The Six Best Narcissists Of The Oval Office

“Diffident people don’t get to the White House. Humble people don’t get to the White House. As surely as you have to be a natural-born citizen and at least thirty-five years old to seek the presidency at all, so too do you have to be a shameless, chest-thumping, unapologetic narcissist—however discreetly you might try to conceal that fact.” –Jeffrey Kluger, The Narcissist Next Door In honor of Jeffrey’ Kluger’s new book, The Narcissist Next Door (on sale now), here’s a round-up of the six best presidential narcissists who led our country with a “level of vanity that seems to border on madness.”

6. George H. W. Bush – 41st President (1989 – 1993)

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Famously looked at watch during a 1992 town hall debate with Bill Clinton

“[Bush was] pilloried for appearing as if he didn’t want to be there in the first place…After he had lost the election and was free to speak more candidly about it, he acknowledged that that was entirely true.”

5. Bill Clinton – 42nd President (1993 – 2001)

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Clinton’s everlasting aim of becoming “loved by everyone one of the seven billion people on the planet,” can classify him as a “love-hungry narcissist.”

The mounting evidence includes his infamous Monica Lewinsky affair (“he liked sex, he wanted, sex, and he was surely in a position to get sex”) and the so-called Clinton charm the “make-youfeel-like-the-most-important-person-in-the-room-for-five-seconds magic.”

4. Franklin D. Roosevelt – 32nd President (1933 - 1945)

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Scored second highest on the NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory) coming in at 33.33 –“the kind of stratospheric narcissism score you’d expect from a man who had both the arrogance to think he deserved four full presidential terms and the charisma to go out and win them.”

3. William Henry Harrison – 9th President (1841)

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Cockiness so extreme that he delivered 90 minute inaugural address without a topcoat... which lead to his fatal case of pneumonia just one month later.

2. Chester A. Arthur – 21st President (1881 – 1885)

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Spending the nations’s the massive $145 million surplus on himself – including an “extensive wardrobe—which included a reported eighty pairs of pants—and his habit of changing outfits two or three times a day, the better to display all that finery” – earned him the nicknames Elegant Arthur, The Gentleman Boss and, The Dude of the White House.

1. Lyndon B. Johnson – 36th President (1963 - 1969)

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Infamous and frequent exhibitionism (often in front of staffers, media), including conducting meetings and conferences while on the toilet.

“Exhibitionism can also be an expression of narcissism, particularly in a person who has chosen a “Look at me” career like politics and who, like Johnson, also exhibited so many of the grandiose, destructive contemptuous-of-others symptoms of the full-blown narcissist.”