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Bill Clinton's mental condition Thursday, Jul 20, 2006 By John Brummett A psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University came to Little Rock last week to work on his book that will propose that Bill Clinton has a mental condition that's actually an element of historic greatness. The author, John Gartner, contended in a previous book that Americans have achieved inordinate wealth because ours is a nation of people who had the gumption to take chances. From that heritage, his theory goes, we have seen the spread of a gene that causes the occasional person to have chemical and brain wave actions called hypomanic. That means low manic, and it is not considered a disease, like manic-depressive. It's just a thing, like a hot temper or grouchiness. The hypomanic person, as Gartner explained, lives in a place of high brilliance with low insanity not far away. His condition impels him to invention, innovation, entrepreneurial venture, maybe even the presidency. He tends to be charismatic. He also tends to have a stuck accelerator. He's impulsive, risk-taking, perhaps sexually indiscreet, given to grandiosity, unconfined by convention and consumed excitedly with ideas, some great, some absurd. Gartner's earlier book was called "The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America." He identified and profiled people of American or America-related greatness whom he believed to have exhibited this condition. They began, actually, with an Italian by the name of Christopher Columbus. Others included John Winthrop, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie. Louis B. Mayer and human genome discoverer Craig Venter. Some found the book fascinating and groundbreaking. Others found it insufficiently medical, since Gartner hadn't actually put his subjects on his couch or drawn their blood or scanned their brains. Either way, a second book was in order. Gartner began looking for a compelling contemporary subject to advance his theory. Next thing he knew, he had a contract for a book on Clinton and was buying me lunch and begging for anecdotes. There have been plenty of books on Clinton. Some have psychoanalyzed him. There hasn't been one quite like this. One of my anecdotes was from a little airplane in 1982, when Clinton was obsessed with regaining the governor's office. We were trying to land amid dense fog for a campaign breakfast in Harrison. The pilot kept dipping the plane under the fog, mouthing an urgent unpleasantness and going back up. Eventually the pilot asked Clinton's young travel aide, Mike Ross, now the congressman, to climb into the co-pilot's seat and count down from, oh, I don't know, 50, maybe, or 20. I was scared half to death. Clinton was oblivious. He kept talking as if nothing was happening. Only when the pilot turned and told him he wouldn't be able to land did Clinton ask what the problem was. Clinton then demanded that the plane land in Harrison, and, when the pilot grudgingly agreed to try one more time (and, it turned out, succeed), Clinton said, "This is going to get hairy. I'm going to sleep." That's exactly what he appeared to do. On the ground, Clinton opened his eyes to dart out the plane's door before we had quite finished our taxi. Gartner said that oblivion and indifference about danger was indeed a characteristic of the condition. Something as mundane as getting from one place to another is beneath the hypomanic person's grandiosity. Clinton cared only about being at that breakfast, because that would help him become governor, from which he might become president, from which he might change the world. Or so the theory goes. The book will be out sometime in late 2007 or early 2008, when the references to how Hillary figures into all of this - whatever they will be - could be timely. Am I buying the premise? I'm agreeing that there's something different about Clinton. I'm not going to say this couldn't be it. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
