The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
By Patrick Weil
(Harvard University Press, 378 pages, $35)
Had you told Mattie Ross that Woodrow Wilson’s reverence for his father indicated he was mad, she likely would refer you to the Fifth Commandment, perhaps adding Matthew 7:3 for good measure, and note with her usual sharp tongue that if anyone is mad, it’s you. The fearless girl from Yell County, Arkansas, the heroine of Charles Portis’ classic novel True Grit, revered her father, a good man named Frank Ross, did not rest until she had hunted down his killer in Indian territory, present-day Oklahoma, assisted by a blowhard Texas ranger and a U.S. marshal who, though a drunk, had what she knew the job required: true grit.
The idea that the 28th president of the U.S. lost his marbles started during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which was to produce a peace treaty formally ending World War I. It was widely acknowledged at the time that Wilson was an ineffective negotiator whose insistence that he was doing the Lord’s work undermined U.S. leadership. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, among many others, recognized the strain on him as he sought a “peace without winners” that would incorporate a League of Nations to maintain peace or at the least prevent another big war. (READ MORE: Imperfect Criticism, Great TV: Remembering Siskel & Ebert)
At least two astute observers viewed the “Wilson problem” as more than a diplomatic failure. William C. Bullitt, a young Wilsonian who was on the U.S. delegation, and Sigmund Freud, the Viennese doctor and philosopher who invented and popularized psychoanalysis, were devastated by the American rejection of the treaty and America’s resulting neglect of European affairs, which they (and many others) thought must lead to another war. They blamed Wilson and wrote a book together to demonstrate that he was crazy, the implication being that a great nation cannot afford mad leaders.
However, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A Psychological Study, completed in 1932, was not published until long after World War II, so whether it would have had a useful purpose was never tested. In last year’s The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil, without explicitly endorsing neither the Bullitt-Freud diagnosis nor its implications for our own time, suggests the story of the long-hidden book merits attention.
Freud and Bullitt thought the nexus of Wilson’s problem was his devotion to his father, a Presbyterian minister of some repute whose fatherhood style would have struck his contemporaries, as well as the next generation of Americans, including Mattie Ross, as unexceptional. The Rev. Joseph Wilson believed his sons should be raised as God-fearing Christians, hard-working high-achievers, and patriotic citizens. He was severe and affectionate, and relatives and others close to the family intimated he could be overbearing and even intimidating — not a recommended parenting strategy, but not unusual then or today. It was common knowledge that Wilson, for his part, loved his father and sought his approval. This was not unusual either and can be seen as a demonstration of the parental values-transmission that holds a society, and even a civilization, from lapsing into nihilism.
Bullitt was a devout Episcopalian, and Freud, a non-believing Jew, appreciated the civilizational importance of religion; his politics were conservative, though he tried to keep them strictly separate from his psycho-medical practice and theorizing. He held pretty firmly to the view that misdirected religious fanaticism could have perverse consequences. He felt the same way about sexuality. Thus, Freud was not distressed by believers; quite the contrary. But he thought that when religion served as an unconscious replacement — a “sublimation” — for something else, it could (and often did) produce perverse behavior. (READ MORE: The Enduring Ronald Reagan)
As Weil explains, Freud thought, and Bullitt agreed with him, Wilson was a passive (unconscious) homosexual, and the resulting guilty feelings, themselves unacknowledged, caused panic attacks leading to self-destructive behavior, brutal rejections of friends and supporters, and policy-wrecking mulishness. Although Wilson compromised with the Western Allies on the treaty’s provisions, he refused to consider the majority Republican senate’s proposed amendments to preserve U.S. sovereignty, which the Allies themselves accepted.
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the grandest Republican of his time, had once been a friend of Wilson and even a (bipartisan) ally, but Wilson reacted to the amendments by cutting off Lodge and ordering the Democrats to vote against the treaty, dooming it.
Unfortunate as this may or may not be, it does not prove anything about Wilson’s sanity or lack thereof, nor does it explain the source of Wilson’s psychoneurosis identified by Freud and Bullitt.
Freud himself never claimed he was making a scientific diagnosis, for he had never met Wilson, let alone listened to him on a psychoanalytic couch. He believed his speculations were sound, based on what he thought he had learned from studying other cases, and from the voluminous interviews and correspondence and diaries Bullitt collected for their study.
Weil writes cautiously in describing the Freud-Bullitt thesis, without, however, asking whether less radical conclusions than theirs could be reached from the same information. The two authors may have thought a letter with phrases like “Dear Father,” a perfectly ordinary American epistolary form, meant Wilson thought his father was God and, therefore, he was Jesus Christ, but who else would think this? Telling the peace conference to ask itself what Jesus would say or do was straight-up Social Gospel rhetoric, which Christian progressives like Wilson used routinely, as did believers like the English Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the pro-treaty Winston Churchill.
With the Democrats returning to power and Bullitt in line for an important foreign policy position in the Roosevelt administration, the two authors agreed to put the book aside, as the time did not seem right for a controversial book about the last Democratic president. Instead, Bullitt went on a crusading career that can be viewed, if speculation is the method, as a mirror image of Wilson’s. (READ MORE: Biting the (Left) Hand That Feeds Him)
Sent by Franklin D. Roosevelt to Moscow to open the first U.S. embassy to the Soviet Union, Bullitt, who had tried and failed to convince Wilson to work with the Bolsheviks at the peace conference — it was one of the main causes of his dismay with Wilson — was mugged by reality and became the hardest of hard-line anti-communists. He later broke with FDR over the latter’s appeasement of Stalin, considered Truman and Acheson, and then Kennedy, too soft on communism, and advocated confronting Sino-Soviet aggression everywhere. (Along the way, he also joined the Free French Army when Roosevelt blocked him from the U.S. military as too old and too much trouble.) His protege and admirer George Kennan, who served under Bullitt in Moscow and who formulated the containment doctrine after World War II, thought his old boss overdid it. Bullitt’s close friend Richard Nixon, whom he advised, stood by him to the very end.
Bullitt, whose two-part 1948 Life magazine article “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace” has been a minor classic for a certain current in American foreign policy thinking for over half a century, felt at times, like Wilson, that he was crying in the wilderness. Weil, while giving an account of his dramatic and adventurous life, does not ask whether it may have occurred to Bullitt to compare his disappointment to Wilson’s. To be sure, this would have made for a different book, so it cannot be held against the author. Yet it seems pretty obvious they both sought to help their country win the central conflict of the 20th century (dixit Sidney Hook), pitting freedom against tyranny. They both made contributions while falling short of their ultimate goal, but who did better? Weil allows that American failure in Paris in 1919 may have been due to factors other than Wilson’s mental problems, and he goes gently with Bullitt’s disappointments as well, without delving too deeply into their possible causes. (READ MORE: William Bullitt’s Search for Permanent World Peace)
Mattie Ross, to return to her no-nonsense assessment of men and American men in particular, would have thought the whole Freud-Bullitt exercise silly, if not disgracefully impolite. That she is a made-up character shows that fiction sometimes gets to the heart of the matter better than theory:
Thank God for the Harrison Narcotics Law. Also the Vostead Act. I know Governor Smith is “wet,” but that is because of his race and religion, and he is not personally accountable for that. I think his first loyalty is to his country and not the “infallible Pope of Rome.” I am not afraid of Al Smith for a minute. He is a good Democrat, and when he is elected, I believe he will do the right thing if he is not hamstrung by the Republican gang and bullied into an early grave as was done to Woodrow Wilson, the greatest Presbyterian gentleman of the age.
