Leaders Often Born From Adversity

Politicians. Consider the story of Bill Clinton’s childhood. Or Ronald Reagan’s. Or Jesse Jackson’s, Gary Hart’s, Jimmy Carter’s, Richard Nixon’s, Lyndon Johnson’s and on and on. They differ mainly in the details of the trauma, not its presence.

Dr. Theodore Millon, a psychologist at the Harvard University Medical School and the University of Miami, said childhood adversity can trigger two opposing reactions: to succumb or to fight. Leaders, of course, do the latter.

“It’s as if they say, ‘I’m going to overcome this. I will assert myself. I’m not going to let this undo me,” Millon said. “This leads to a powerful drive for ascendancy and for control over one’s life.”

Millon said the president fits a classic pattern. Clinton never knew his father, William Jefferson Blythe III, who was killed in an auto crash three months before his baby was born. The president was raised by an alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton Sr., whose violent temper caused him to beat his wife and terrorize his children.

At the age of 14, young Bill broke his parents’ bedroom door down during one such beating and told his stepfather that if he ever again lifted his hand against his wife, “you’ll have to deal with me.” Ironically, however, in that same year he went to the local courthouse and changed his last name from Blythe to Clinton - an attempt to close the wound his confrontation may have opened.

As he explained in a speech during the campaign, his act was typical of children of an alcoholic. “One of the things that happens is that you always want to be a peacemaker. … My opponents … say, well, old Clinton compromises too much, he wants everyone to get along. And I think I do go out of my way to do that.”

Newt Gingrich, in an interview with Gail Sheehy and in a recent biography, doesn’t dispute suggestions that his pursuit of the spotlight can be traced in part to an unfulfilled longing for fatherly love. The speaker’s natural father, “Big Newt” McPherson, was a hard-drinking, barroom-brawling laborer whose furious temper pushed his mother to divorce. His stepfather, Army Lt. Col. Robert Gingrich, was coldly distant, imperious and perhaps frightening to his stepson.

If Col. Gingrich loved his adopted child, he never showed it. In an interview with the now-retired military man, Sheehy asked if he ever hugged his son. “You don’t do that with boys. I didn’t even do that with my girls,” he said. Then he turned and asked his wife, Kit: “When was the last time I told you I loved you?”

“That’s a good question,” she replied.

“If I tell you once, that’s all that’s necessary. If it ever changes I’ll let you know,” the colonel said.

Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of the book “Military Brats,” which studied the personality traits of the children of career military men, reached a conclusion that comes remarkably close to summarizing Gingrich:

“Anger is the core of every military son whose father was abusive or distant,” she wrote. “And what spills over into the world is likely to be fiery as well: a quick temper, pugnacity and choice of career that channels aggression and allows for plenty of confrontation.”

As difficult as Gingrich’s childhood was, others can certainly claim at least as much tumult. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, didn’t know his father. He grew up as the child of an unmarried mother in the projects of Greenville, S.C. Ronald Reagan, who sounded the early cry of family values, was the son of an alcoholic, Jack Reagan, whose penchant for bourbon often prevented him from holding a job or playing a significant role in his son’s life.

Little wonder that Reagan - as would Gingrich - sought escape from this reality through the fantasy world of Hollywood movies.

And so it goes, well back into history. Psychohistorian Paul H. Elovitz of Ramapo College, who has written extensively on presidential personalities, said a difficult childhood can actually serve a leader well. “The crises that would cause more normal people to say, ‘Hey, this is the end of my political life, I have to go back home and get things together, or I must go hide on an island because things are falling apart,’ he can keep functioning,” Elovitz said. “To him, this tumult seems like a normal part of life.”

There is a flip side to this phenomenon, according to psychologist Millon. “The more benign the early life experience, the less ambitious and driven the offspring may be,” Millon said. “If everything has gone well as a child, they aren’t fighting deep battles from an emotional source; they’re fighting them from an intellectual one.”

Such leaders may be “serious and well-intentioned,” Millon said, “but they don’t have the gut fighter element that Clinton and Gingrich have. No matter how many times we hit them over the head, they get back up and get going.”

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