Bill threatened to "destroy" her and she countered with "MAD," an angry acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction. Affairs often end in recriminations but this choice of weapons suggests an influence from the fear and the violent threats that Bill heard between his mother and stepfather as he was growing up. Bill's mental environment included his stepfather's brutality and his mother as the victim of his stepfather's sadism.

Gennifer and Dolly's fears of being killed or destroyed point to a sadistic current in Bill's personality. Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas talked about her affair with Bill on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show and later she found a shotgun cartridge on the driver's seat of her Jeep and her car window was shattered. Paula Jones was characterized as "trailer park trash" by James Carville, a Clinton spokesman. Kathleen Willey said her life was threatened, her tires were slashed and her cat disappeared. They were all fearful of a Clinton inspired attack. Monica and Bill seemed angry at each other as they talked through lawyers and press leaks before Bill's August 17, 1998 apology. Afterward the Starr documents reported that Monica told Linda Tripp that she was in "fear of my life." Monica's former duenna, Linda Tripp who turned snitch lived in an FBI safe house during the Starr investigation.

The political risks of Bill's casual sex described by Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones produced a major threat to Bill's Presidency. The pleasures of sex produced the pain of Ken Starr's prosecution, the huge presidential legal bills, impeachment and the effect on the Clinton legacy. The Democratic gains in the 1998 elections might have been larger without the sex scandals. The reaction of presidential masochism is best expressed by the whine of Jack Stanton, the Clinton surrogate in Primary Colors who says, "I can't catch a break, can I," as he learns that his casual encounter with a teenager has left her pregnant.

But isn't Bill a lovable rogue, a Falstaff of gargantuan appetites? Yes, and that's one reason why his poll numbers kept going up. The soccer moms and America's dads put Elvis in the White House and they don't want to hear about his or their own unconscious sadomasochism.

We haven't heard the stories of most of JFK's mistresses although we are told that many of his lovers didn't feel threatened. Still Judith Exner continues to sleep with a gun under her pillow according to Seymour Hersh in the recent Dark Side of Camelot. She was harassed and threatened by both the CIA and the FBI according to her book about her affair with JFK. Marilyn Monroe was depressed after her affair with JFK and she continued to talk about how Jack would divorce Jackie and marry her as she approached her own suicide. We know one of Jack's White House lovers, Ellen Rometsch who was rumored to be an East German spy was sent back to Germany in 1963 and Jack paid to insure her silence.

I'm not suggesting that Kay Summersby was totally forgiving about being dumped by Ike but she didn't feel danger and malevolence. After their wartime romance, Kay wrote a book about her relationship with Ike whom she continued to love from afar. Lyndon Johnson's first long term affair ended when Alice Glass disagreed with his position on the Vietnam war although they continued to correspond. His other long affair with Madeleine Brown from 1948 to 1969 ended when he failed to acknowledge their son who was then eighteen although he had provided for them financially. Her son sued LBJ's widow in 1987 for a share of his father's estate but in 1992 Madeline told a reporter that she still loved LBJ.

To compare Clinton with the past is really impossible because the Nineties have different standards on presidential behavior and new rules for the media about privacy as well as a special prosecutor. It is these new norms that have led to the publicity about the affairs of the other post-war presidents.

Bill's behavior toward Hillary is sadistic too and this dovetails with Hillary's masochism. Again, this isn't necessarily conscious but it's certainly visible. Bill's casual infidelities as well as his long term affairs cause Hillary pain and maybe a kind of perverse pleasure. (See Hillary's Sadism and Masochism and Hillary's Moral Masochism and the Monica Porno Flick).

Bill's sadomasochism is manifested by his unconscious switch of Hillary from her role as a sexually desirable woman, the Whore to the sexually taboo woman, the Madonna. This is signaled by Gennifer's arrival in 1977 as well as the other affairs as explained in Bill's Good and Bad Women. The section on Bill's Narcissism explains another unconscious factor in Bill's quest for love affairs: Bill needs the adulation of the affair and the mistress to bolster his self-esteem because he has a hidden childhood inferiority as a loner, a clumsy, fat sissy who was rejected. This fits well with Bill's Acting Out, an ego defense that is most visible as the bimbo or Bubba eruption. To make matters more complex, there is an affinity between Bill's sadomasochism and his death instinct if you believe that aggression originates in Thanatos.

How did Bill's sadomasochism get started? This is bound to be sketchy but it's better to speculate then ignore the issue. It has already been noted that Bill may have been a victim of Stepfather Roger's physical abuse. In any case, the assaults on his mother Virginia from the time Bill was a child to age fourteen were like attacks on Bill. As a victim of actual or vicarious child abuse from his stepfather, Bill is stimulated by this acting out of sadomasochism. His identification is with both the aggressive sadistic stepfather and the masochistic mother who divorces and then remarries the stepfather. Tracking sadomasochism to its origin suggests some oral sadism mixed in with Bill's predominant oral optimism and some anal sadism along with Bill's strong anal control.

Bill's sadomasochistic legacy is also an extension of Mother Virginia's conscious and unconscious behavior. Reading her autobiography for her sadism and masochism leads us first to her teens and then to her marriage and finally to her professional struggles.

Mother Virginia's behavior was an attack on her Mother Edith that was sadistic beneath its Oedipal trappings . We learn of Virginia's teen age rebellion against Edith's repression when she first left home for nursing school. She was free at last to release her repressed sexuality and anger, the first as her love at first sight for Bill Blythe and the latter as her attack on the maternal authority of the nursing school.

Virginia drank alcohol in the dorm, sneaked out after being restricted on New Year's Eve, threw an electric fan at her roommate, wore excessive makeup and a lace handkerchief on her uniform, took an unauthorized trip home and married while still in school, all against the rules. These were attacks on Edith's decorum and standards via Nurse Frye, the nursing school director who was a Mother Edith surrogate. Virginia's pleasure included the "wrath" caused by her attack on authority. There was the possibility of her expulsion from school but she escaped this. Her behavior which included reprimands and being suspended from school for thirty days were more then punishments; they were the pleasure of suffering from self-inflicted wounds, that is masochism.

Virginia dwells on how much Mother Edith disliked Roger, her second husband whom Edith didn't want her to marry. Choosing Roger gave Virginia the pleasure of a sadistic attack on Mother Edith in addition to her own masochistic suffering from Roger's alcoholism, philandering, gambling and abusiveness. Mother Edith was right about Roger but Virginia rationalizes this saying, "In hindsight, I suppose you could make the case that Mother knew best - about Roger Clinton...but...I know you can't live other people's lives for them...and ...you can't relinquish responsibility for your life to anyone else."

Virginia remained married to Roger despite his abusiveness for seventeen years until his death. She divorced him after fifteen years of marriage when his abusiveness led to a confrontation with fourteen year old Bill and to an increasingly fearful five year old Roger Jr. Then, three months later she felt sorry for Roger, the tearful ex-husband who was camped in a car outside her home so she remarried him.

Mother Edith and Husband Roger continued to hate each other and Virginia tells us that stubborn Mother Edith's waited Roger out so she died at 66, two months after Roger died at 57. It is the sadomasochistic Virginia who delivers the final benediction on her two love-hate relationships when she hopes "...that Heaven for them meant that neither will ever have to shriek through the night again."

Virginia as the physically abused wife with a philandering and alcoholic husband is a story from a textbook of masochism but there was yet another side to this story. Virginia tells us that when she decided to divorce Roger, Mama Clinton, her mother-in-law called weeping and wailing, "Please don't do this to my baby..." and so Virginia was cast in a cruel if not sadistic role by at least by some members of this extended family.

Another drama laden with sadomasochism is Virginia's struggle with the Hot Springs medical establishment to maintain her independent practice as a nurse anesthetist. She explains the sadomasochism about this when she says, "There are... people today, some of them my supporters who say I brought my thirty year battle...on myself... my response was just me...pride, gender, and personality entered into the mix..." The atmosphere in the Hot Springs medical community "...was a poison I had helped to inject." Many things happened but Virginia's sadism and masochism are both here.

·Mother's Day for Bill

In 1996, Bill Clinton wrote a public Mother's Day tribute to Mother Virginia mentioning their separation when he was a toddler and she was away in New Orleans for training as a nurse-anesthetist. His words are almost identical to those in her book about their tearful parting. Both Virginia and Bill suffered from separation anxiety. Bill remembers the separation but he repressed the powerful emotions of this experience which reemerge later in his ego defenses.

Bill's repression is underlined by his remembrance of his mother's death in 1994, "...after she got home (from Las Vegas), she called me. Hillary, Chelsea and I ...had a four-way conversation. Just a few hours later, she died in her sleep...And while I regretted not having the chance to say goodbye, I knew... we had said all we needed to say...There were no accounts to settle...no words or emotions left unsaid." These words also points in the opposite direction toward an endless reservoir of unconscious and unresolved Oedipal emotions.

A few days before Virginia died of cancer, she was a guest at Barbra Streisand's New Year's Eve show in Las Vegas. They met at Bill's inauguration and became special friends and I recall the rumors of Bill's brief affair with Barbra. Virginia's visit to Las Vegas as she is dying reaffirms her choice of Barbra for Bill as an Oedipal prize. So Virginia is Oedipally united to Bill and she delivers a final attack on Hillary.

Bill's Mother's Day card at a midpoint in his life and his Presidency says, " I miss her laugh...hugs...fire in her eyes...never-say-die attitude. There are still some Sunday evenings when I have the urge to pick up the phone to call her and suddenly realize that I can't do that anymore." Beneath this rational and loving appreciation of his mother there are the unconscious forces of a mourning reaction. Clinton, the child-man is depressed over his loss, guilty about his survival and angry at his mother who left. These emotions after his mother's death mirror his childhood separation reactions of depression, guilt and anger. Virginia's sudden death was a major stress for Bill in the first two years of his presidency according to Bob Woodward in The Agenda.

