SUZANNE FIELDS: WM. JEKYLL & BILL HYDE

Topic: White Water

SUZANNE FIELDS: WM. JEKYLL & BILL HYDE

THE WASHINGTON POST
1/25/99 SUZANNE FIELDS

William Jekyll and Bill Hyde

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Suzanne Fields
THE WASHINGTON TIMES ---------------------------------------------------------------

----------------- Robert Louis Stevenson would have understood Bill Clinton. In fact, he wrote the book on him.

We saw Stevenson's Bill Clinton at work in the State of the Union address, the munificent Dr. Jekyll charming his impeachment jurors while struggling to keep the monstrous Mr. Hyde in the shadows, desperately hoping no one would see him. Alas, the monster in the shadows was there all right.

. . . . William Jefferson Clinton as Dr. Jekyll showers honors on the first lady, graciously thanking her for her public duties in the Millennium Project.
But there was Mr. Hyde lurking in the lies catalogued in the articles of impeachment and defended earlier in the day.

Despite the exchange of smiles as the president silently moved his lips, mouthing "I love you," the shadow fell across the chamber. We were watching Dr. Jekyll, but was that a tuft of Hyde hair on his outstretched hand?

. . . . William Jekyll, the big boss, promises to enforce equal pay for equal work in places where women have been most vulnerable.
But no woman can be blind to Bill Hyde, the misogynist, who sexually exploited an intern half his age, and did something to Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones, something unsavory enough to make them accuse him of sexual misbehavior.

. . . . William Jekyll evokes in the State of the Union our first president: "In ways large and small, we are keeping alive what George Washington called 'the sacred fire of liberty.'"
But even though none of us knew George Washington, we know Bill Hyde is no George Washington.
"I cannot tell a lie," is nothing this president could ever say.

. . . . Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times that Bill Clinton is a "split personality," victim of a psychological malady in which one personality doesn't know what the other one is doing: "The good Bill who promotes solid American values like V-chips and targeting deadbeat dads, and the bad Bill who cavorts with interns and lies about it."

. . . . Close, but no cigar. A split personality doesn't have communication between the two personalities. So great is the disconnection in a split personality that one cannot even recognize or remember the other.

That's not true of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good doctor, a brilliant scientist, wanted to indulge his animal instincts and then easily return to being a man of genial respectability.
His problem occurred when the animal grew more powerful than the man, when as Dr. Jekyll put it, "the animal within me [was] licking the chops of memory" and the "lower side of me began to growl for license."

. . . . The "split personality" has its roots in Freud, in theories of the mind. The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde grew from Darwinian theory that men were once animals and could revert to acting like animals. In the novelist's imagination the fight is between body and mind.

. . . . Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about a "double consciousness" a kind of peaceful coexistence between upright man and beast inside, public Calvinist and private hedonist.
He thought he could indulge both aspects of himself at different times, rather like having your cake and eating it, too. That rarely works, although Bill Clinton has indulged himself in more pastry than most.

. . . . When the president returned to the White House after giving his State of the Union speech, one of his aides remarked that he was "pumped up." He had reason to be.
The speech went off without glitches. It was uninspiring and without soul-stirring rhetorical flourishes, but it was a poll-driven laundry list of goodies and efficient enough to raise job approval ratings.
For the moment he had rid himself of that monster he had created. He was no longer "travelling beastwards." But only for the moment.

. . . . Few could forget the words of Charles Ruff, his defense lawyer, spoken to the Senate earlier that morning acknowledging the two Bill Clintons.
"We are not here to defend William Clinton, the man," Mr. Ruff conceded. "You are free to criticize him, to find his personal conduct distasteful. . . ." But that shouldn't merit the expulsion of Bill Clinton, the president, just to get the beast out of the Oval Office.

. . . . Dr. Jekyll both loved and hated Mr. Hyde. He loved "his raging energies of life." He hated that he had created a certain "callousness of soul." In the end Dr. Jekyll felt the horror of his other self. That's where this comparison with Bill Clinton ends.

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