Compartmentalising Clinton

He answered the decathlon,8217; Plimpton said. He said it was because, there, you had 10 disciplines that you could concentrate on. And it8217;s quite evident that he has the ability to do it, too. This is a man who is able to stand and give a speech and not have you-know-who popping up in the back of his head.8217; In a word, Clinton is the embodiment of a neurotic symptom that has shown up as the self-description of over-reachers everywhere: compartmentalisation.

And, boy, can he compartmentalise. Never before has public life been witness to a man who can open and shut the many doors of his mind and soul with such chilling self-assurance. Clinton has diffracted himself into the adulterer, the good father, the loyal husband, thelousy husband, the liar, the truth-teller, the charmer, the politico, the policy wonk, the man who loved Yitzhak Rabin, the man who strokes Yasser Arafat, the peacemaker, the missile launcher, the liberal, the social conservative, the moral arbiter, the seducer.

Is he polymorphous? Is he perverse? He is the man about whom Toni Morrison wrote: He8217;s our first Black President.8217; And yet he8217;s not a Black man. He8217;s just trained, as his generation was, to be all things to all men, and women. And not too much of anything to anyone. He8217;s compartmentalised.

Since Monica Lewinsky spurted on to the scene one year ago, the Republicans have been trying to sell character8217;, and it hasn8217;t worked. George Bush had character. So did Bob I8217;m just a man8217; Dole. But character is an inhibiting constraint in this era; it keeps you from doing everything you want. 8220;On the one hand, you probably can8217;t succeed in modern life without being able to compartmentalise,8221; says Peter Kramer, author of Listening To Prozac. 8220;Thisculture favours people who are able to be very flexible, to put things aside and move on. On the other hand, there is some loss involved, in the way that we think it8217;s a fully human trait to be deeply affected by things; that if you8217;ve done something wrong, that there8217;s some virtue in contemplating it.8221;

Dr Bertram Slaff, a New York psychiatrist, says: 8220;It seems to me a coping technique I think of it not as something wrong, but just as something that is. It requires that we be able to prioritise, what we would call focusing.8221; However, Dr Jerome Levin, a psychotherapist and author of The Clinton Syndrome: The President And The Destructive Nature Of Sexual Addiction, thinks he knows the First Compartmentaliser all too well.

8220;I compare Clinton to the Titanic,8221; he says. 8220;It had watertight compartments, but they only went up to the sixth deck. Once the water went over that level, the ship sank.8221; The ship was sunk, of course, by a blowjob, the sex act of choice for the modern compartmentaliser. 8220;Youseparate your genitals from the rest of you,8221; Levin says. 8220;There8217;s no real relationship there.8221;

The President learned early. 8220;This form of compartmentalising is nothing new for Clinton,8221; David Maraniss, Clinton8217;s biographer, says. 8220;It goes back to his childhood. His mother taught him how to create different fantasy worlds to help keep him going. As the wife of an alcoholic, it was the same thing that she had to do.8221;

Sometimes compartmentalisation makes for great bedfellows. Politically divided power couple Mary Matalin and James Carville prospered personally and professionally through rigorous compartmentalisation. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Matalin told The Los Angeles Times: 8220;I had to compartmentalise my sweet baby James and Carville the Axe-Murdering Consultant From Hell, whose face I wanted to rip off every day.8221; Since the Lewinsky scandal broke, Matalin says their temporarily integrated household has recompartmentalised. 8220;My New Year8217;s resolution is no longer to take it out onmy husband for the foibles of his President,8221; she said four days into 1999. 8220;It8217;s been much worse than quitting smoking.8221;

Those who admit to compartmentalising tend to cast it as a positive thing, a time management skill. Kate White, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan says: 8220;I remember my very first editor-in-chief job, at Child magazine. For the first time, I didn8217;t just slam the door on the work and forget about it. It went with me. I was giving my nine-month-old son a bath and I realised I was thinking about the magazine.8221; Then she compartmentalised and, hey presto, all was well.

8220;I think that if you want to get to the top, in any industry, you have to be able to claw on your way up, and a lot of that has to be compartmentalised,8221; says Nancy Friday, the author, who is married to Time magazine8217;s editor-in-chief, Norman Pearlstine. 8220;It8217;s so tied into a career, to having business goals. The workplace is the workplace and you don8217;t want to bring your feelings into it.8221;

NaomiWolf, the Rhodes scholar, mother, wife, post-feminist babe, anti-makeup author, pro-makeup author, recently reinstated New Yorker, had this to say about the C8217; malady: 8220;Anyone in this kind of alpha, hyper success-driven culture is encouraged and rewarded to split off any aspect of themselves that is vulnerable, complex, or weak. I think it8217;s one of the great diseases of late industrialised society, that we8217;re not integrated. It8217;s dangerous, because the more compartmentalised you are, the more amoral you can tell yourself to be.8221;

Are Rhodes scholars, like the President, particularly susceptible? 8220;If what you8217;re talking about is dishonesty to the self, then definitely the need to present a perfect front, a perfect facade it8217;s a recipe for dishonesty, to others and to the self,8221; she says. 8220;Clinton is not the first person of whom this has been said,8221; says Peggy Noonan, the speechwriter who was skilled at taking the various compartments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and wrapping them into one compactpoint of light. 8220;It was said 30 years ago, admiringly, of John F. Ken-nedy,8221; Noonan reminds us.