·Monica Talks About Bill

A different kind of look into Bill's mind appears in the tapes of Monica Lewinsky's phone calls to Linda Tripp made during the last three months of 1997. These calls were recorded by Linda without Monica's knowledge and given to Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and are among the evidence released by the House Judiciary Committee on thirty seven tapes that have a playing time of twenty two hours. I listened to the tapes during a marathon broadcast which ran from a Friday to a Sunday on San Francisco's KSFO during November l998.

These tapes are a longer and more emotional version of Monica's testimony before the grand jury. Through Monica's love, anger and depression we hear about Bill and their failed relationship. No one altered this oral diary unlike Monica's book and the others written by Bill's friends all of which went through the editorial process. Monica talked to Linda several times a day for over a year but is on tape from October to December 1997 after she and Bill had been lovers for eighteen months from November 1995 to May 1997.

Linda was told to make the tapes by Lucienne Goldberg who said she should to do this to protect herself from being "destroyed," that is called a liar after she told the story of Bill's affair with Monica. Linda had a right wing orientation like the other conservative Republicans who facilitated the Monica tapes, Lucienne Goldberg, Ken Starr and the Paula Jones' attorneys. Literary agent Goldberg said Linda could get a book contract for the story of the President's affair with Monica.

Bill's lovers from earlier decades, Gennifer and Dolly who told their stories in books had longer relationships with Bill, twelve and thirty three years respectively but their fantasies, activities and visits with Bill were not confirmed by physical evidence, logs, witnesses, interrogations or verified tapes although there were some Gennifer-Bill telephone recordings made public in 1992.

After their affair was over, Monica remained in contact with Bill and sought a job in New York where her mother lived. She couldn't find a job that she wanted despite the help of UN Ambassador Richardson and Bill's friend, corporate attorney Vernon Jordan and some of the phone conversations are about her job search. Finally the demand of Paula Jones' attorneys for a deposition led to her affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Bill. After being threatened with a perjury charge by the Special Prosecutor, she negotiated immunity and then testified before a grand jury in August 1998. She met with representatives of both the House and Senate during the impeachment hearings in 1999. Afterward she and Andrew Morton wrote Monica's Story and she did a television interview with Barbara Walters.

The hours of rambling phone dialogue are evocative of Handsome Bill as Monica longs for a call from him, wants him to get her a job, plots to conceal their relationship from deposition and is lovelorn, suspicious, angry and tearful. This serious girl talk is mostly about Monica in jokey and chatty tones with threads about love, friends, hair, food, weight, moms, clothes and travel. Monica's posture was naive and questioning while Linda was tutorial about jobs and relationships. Monica's need for attention interrupted Linda's television time so it is heard in the background. One hears fragments of Linda's comments to her cat and dog and sometimes she talks to visitors including her adult children. At times the calls interfered with Linda's meals so the talk went on as she ate. They gossip about friends and coworkers whose names are sometimes deleted. Expletives are censored. Monica's endurance on the phone often exceeds Linda's bedtime so she pleads for sleep and signs off.

Monica says Bill is "hiding" and wonders if "he stopped liking me" or if he has a new relationship. She is obsessive about Bill as she speculates wildly, "maybe he's on drugs" when he doesn't call back. At other times Monica feels sabotaged by the White House staff as she sends notes and gifts to arrange an appointment with Bill. Anger and depression are heard as Monica says, "(Bill) yelled at me... he scared me." Appointments with Bill are made and broken. The emphasis shifts over time from her return to a job at the White House to working in New York in the private sector to get away from Washington. Another reality intrudes at times when Linda says of Bill, "he's a guy" and Monica agrees. Linda's judgment is that "he needs supervision" and they recall the role of Betsey Wright who screened the women coming to Governor Bill's office in Arkansas.

The relationship between Monica and Bill can be seen in terms of the stereotypes. Monica is a material girl of the Madonna legend seeking fun and connections, love and sex, success and fame, a Beverly Hills vixen with big hair, a big chest and a short skirt among the White House suits and secretaries. She is poised, smart, funny, and self assured according to Dominick Dunne writing in Vanity Fair. Monica jokes about asking Bill for a position as the President's special assistant for blow jobs and she wants them to run away together. While in mourning for the lost Bill, she dates Thomas Longstreth, a fellow Pentagon employee and becomes pregnant and has an abortion. She has an affair with "a nutrition guy" at at a fat farm described in the tabloid press and she notices that Vernon Jordan is "quite the ladies' man."

The Bill of the tapes fits the errant husband formula, a horny fifty year old who seeks sexual conquests with charm and explanations about his need for love. Bill tells Monica as he had told Gennifer and Dolly about his loveless marriage with a cold, bad tempered wife.

What can we learn about Bill Clinton's inner life from the Monica-Linda tapes that we don't already know? Bill's passivity, deceptiveness and charisma receive new dimensions from the words of Monica, the Wounded Stalker and Linda, the Righteous Snitch. Monica and Linda are both stressed during their intersection and their insights reflect this anxiety. Bill emerges from this dialogue as more passive in his relationship with Monica then in his earlier love affairs with Dolly and Gennifer or in his courtship of Hillary for that matter. He met Hillary in his twenties and Gennifer in his thirties. He met Dolly in his teens when he was really quite inhibited with girls but later in his twenties and thirties he was more active in their affair.

Does Bill's passivity in his affair with Monica mean passivity in his life or for that matter does activity in affairs of the heart mean an aggressive career? Of course not but love is life. Examples muster themselves. Monogamous Truman was at least as active in love as adulterous Roosevelt. Both were active Presidents. LBJ was an active President while Bush was a more passive president though both had affairs.

Bill's deceptions and ambivalence speak in the tapes and in Monica's book. His fluctuations of mind and heart during their affair deceive Monica and probably Bill himself according to the Monica-Linda duet. This is illustrative of his narcissism and superego deficits which affect both his political and sexual behavior. Bill believes everything he says at the time he says it according to biographer David Maraniss. Narcissists need instant gratification and one of the ways to get it is to offer it to your lovers, friends and the voters.

Monica's Story covered the same territory as the tapes and the Starr report but now Monica speaks for herself. The book focused on her background of weight problems, a sense of entitlement, immaturity, perfectionism and low self-esteem that led to her enticement of and enthrallment by Bill and then their breakup. In the book we hear about the errors and bias of the Starr report and the way Monica's words were manipulated by Linda Tripp on the tapes.

We do learn new things: Monica had an orgasm the first time she gave Bill a blow job; they were soulmates; Bill sang "Try a Little Tenderness" to her; they discussed their childhood weight problems; he said she was full of piss and vinegar like his mother; she told Bill he was like her mother, an ostrich with his head in the sand who avoids confrontation; Bill and Monica both lied; Monica and Bill both cried; he was furious with her for 56 minutes on the phone and she was often angry with him too; Monica, her mother and her father were all suicidal at one time or another.

Monica's tells us about Bill's charisma but it's easier to characterize it then to explain it. I've already assigned his sex appeal for both women and men to Bill's genetics by a reference to Elvis but this discounts his performance. Monica saw Bill as a "a beautiful soul...this incredible person...a little boy...I fell in love (with on) July 4, l997." Billy Graham, the evangelist says Bill has "a tremendous personality" that makes the women "go wild." If impeachment means they're going to turn Bill into a peach, singer Sinead O'Connor asks, "Can I eat him?"

The reaction of men is similar. Bob Woodward who talked in San Francisco in 1999 recalled an interview with Bill for his book Shadow when Bill's eyes "drilled him" and he was "seduced." Republican David Gergen's book calls Bill "seductive." A man whose only meeting with President Bill was a chance encounter in a country restaurant told me about the raw emotional power of Bill's intensive listening while this minister expressed his own political opinions. Bill wasn't talking; he was listening.

• Walking the Dog With Bill and Monica (Walking the Dog is the title of a blues by Rufus Thomas which uses a euphemism for masturbation.)

Bill had "hundreds of affairs" before "turning forty" but then he began a "concerted effort to be faithful," he told Monica which she reported to the Starr grand jury. This suggests to a psychohistorian that Bill began to have episodes of impotence, that is sexual potency problems technically referred to as erectile dysfunction after he turned forty in 1986. Premature ejaculation is the most common kind of erectile dysfunction but there are others such as the loss of an erection or an inability to get it up at all. Such events give Bill a reason to avoid sexual intercourse and to substitute masturbation and oral sex. The reason is fear of failure.

Another saga about an impotent American is Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises where we meet Jake Barnes who suffered a mysterious and symbolic "wound" in the First World War. Jake's malaise is a badge of his membership in the Lost Generation like Bill who belongs to the burdened post Vietnam era. Another hero whose sex life is restricted to masturbation fantasies is Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses who became impotent in midlife after the death of his infant son.

This paradox is expressed by Priapus, the Greco-Roman god with an enormous deformed penis in a permanent erection who never actually reaches orgasm and ejaculation although he is a symbol of fertility.

Did Bill's failed erections and his fears and inhibitions about sex originate in his midlife crisis? This theory leads to Bill's unconscious and its vicissitudes beginning at age forty. Bill's potency disturbance at forty was a punishment imposed by the superego or conscience which he rationalized as moral improvement. This was part of a midlife crisis which revived his childhood masturbation guilt with its castration anxiety and separation fears. Bill's separation anxiety echos as he says to Monica, "Why do they have to take you away from me? I trust you so much..." Bill's description of his "empty life" and his memories of inadequacy as a "fat kid" were relayed by Monica during her taped telephone conversations with Linda Tripp. Bill's ambivalence, an unresolved complex from his early development becomes more powerful as he begins an affair with Monica and then he withdraws "to avoid temptation."

