Celebrity Profiles

Bill Clinton

An analysis of ‘Presidential Sex’ (by Wesley Hagood, Birch Lane Press) reveals that Thomas Jefferson had 5 adulterous affairs, Roosevelt 4 and Kennedy over 30 (including strippers, airline hostesses and secretaries). Bill Clinton has had at least 9.

The extent of the emotional derangement of American Heads of State usually only emerges posthumously.

It is remarkable about that Bill Clinton’s disordered personality is not only already a matter of public record but, it seems, no bar to reelection.

The bible of American psychiatry (called the DSM) defines an antisocial personality disorder by a list of 7 characteristics, of which a person must have 3 to qualify for diagnosis.

They include ‘impulsivity; reckless disregard for safety of self or others; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying’.

Clinton’s sexual impulsivity is legion. His bodyguards reported how he would suddenly be in need of a sexual fix and it was their job to procure a woman - any woman - quickly and conceal the incidents from Hilary Clinton.

She allegedly told a friend that ‘he’s ready to go after anything that walks by’ and an aide said of him that he ‘just can’t keep his zipper closed’.

In his pursuit of sex he appears to have displayed ‘reckless disregard for safety of self or others’, on one occasion allegedly having oral sex outside his daughter’s school and on another, propositioning a sunbathing woman he had never met.
His silver-tongued dishonesty in this area is recorded by a man who knew him at Oxford. ‘He was amazingly successful with women. Watching him, you would say to yourself ‘noone is going to believe that line’ but they all did’.

The irony of sex addiction is that it is fuelled by the fact that the addict is not getting much pleasure from the encounters - that is why he keeps going back for more.
There is a lack of intimacy, none of the togetherness and emotional union which leaves people after healthy sex satisfied and in need of no more.

To sex addicts it is a game. Gennifer Flowers, who had a 12 year affair with Clinton said ‘Bill was addicted to the chase, not the sex act itself but the actual conquering of all those women’.

Sex addicts come from a childhood which lacked stable relationships with parents or carers. They also tend to have been abused.

Consequently, they have a terror of dependence on others. It may be no coincidence that Clinton has said that when he met Hillary he thought ‘Oh-oh, this woman is trouble - the one I could love’.

Clinton was cared for by a succession of black maids in his earliest years. His mother worked long hours as a nurse and was separated from him between the ages of 2 to 3 whilst she trained.

His father had died 4 months before his birth in a car accident and he lived with his grandparents but they also worked, so it was a classically unstable early childhood.

When he was 4, his mother remarried to Roger Clinton, a violent drunk.
In a deposition when she divorced him she stated of Roger that ‘he has continually tried to do bodily harm to myself and son Billy’.

Typically economical with the truth, after he became successful Clinton tried to diminish Roger’s cruelty. ‘He was a wonderul person, a marvellous person and was very good to me’.

But if Roger was so ‘wonderful’ and ‘marvellous’ why did Clinton strenuously oppose his mother’s subsequent remarriage to him?

Clinton has also described the day when, aged 14, he called a halt to the beatings.
‘I broke down the door of the room where they (Roger and his mother) were having an encounter and told him I was bigger than him now. ‘You must never hit again’.’
This is a classic example of the bereaved son’s battle to replace his father and protect his mother, becoming his own authority-figure.

Rendered powerless by fate, they may develop a fanatical lust for power. To this end, they do well at school (as Clinton did) and are keen to please.

Clinton is famously anxious to win the admiration of anyone he meets and doubtless his sexual philandering is about having power and sexually expressed worship.

Virgil Spurlin, who is said to have been ‘like a father to him’, recalls that as a boy Clinton ‘came across as a young man older than his chronological age’.
This is typical of boys who had to be responsible for themselves from a very young age.

It is also the main reason why they are more likely than normal to achieve power: one third of US Presidents (and of prime ministers) lost a parent before the age of 14.

Losing a parent young makes a boy more likely to be antisocial but it can also increase the chances of high achievement. In a few cases, it causes both.