A First-Rate Madness (31 page)

After eight years as vice president, Nixon's string of successes ended. In 1960, loss of the presidency. In 1962, loss of the California governorship. Nixon was washed up at age forty-nine. But Chotiner had good advice: Go to New York, make money as a corporate lawyer, deepen your financial connections, stay active in the party behind the scenes, sit out 1964, campaign hard for others in 1966, collect political debts, come back in 1968. By then, America was at war and torn apart. Republicans had their radicals (like Goldwater or Reagan) and their liberals (Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney). Nixon stood in the middle, appealing to all sides.

He promised peace in Vietnam, but with honor; as author Rick Perlstein puts it, he was the peacenik of the Silent Majority—or, which is to say the same thing in my view, the homoclite answer to the hippies.

 

 

WE NEED RICHARD NIXON to be sick, because we believe we are healthy.
If mental health means being a homoclite, then mental health has a considerable drawback: conformity.
The Nazi leaders were mostly homoclites, as we will see; so were, by definition, the German people; so are the American people. So was Richard Nixon. So am I, and so, probably, are you. Nixon realized that he shared the average American's vices, not just their virtues. He believed that “you've got to be a little evil to understand those people out there [meaning average Americans]. You have to know the dark side of life to understand those people.”

Three decades of psychoanalytic suspicion have taken on a life of their own. Concludes David Greenberg: “The notion of Nixon as a madman, narcissist, or dangerous neurotic lived on in the political culture.” This history is not at all consistent with the psychoanalytically based presumptions of some historians. When Theodore White wrote that Nixon's presidency was “a study in psychiatric imbalance,” and that Nixon “became unstable as the great forces of history bore down on his character flaws,” one has to wonder what White would have made of Kennedy's obsession with dying, the psychiatric impact of his steroid abuse, and his life-threatening hypersexuality. Richard Nixon took no dangerous medications, nor did he engage in any dangerous behaviors. If Nixon was psychiatrically unstable, then John Kennedy would have to be deemed outright insane.

In truth, Nixon was rather normal, and Kennedy mildly abnormal—hence the failures of the first and the resilient successes of the second.

Even the best reporters were psychiatric amateurs. In 1975, James Reston of the
New York Times
asked, “How is the nation to be protected from irrational presidents?” William Safire, having newly joined the
Times
after recently serving as a Nixon aide, saw no reason to claim irrationality: “A man harassed, tortured, and torn, but of sound mind, came to a rational decision to resign.” Safire knew something was wrong with Reston's question, though he did not know its psychiatric basis: “There is a delicious inconsistency in the Nixon story: How could an intelligent man, a canny politician, blunder so egregiously in covering up a foolish crime—unless he had lost all his marbles? The historian who figures this out might earn a niche in history himself.”

Historians have not figured it out, because they have not realized that, in this case, their man was not crazy. I believe I have solved Safire's riddle:
A mentally healthy homoclite,
who fully suffers the Hubris syndrome identified by David Owen,
would do what Nixon did
.

 

 

NOW WE COME TO our living homoclite leaders, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, two men who ruled when the great crisis of September 11, 2001, ushered in a new political world. I have already acknowledged the challenges of examining the mental state of leaders who are our contemporaries, but I believe it's possible to do so with these two figures because we've already established a detailed context in which to view them (that is, all the other mentally ill and healthy leaders we've considered thus far). And I believe it's valuable to look at the performance of these men, because their immediacy underscores the potentially tragic consequences of homoclite rule during times of crisis.

George W. Bush follows Grinker's model closely: he was solidly religious, upright, middle-of-the-road in his personality traits. He was sociable but not too extraverted, entrepreneurial but not an excessive risk-taker, easygoing (with neither too much nor too little anxiety or neuroticism). Under normal circumstances, like the midwestern homoclites of Grinker's study, he should have spent his years in Midland, at the side of his librarian wife, raising his two girls, watching the Texas Rangers, relaxing in Crawford on vacation. Without a president for a father, a senator for a grandfather, and family ties to Yale and Harvard, he probably wouldn't have gotten as far as he did. But he did as well as he did because of his own efforts too. With the social status that happened to be his lot, George W. Bush was a very successful homoclite, a fine peacetime leader, and a failed crisis leader.

