Assessing Leadership Style: Trait Analysis

The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders

The Primacy of Others: The Question of Fidelity

The interpersonal style of both Virginia Kelley and her son Bill is
characterized by a movement toward people. Mrs. Kelley has charac-
terized herself as a person who trusted others and was, if anything,
too trusting. She and others have characterized Clinton in the same
way.
However, one important lesson of Clinton's early experiences was
that it was unwise to invest too much of oneself in individual rela-
tionships and to turn to a broad range of others to seek personal
confirmation. The origin of Clinton's turn toward others can be
traced to the loss of his biological father and the loss of his mother
when she went to New Orleans for two years to study, a fact that his
traumatic memories of their infrequent visits attest was an impor-
tant early experience.
A child who loses a parent often longs for him or her and can
become "object hungry" (Neubauer 1960, 68). That is, they search
for persons (objects) able to provide what is missed in the absent par-
ent (in this case parents). Clinton's growing realization that he didn't
have a father, coupled with the simultaneous absence of his mother,
was a powerful inducement for him to seek out other people.^4
As powerful as they were, these early lessons do not, in and of
themselves, fully account for the nature of Clinton's interpersonal
relationships and the low levels of trust that underlie them. To do so,
we must examine the relationship among Clinton, his mother, and
his stepfather.
Parental irregularity, lack of reliability, and concern with plea-
sures at the expense of a commitment to a firmly rooted family life
can be seen by a child as a form of betrayal. Clinton's stepfather was
no more reliable than his mother. He often went out and left his
stepson at home alone in the evening or all night (1994a, 111, 124).
Clinton could count on neither parent, individually or as a couple.
By the mid-1950s, when Bill Clinton was in adolescence, Mrs. Kel-
ley's husband was drunk "nearly every single day" (1994a, 117). The
fights between them escalated: verbal abuse sometimes turned phys-
ical. Mrs. Kelley began to secretly put away money. It is from this
period that the dramatic stories date about Clinton standing up to
his stepfather to protect his mother and young brother. Even Clin-