Part III. Applications: William Jefferson
Clinton and Saddam Hussein—
An Introduction
The Construction of Causal Stories
about Political Leaders
Jerrold M. Post and Stephen G. WalkerIn this part, each of the previous methods of personality assessment
is applied to William Jefferson Clinton as a Western democratic
leader and to Saddam Hussein as a leader from a closed Arab society
to illustrate the complementary contributions of these approaches to
understanding political leaders. Each leader is the subject of a com-
prehensive portrait focusing on the deep structure of his personality
followed by analyses of different features of the leader's personality.
Drawing on his Neustadt Award-winning book High Hopes, Stanley
A. Renshon constructs and interprets a psychoanalytic portrait of
Clinton. Jerrold M. Post's psychobiographic/psychodynamic profile
of Saddam Hussein's political personality is updated and revised here
from his testimony before the House Armed Services and House For-
eign Affairs Committees. These analyses provide a formulation of
each leader's core personality structure along with an account of the
formative experiences that shaped it and the externalization
processes that displace private motives on public objects.
The remaining analyses of each leader are organized according to
their focus on one of the kinds of causal mechanisms identified ear-
lier as the processes of ego defense and externalization, mediation of
self and other, and object appraisal. Weintraub's structural analyses
of each leader's spontaneous speech patterns reveal each one's charac-
teristic style of coping with stress as a pattern of ego defense. The
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