The Madman in the White House
Has there been a madman in the White House? At a talk at the Intellectual Forum on 30 April, historian Patrick Weil considered the question.
鈥淥ne of the first events that we ran was timed to fit in with the inauguration of President Trump", said IF Director Julian Huppert during his introduction to the evening. 鈥淭hat is not the subject of tonight鈥檚 talk鈥.
Instead, historian Patrick Weil considered the psyche of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913 until 1921 and often considered the reason that the US failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
While analysis of the mental state of American Presidents has become commonplace in recent years, the psychobiography on which Weil based both his book and his talk at the IF was the first attempt to apply psychoanalytic theory to a political leader. Alarmed by Wilson's handling of the Treaty of Versailles, and concerned about how a political leader鈥檚 mental state might have altered the course of history, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president.
To do so, he recruited the help of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and together they wrote a manuscript based on interviews with members of Wilson鈥檚 inner circle, including his doctor, his secretary, and his most intimate advisers.
After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, after the deaths of both Wilson in 1939 and his wife in 1962, and the published version was heavily edited and redacted. For decades, Bullitt and Freud鈥檚 1932 manuscript was considered lost.
Weil rediscovered the original manuscript 鈥 with each chapter signed by the two authors 鈥 in the Yale University archives in 2014. Upon comparing the published version with the original manuscript, Weil found over 300 amendments. His talk, based on this manuscript and he published about his discovery, was a wide-ranging consideration of some of Bullitt鈥檚 鈥渆vidence鈥 for his analysis of Wilson. It considered not only the events surrounding the Treaty of Versailles, but also Wilson鈥檚 time at Princeton, when his reformation of the University turned some of his friends against him 鈥 a betrayal that stayed with Wilson throughout the rest of his life.
Weil did not completely agree with analysis in Bullitt鈥檚 and Freud鈥檚 book and felt that, at points, the authors went too far in attributing everything in Wilson鈥檚 life to his deteriorating mental health. But as an intimate portrait of Wilson, the manuscript, and Weil鈥檚 interpretation of it, provides the basis for a powerful reassessment of 20th-century American diplomacy and of how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.
