The Psychology of Power

Temptation at the Top

Jaap van Ginneken

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137454027
• eBook ISBN: 9781137454034
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The author tests the hypothesis that hubris and the Bathsheba syndrome tend to affect all top leaders, by zooming in on the best known and very highest executives of our own day and age, and examines the psychological forces tugging at the top level of political leadership.

1

LUST or sexual obsession

The dominant moral codes of the western world were provided by the Abrahamic religions of ‘The Book’. All three took male domination as a ‘natural given’. But its ‘Ten Commandments’ say: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’ and ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’.¹

The section on King David and the Bathsheba syndrome in the introduction already noted that these commandments seemed particularly hard to keep for powerful political leaders. This is also illustrated by the history of secular antiquity, in both the West and the East. Rulers often married out of political calculation, but had many mistresses and concubines on the side. In predominantly Catholic and Latin countries, this often seemed widely accepted as a fact of life. In predominantly Protestant and Anglo-Saxon countries it was frowned upon and more hidden.

The same patterns persisted in the modern age. Several American Founding Fathers were slave owners. When Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence, later secretary of state and president, was a diplomat in Paris, he had his 14-year-old slave Sally Hemings accompany his youngest daughter from America to France. At one point, the 50-plus widower began an affair with the slave girl, which produced five children. The allegation was long contested, but finally confirmed by DNA tests in 1998.

Many subsequent presidents probably also had extra-marital affairs at one point in their lives: ranging from Cleveland and Harding to Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon and Ford’s national security adviser and later secretary of state famously quipped: ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’.² Wikipedia has very long lists of local, state and federal sex scandals involving top politicians in the outwardly puritan and rather prudish US: an average of several per year. On the one hand this would, of course, normally be considered a private matter. But on the other hand it often leads to improprieties (for instance with subordinates), risks of blackmail or security breaches.

It is no different for other major powers. The post-war UK had several political sex scandals with major foreign policy implications. For instance, the early 1960s affair involving defence minister John Profumo who was supposedly seeing the same call girl as the Soviet military attaché. Or the mid-1970s affair involving top Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe who lost his job over a homosexual scandal.³ As he played a key role in the opposition against apartheid, it was also stoked by the South African Bureau of State Security BOSS.⁴ We will return to other examples of sex scandals from Canada and Germany, France and Italy below. But the main question remains: Why is it so many top politicians cannot restrain themselves, even if they know it poses a major risk to their careers?

In the concluding chapter of this book, we will return to ‘the winner effect’ and highly illuminating recent new findings about gender and hormones. Males continue to dominate politics, particularly at the very highest level. At this point, it suffices to say that the major male hormone is testosterone, and that on average women have very much lower levels of it. In the entire animal world, this testosterone has a dual role. On the one hand, it drives male competition for power and territory, for resources and higher positions in social hierarchies. On the other hand, it also drives libido.

In recent decades, psychological research has found a close relation between power and sex. A first article on ‘Attractiveness of the Underling’, in the authoritative Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that if one subliminally ‘primed’ men with power words during an experiment, they suddenly found female confederates in the room more attractive. Even if this effect seemed to be limited to men who already had a tendency toward sexual harassment.

A second article on ‘Implicit Motives and Sexual Behavior’, in the equally authoritative Journal of Research on Personality, found that both men and women with a strong power motive turned out to have sexual intercourse much more often.⁵ So there is a definite connection between power and sex. This transpires in the behaviour of male superiors pressing their female subordinates for intimacy and sex, also at the very highest levels of the state. Recent years have seen several living and supposedly respectable presidents accused of outright rape.⁶ Some researchers have recently linked the fact that victorious soldiers so often recur to mass rape to the production of excess testosterone in battle situations.