It may seem odd to some readers, especially those who are critical of him, that I will insist that Bush was mentally healthy. In fact, I would diagnose mental health, or the absence of illness, in most leaders.

It is, in fact, a reflection of the deep stigma against mental illness, even among mental health professionals, that critics of his policies or actions should have trouble accepting that George W. Bush might be mentally healthy. Many of us have trouble envisioning someone we disagree with on fundamental issues as being entirely sane. It is harder, as I said earlier, to do psychological history with living leaders, not because of them, but because of our
own
feelings about them. Our feelings—yours and mine, politically based and deep-seated—interfere with objective psychiatric evaluations. The longer a leader is dead, the more objective we can be. Hindsight is clarifying. Chamberlain we can admit as healthy and weak as a leader; Bush and Tony Blair feel, to their critics, unhealthy and weak. But all of them could and should be seen as homoclites.

 

 

A KEY CHARACTERISTIC of a homoclite leader is that he or she is effective and successful in peacetime or prosperity, but fails during war or crisis. Let's see how successful George Bush was before he became president.

As a young man, he was widely viewed by friends as amiable and appealing. “He was Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer all in one,” one friend recalled. “When you met him, you thought, ‘I'd like to be around him.'” He was well liked, and had many friends. He suffered losses, like most people do at some point in life. Perhaps the greatest loss was the death of his older sister from leukemia, when George was only seven years old. His mother has written about how George's parents hid the severity of the illness from the young boy; he found out she was seriously sick only after she had died. Barbara Bush does not describe anything resembling depression in her son, only a questioning about why he had not known earlier. Barbara, on the other hand, suffered much, as most mothers would. She describes how she realized she needed to move on when she overheard George tell a friend that he could not come to play because his mother was grieving. Some might point to this experience as unusual, marking Bush as in some way psychologically abnormal as a result. In fact, about 15 percent of all adults in the U.S. population lose a parent or a sibling before age twenty, making this a relatively common phenomenon. Fifty years ago, when medical treatment for illnesses like leukemia was much less effective than it is now, one would expect even higher rates of early sibling loss. Although childhood parental loss in particular increases the risk of depression when a person reaches adulthood, some studies show that most people who experienced losses during childhood correlate with people being
more
resilient as adults. Thus the experience of his sister's death does not necessarily, or even probably, imply that Bush would have become in some way psychologically abnormal as a result.

Bush had the best education, attending the elite Andover boarding school and then Yale. At the end of high school, his SAT score was 1280 (adjusted for today's test), which puts him well above the average score of 1026, and approximates to an IQ of about 120, average for a college graduate (and similar to John Kennedy), and notably higher than the norm of 100. So much for the claim that he is unintelligent. He was extremely socially adept; he joined a jock fraternity at Yale and was soon elected its president. He showed not only his pure intelligence but his “emotional intelligence” when during a fraternity ceremony he was asked to name as many of the new pledges as he could. Most people could name at most a dozen of their fraternity brothers, mostly new acquaintances; Bush named all fifty. His social ability is also highlighted by his election to elite societies, like the famed Skull and Bones. Even later political enemies, like the Clinton operative Lanny Davis, who was a Yale classmate, commented on Bush's interpersonal abilities. Some have used his average college grade of C to demean his intellectual skills, but a C at Yale is no mean feat. Bush's grades at Yale were in fact slightly higher than Franklin Roosevelt's, and similar to John Kennedy's, at Harvard.

