Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Given that development, Eilat burst like a racehorse from the starting gate. Its lifeline, the highway to Beersheba, was opened in 1958. As the artery of the Negev’s future, the road has made possible the expansion of the desert and Dead Sea chemical industries whose products, borne on diesel-powered fifty-ton trucks with eight pairs of wheels, now rumble into the docks of the new port. The port can accommodate four ships at the pier and three tankers at the oil jetty. Plans have been drawn up to double present capacity. Goods leave Eilat bound for Abyssinia, Iran, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, and Australia. Rubber imported from Singapore is manufactured into tires at Petah Tikvah in the north, to be re-exported from Eilat to Iran as finished product. The manager of the port is a young man of twenty-four who came to Eilat three years ago after his army service. To improve his command of English for dealing with shipmasters, he was going to England for two and a half months. Accustomed to government grants and the largesse of foundations, I asked who was sending him. “I send myself,” he replied haughtily.

  In addition to being a port, Eilat is booming as a tourist resort for sun-seekers and skin divers. It has twelve hotels of varying size and luxury, a tour by glass-bottomed boat to view the exotic fishes of the Red Sea, three museums, including a “musée de l’art moderne,” a library, an aquarium, a zoo, a park, a shopping plaza, a municipal hall of immodest proportions obviously designed for a town three times the present size, a 120-bed hospital under construction, two movie houses and a third under construction, a Philip Murray Community Center jointly established by the CIO and Histadrut, Israel’s labor federation, two local airlines serving Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba, a bus line, three banks, three filling stations, two synagogues, two bars, and one mayor of dynamic capacity.

  He is Joseph Levy, aged forty-three, a native of Egypt who in 1948 was arrested in Cairo as a Zionist youth leader and sent to a prison camp in the Sinai peninsula. Held there for a year, he planned an escape to the nearest point in Palestine, which happened to be Eilat, but was released before he could make the attempt. Reaching Israel, as it had now become, by way of Marseilles, he made for Eilat, having on the way talked himself into a job as manager of an airline branch office about to be opened there. He arrived in 1949, one of Eilat’s Mayflower generation, and ten years later was mayor.

  A dark-haired, dark-skinned, quiet-mannered man, he wore when I saw him recently an air of enforced calm, as if he felt that were he to let himself go in reaction to all the demands, pressures, and harassments of his job, he might fly apart in a thousand pieces. He was entirely self-possessed, with the self-assurance that comes from having tackled and, if not solved, at least come through a chronic multiplicity of problems, and from acquiring the knowledge en route that no one of them need be fatal. Besides Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke English, French, and Italian, all of which he had been taught as a boy at the Jewish school in Cairo because, as the headmaster had explained to protesting parents, “Who knows today what may happen in the world? I must do what I can to prepare these children for anything.”

  Mayor Levy knew all about Mayor Lindsay of New York, kept similar hours, and left us after dinner to attend a meeting at ten-thirty. He had just been re-elected for a second term by an increased majority and was supported by what he called a “wall-to-wall coalition” in the municipal council—that is, without other-party opposition on the council, a condition virtually unique in Israel. He ascribed it to the pioneers’ sense of solidarity in Eilat. Out on the perimeter, too distant from the rest of the country to draw either water from the national carrier or electricity from the national grid, Eilat feels thrown on its own resources, a kind of fortress on the frontier.

  The mayor recalled the hard early days when no one had any faith in the town’s future. Businessmen would not invest capital there; no one would build a hotel until Histadrut put up the first; water would give out in the middle of a shower; power would fail. Families left after a few months, citing all sorts of reasons: Schools were inadequate, hospitals non-existent, provisions erratic, the summer’s heat unbearable. “It was terrible to see them go.” To keep at least the bachelors on the job, Histadrut was persuaded to build a girls’ youth hostel (“We had to go to Histadrut for girls too”), but few girls came. Yet bit by bit, with subsidies and from small beginnings, industry and tourism got started, gradually bringing in money, people, and developing facilities.