Of course the question of power and sex is extremely complex, and cannot be reduced to one or two simple factors in a politician’s life. In the case of Kennedy, which opened the first chapter, a testosterone imbalance related to Addison’s disease (and the medication against it) may have played a role. (We will return to this subject in a full section of the next chapter.) In the case of Trudeau, toward the end of this book, fear of commitment may have played a role. In the other cases discussed in the present chapter, issues related to various ages seem to have contributed to the nature of the politician’s obsessions: childhood issues, mid-life crises and the old age rejuvenation motive. But also personality traits such as introversion versus extraversion. Let us begin with childhood issues.

Childhood issues and ‘attachment’ problems

Some psychologists have claimed that one of the contributing causes of philandering and serial adultery may lie in early affective deprivation. American psychologist Harry Harlow did his famous experiments with rhesus monkeys at the primate laboratory of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He had babies suck milk from two alternative ‘mother machines’: one made out of bare mesh wire, the other covered with terrycloth. Not only did they prefer the softness and warmth of the latter, but when limited to the former they developed clear behavioural problems. The same thing happened if they were kept in isolation cells. The experiments demonstrated that the very young had a profound need for ‘attachment’.

This notion has been elaborated by the British psycho-analyst/ psychologist/psychiatrist John Bowlby. After a dozen years of economic crisis and war, he found that children who had been separated from their parents or primary personal caregivers in early childhood could also develop serious behavioural problems. Another later study looked at the curious role of orphans in politics and public life.⁷

Spartan and/or Victorian educations, in orphanages and boarding schools, or by absent or distant parents, failed to provide enough warmth and emotional security and thus created ‘attachment problems’ in youngsters that would last into adulthood, because, Bowlby said, they would often have great difficulty in connecting with others on a deeper level. They would frequently show a pattern of shallow, superficial and rapidly shifting relationships, and would be unable to engage truly with partners and friends. Mere sex would often turn into a substitute for emotional intimacy. Some of this can be found in the biographies of Kennedy, Clinton and Brandt (further below), although in partial, different and often contradictory ways.

Bill Clinton was the first ‘baby boomer’ president, and one of the youngest ever. He presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history, culminating in a rare budget surplus during his last three years in office. When he stepped down, he also had the highest approval rating of any president since the Second World War, in spite of huge controversies about his character and private life – which had earned him the nickname ‘Slick Willie’. We are all familiar with the sex scandal about White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But in retrospect, it turned out he had been a compulsive philanderer ever since he was first elected for public office – also with subordinates.

Some of that behaviour might indeed be rooted in his early life experiences. His biological father was a travelling salesman who died in a freak car accident, three months before he was born. When he was only a year old, his mother went away for two full years to study as a nurse, and left him in the care of her parents. Although they became and remained close after she returned, this prolonged absence must have left an invisible scar. On the one hand, an ‘attachment’ problem, in his difficult relations with women and sex. On the other hand, a superficial charm and warmth, which made it easy for him to win people over.⁸

Clinton’s mother soon remarried. Her second husband was car dealer Roger ‘Dude’ Clinton, who gave the child his name, but he turned out to be a gambler and a drinker. The stepfather frequently beat Bill’s mother and brother, until the boy had grown big and strong enough to stand up to him. The frequent family crises taught him to ‘compartmentalize’ his mind, psychologists later said. That is to say: to set apart and simply deny unwelcome aspects of reality. In spite of the dramas in her life, however, his mother remained a light-hearted partygoer. She married twice more – first to a fraudster-hairdresser, and then to a retired stockbroker.⁹

But Bill was gifted, and considered the ‘golden boy’ of his high school. He obtained a scholarship for ‘Foreign Service’ studies at the renowned Georgetown University in Washington DC, and then another one for Oxford University in Great Britain, where he became a student leader and war protester, but failed to finish his degree. Thereafter, he completed his studies at the prestigious Yale Law School, where he also met Hillary Rodham, and proposed to her. Whereas he had not been particularly well focused and disciplined that far, she was, and they had closely intertwined careers thereafter.

