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Nowhere Man, your points on presidential paranoia are dang well taken. You should take a look at one of the scariest books ever written about the office, George Reedy's THE TWILIGHT OF THE PRESIDENCY. (Get the original edition; he blunted the force of his argument in the second edition.)
As for Nixon, I can bet that you read David Abrahamsen's NIXON (which he touted as a psychological profile and did come out in 1973 or 1974), or Bruce Maizlish's psychobiography (from the same vintage), or maybe Fawn Brodie's psychobiography, which was published in 1981 (unfinished due to the author's death). In an odd way, though, Garry Wills's NIXON AGONISTES (1970 -- out of print and deserving to come back into print) is still the best and most probing analysis.
What's weird about Jefferson is that the public face/myth lives on, while historians swap stories about the intensely fallible, thin-skinned, nearly humorless man behind the public face/myth. No wonder that Alexander Hamilton lost his temper, begging his contemporaries to probe beyond the surface of the "philosopher on his mountaintop." Poor guy.
I did see the Ken Burns incense-burning festival, featuring Gore Vidal. If you're interested in Jefferson, you really should look at Joseph Ellis's fascinating new book, AMERICAN SPHINX (Knopf).
As for Clinton, I worry about him. He may not reach the depths of paranoia that Nixon plumbed (or that Jefferson ventured near before Nixon), but he is a remarkably thin-skinned man, and every time he claims that no previous President has ever endured the storm of public abuse that he has had to endure, I lose my temper. He ought to look at what Jefferson had to endure (which may explain his paranoia a bit), or Madison, or Jackson, or Lincoln, or (in our own time) Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Has anybody, for example, ever charged that Bill Clinton is a syphilitic paranoid case huddled in the White House while a Communist half-breed lesbian is running the country? That's what some of the lunatic-fringe Republicans charged about FDR and Eleanor. In the late 1930s, Marquis Childs wrote a fascinating article called "Why They Hate Roosevelt." This past Sunday, Philip Weiss wrote a similar article for THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, except that he clearly had no sense of historical perspective.
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