Bill's erectile dysfunction is psychological in origin because his penis functions normally in masturbation and oral sex. Sometimes in foreplay too. Overall about half the cases of erectile dysfunction are psychological like Bill's while the other half are caused by organic problems. Most erectile dysfunction is transient but serious sexual potency problems are estimated by the National Institute of Health to affect five percent of American men at age forty rising to 15 to 25 percent by age 65.

The Starr Referral says, "...the President inserted a cigar into (Monica's) vagina and then put the cigar in his mouth and said, ÔIt tastes good.' " Explicit Bill tells us of the pleasure of tasting Monica's vagina which merges in a bisexual fantasy about the flavor of a penis.This is a statement about Bill's felt need for a better penis, more dependable, harder and maybe larger. Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but this isn't one of them. Bill's playful tasting of his phallic cigar exposes a bisexual fantasy which flits from the masturbatory to the homosexual and then to the street challenge, "Go fuck yourself."

Monica tells us via the Starr report, "...that her physical relationship with the President included oral sex but not sexual intercourse...he touched her genitals...bringing her to orgasm on two occasions...initially the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion...(but) during their last two...encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate." The report said that on March 31, 1996 the President " Ô...focused on me pretty exclusively...' kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals..."

Bill's preference for foreplay rather then sexual intercourse with Monica is the routine as he, "...'unzipped his pants and sort of exposed himself,' " when they meet in the Oval office. Altogether they had oral sex nine times and phone sex fifteen times according to the Starr report. Monica wanted sexual intercourse with Bill but it never happened although once there was "...brief genital to genital contact."

Bill, the horny hunk with a potency problem might just as well have said, "Not tonight dear, I have a headache," as he complained about his "sore back." Monica says, "We tried...but ...he couldn't bend because of his knee, it really didn't work..."

Maureen Dowd has it right although she doesn't intuit the reason for Bill's fears. "It is Ms. Lewinsky who comes across as the red-blooded predator, wailing to her girl friends that the President wouldn't go all the way. It is Mr. Clinton who behaves more like a teen-age girl trying to protect her virginity, insisting on holding back, reluctant to even remove any clothes, even pushing Ms. Lewinsky away and pushing up her slipping bra strap...emotionally upset about it...(saying) I'm trying to be good..."

Psychiatric case studies are filled with men whose orgasm requires special conditions: exhibitionists who show their penis to women at bus stops, voyeurs who peek at partly dressed women through windows, fetishists who fondle women's apparel like shoes and the pedophiles who seek sex with children. These can be lifelong perversions or they can be temporary and sporadic at those times when infantile castration fears and sadomasochism emerge from the unconscious. Perversions, Freud tells us are sexual behavior with infantile rather then adult goals.

Perversions are now called paraphilias, a more neutral term, Some of these activities are a part of the normal foreplay that leads to intercourse but for a paraphiliac they are his only avenue to a sexual climax. The paraphiliac is expressing his sexuality according to an infantile pattern so according to this theory, Bill regressed after the age of forty to behavior reminiscent of the oral stage of development by avoiding sexual intercourse in favor of fellatio, masturbation and phone sex. Of course, these paraphilias are defenses against infantile oral impulses rather then the impulses themselves. Perhaps there is some truth in a tabloid, the Star (pun intended) that says that Bill hasn't had sex with Hillary since 1986 or Hillary's complaint that Bill only has sex with her twice a year.

Bill's orgasms by phone sex and fellatio are an expression of oral dependency in a man whose Oedipus complex is unresolved so he avoids sexual intercourse in his new relationship during his prolonged midlife passage, the male menopause. Consult Hillary's and Bill's Change of Life for details about this.

Bill's choice of oral sex indicates unresolved problems originating in the unconscious. Oral sex avoids pregnancy as well as the love, responsibility, bonding and the psychobiology of sexual intercourse. Oral sex involves recreation not reproduction in the fantasies of the participants. Rock star Marilyn Manson says in Rolling Stone, "...blow jobs are right there with handshakes and autographs as part of the job. It's like kissing babies." Among fifteen to nineteen year-olds, fifty five per cent engage in oral sex according to a Kaiser Foundation poll reported by Seventeen magazine. Monica called it "fooling around" in her conversations with Linda Tripp. Oral sex is clothed sex and phone sex is even simpler since masturbation doesn't even require getting dressed up. Fellatio which mirrors the nursing experience both for its giver and its receiver is, "...a displacement of the infantile desire for the mother's breast, " according to psychoanalyst Richard Sterba. Sexual fluids and semen are like milk in this unconscious scenario so both cunnilingus and fellatio have an analogy to offering and accepting the breast.

Why did Bill initially refuse to climax during oral sex with Monica? She urges him to come but he doesn't trust her fully during their first seven encounters but finally during the last two episodes, he ejaculates. Bill's unconscious includes fantasies of oral impregnation so his inhibition about orgasm with oral sex is a fear of oral pregnancy, an idea originating with infantile oral development. This begs the question of who in Bill's unconscious is the impregnator and who is impregnated. The answer is that the infantile mind is bisexual so he has both male and female fantasies. Bill plants the magic seeds in mommy which starts a baby like his brother Roger but he is also the recipient of seeds from Daddy so he grows a baby too. When Bill finally does climax during oral sex, his fear of an oral pregnancy may become so threatening that he breaks off the affair with Monica.

The Bill who withheld semen from Monica during fellatio was a Bill who was in control. This unconscious need for control comes from his anal fixation. Despite his oral optimism, Bill is an anal compulsive campaigner, speaker and leader who shares or gives up power reluctantly. Once Monica recalls that Bill stopped oral sex part way through to climax and then she notices that he masturbated into the sink. In control again!

Anal and oral impulses unite sexually in Monica's and Bill's anilingus mentioned in the Starr report which neglects to tell us whose tongue and whose anus it was. Maybe it was both.

Cunnilingus with Monica becomes an issue when she says, "The President Ôwas talking about performing oral sex on me' but she stopped him because she was menstruating..." Monica was in control now. Was she really menstruating or just teasing? Anyway isn't the yuck in the tongue of the beholder? Monica didn't take up Bill's offer later on either although Gennifer did enthusiastically in Arkansas and she says, "I had never known a man so eager to use his mouth for pleasure and so skilled at it." Infant Bill wanted cunnilingus with Mother Monica but she continued as the baby sucking on Mommy Bill's nipple-penis.

Bill's oral sexuality is center stage with Paula and Gennifer too who says, "...Oral sex seemed like the natural thing to do, I was a little surprised, though, when he came in my mouth the first time we did it " The Paula Jones case which led to the Starr investigation of Monica started in Little Rock when Paula says she was taken to a hotel room by a State trooper in 1991 to meet Bill Clinton who briefly admired her and then dropped his pants and asked her to kiss his erect penis. Paula insisted Bill's penis was distinctive in appearance which led to unconfirmed speculation that Bill had Peyronie's disease, a midlife condition that causes a curved and deformed organ. Although Bill had argued that oral sex isn't adultery in the Biblical sense, there is no question that Bill knew his behavior with Monica was "inappropriate" according to his Bible-based Baptist religion and so he felt guilt. His conscience or superego was the same in l996 at fifty when he began the oral sex affair with Monica as it had been in 1977 at thirty-one when he started his genital affair with Gennifer. But in his midlife forties, Bill's sexuality was affected by erectile dysfunction and maybe the "wound" of Peyronie's Disease. Now in midlife, Bill's sadomasochistic "enjoyment" of his compulsive sexuality shifted from sexual intercourse to oral and masturbatory sex. This was necessitated by the erectile difficulties which were rationalized by a change in the values or content of his superego or conscience. See Bill's Superego for an overview on his conscience.

Bill's monologue of denials of a sexual relationship with Monica followed by his many apologies for it led me to his favorite book, The Mediations by the Roman philosopher and emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He tells us, "If you are distressed by something outside yourself, it is not the thing which troubles you but what you think about it and this is within your power to obliterate at once." Bill's mother Virginia often acted with this kind of denial and Hillary's family legacy also makes denial prominent. Bill and Hillary trained Chelsea in denial by role playing when she was six in Arkansas as they simulated angry criticisms about Governor Clinton by rival candidates like Orval Faubus after which Chelsea herself played the roles of candidate Bill and his opponent.

How did Bill go from a pleasure- loving Bubba to a worried prim middle age, from saying "I'll always feel sixteen" to "trying to be good." Bill was already a changeling who had gone from a repressed adolescent with no dates except for a prom with Dolly Browning when he was too fearful to have sex to become a Casanova in his twenties and thirties. The turnabouts of Bill as a changeling/narcissist without a central identity are hard to distinguish from his personal growth. Return to the section on Bill as Narcissus for more about this complex and controversial matter.

Monica called Bill "handsome" to which he replied, "When I look in the mirror, I sees (sic) a fat kid who couldn't throw a ball straight," according to the Washington Post. The low self esteem of Bill's childhood returned during his menopause with fears about sexual potency and his likely erectile dysfunction. His change of life started at about forty in 1986 but ten years later it was still ongoing.

"I have an empty life except for my work," Bill told Monica. These are the spoken words of the midlife crisis with its hormonal changes, fear of aging, loss of virility, depression and existential anxiety. Stress and particularly losses play a role in the onset of the midlife crisis and we know of one of Bill's major traumas was the death of his mother Virginia in 1994. Other stressful experiences remain to be reported in Bill's memoirs.

The Lewinsky disaster should be viewed as an episode in Bill's Sadomasochism described earlier. The influence of his sadomasochism is stronger at fifty then it was at forty so his continuing midlife angst is fueled by this unconscious primitive preOedipal force along with the castration fears. This is Bill's repetitive sadomasochistic sexual epic: a sexual affair, its discovery by his political enemies, a denial and then the pain of exposure followed by public punishment. This happened with Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, then in the Kathleen Willey episode and the Lewinsky affair, the Juanita Broaddrick rape story and perhaps there will be others like one with Eleanor Mondale hinted at in the 1998 tabloids.

