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The Phallic Presidency

Lloyd deMause
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 4, Spring 1998

Washington, Jackson, Buchanan, Cleveland, Wilson, Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Bush, Clinton - adulterers, fathers of illegitimate children, prostitute chasers, sex addicts.1 Why do Americans so often choose as leaders men who betray and humiliate their wives with their compulsive sex affairs rather than mature men who are capable of loving their wives and not betraying them?

It is no coincidence that of the 12 presidents listed above who were womanizers all but 3 also commanded major military ventures - and Clinton may cut that to 2 if he ever goes ahead with his threatened bombing of Iraq - while the 29 other presidents were far more peaceful. Might modern nations at certain times unconsciously choose their leaders as some primitive tribes choose theirs - for their ability to conquer both women and enemies?

Clinton's threat to bomb Iraq has had the approval of most Americans.2 In addition, according to Ramsey Clark's book, The Children Are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq,3 our embargo of Iraq already has killed one million Iraqi childrenÑnearly as many as the number of Jewish children that were killed in the HolocaustÑeven though it hasn't deterred Saddam from his military preparations. It is widely believed that, as one columnist put it, "Saddam is so vile, so evil, so patently irrational that letting him get his way is simply not an option...he needs to be whacked."4 But a new massive bombing of Iraq is not backed by most Middle East nations,5 nor by the Secretary General of the U.N.,6 and most experts admit bombing won't deter Saddam from anything. It will just add a new slaughter of innocents to our genocidal embargo, as will any wider Middle East war, with Iraq admitted to have enough biological missiles to "blow away Tel Aviv" if attacked.7

Sexually compulsive personalities in our leaders should not surprise us, since we are so often warned of them before we elect them. That Bill Clinton - whose mother left him at birth for two years and who had a violent, alcoholic stepfather8 - might have been a sex addict was suspected while he was still a candidate. As he told a reporter once, "Some people are addicted to drugs...Some to sex. We're all addicted to something."9 This is certainly true of the Clinton family, since his father was addicted to alcohol, his mother to gambling and his brother to drugs. Since he remained the Democratic front-runner after admitting infidelity on 60 Minutes, perhaps his infidelities only made him more qualified to be president in our minds. The media had already widely reproduced his sexually explicit telephone conversations with Gennifer Flowers, and since the voice on her tapes was unmistakably his, we all knew it was him telling her to "hang tough..if everybody's on record denying it, you've got no problem."10 So when Monica Lewinsky reportedly says she was told to lie because "there were only two people in the room and if both of you say nothing happened, nothing happened,"11 we shouldn't act surprised that Clinton might suggest lying to cover up his exceedingly risky affairs. That JFK could count on the media to cover up his affairs could have been because he had an "Evil Empire" that the media was colluding with him in making the "enemy."

I began my own file on "Clinton's Sexual Addiction" during the Flowers revelations, and since the file has grown thick with allegations I wasn't surprised when he was allegedly quoted in the Lewinsky tapes as saying he had affairs with "hundreds" of women. Even though Lewinsky reportedly sometimes exaggerates, she is not clinically psychotic,12 so her unguarded, frightened voice on the tapes isn't likely to be reporting pure delusions. I have been particularly struck while collecting this evidence by how allegations of Clinton's continuous humiliations of his wife over the years could be expressing his unconscious anger toward his mother and restaging the betrayal he may have felt by her early abandonment of himÑwith the difference that in his affairs he would reverse roles and he would be the betrayer and his wife would be the betrayed. Clinical studies of sex addicts find they aren't "expressing their drives" so much as combating desperate inner feelings of maternal abandonment, impotence and self-fragmentation through their repeated conquests of women.13 That so many American men enjoy jokes that express a thinly veiled admiration of Clinton's alleged sexual conquests shows how dysfunctional many men still are - 28 percent of American men currently admitting to having had extramarital affairs.14 Since Clinton's polls and the stock market both initially soared to new heights after the scandal broke, perhaps Americans actually enjoy having a phallic president to embody their reparative fantasies of potency and may now be asking Clinton to be a sacrificial scapegoat for our guilt, to pay for six years of peace and prosperity.