Back in his home state of Arkansas, Clinton joined a law firm, and became a law professor. But he also joined the Democratic Party and its liberal Left wing. He had once visited the White House and met his ‘great example’, President John Kennedy. He had done an internship at the office of influential senator William Fulbright, and at one point worked for the campaign of liberal candidate George McGovern. After unsuccessfully running for the House of Representatives, he ran successfully for attorney general and then for governor of the state, building a good track record. In 1992 he entered the primaries for the presidential race. But this made his enemies dig for ‘dirt’, and they soon found some.

At this point in time, actress and model Gennifer Flowers first denied and then confirmed a 12-year extra-marital affair with him. Clinton denied it, and when she played their taped phone conversations, he suggested they might have been doctored. When she told her story to the men’s magazine Penthouse, and appeared nude in it, he said she had made it all up for the half million dollars she was paid. But many years later he conceded to at least one early sexual encounter with her – because it could also be confirmed by other sources.

After he had been elected president, his enemies continued to dig further, and came up with ‘Troopergate’. It was alleged that as governor, Clinton had frequently pointed to attractive young women in crowds, and asked his state police troopers to tell them that he would like to meet them. One such case had been a former subordinate, state employee Paula Jones, 20 years his junior. She said she had been led to his hotel room, where he simply dropped his pants and asked her to perform fellatio on him her right away. She now sued him. He ultimately settled for 850,000 dollars – although three-quarters of that amount went to pay for her lawyers.

Meanwhile, a former Miss Arkansas had also come forward to say that she had had an affair with him, and that a former Democratic Party staffer had threatened that ‘he couldn’t guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs’ if she ever talked about it. But the various court cases about these allegations became drawn out over years, and meanwhile Clinton had become the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to be re-elected for a full second term. Even if the three earlier revelations of impropriety continued to trigger still further ones.

A former high school sweetheart now came forward to say that they had had a 17 year affair ‘that included sex’, but that he had suddenly refused to take her calls after the first scandal had broken. A nursing home administrator even claimed that he had raped her during a seminar in a hotel, that her house had subsequently been broken into, and her answering machine tape stolen. A former Miss America first denied and then confirmed that she had had a one-night stand with him; after which she went on to pose nude for the men’s magazine Playboy.¹⁰

Several of these victims were starlets who profited from the media exposure, and there was no reason to believe them without further proof. But many people had started digging now, and had uncovered various details confirming their stories. Half a dozen women ultimately decided to come forward, but others may well have felt such media attention might mess up their present lives and thus chose to keep quiet. The stories were largely limited to Arkansas at first, but they did reveal a consistent pattern.

Many husbands are of course occasionally unfaithful, but only a few are really compulsive philanderers. In this case, several things stand out. On the one hand, Bill Clinton was apparently unable to refrain from such transgressions, even when it became increasingly risky because of his elevated and exposed new position as the nation’s president. On the other hand, there are few signs his wife was completely aware of all this. He may long have succeeded in having his wife believe that the charges were largely made-up, and part of an elaborate Right-wing conspiracy. Up to and including the first stages of the last and biggest scandal of them all.¹¹

If power makes people horny, the Oval Office risks being the horniest of all environments – as the Kennedy example illustrated. The psychological experiment quoted above illustrated that feelings of power stirred testosterone, and made superiors rate passing women more attractive. Female subordinates may in turn feel flattered by the attentions of a more powerful man. But if they are not, they may just as well be pressured to cede. Even and particularly in the ultimate sanctum of power: the White House.

In January 1998, it was revealed that Bill Clinton had also had an 18 month affair with his lowest-level subordinate Monica Lewinsky: an unpaid 22-year-old intern in the White House, who had meanwhile been transfer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowlegements
• About the Author
• The Bathsheba Syndrome – Introduction
• 1 Lust or sexual obsession
• 2 Gluttony or substance abuse
• 3 Greed or hidden corruption
• 4 Wrath or power abuse
• 5 Folly or mental disease
• 6 Denial of mortal illness
• 7 Pride and over-confidence
• Gender, Hormones And Risk – Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• References
• Index