When does taking risks about sex in the White House become sadomasochism? It was just a part of being the POTUS (president of the United States) if you were Kennedy or LBJ when there was national denial about presidential adultery. JFK 's nude White House pool parties with the two nymphs Fiddle and Faddle were guarded by the Secret Service. But in the Nineties, extramarital sex in the White House is a sadomasochistic performance with Starr and the media snooping for a prurient audience as Betty and John Q. Public peek through the beaded curtain.

Bill's sadomasochism in his love affairs involve his phone and oral sex with Monica, perverse in the psychological sense and then his public punishment as Elvis, the bad boy superstar. He has corrected the image of the awkward sissy, an over achiever who didn't get dates. Now he's not just Elvis but James Brown too. Sure, Bill is in pain after his sadistic pleasure in hurting the public and his wife but then there is a healing with masochistic pleasure as he suffers for what he did. This is a largely unconscious process for Bill and for the public but it's real enough to cost the taxpayers millions for the Special Prosecutor and the impeachment process. The increase in the ratings of the media was worth millions from advertisers who paid for the crowds attending the circuses. Meanwhile the attorneys received huge sums from Bill and the witnesses. Slick Willie like Tricky Dick is a sadomasochistic president with secret affairs, coverups, denials and explanations.

At some point in my study of Bill's and Monica's sex life, I became aware that I needed a real life perspective. I knew that porno guides to oral sex on the internet, the counting of oral orgasms by scientists in the Kinsey tradition, the sculptures of oral sex in the Hindu temples of Khajuraho and psychoanalytic theories weren't the whole answer. Soon I read in a local paper about a male stripper at a Girl's Night Out for teenagers in a San Francisco suburb who ended his performance by letting one of the fifteen year olds perform oral sex on him, a misdemeanor. Fellatio was the way novelist Joyce Maynard, then eighteen consummated her affair with fifty-three year old J. D. Sallinger according to her recent memoir.

In Ulysses, Molly Bloom contemplates, "...listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldn't mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew..."

Before I really had a chance for further rumination, I was at lunch with fellow senior citizens at a local university where we take classes.

The Starr report was just out so after a few comments about Clinton I asked, "Why do people want oral sex?"

"There won't be a pregnancy," a serious dark haired women pointed out.

"It's a power trip for Bill, " said a man with a cane.

A gray haired women with a single chin whisker smiled as she said, "It doesn't do much for a women."

"If you're in a hurry, you don't have to take off your clothes," commented a women in a rose jump suit whose lined face resembled a washboard.

"In cars," was the last word about oral sex from a man who takes the grandfather role in TV commercials.

It was an intense and all too brief focus group. Later on, I'll try another one with some baby boomers. Maybe Gen X too.

HILLARY AND BILL IN LEGEND AND STORY

·Bill and Hillary in Group Process With Dick, Dolly, Gennifer and Robert

Interpersonal psychoanalysis is the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, the American born psychoanalyst who in the 1930's led Freudians to a view of the mind as an appendage of its relationships with people. Freud's paraphernalia of id, ego, superego and the psychosexual stages remained but Sullivan explained that the mind of the infant grows because of its relationship to significant people and their mental representations. These life long influences which form the mind are called dynamisms. "We are our experiences," is the slogan of Sullivanian psychoanalysis which looks to the interpersonal for a measure of mental health. There is a connection from interpersonal psychoanalysis to both the humanistic and group therapies of the Sixties and also to object relations theory as an alternative to the older instinct model of maturation. Bill and Hillary must be examined by this interpersonal yardstick. Our resources include the political books about Bill by friends like Robert Reich and Dick Morris who knew both Bill and Hillary for many years . It was Hillary who often called Morris to help Bill with election campaigns. Reich knew Hillary even before he met Bill in 1968 on the boat going to England for their Rhodes scholarships at Oxford. These books are positive about the Clintons but they also offer useful critiques.

Reich who served as Secretary of Labor during Bill's first term left in 1996 to resume teaching, spend more time with his family and recover from the burnout of being Locked in the Cabinet, the title of his book. He says Clinton wanted him to stay for his second term. He is four feet ten inches because his growth was affected by a hereditary condition, Fairbanks disease; an attorney; a professor of public policy; a journalist and an activist for workers' rights. He was on the left in Clinton first term along with Hillary and Harold Ickes during the internecine warfare with Clinton's right of center cabal, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, the Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan and Dick Morris.

Morris who is often called a spin doctor was a consultant who helped Bill with polling voters and formulating campaigns and issues beginning in 1980 when Bill lost the Arkansas governorship after serving his first term. Morris who continued to work for Clinton in Arkansas and Washington resigned as a consultant during the 1996 Democratic convention when his relationship with a prostitute became public. Another kind of book is also helpful, the kiss-and-tell. Gennifer Flowers tells the story of her twelve year affair with Bill which ended in 1992 while Dolly Kyle Browning wrote a novel about their relationship which lasted from 1959 to 1992. The affair with Flowers was denied by Bill during the 1992 campaign but in 1998 Bill acknowledged it offering an abbreviated version in his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Attorney Dolly Browning's love affair first received public attention when she was also deposed in the Jones case. The details of these books cannot be verified but they are from Bill's widely known Kennedy-pattern womanizing. Jack Palladino, a private detective tells The New Yorker that he "was hired by Clinton's 1992 campaign to check out the credibility of Gennifer Flowers and that of twenty-six or so other women" who could say they slept with Bill Clinton.

What can we learn from these four tales of Hillary and Bill? Of course, the authors' credibility is the first question in the mind of the reader. These books like many others are self serving milestones for these four career minded authors, Bill and Hillary's peers. Their relationship to Bill Clinton gives them a unique audience so their words are shaped carefully. But in a real sense the authors are all frustrated by the Clinton Presidency. The two women say that Clinton's election meant they lost their connection to him as a lover. Morris left the White House in disgrace although he hoped to come back while Reich failed to achieve many of his goals for social change and so he laments his lost main chance. The books are each protestations of sincerity, passionate statements of the authors' achievements, their ties to Bill and their future hopes. Each presents the mind of Bill and Hillary with perspectives that we can't get in any other way. The men, Morris and Reich are FOB and FOH while the women, Flowers and Browning are FOB but not FOH although they certainly don't ignore Hillary.

During his twenty year relationship with Bill, Dick Morris worked to increase Bill's popularity and electability by taking polls about his campaigns and policies in Arkansas and then nationally when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. Morris' idea of a continuous campaign requires polling for each policy decision, speech, legislative session and election. Bill was constantly concerned with his image among voters and looked to Morris for answers. He wanted approval about everything from policy issues to whether a swimming pool should be built in the governor's mansion and where he should vacation.

Polling wasn't developed by Morris but he used the polls to triangulate a third position between the opposite views of the two political parties for Clinton. It was this use of triangulation for policy decisions such as welfare reform that was characterized by George Stephanopoulos as stealing popular positions from the Republican platform to gain voter approval. Morris' triangulation certainly fits Bill's style of avoiding confrontation and his desire to be liked and of course to win everyone's approval.

The Bill Clinton who needs affirmation was five when his stepfather Roger fired a gun during an alcohol-fueled argument with his mother. Bill recalls, "That bullet...could have killed me." In the same interview by Nancy Collins, he describes how he was a "loner" in childhood because of a dysfunctional home. By fourth grade, Bill is remembered by a friend as the smartest kid in class and "running the school" but another classmate says Bill felt "fat and rejected." The two Bill's coexist: a glass that is half full and a glass that is half empty.

Morris' continuous polling represents Bill's unconscious need to enter into a popularity community from which he felt excluded. Another impetus for the questioning was to get the answers that he lacked about the earlier family turmoil: Virginia vs. grandmother Edith when Bill was a toddler, Virginia vs. stepfather Roger during Bill's childhood, Virginia the racy iconoclast vs. the local bluenoses and Virginia vs. Bill when he decided to marry Hillary. Bill's politics of approval leads him away from the politics of leadership as practiced by recent presidential candidates like Pat Buchanan from the Republican Right and Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson on the Democratic Left.

Clinton used Morris to edit speeches and develop policies in accordance with polls but he also fought against control by Morris. Bill struggled to maintain his independence against this powerful genie that he had called up in a Faustian bargain. It is as though Bill's latent opportunism is unleashed by Morris with unforeseen consequences that Bill's ego can't control. When Bill feels anxious, he calls for Morris who arrives on the scene before or after electoral crises; at times only Hillary is strong enough to call Morris to the rescue as she did in Arkansas in 1980 and in Washington in 1994. Bill lost the race for governor after his first term in 1980 and in the 1994 election the Republicans took over control of the Congress. Morris' consultations are often hidden from the public and sometimes even Clinton's own advisors aren't told about Morris' role. Clinton's guilt about his loss of self confidence that leads him to call for help from Morris is like his shame about masturbation.

The president's shame is the focus of an appropriately named movie, Wag the Dog in which a Morris character is an anti-hero who is concealed in a White House basement. The embarrassed president is almost entirely absent from the film. This is a black comedy about a clandestine and anonymous consultant who creates a pretend-war on Albania as a pageant to seize the headlines after the President makes a newsworthy pass at a preteen Firefly girl. So life imitates art as the rocketing of terrorist bases in the Sudan and Afghanistan and the bombing of Bagdad and Belgrade take the headlines away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and post-impeachment malaise.

