Can the President Think?

The chaos and paralysis of the Clinton presidency reflect the chaos and paralysis of Bill Clinton's mind--and he is not going to change.

Edith Efron from the November 1994 issue

(Page 5 of 23)

That is undoubtedly true. But it cannot be the whole truth. One can readily purchase brains, logic, and focus in the marketplace. One does not have to marry them. For Clinton, a wife with brains, logic, and focus serves a deeper need. In a particular and important way, Bill Clinton is cognitively disabled.

There is nothing obvious about that disability, although its superficial manifestations strike many people immediately: If one concentrates on what Clinton says, not on his facial expressions and the motions of his poetic hands, one discovers that he is a phenomenal bore. He is so monumentally boring that thoughtful people feel compelled to discuss it.

That is the clue to Clinton's cognitive disability. There is only one thing that will produce this detail-saturated effect, enlivened by no thinking or creative impulse, and that is the memorization one frantically engages in before an exam if one is the bright kind who studies for As.

Is Clinton a memorizer? Yes, indeed he is. And a very unusual one, the type who could get a job in the circus as a Hans the Talking Horse. He has a photographic memory, and witnesses to that skill come from every period of his life. When David Gallen, armed with a tape recorder, interviewed a few dozen Arkansas journalists, politicians, and friends and associates of Bill, they all talked their heads off about his amazing memory for the faces, names, family members, and illnesses of what seems to be half of Arkansas.

And, apparently, he forgets nothing. In January 1994 David Maraniss of The Washington Post wrote: "Clinton has a nearly photographic memory--he recently stunned a friend visiting the White House by saying, 'Let's call your parents!' and then recited a number he hadn't dialed in more than a decade."

Before he was elected president, Clinton himself liked to show off his remarkable memory. According to Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid, Clinton recited 100 lines from Macbeth that he had learned in high school to a high school class in the small town of Vilonia, Arkansas: "I hadn't [recited] it in 20-something years," Clinton said. "And I started reeling it off, and these kids, their eyes got as big as dollars. I recited the whole soliloquy."

But this skill is more than a complicated parlor trick. It has played an important role in Clinton's intellectual life. Clinton has always been extremely bright, a good student and a voracious reader. But his memory has greatly supplemented, amplified, and very often substituted for an intellectual life. His memory is a theme that runs throughout people's conversations about him.

Arkansas journalist Meredith Oakley, who repeatedly refers to Clinton's photographic memory throughout her book On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton, says of Clinton, "He was not studious by nature and though he made exceptional grades--he eventually won a Phi Beta Kappa key--he did so by routinely cramming for exams and relying on a photographic memory."

Clinton's classmate at Yale, William P. Coleman, calls Clinton "the classic quick study." He studied little, went to few classes. Then before exams he borrowed the class notes of others and memorized.

Clinton's high school friend David Leopoulos visited Clinton when he was at Oxford and found that Clinton had suddenly become a fount of information about painting. Leopoulos told a reporter, "He is interested in everything and wants to consume everything. He is almost a fanatic about information. He gathers and retains it better than anyone I've ever known."

Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post jokes, "That's Clinton: well-versed in every subject, has memorized the leading economic indicators for every quarter since the '20s, knows how to say 'fungibility' in Farsi."

Finally, Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid describe the Clinton of the presidential campaign: "Clinton became known as a 'policy wonk,' a politician who could spout data and statistics nonstop, a man with a quick answer for every question. Members of the national press were amazed at his ability to formulate answers to complicated questions, seemingly without thinking."

It is not "seemingly" without thinking. Very often, it is actually without thinking. Clinton can memorize as he breathes. But he finds thinking--analysis, evaluation, reaching conclusions--intensely difficult.

And that is the essence of Bill Clinton's cognitive disability, and the reason for his dependence on his wife.

In The Agenda, Woodward shows that dependence in action. He describes Clinton as candidate, surrounded by high powered advisers. "Everyone," writes Woodward, "was throwing ideas at the candidate, who had no system to evaluate or decide among them." It was Hillary who rescued Clinton, and in doing so, explained what he actually did with the information being hurled at him. He had to "come to it in his own way," she said. Woodward continued: "Hillary insisted he had to 'internalize' the message and the ideas. He needed in-depth exposure to the alternatives and lively debate, pushed even to the point of confusion. 'He has to come to this in his own way,' she repeated." What Clinton needed, she said, was the time to rest and "internalize."

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