  Water was, and remains, the major problem. Rainfall collected in cisterns, plus underground desert water that is too saline to be potable unless diluted by pure water, can together supply about seventy percent of requirements. The remaining thirty percent must be provided by desalinization, which, however uneconomic, the government subsidizes, since Eilat could not exist without it. Air-conditioning makes an extra demand, but because of the extreme summer heat it is considered necessary in order to hold the population. The desalinization process is operated in conjunction with Eilat’s independent power plant. Nearby, a second desalinization plant, using a refrigerating process, has proved ineffective. Mayor Levy shrugged when asked how water would be found to match the city’s proposed expansion. “We can’t let the water problem limit our plans,” he said. “It will be found somehow.” Perhaps he operated from some race-memory of the water that gushed when Moses tapped the rock.

  One alteration of nature already figured in his plans: to increase artificially the coastline available for tourist facilities by cutting a number of lagoons and canals inland from the sea, and eventually to sell property along the banks of this “little Venice” for more hotels. The creeping shadow of Hilton could be felt over one’s shoulder; already a Sheraton is being talked about. Doubtless in the course of that relentless advance, Eilat will one day become Israel’s Miami. Such is progress.

  Meanwhile, water or no water, Eilat plants as it builds. Fast-growing eucalyptus trees already give shade and a green rest for the eye, shrubs and grass plots battle sand, scrawny saplings border a newly paved street, looking as if they had been planted yesterday. Waking early, I went for a walk before eight in the morning when the air was fresh, before the dust and heat would rise. A street cleaner on his knees was sweeping up the leftover dirt with a small brush, singing a melancholy Oriental chant while he worked. Over grass and shrubs, sprinklers were whirling as if no one had ever heard of a water shortage. They seemed symbols of the Israelis’ refusal to accept limits, a living example of unlimited impossibility. In the sprinklers of Eilat one could see what the professors call a “future-oriented society.”

  * * *

  Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1967.

  Woodrow Wilson on Freud’s Couch

  SINCE AMERICANS ARE NOT, by and large, a people associated with tragedy, it is strange and unexpected that the most tragic figure in modern history—judged by the greatness of expectations and the measure of the falling off—should have been an American. During the two climactic years of one of the world’s profound agonies, 1917–19, Woodrow Wilson was the receptacle of men’s hopes. He personified the craving of men of good will to believe that some good would come of it all, that the immense suffering, turmoil, and disruption would not be for nothing, that the agony must prove to have been the birth pangs of a better world. In a series of pronouncements that seemed to pluck out men’s best desires and give them shape, Wilson supplied the formula for that better world (which must be read not as a stale slogan but in the first fine rapture of its promise) as one made “safe for democracy,” safe from war ever again, safe from tyranny, hunger, and injustice, safe from the oppression of one people by another. It was felt he had made the world a promise; nor was it only simple people who believed in him, but also the sophisticated—men of affairs and intellectuals. It was these whom the subsequent disillusion most embittered, for they felt they had been made to look like fools. When the Treaty of Versailles made a fiasco of their hopes, they felt personally deceived and betrayed.

  Two men acutely afflicted by this anger and resentment were Sigmund Freud an
d William Bullitt. Their collaboration seems at first sight wildly improbable: the old famed weary European, a genius, one of the rare authentic pathfinders of all time, and the young American, a person of courage, independence, and good will but volatile and “adrenal” (to use the word of a shrewd observer), a picaresque adventurer in politics, a Tom Jones of diplomacy. This seemingly bizarre combination has produced a fascinating but distorted book. As an analysis of the deep mainsprings of motivation in one of the most complex and puzzling public characters who ever lived, it is sharply illuminating and, with certain reservations, convincing; it makes the contradictions in Wilson’s behavior fall into place with an almost audible click. But as an over-all estimate of the whole man it is lamentable, and as an interpretation of events it falls to pieces. It is good psychology but bad history; bad because it is invalid, dangerous because it misleads us as to where the responsibility lies.