In the contest for control between Bill and Dick, Bill's easy anger surges and in 1990 he is reported as hitting Dick. Clinton apologizes immediately although both deny the story. Dick leaves him but not for long. This story highlights Clinton's rage and his obsessiveness about voter and media approval. Bill's narcissism emerges as he asks Morris where he will rank among America's presidents. Morris' operations are a balm to Bill's narcissistic wound just as Morris' own injured narcissism is salved by being the Presidential advisor.

Two of Bill's lovers, Dolly and Gennifer chronicle long, intermittent and satisfying love affairs in their books. Dolly's story begins when she is eleven and meets thirteen year old Bill at a golf course. She is smitten for the next thirty-three years which end in 1992 as Bill becomes a candidate for President. During their affair Bill is ambivalent and distant at times despite his sexiness and ardor in bed. Her story describes the inhibitions of a man with significant castration and separation fears. They begin with Bill's refusal to make love the night of the Senior Prom to Pretty Girl, his name for Dolly because of his feeling of sexual inadequacy and they go on to his failure to give her the attention and time that she thought she deserved. Then she excuses him by saying that he was "afraid to let me touch..." and this is because he was "pure." She repeats this in a higher octave when she says to him, "...you can't or won't receive what I have to give."

It's down and dirty time as we hear from Gennifer that Bill wasn't especially well endowed although he was a successful lover. The echo from Monica is of a Bill's who is "a little on the slender side" as she mourns his loss on the telephone to Linda Tripp. Is this a case of Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars? Of course and that is a reason the women offer a unique and important perspective about Bill's mind. Wouldn't stories by Lyndon Johnson's or FDR's mistresses offer unique insights into these presidents? Yes, but it's worth a reminder that although not everything in a leader's life is politically significant, all the experiences are important for biography and especially for psychobiography.

·Hillary and Bill in the Sadomasochistic Marriage

The Clinton marriage which was already a symbol became an enigma with the Monica Lewinsky fire storm and Bill's apology to Hillary and the nation on August 17, 1998.

There are two common speculations about Hillary's and Bill's marriage. One opinion is that it is a love match in which Hillary remains devoted and makes periodic denials about Bill's philandering and Bill is dependent on Hillary for support and guidance despite his infidelities. The other view is that it is an arrangement or understanding about sharing political power and tolerating extra-marital activities. This scenario says that Bill's numerous infidelities are ignored; Hillary has a lesbian love life and she had an affair with Vincent Foster. The two theories aren't really contradictory although they imply that a love marriage couldn't include political power sharing and a permissiveness about extra-marital liaisons while a power marriage couldn't involve real love.

The first answer about this was in 1992 during the Gennifer Flowers flap when Bill said on national television that they were in love and it was a marriage, not an arrangement or an understanding. In 1999 Hillary said, "We have love." Despite the proliferation of comments on their marriage, we lack a satisfying explanation.

The Bill and Hillary story begins with their first meeting in the Yale Law School library in a fabled and maybe even true story of how Hillary introduced herself to Bill who was so smitten he couldn't remember his own name. In psychohistory, fables are usually more useful then "the facts" in reading the mind. Bill, a freshman and Hillary, a sophomore were eyeing each other across the length of the Yale Law Library during in November 1970. Bill was a shaggy, story telling Southerner while Hillary was a star having been pictured in Life leading the counterculture and the antiwar movement. A classmate describes her as a member of the "look like shit" school of feminism. She was an activist at Yale where she was a articulate student with top grades. They'd met briefly earlier through Robert Reich in the cafeteria, been in eye contact and Bill had trailed Hillary out of classes. In the library, Bill was being unsuccessfully recruited for the Yale Law Journal by another student in a conversation that didn't really engage Bill. As his eyes met the studying Hillary again, she got up from her books and notes and walked the length of the room and said to Bill, "If you're going to keep staring at me and I'm going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves, I'm Hillary Rodham."

Fables abound so the story of their first meeting in Oppenheimer's book is attributed to Hillary who says they met in a registration line. Bill asked her where she was from and as she replied, "...his leg was rubbing against mine."

Their friends noticed the chemistry and Hillary explained Bill's appeal saying, "I've actually found a guy who is not afraid of me. Not one bit." Bill's housemate recalled Hillary's midwestern directness as the "...counterpoint to Bill's southern charm." By most accounts, Hillary took the initiative in their courtship.

Love operates in both the unconscious and the conscious mind and they aren't separate like playing cards. In Hillary's mind, Bill was the opposite of her Daddy Hugh as warm, not a curmudgeon; complimentary not critical; gregarious not isolated; easy going and even passive not rigid and aggressive. In fact, Bill's traits were more like a Good Mother (maybe a maternal Grandmother Della or Aunt Isabelle not the stern and bitter Mother Dorothy) and this could weigh in Hillary's thoughts. In Hillary's mind, the process was not a counting of qualities but a balance between the sexual energy of the id and the critical superego. In Bill's mind, Hillary was an exciting Yankee intellectual who offered an escape from Mother Virginia's control in Bill's unconscious dilemma about the Whore versus the Madonna described in Bill's Good and Bad Women.

The question is what keeps the marriage together. Of course, President Bill and First Lady Hillary are power people but so are the Governors, CEO's and university Presidents some of whom have power-oriented spouses too. Columnist Stephanie Salter wrote, "It's the love, stupid" as she looked at a photo of Hillary and Bill about to kiss in 1992. Meanwhile Maureen Dowd, who talks about a power marriage says that the reason Hillary doesn't walk or talk is because she likes "the look of the world from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

People aren't packaged as tightly as the pundits' explanations so maybe the Clinton have a combination of a love and a power arrangement that oscillates between these poles. For months or years it's in phase one and then it reverses to phase two. A seesaw arrangement between Hillary and Bill is the metaphor used by White House counselor David Gergen in his book. Or maybe it's really complicated like osmosis or magnetism or the unconscious. Perhaps we'll get some answers in Hillary's and Bill's tell-all books after they leave the White House.

Sadomasochism, both conscious and unconscious is the touchstone of their marriage. For background read Bill's Sadism and Masochism, Hillary's Sadism and Masochism and Hillary's Moral Masochism and the Monica Lewinsky Porno Flick. But how does this really work?

There is no doubt that Bill's affair with Monica had a sadistic message for Hillary. Sadism is the derivation of sexualized pleasure from pain inflicted on another so the affair has a double thrill for Bill, sexual at the point of production and sadistic in its unconscious meaning. Then he's unmasked by Ken Starr, Linda Tripp and Monica herself and he suffers public censure, demands for his resignation and impeachment.

Bill was also attacked privately by Hillary, the betrayed wife whose political stock in Clinton & Clinton was declining in value. Now he was a disgraced partner-husband; his sexual affair was over and his creditability was down. Are adulterous husbands victims? Not really but by then all Bill had left was his masochism, the sexualized pleasure produced by his own pain.

Meanwhile what of Hillary who like Bill is a sadomasochist. She first appeared in the Monica affair as a victim of Bill's adultery and in this role suffered both emotional pain and masochistic pleasure. Then she went into "battle mode" and attacked Bill's accusers as right wing and anti-Arkansas conspirators. Did she know the truth then or only suspect the worst or was this just plain old denial? We can't be sure but her attacks on Bill's enemies were a source of sadistic pleasure for her. When the truth about Bill's bimbo eruption emerged there was a noisy confrontation. Hillary slapped Bill hard enough to leave a red mark seen by the Secret Service as Bill emerged from Hillary's bedroom according to Chris Andersen's book. This was a sadomasochistic response, striking out sadistically and also receiving masochistic pleasure as a victim, maybe helped along by media-enhanced porno images of Bill's affair with Monica.

After Bill's confession, Hillary tells Mike McCurry, Bill's chief of staff that she was "...angry...betrayed...lonely...exasperated and humiliated" On Martha's Vineyard, Hillary says to a women friend, "I have to take this punishment...God is doing this, and He knows the reason..." These quotes in Shadow are from Bob Woodward's secret sources. Theology aside, Hillary is using her ego defenses of intellectualization, isolation and projection against being overwhelmed by her sadomasochism. There is narcissism here too although some would take the reference to God to be a surrogate for a punishing Daddy Hugh or an unforgiving Mother Dorothy.

Hillary's response to Monica and to Bill's hundreds of other affairs remained theological a year later. Bill had committed sins of weakness not malice according to Hillary quoted in the Lucinda Franks interview in Talk in 1999. In an explanation that goes beyond an analogy, Hillary compares herself to Jesus who was denied three times by Peter, a Jesus who loved Peter anyway. We must look behind Hillary's facade of partly conscious grandiosity, narcissism and blasphemy to find her identification with the Jesus who predicted Peter's apostasy. In the New Testament Jesus said, "...I tell thee Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me." Nonetheless Hillary as Jesus loved Bill the way Jesus loved Peter who became the Rock on which His church was founded.

Bible history as explained by a scholar, Brownrigg is helpful in understanding Hillary's words when we learn that Peter like Bill was "...a granite-like leader...a man of action...impulsive...aggressive...of childlike simplicity...daring...alternating with weak and cowardly instability." Both Jesus-Hillary and Peter-Bill performed many miracles before they were crucified. Hillary as Jesus emphases the bisexuality and the feminity of a Jesus who appears in the older mystery religions as a sacrificed Goddess or God. The sadomasochism in the stories of the sacrifice of the crucified and resurrected God assuring growth, fertility , crops and survival is implicit in Hillary's theology.

"We have love," she says of her marriage. But the love between Hillary-Jesus and Bill-Peter echos the sadism and masochism of the bloodshed and tribal wars of the Old Testament and their extension into the New Testament by the lives of the martyrs, the conversions by sword and fire, the Crusades and the innumerable wars fought in God's name.