All American wars have been preceded by Purity Crusades like the current American fascination with presidential affairs, most of them conducted against "too much sexual freedom," with various designated sacrificial scapegoats.15 Purity Crusades are conducted after long periods of peace and prosperity. The most famous took place prior to WWI, with a hysterical Vice Commission closing down brothels and regulating dance halls. Before the Civil War, reacting to the feminism and new sexual freedom of the 1850s, purity reformers suddenly decided to "protect the sexual purity of America" by starting a civil war to clean up the "one vast brothel" in the South. Before the Vietnam War, following the first legal publishing of Henry Miller's books, Citizens for Decent Literature conducted nationwide letter-writing campaigns and harassed drug store chains to stop the distribution of "obscene" literature. Time even ran a cover story in January 1964 on "Sex in the U.S.," full of shocked prose on how America had become "one big Orgone box of Freudian" pornography and promiscuity. Our current Purity Crusade focuses on the President, who has volunteered to be a scapegoat with his apparent reckless behavior.

That nations sometimes choose their leaders because of their personal emotional dysfunctions seems an odd notion. Of course, other nations often choose leaders - like Hitler or Saddam - Ñwho have serious emotional problems, starting wars that end by costing the lives of millions. But "not us." Yet many scholars argue that America chose JFK for his phallic cold war personality, so it should not have surprised us when he ordered the Cuban invasion and even risked incinerating millions of Americans with Russian nuclear missiles during his Cuban embargo, saying, "If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over."16 With JFK, there was an intimate emotional link between his sexual addiction - requiring almost daily conquests of mistresses and prostitutes - and his equally compulsive need for cold war conquests.

Our use of leaders as containers for our sexual and aggressive fantasies is responsible for many of our political problems, and could still lead to the useless bombing of the Iraqi people for Saddam's "rubbing our nose in the dirt." That fantasies of American potency are at stake can be seen in statements such as that an attack must be massive "to make Saddam totally impotent."17 Even if nuclear and bacteriological missile warfare is avoided, should our bombs hit his anthrax plants only American troopsÑnot Iraqi civiliansÑare inoculated against anthrax. As of this writing, American troops are still deployed, ready for attack. That because of internal emotional problems America might start a new war in the Middle East which could kill even more innocent people means that Bill Clinton might not be the only sacrificial victim of the current manic group-fantasy. In the meantime, as America holds its breath to see whether the sacrifice will take place in the Middle East or in Washington, D.C., the country seems paralyzed, powerless to snap out of its social trance.

Lloyd deMause is Editor of The Journal of Psychohistory and editor and author of The History of Childhood, Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy, Foundations of Psychohistory and Reagan's America.

1. Wesley O. Hagood, Presidential Sex: From the Founding Fathers to Bill Clinton. New York: Citadel Press, 1996.

2. Time, February 9, 1998, p. 71.

3. Ramsey Clark, The Children Are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq. New York: World View Forum, 1996.

4. Richard Cohen, "Whacking a Rat: Why Saddam's Got It Coming." New York Post, February 6, 1998, p. 29.

5. CNN, February 10, 1998.

6. The New York Times, February 11, 1998, p. A6.

7. New York Post, January 31, 1998, p. 14.

8. Paul M. Fick, The Dysfunctional President: Inside the Mind of Bill Clinton. New York: Citadel Press, 1996; David Maraniss, First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

9. Washington Post, cited in Hanna Rosin, "Free Willy!" New York: February 9, 1998, p. 28.

10. New York Post, January 22, 1998, p. 6.

11. Ibid., p. 4.

12. Charles Krauthammer, M.D., "It's About Truth, Not Sex, and Bill's Lying Once Again." New York Daily News, February f1, 1998, p. 59.

13. Patrick J. Carnes, Don't Call It Love. NY: Bantam Books, 1992.

14. Samual S. Janus and Cynthia L. Janus, The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior. New York: Wiley, 1993.

15. Lloyd deMause, "American Purity Crusades." The Journal of Psychohistory 14(1987): 346-347.

16. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; Theodore C. Sorensen, The Kennedy Legacy. New York: Macmillan, 1969; James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

17. New York Post, March 22, 1998, p. 53.

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