  Past circumstances have a direct bearing on content. As a twenty-eight-year-old specialist for the State Department on Eastern European affairs, Bullitt, previously a participant in the Ford Peace Ship, went with the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 in the same mood expressed by his contemporary and colleague Harold Nicolson on the British delegation: “We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission.… We were bent on doing great, permanent noble things.” For Bullitt the opportunity came when he was sent to Russia to ascertain terms of settlement with the Bolshevik regime, which Wilson acknowledged to be “the acid test of good will.” Accompanied by Lincoln Steffens and sharing his conclusion, “I have seen the future and it works,” Bullitt returned with Lenin’s offer of incredibly favorable peace terms. His reception was a stunning blow.

  Because the treaty with all its faults, after agonizing delay, was at that moment on the edge of conclusion and the Bolshevik problem seethed with cause for dissension, Wilson, who habitually evaded reality by refusing to look at it, refused to receive Bullitt, to read his report or hear what he had to say. Although it meant inviting attack as pro-German and a Bolshevik, Bullitt resigned in a public letter to the President stating that “effective labor for a new world order” was no longer possible as a servant of his government. He then left for the Riviera telling reporters he intended “to lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.” Subsequently called to testify before the Senate, he supplied Senator Lodge with potent material to aid in defeating American ratification, thus earning denunciation as a traitor to his party and finishing off, as it seemed, his public career. True, Bullitt had a private income, but not everyone who can afford the courage of conviction exercises it.

  Freud, too, had had high hopes of Wilson which had turned sour. It was “one of those numerous cases” in his life, according to his biographer Dr. Ernest Jones, where his “optimism and credulity” led to inevitable disappointment and resentment. The experience confirmed Freud’s existing displeasure with America, a country which he regarded as a “gigantic mistake.” “Your Woodrow Wilson,” he told Max Eastman in 1926, “was the silliest fool of the century, if not of all centuries. And he was probably one of the biggest criminals—unconsciously I am quite sure.” When Dr. Jones, in a similar conversation, pointed out that the complexity of the problems after the war precluded an ideal peace being dictated by any one man, Freud replied tartly, “Then he should not have made all those promises.” In this preface he writes that from the start of the undertaking Wilson “was unsympathetic to me,” and this aversion increased the more he learned about him and “the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.” The last four words are highly revealing of a point of view, perhaps a natural one to a national of the Central Powers.

  In the 1920s when Bullitt’s second wife was a patient of Freud’s, the doctor helped Bullitt through a difficult period, and the two became friends. Their joint study of Wilson was begun in 1930 when, on learning from Bullitt that he was planning a book on the Treaty of Versailles and its authors, Freud eagerly offered to collaborate on the chapter on Wilson. The project soon grew into an analysis of Wilson alone. No more tempting subject for the exercise of the Freudian method could have offered itself. Wilson had combined world power with extraordinary contradictions of character which to Freud bespoke some torturing inner conflict. What was the nature of the conflict, and was it in fact the source of Wilson’s power as well as of his failure? The challenge of the question was obviously irresistible. Although, in the usual procedure, psychoanalysis takes two, the couch in this case would not be quite as silent as in the case of Moses, on whom Freud also tried analysis without the patient. Wilson had been dead only six years, not three thousand, and had left a mass of contemporary evidence.

  Although work on the manuscript was completed in 1932, certain unspecified differences between the authors kept it from publication at that time. It was not until 1938, after Freud’s safe removal from Vienna to London, in which Bullitt, by then Ambassador to France, was directly instrumental, that agreement between them was reached. A contract authorizing publication by Bullitt was then signed, whether under a sense of obligation to Bullitt felt by Freud, who was then in his last illness and was to die in the following year, is impossible to say. Publication was mysteriously delayed for nearly thirty years, according to Bullitt as a matter of courtesy until after the death of Mrs. Wilson. The explanation seems inadequate since Mrs. Wilson died in 1961 (Bullitt survives), and in any case the authors originally intended to publish in 1932. Undeniably, certain questions are left unanswered, but not such, it seems to this reviewer, as to justify the current anguish of the psychoanalytic fraternity, who have greeted this posthumous work of the Master as if it were something between a forged First Folio and the Protocols of Zion. The sinister doubts they cast upon the authenticity of Freud’s share in the book seem groundless. The writing may or may not be largely Bullitt’s, but even if Freud only talked his share, characteristic ideas and prejudices affirm his presence. Moreover, his estate is sharing in the royalties.