The pre-JudeoChristian origins of this sadomasochism are "...the decisive moments in the life of the female - menstruation, deflowering, conception, and childbearing - are intimately bound up with a sacrifice of blood, the goddess perpetuates life by exacting bloody sacrifices that will assure the fertility of game, women, and fields, the rising of the sun, and success in warfare." This Jungian explanation by Erich Neumann goes on to say, "...the male like the female is impelled by his very nature to sacrifice."

·Bill and Hillary's Change of Life

Why did the Lewinsky scandal happen in 1998, six years after the Gennifer Flowers eruption in 1992 and four years after the Paula Jones lawsuit in 1994 which was based on an incident in 1991? Is this is the perilous midlife passage, the female and male menopause with their dual crises feared and celebrated by Gail Sheehy (later a Hillary biographer) and Daniel Levinson? Another affirmation for both a male and female menopause comes from Isadore Rosenfeld, internist and media health columnist.

The folk meaning of the change of life for both women and men is the loss of sexuality, fertility and attractiveness. So we see the eruption at the change of life of castration and separation fears from an unresolved Oedipus complex and sadomasochism from unresolved preOedipal complexes. For Bill, there was the revival of the sissy, a fat, clumsy little boy with masturbation guilt and anxiety about separation and castration. Bimbo eruptions are his response. This is accompanied by a midlife Hillary in her familiar roles: the enabler, the protective wife of an errant husband and Cinderella, the victim of Monica, the new wicked stepsister.

Hillary's and Bill's midlife nest became empty during the second presidential term with Chelsea off to Stanford in 1997. A needy Hillary spoke during the 1996 campaign of a plan to adopt a baby although it was unlikely then and it's not been mentioned since. Bill adopted Buddy, a Labrador.

Society's traditional response to midlife has been to seek the fountain of youth or to use jade, goat gland implants, potions and cosmetic lotions but now these quests take the form of plastic surgery, spas, estrogen, testosterone, human growth hormone and Viagra. Midlife is a flexible zone from the late thirties onward into the forties and the fifties but this definition is influenced by our current life expectancy of 75 in contrast to 1900 when it was 49 years.

The midlife crisis is really a myth according to Hunter and Sundel. The group statistics about the midlifers show them to be remarkably stable. There is no change in their divorce rate, the frequency and satisfaction of their sexual relations and the number of mental disturbances including the data about their mental hospital admissions, emotional crises, alcoholism, suicide and depression. They remain mostly in the same careers which are unchanged in their frequency of promotions and levels of satisfaction.

Even more counter-intuitive is the new research which finds that menopause in women leads to "increased activity, increased excitement, increased overall happiness, a decrease in depression and an increase in pride" after an initial reaction to the empty nest and the loss of biological fertility. These are the words of Betty Friedan, the feminist icon turned gerontologist writing about aging. She summarizes several studies including one by Bernice Neugarten in 1970 of middle class and working class neighborhoods in Chicago showing that post-menopausal midlife women in their forties and fifties were more satisfied then they had been earlier in their lives. The women with the most favorable outcomes were those who who had jobs or careers and were also mothers.

Menopausal zest is the term for this satisfaction and has been attributed to the experiences of women's discontinuity with their many changes: housewife, career, mother, empty nester and widow. The increased vitality of women at the menopause and later on too is highlighted when compared to the men who have more trouble adjusting to their midlife-menopause and to their years beyond. This runs parallel to the biology of the women's longer life span and their reduced frequency of impairment after their menopause. Again, this is contrary to the observation that women during their earlier decades go to doctors more often and take more sick leave then men. Perhaps the reason that women use health services more is because they are more attune to their health problems and bodily events. Women's responses to midlife have changed with their greater independence so by 1970, the time of the study, they are able to cope more effectively then earlier generations. Studies of women in Japan and Israel. show similar results.

Psychohistory is not consensus and some midlife crises are just like Bill's: the husband has an affair with a younger woman in the office, his job and marriage are threatened and family life is disrupted. Smoldering midlife crises can be fanned into flames by personal stress like the death of Hillary's father Hugh in April 1993 followed by Vince Foster' suicide in July and then the death of Bill's mother Virginia in January 1994. In nine months these were major stresses for both Hillary and Bill according to Bob Woodward in The Agenda.

Another point of departure into the Lewinsky crisis is the role of channel fever. Channel fever is the tense, edgy and erratic behavior of the ship's crew and its captain in the days before the end of a long sea voyage. The preoedipal maternal security and rhythm of the sea and ship on the journey is to exchanged for the uncertainty and hazards of arrival at a port. Another version of such a transition is "the shorts," the anxiety and irritability of long term convicts whose sentence has only a few weeks to run. Misbehavior is more likely in a previously tractable prisoner who is suffering from "the shorts."

Presidential shorts and channel fever are to be expected as the Clintons reach the end of eight years in the White House just after their twelve years in the Arkansas Governor's Mansion. There is the impending loss of the familiar routines of power and governance and the uncertain future for an ex-President and a former First Lady.

I saw something similar in my practice with the midlife crisis of a thirty-something hockey star facing obligatory retirement due to his advanced age for his sport. His future seemed murky as he reacted with anxiety and depression that affected both his marriage and his children. Therapy helped this family and there's a hint here that it could help the Clintons too.

· Hillary and Bill's Psychotherapy

The question that tugs at our sleeve as we read both Hillary and Bill's psychobiographies is what about therapy? Shouldn't they seek self-understanding and personal change as individuals or as a couple? We know that Bill went to family counseling with his mother, brother and Hillary while he was Governor in 1985 when brother Roger was arrested for drug sales. Bill and Hillary were in pastoral counseling for marital problems in 1989 and had counseling again during the Monica Lewinsky crisis according to Bob Woodward in Shadow.

Hillary's therapeutic White House praetorian guard has consisted of psychologist-philosophers like Jungian Jean Houston and Rabbi Michael Lerner (he will appear later in What About the Rest of Us in Clintonia). The roster also includes Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, the Eleanor Roosevelt scholar and Anthropologist Catherine Ann Bateson who like the others speaks for a New Age feminism.

The selection of California internist Dean Ornish as a White House physician reflects Hillary's interest in a healthy diet and preventative medicine and perhaps an approach to stress reduction as well. The widely read Ornish program for the rehabilitation from heart attack as well as their prevention includes diet, exercise, stress management, meditation and psychotherapy. Ornish who writes about his personal experience with suicidal depression could facilitate psychotherapy for the Clintons.

Both Hillary and Bill use pastoral counseling. Hillary consults with Rev. J. Philip Wogaman at Washington's Foundry Methodist Church which she attends with Bill and she continues her contact with Don Jones, her Methodist youth leader, now a professor of theology in New Jersey.

Bill meets regularly with three different ministers for Bible reading, prayer, spiritual growth and to stay centered according to a New York Times report by Niebuhr. This includes weekly phone calls with Rex Horne, his pastor in Little Rock and monthly visits with Tony Compolo from Pennsylvania and Bill Hybels from Illinois, all Baptist ministers. They describe these sessions using words like blunt and rebuke. By 1998, Bill's "God Squad" included Gordon MacDonald, a Protestant clergyman who had left his pulpit after adultery with a parishioner, Reverend Jesse Jackson who prayed with Bill and Chelsea in the White House during the Monica crisis and also Hillary's Methodist pastor, J. Philip Wogamon.

A therapeutic alliance between Christianity and psychoanalysis began with the psychoanalytic work of one of Freud's early followers, Oscar Pfister, a Swiss Protestant minister. Although psychotherapy comes in 256 varieties like the colors on my printer, Hillary's New Age explorations and Bill's Bible therapy sound like resistances to the exploration of the unconscious. A resistance is a defense against the conscious awareness of incestuous impulses, murderous rage, masturbation guilt, castration fears, sadomasochism and narcissism, the normal occupants of the unconscious.

There is always more to be said but finally I stopped for help. An friend who read this report refused to comment explaining, "Your analysis of the Clintons will harm them. I like Bill and Hillary so it would be immoral to help." This gave me hope that there are some secrets here that will illuminate as well as offend.

· Is Psychohistory Really History?

How do you know if the psychohistory of Hillary and Bill is true? Can it be proven? Do you think Bill at fifty is a garden variety middle aged satyr or is he a man with potency problems who is dependent on fellatio, phone sex and masturbation for orgasms? Is Hillary a masochist who receives unconscious gratification by Bill's affairs or is she really just a victimized wife?

Did I hear someone say that psychohistory is just a smorgasbord of anecdotes and events tailored to fit a psychological thesis? Of course it is but history itself is a series of stories arranged into themes. All accounts of history are selective so the psychohistorian makes choices like other historians. If there is any doubt about the need for themes in constructing history, read a newspaper from a hundred years ago and you'll see how much you need the context to decipher the meaning behind the words.

It's hard to prove that psychohistorical explanations are right but the debates about them are invigorating. The nucleus of psychohistory is the communication between the psychohistorian's unconscious and that of the subject so psychohistorical assertions are metaphors which stimulate the juices of history and life. This encounter in the thicket of psychology and history follows the principles of these disciplines but such rules don't determine the validity of the conclusions. So the psychohistory of the American Revolution gives us a new dimension by Burrows and Wallace who learned that the Revolution was a family drama when England acted like a parent while the colonists played the rebellious children even as the colonies themselves experienced a change in their pattern of child rearing from England's patriarchal model to a more autonomous style suited to a frontier society.

Is this psychohistory of the Clintons like the " Ôwild' psycho-analysis" which Freud defined as interpretations which were premature, incomplete and erroneous? He illustrates this by describing a divorced woman with anxiety-states who was told by a physician using his warped version of Freud that she needed sexual satisfaction so she should return to her husband, take a lover or satisfy herself by masturbation. Freud concludes that such wild analysis may not be wholly bad since it may stimulate some patients to undertake a real psychoanalysis. Maybe this psychohistory, fierce if not wild will encourage new psychohistorical information to emerge or even motivate Hillary and Bill to undertake their own analytic therapy. The Clinton Library which will be built in Little Rock needs a Psychohistorical Wing, I think.