In all, this history of childhood and young adulthood indicates a thoughtful, sociable, intelligent, “well-adjusted” man. Even so, this period also marks the start of Bush's drinking, and many of Bush's detractors would cite his alcoholism as an indication that he must at least be mentally abnormal in that regard. Bush doesn't hide this aspect of his past; indeed, he begins his memoir
Decision Points
by discussing it. He appears to have begun drinking in college, and according to his college friends later interviewed by the journalist Ronald Kessler, he drank no more than was typical in his social circle. But while vacationing with his family in Maine, the twenty-one-year-old was arrested for drunk driving, an event that later came to light one week before the 2000 election, producing the public perception that Bush had a severe alcoholic past that he had been hiding. In the police station, his blood alcohol level was found to be 0.10. This is legally drunk, but it is a level that is achieved by having four drinks. If this reflects psychological abnormality, then the majority of the U.S. population would qualify as abnormal at one time or another. Bush had no other legal or medical problems with alcohol, though he continued to drink for the next two decades. In his memoir, he describes quitting right after his fortieth birthday, when he was bothered by a hangover the day after drinking wine with friends.

A key factor appears to have been increasing anger related to drinking. One public event occurred in 1986, when a tipsy Bush confronted the journalist Al Hunt, who was dining with his wife, Judy Woodruff, and their four-year-old daughter in a Dallas restaurant. Hunt had written an article predicting that Bush's father would not be the 1988 Republican presidential nominee; George W. was livid, and swore at Hunt in public. His wife, Laura, pressured him to quit drinking, and the morning after the fortieth birthday bash, he apparently did. He says he has not had a drink since.

This history is actually the best possible outcome in anyone with alcohol problems, as well described in a fifty-year study of the natural history of alcoholism by the psychiatrist George Vaillant. As part of a larger study that young men entered around age twenty, Vaillant's group followed about six hundred normal men throughout their lives, many into their seventies. Of this group, eighty-nine people developed alcoholism (about 15 percent) over fifty years of follow-up. In fact, Bush's history is typical: among Vaillant's subjects, alcoholism usually began in the twenties, and increased until about age forty, at which point it decreased by about 2 to 3 percent of persons per year. But two features mark Bush as different from a typical alcoholic: he quit cold turkey, without any formal treatment; and he has never relapsed, as best as we can tell. In contrast, Vaillant found that only about one-third of the people in his study managed to stop drinking completely, and 95 percent of them relapsed at some point after quitting.

Thus Bush can be seen as different from a homoclite in that he has had alcohol problems in the past, something that does not occur in about 85 percent of the population. But Bush's problem with alcohol was not severe and did not meet addiction diagnostic criteria: he had no symptoms of withdrawal or physical dependence, and his only legal problem occurred with a minimally high level of alcohol. Further, he was able to stop cold turkey and never relapsed, which makes him unlike 95 percent of alcoholics.

All this is to say that Bush's purported alcoholism is perhaps the strongest argument against simple homoclite status, but it also was a highly unusual kind of alcohol problem, one that was mild and easily solved, in such a way that rarely happens in those with alcoholism. Placed in the larger context of a great deal of evidence of mental health, as described above, Bush's past alcohol problems seem smaller and less central to who he is than many of his critics suppose.

 

 

THE REST OF BUSH'S pre-presidential life also strongly supports the notion of him as a homoclite. After graduating from Yale and Harvard Business School, he decided to join the oil business in Texas, like his father. This was a wise move; the 1970s oil boom was creating plenty of millionaires; it has been estimated that one person in five in Bush's hometown of Midland was a millionaire. Bush started with limited funds, $15,000 given to him from a trust fund owned by his father. He lived frugally: he was known for being cheap, and he often wore secondhand clothes. He used his social abilities to talk neighbors and friends into investing in drilling on West Texas land. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he didn't, but all in all, he was a typical 1970s Texas oil entrepreneur.

His grandfather having been a senator and his father a congressman, George W. seems to have caught the family bug for politics, and after a few years in the oil business he ran for Congress in 1977, beating another man in the Republican primary, but losing the general election to a Democrat who painted Bush (ironically, we might think in hindsight) as an eastern liberal. He returned to the oil business, but, like many others, suffered when oil prices fell in the 1980s. Bush's company lost money, along with most in his industry. By then his father was vice president; this fact did not hurt when Bush's indebted company was bought in 1984 by another oil company, Harken Oil and Gas. Bush's debts were paid as part of the deal, and Harken hired him as a consultant.