  The authors’ basic premise is that the Treaty of Versailles was the Great Betrayal, from which the world has suffered ever since; that as such it was the result of Wilson’s failure to make the Allies live up to the promise of the Fourteen Points and other Wilsonian principles; that he had the power to do so but exhibited a moral collapse and “mental degeneracy” at Paris which were the outcome of his inner psychological conflicts; ergo, that all of us thereafter have suffered from Wilson’s neuroses.

  Despite a gaping hole in this argument, which I shall come to later, it has the simple appeal of all personal devil explanations of history. Blaming Versailles on Wilson’s personal faults is the easy way out, which J. M. Keynes, among others, followed in his Economic Consequences of the Peace. It has taken enough hold to justify a deeper look at the President whose Secretary of War, Lindley M. Garrison, said he could never understand him and doubted if anyone could. “He was the most extraordinary and complex character I ever encountered.”

  The central neurosis, unearthed by the authors, which established its deep unconscious grip on the whole course of Wilson’s life and caused him, like Whittier’s Daniel Webster, to be “fiend-goaded down the endless dark,” was his fixation on his father. The relationship was, in fact, sufficiently remarkable to have attracted notice by others, notably Alexander and Juliet George in their study Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, published in 1956. Recognizing in Wilson “some consuming inner difficulty for which he paid a terrible price,” the Georges used the father fixation as an informing symptom. Freud and Bullitt break it down into its Freudian components and show how these determined Wilson’s development and explain his frequent episodes of self-defeating behavior, which have always seemed so incomprehensible. They draw on the known facts of Wilson’s passionate adulation of and unbroken subservience to his father, his chronic headaches, indigestion, “breakdowns,” and other psychosomatic symptoms, his exaggerated friendships, hat
es, and quarrels, and other evidence.

  Briefly, the analysis discovers a man in whom manifest submissiveness toward his father warred with unconscious hostility, which had to find release in acted-out hostility toward substitute father figures such as Dean West at Princeton and Senator Lodge, while the submissiveness had to be compensated by a torturing super-ego whose excessive demands “required of him such God-like achievements that no actual accomplishment could satisfy it.” On the jangling Freudian battlefield of the id, the conflict rages in many forms: There are the complicated shapes of narcissism—identification with the father, a Presbyterian minister, becoming identification with God, and, conversely, as little “Tommy” Wilson, with Jesus; there are over-devoted friendships with small, slight “son” figures—Hibben, Tumulty, House—always ending in a sense of betrayal; there is identification with the mother, prompting or requiring “feminine” concessions and submissions to father figures in the case of Lloyd George and Clemenceau; there are the compulsions to repeat, and, over all, the unrelenting super-ego.

  Born of his deep inferiority as a small child vis-à-vis his father, which itself was part cause and part effect of the startling and almost unbelievable circumstance that Wilson did not learn the alphabet until the age of nine or read easily until eleven, his tyrannical superego could never be satisfied with any success. No rung up the ladder was high enough, not even Presidency of the United States; he had to become Savior of the World. The League of Nations was to be the Grail, proof of his title as Savior. The treaty’s inequities did not matter as long as it embodied the League, for the existence of the League would solve all problems. The League was “the rationalization which made it possible for him to believe he had indeed saved the world.” Wilson had to gain the League to save his soul, yet in the fight with Lodge he himself set up the conditions which made the gain impossible. In Freudian terms this becomes the death wish, which to this reviewer seems supererogatory, for the battle with his father in the shape of Lodge, plus the demands of his super-ego and the terrible truth in his heart that the treaty, even including the League, was not the peace he had promised the world, was enough to destroy any man. On October 2, 1919, came the paralytic stroke by thrombosis in the brain, even as thirteen years earlier, in the midst of his frenzied struggle with West at Princeton, his arteries reacted with the bursting of a blood vessel in the eye.