Some voices object to the psychohistory of a living president and the first lady because it is an invasion of their privacy. Morality, style, etiquette and the First Amendment, enter the argument. Hillary says it is "... mean...the way we strip away everyone's sense of dignity, of privacy..." in her interview in Talk. Is there a zone of privacy that is out of bounds to psychohistory? I'll refer the propriety of the psychohistory of presidents and first ladies to the ethicists and leave the policy issues to the social scientists but a taboo here suggests the family prohibitions against childhood curiosity about parental sexuality.

I plead guilty to a kind of voyeurism by breaching the taboo and violating the parental rule. The flip side to the voyeurism about the personal habits of a president-father and a first lady-mother is exhibitionism. The president and first lady who are seen through a beaded curtain are themselves engaged in selective exhibitionism. This sleight of hand involves politics but also their image, their marriage, their child and their life style. All presidential candidates depend on name recognition for their rankings in the polls, for fund raising and then for votes in the primary and the general elections. Perhaps the psychohistorian and the presidential couple have complementary voyeur-exhibitionist roles although they may prefer to see themselves as scholar and statesman respectively. Meanwhile the consumers of this voyeurism are a public who both savor and deplore such exposŽs.

Revelation about the president remains controversial. When I bought the Starr report from a government office in San Francisco, I was told by a clerk that he would never read an exposŽ about President Clinton's private life although he was a presidential history buff.

Psychohistory as an excuse for behavior was raised as a question after Hillary's interview in Talk where she calls Bill "...a very, very good man." She says that Bill was the victim in a struggle over him by Mother Virginia and his maternal Grandmother Edith when he was four which "...scarred him by abuse..." and she goes on to explain that he grew up in a violent family with an alcoholic stepfather. Still Hillary says that "He's (Bill) a grownup...He is responsible for his own behavior..."

I like Hillary and Bill as I said in the beginning so you'll have to decide whether I have offered psychohistorical excuses for them in my analysis.

It is a paradox is that a psychohistorical insight can be wrong and still be productive. Psychohistory is a cultural product like a sonnet, a vase or a painting that is useful and beautiful or else it doesn't work and is unattractive. Utility as well as beauty are in the eyes of the beholder. Freud's view that Moses was an Egyptian monotheist and his pronouncements (with Bullitt) on Woodrow Wilson whose fear of his father led him to wimp out at Versailles are not the final answers. Thomas Jefferson scholars were of two schools, one that he fathered slave Sally Hemming's children and another that he didn't. Recent DNA tests show that he did father at least one of her children but the studies of his character and opinions that were done to show that he didn't have a child with Sally do not lose their value for Jefferson scholarship.

Psychohistory which links author and subject also connects them to the reader using their conscious and unconscious minds. So hopefully we are all hooked up to the minds of Hillary and Bill.

·Bill and Hillary Face the Future What's ahead for the Clintons?

Psychology is a unreliable predictor of behavior but some trends are notable. Hillary was elected to the Senate in New York in 2000 and maybe she will be a candidate for President in 2004 or 2008. Hillary's book is already on the horizon. Bill is addicted to politics so after 2000 he'll turn to it again after the inevitable book and a trophy sinecure. Perhaps he is selecting a state like Arkansas where the fund raisers and pols are planning a Senate seat. The Presidential Library is being planned in Arkansas and the Clintons own a home in New York's Westchester County. After John Quincy Adams' term as President in the 1820's, he served seventeen noteworthy years in the House. Andrew Johnson, the other impeached president represented his state as a Senator after his presidency.

Hillary was elected to the Senate in New York in 2000 and maybe she will be a candidate for President in 2004 or 2008. Hillary's book is already on the horizon.

My psychohistory doesn't rule out a divorce especially after 2000 when the anxiety of Bill's separation from presidential power may lead to more bimbo eruptions. Bill's addiction to casual sex is likely to be more manifest after he leaves the White House and has more time and privacy. (I wrote this line before the Monica Lewinsky crisis in January 1998 but it's still true.)

My analysis is focused primarily on Hillary's and Bill's flaws and faults while their virtues and successes remain in the background maybe because the psychological explanation of achievement is more difficult. Maybe psychohistory is like Paradise Lost where Blake tells us that Satan really gets all the best lines.

WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US IN CLINTONIA?

Clintonia, the place of the Clinton Presidency needs its own psychohistory. To survey this land, we need to examine the culture of the Nineties. Hillary and Bill are the symbols for the Nineties as Eisenhower was in the Fifties, Kennedy in the Sixties, arguably Nixon in the Seventies and Reagan in the Eighties.

A national history is a series of stories with different layers of meaning. To seek the hidden or unconscious meaning of the Clintonian Nineties, we need a psychoanalysis of Betty and John Q. Public. This is justified when we realize how few tools there are to explain the sometimes strange behavior of societies like the U.S.A. You can't depend on the visible motives of patriots and villains, changes in the biophysical environment, famine, disease, wars, class conflict, self-interest or even the wisdom of economists to understand a nation. Recall the mysterious demise of major civilizations like the Mayans before the arrival of the Spanish or the Etruscans who lived in Italy before the Romans. A cult of cannibalism led to the near-extinction of the great cliff dwelling Ananazi civilization in our Southwest about 1150 A.D. according to anthropologist Christy Turner. While the psychohistory of individuals from biographical data offers the obstacles mentioned earlier, the study of a national mind is even more dicey. After all, what is a normal nation?

The relationship of Bill and Hillary to the nation can be focused by three questions: Do we get the President and First Lady we deserve? What is the relationship between the Presidential Couple and the country? Are both the President and the people really controlled by the forces of history like Manifest Destiny, the Depression or the Cold War? The answers are, "Yes" to the first, "Reciprocal" to the second and "Sometimes" to the third question. These answers need elaboration.

William Jefferson Clinton is the President we deserve because metaphorically, he is us. The American Pie is complete with Hillary in the presidential package. "No one gets to run for president on his terms. The terms you run on are set by the American people and that means what the American people are receptive to," says pundit Roger Simon. Bill is the leader "... we have asked for and don't know quite what to make of, " explains writer Stephen Dubner.

Well, at least the Clintons are more like us then Bush and Barbara, Dole and Elizabeth and the Perots. If they aren't like you, use the American prism to add Pearl Jam, Martha Stewart, Mike Tyson, Bill Gates, Ray Charles, Jimmy Swaggert, Sharon Stone, Patricia Ireland, Pat Buchanan, Amy Tan or Ralph Nader. Maybe Beavis and Butthead or the Simpsons too.

Our zeitgeist, the spirit of the Nineties is already the subject of academics, film producers, novelists and pundits but I want to look at the unconscious part of the national psyche. Beneath the shores and lagoons of our collective persona are the tectonic and volcanic forces that shape the American mind.

What are these psychocultural landmarks of the Clintonian Nineties?

First and foremost, sexuality was the new and noisy issue of the Nineties. This is not just the classifieds where men seek women, women seek men, men seek men and women seek women. This is culture wars, a journey into an America which is polarized into one community which is permissive, prochoice, tolerant of gay rights and anti-patriarchal while the another America is fundamentalist, censorious, patriarchal and opposed to abortion and homosexuality. Conservatives who support the right to privacy are caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile lurking in the erotic wings are the images of Bill's affairs, Hillary's lesbian relationships and her affair with Vincent Foster and the Clinton's open marriage. The sexuality of the Nineties results in the turmoil between Ken Starr and the White House about Bill's bimbo sexuality, his apology and Hillary's defense of Bill.

The Nineties are a stage in a sexual revolution beginning with the Pill researched in the Fifties, the liberated Sixties, a gay and a women's movement in the Seventies and AIDS in the Eighties. For those with a longer memory, the sexual revolution in this century began in the Twenties with the flapper generation, jazz, bathtub gin and women smoking cigarettes.

The sexual revolution has returned led by Bill and Hillary but also by Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. The immediate effect has been Bill's continued high approval rating before and after he admitted he had sex with Monica. His two elections were about the economy but 1992 was also a referendum on the Flowers affair while his 1996 election discounted the Paula Jones accusation. Hillary's stand by Bill is active, visible and planned like Tammy Wynette whose bittersweet lyrics warn, "Remember, he's only a man." Hillary is a liberated woman who acts according to her own lights. The polls were up for Hillary too as she led on both cultural and political issues during the 1998 campaign.

This is a new Nineties' sexuality, not the Fifties' climate control nor the "dope, rock and roll and fucking in the streets" of the Sixties' poet John Sinclair. The Nineties are the time of safe-sex-AIDS-awareness, single parents, gay marriage and a subdued sprinkling of S and M. Married and unmarried couples often say they are monogamous but adultery is acknowledged nationally by a third of the married women (the same number as in Hillary's Wellesley class of '69) and half the married men.

The Lewinsky publicity, the prurient Starr report, the chutzpah of Bill's legalistic rebuttal, his apologies and Hillary's stand by Bill tend to make adulterers feel less guilty. Who could better initiate their forgiveness then President Bill and First Lady Hillary, the Boomers who attend church each Sunday with Bibles in their hands? Maybe Americans will celebrate Bill's August 17, 1998 apology as Adultery Amnesty Day, the first private national holiday.

The new sexuality of Clintonia has a dark side with its unleashing of the the forces of sexual repression. The media concentration on the Lewinsky-Clinton foreplay along with the attacks on the right of presidential privacy come from a long tradition of puritanism. Lewinsky-Clinton is Salem Revisited, according to Arthur Miller who points out that "witch hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil...with witch-hunting ministers (who) examine women's bodies for signs of the Devil's marks..." The Salem and the European witch hunts in which tens of thousands of women perished resulted from a misogyny which remains alive in our unconscious.

The prototype is the fear and hatred of an Eve who is held responsible for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Biblical sexism. The witch trials were specifically aimed at women's liaisons with Satan who came to them in many guises. The victims of the European witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were frequently poor or older single women or widows who had worked as lying-in maids for richer, married women after the birth of a baby. The accusers were frequently women whose child failed to thrive or died or those who suffered from other misfortunes. But it was men who solicited the accusations, initiated the trials and then judged and punished the witches. The witch who was hunted, tortured, tried and burned is the prototype for the evil punished by the McCarthyism of the Fifties and now the Starr investigation which targeted both Monica and Bill. Like the witchcraft trials, it is directed by men but there are crucial roles for women accusers, witnesses and victims, Hillary, Paula, Monica, Linda, Susan McDougal, Kathleen Willey and Julie Hiatt Steele for example.

The witch has survived and today, the world's bestselling author, Stephen King in his novel It, informs this fear of women who, "...smell of the monster...a creature which would eat anything but which was especially hungry for boymeat." This fear from the unconscious and myth is acknowledged by King with unusual frankness when he says that his greatest sexual fear is, " The vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth."

The attack on sexual Clintonia is also directed against the prochoice position, an openly gay ambassador, art from the National Endowment using sexual images and even a White House Christmas ornament, probably a fertility goddess called Bertha's Big Butt by author Gary Aldrich, a retired FBI agent. This sexual McCarthyism has also invaded the private lives of Republican Representatives Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth, Bob Livingston, Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich with news stories about their adultery. An irony is that Clinton signed a law opposing homosexual marriage, sponsored legislation that makes legal wiretapping easier and offered proposals for internet censorship.

Beneath the conscious events of the Nineties is the return of the Goddess, who renews sexuality, fertility, maternity and the earth itself. There is a resurgence of the Yin archetype, the female force in a balance with Yang, the male principle. Yin is earth to Yang's heaven, night to Yang's day, the valley to Yang's mountain and in a more controversial dichotomy, Yin is feeling and receptivity to Yang's intellect and creativity. The Yin forces of the Goddess influence both men and women just as the Yang energy of Zeus also plays on both sexes. Jungians invoke the Chi energy of the unconscious to explain the Yin-Yang balance.

The Goddess reemerges in the Nineties because of increasing threats to survival from pollution, global warming, overpopulation, the loss of plant and animal species, environmental destruction and nuclear weapons. Recall that the Goddess or Great Mother includes both the Terrible Mother or Death Goddess as well as the Good Mother.

The mind of the group is influenced by its collective unconscious where the archetypes hold sway according to Jung and his followers, Neumann and Whitmont. When we seek these archetypes we find them in art, religion, myths, folklore, play and dreams. More controversial is the Jungian idea that these archetypes originate in the racial mind of the species. Freud also studied the collective unconscious but found its origin in social development rather then in the genes, an issue that is still being debated.

Second, Neofeminism is pivotal to the Nineties as well as to its government, business, education, culture, law and science. It's Neo because it is not the feminism of the Seventies when there was an anti-heterosexual bias, attacks on the traditional family, women's affinity groups and no celebrities. Neofeminism has luminaries like writer Gloria Steinam, entertainment promotions like Madonna and a buzz of sex chat and gossip. The Neofeminist avatar is Co-president Hillary but there are other power centers like the first woman Secretary of State, Madeline Albright and the first woman Attorney General, Janet Reno. This is a mindset that visualized Elizabeth Dole as a Republican presidential or maybe as a vice presidential candidate in 2000.

In the Nineties, the political power of women voters increased as they played a key role in both Clinton's elections. The gender gap means that women voted for Clinton in a higher proportion then men. Clintonia included the Year of Woman in 1992 when three new female Senators were elected. Women's concerns included the Democrat's focus on education, health care, the environment and Social Security as well as the traditional feminist causes of gender equity, abortion rights, childcare and benefits for poor women and children. They are on Hillary's agenda and were present during Bill's campaigns. It is of interest that the issues of most concern to California voters during an exit poll after the 1998 election were education, 19% and abortion, 16% followed by the economy, jobs and taxes while the environment, gun control and the Lewinsky affair trailed in the single digits. The Democratic Party as the Neofeminist engine is a legacy that awaits the verdict of a history that is clouded by Bill's welfare reform with its scuttling of the safety net for poor women and children in his second term.

Another Neofeminist statement from the White House is about the relationship between women and men. Hillary was a successful attorney, a policy leader and raised a child while married to Governor Bill and then in the White House she continued her political leadership while mothering teenage Chelsea and being the First Lady. This is a new American homily about the Presidential Family. That their marriage is troubled and that some of the dissension is public gives this neofeminist love story more rather then less visibility.

Bill Clinton's national sexual theater beginning during his 1992 campaign led directly to this Neofeminism. This was not the plan of the feminists or their enemies but it happened on Hillary and Bill's watch. It was Bill's in-house sexuality that led to an awareness of the women's agenda in a way that the ERA and abortion rights didn't do. The feminists were prochoice, equal rights, Anita Hill supporters and the antifeminists were in opposition but Bill's spectacle was a scream at both factions with a whisper of irony.

The national attention was first on Gennifer and Bill, then on Paula and Bill and finally on Monica and Bill with Hillary completing each of these triangles. National tournaments of prurience, sermonizing and spin reached supersaturation. Widow Kathleen Willey's case contributed briefly while snitch Linda Tripp and literary agent Lucienne Goldberg had walk-on parts. The power of a sexual platform with Ken Starr, the White House players, the Secret Service, Matt Drudge and the journalists, attorneys William Ginsburg and Bob Bennett and a cast of hundreds eclipsed issues like campaign finance reform, the sins of the IRS, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the survival of Social Security and even the economy.

A separate women's role in the Nineties is best exemplified by Gaia, the first matter to emerge from the void during creation. A later incarnation of Gaia is Athena, born from Zeus' forehead as the Goddess of wisdom and victory in war for Athens. Androgynous Athena who invented the ship and domesticated the olive is a virgin Goddess in a promiscuous Pantheon.

Hillary-Athena, an American Goddess is nurtured by Mother Dorothy, Teacher Elisabeth and Adolescent Guide Don Jones. She faced Daddy Hugh in a love-hate Oedipal struggle from which she emerged with Hugh's dark powers and she continued to contest the oppressors, Daddy Hugh and Husband Bill and so gives a voice and strength to the Village, especially its women and children. She speaks with fury and sacred curses, a language that is undecipherable to many. The neofeminist legacy from Hillary is served with the salt and pepper of S and M and the anger of hot sauce too.

Third, is the nihilism which is emblematic of the emptiness, passivity and centrism of American politics in the Nineties and beyond. This is a style of inactivity and moderation which contrasts to the density and activism of both the liberated Sixties and the Reagan Reaction of the Eighties.

The electorate is cynical, apathetic and disinterested and the number of voters declines in each election. A variety of emotions affect the citizen: passivity, anger at government, loss of hope for a better system, distrust of politicians and black humor. The public's "...thirst for passivity..." was slaked by George W. Bush's campaign and personality in 2000 according to Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker. Nobody for President is the continuing message of Wavy Gravy.

In addition to public lethargy, there is fear and anger about public service which was expressed in the suicide note of Vincent Foster, the White House counsel who wrote about a Washington climate where "ruining people is considered a sport." The same feelings of frustration affect the members of Congress who increasingly decide not to return for another term and the citizens who avoid political careers or temporary public appointments. The voters and the politicians feel powerless.

This political passivity and nihilism is Surplus Powerlessness. I worked with Psychologist Michael Lerner in Oakland during the Eighties when his studies of occupational stress groups led to the identification of Surplus Powerlessness. Most people suffer from real powerlessness as workers and as citizens leading to their cynicism, passivity and frustration. These workers and citizens who are the victims of real powerlessness blame themselves and this leads to Surplus Powerlessness, a further and crucial increase in isolation, anger, suspicion and alienation that prevents action. Worse still, the victims of Surplus Powerlessness often turn their anger on each other.

We are often unaware of our Surplus Powerlessness because it develops in what Lerner calls our Social Unconscious when our Human Essence is violated. The increase in Surplus Powerlessness during the Nineties can also be explained in Freudian terms as a regression to the narcissism of childhood so we have oral dependent and passive behavior on a national scale.

The Nineties' preference for centrism and moderation expresses the ambivalence and apathy of the voters who choose a government divided between a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. Bill's ambivalence and indecision and Hillary's pragmatism are the mirror image of these Nineties' voters.

The landmarks of Clintonia's domestic program are moderate and centrist: NAFTA, an increased minimum wage, the Brady bill, transferability of health benefits, family leave, subsidies for child care, more police, anti-terrorism laws, welfare reform, a tax increase, benefits for education, a balanced budget and deficit reduction. This is called "the school of smaller steps" by Andrea Bernstein. This contrasts with the Himalayan peaks and valleys of domestic policy during the postwar era: McCarthyism, polio vaccine, Medicare, putting a man on the moon, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and firing the striking air traffic controllers.

International Clintonia is also moderate with its restoration of democracy in Haiti, the Dayton peace plan for Bosnia, the Northern Ireland agreement facilitated by George Mitchell, the White House role in the final phase of the Oslo agreement for the Mideast and the military intervention in Kosovo. These are important but they are not major events like the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam or the beginning and the end of the Cold War. Other moderate Clinton's policies are the inaction in the thorny human rights issues in the Sudan, China, Indonesia, Rwanda, Nigeria. Afghanistan and until 1999, East Timor. There were many wars without presidential mediation: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Chechnya. There were confrontations without resolution b