Churchill never fully evaded his melancholic attitude, even after he became a legend. Toward the end of his life, he considered himself a failure. Montague Brown, a companion in his later years, wrote, “He felt that everything he had done had ended in disaster. He had won the war but lost the Empire, communism had swallowed up half of Europe, and socialism was threatening the world he loved at home.” In his seventies, he told his daughter, “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”
Treatment is the last source of evidence, and Churchill was treated for his moods throughout his life. We have no evidence that he received much treatment that was specifically psychiatric, mainly because the first psychiatric medications weren’t discovered until the 1950s. However, his doctor, Lord Moran, gave Churchill amphetamines at least in the 1950s, and possibly earlier. Amphetamines are effective antidepressants and were the most commonly used drugs for depression in the 1930s and 1940s; they’re sometimes prescribed for depression even now.
He also self-medicated with liquor. “I have taken more out of alcohol,” he averred, “than alcohol has taken out of me.” In fact, most historians have seen alcohol as a rationale for his moodiness, making a cause out of what may have been an effect. His daily routine involved drinking whiskey and soda soon after breakfast, having champagne at lunch, another whiskey and soda in late afternoon (followed by a nap), then dinner at eight, usually with multiple drinks. After midnight, Churchill would do most of his writing, with the help of some nightcaps. (“I could not live without champagne,” he said. “In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”) Once, when he was hit by a car and suffered a concussion during a visit to Prohibition-era New York, he even obtained a doctor’s note to certify medical necessity for alcohol consumption. People with bipolar disorder often abuse alcohol. When they’re depressed, anxious, and restless, alcohol soothes them; when they’re manic and they can’t control their impulses, alcohol serves them—along with sex and spending—as an appetite to be indulged.
Most historians have also ignored Churchill’s mood swings. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr took the view that Churchill’s manic depression helped him by making him a bit grandiose, luckily for England:
In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished. . . . In 1940, any political leader might have tried to rally Britain with brave words, although his heart was full of despair. But only a man who had known and faced despair within himself could carry conviction at such a moment. Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us in the menacing summer of 1940. Churchill was such a man: and it was because, all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome.
I think Storr misses a deeper wisdom in Churchill’s mental illness: not the supposed grandiosity of his manic temperament, but rather the realism of his depressive suffering. Perhaps the key to finding a link between this melancholic Churchill and his political realism can be found in the era of his political exile, the Wilderness years.
In the period between the two world wars, Winston Churchill, out of power and sidelined by his own Conservative Party, was seen as a peripheral and somewhat curmudgeonly political has-been. In 1924, in his last cabinet post as chancellor of the Exchequer, he showed minimal understanding of economics, and was off target (as with his strident opposition to the rising labor unions) in his domestic policies. His foreign policy fared little better: a war-weary nation cringed when Churchill wanted to send more troops to India rather than negotiate peaceful independence with that “half-naked little fakir,” Mohandas Gandhi.
Churchill did not fit the times. In the 1920s and 1930s, the leader of the Conservative Party, Stanley Baldwin—a man esteemed by all, including Churchill—appeased his conservative base while also compromising with the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, who exuded the same basic attitude (some leftists called MacDonald the “Boneless Wonder” for his penchant to compromise). For about a decade, the two men led a government of national unity, one that excluded Winston Churchill.
CHURCHILL WAS NOT part of the national unity club of the interwar peace primarily because his military views conflicted sharply with those of his peers. Churchill wanted to rearm England to prepare for the Nazi threat; he foresaw war. His peers opposed military spending and couldn’t fathom the reality of the German danger. For instance, the Duke of Westminster—best man in Churchill’s wedding, and widely viewed as England’s richest man—was an openly anti-Semitic supporter of Nazi Germany. Lord Londonderry—a cousin to Churchill and head of the Air Ministry in the years 1931–1935—consistently rejected Churchill’s calls to expand British air forces. Londonderry even hosted Hitler’s aristocratic emissary, Count von Ribbentrop, during a 1935 visit to England. Sir John Simon, Baldwin’s foreign secretary, called Hitler “an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.” Even Churchill’s closest political mentor, the former World War I prime minister David Lloyd George, called Hitler “a born leader, a magnetic dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose,” and concluded, “I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country.” The royal family itself had pro-German sympathies; the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) told a German prince in 1933, “It was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either [regarding] Jews or anything else. . . . Dictators are very popular these days and we might want one in England before long.” King George V was explicit: “I will not have another war. I will not. The last one was none of my doing and if there is another one, and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square [where demonstrators traditionally gathered] myself sooner than allow the country to be brought in.”
Baldwin was ambivalent about Churchill. When Churchill sent signed copies of his books to Baldwin, the prime minister would write letters of praise in return. But deep down, the Conservative leader looked askance at the unpredictable Churchill, telling a friend in 1936, “When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said ‘No person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom . . . [which is why] while we delight to listen to him in this House we not take his advice.” Many assume that Churchill’s isolation made him depressed; it may be that Churchill’s depression made him isolated. Churchill was relegated to the Wilderness, by Baldwin and others, because his unconventional persona (partly reflecting his mood illness) provided an excuse to ignore his sadly realistic political judgment. Baldwin groomed another successor: Neville Chamberlain.
The contrast between Churchill and Chamberlain in their approach to Nazism is well known. Where Churchill began to warn about the Nazi threat as early as October 1930, Chamberlain remained oblivious as late as his fateful Munich visit in 1938. Chamberlain wanted to establish personal relations with Hitler, to meet him, to rationally convince him of the need to avoid war.
After his first meeting with Hitler, Chamberlain convinced himself that he had been right: “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” Chamberlain met Hitler three times in all; before the third trip, as he announced his plan in the House of Commons, most members stood and cheered. A few, like Churchill, remained seated, despite angry reproaches from nearby colleagues. In September 1938, while Chamberlain had dinner with Hitler in Munich, Churchill supped with two anti-Nazi MPs and steamed, “How could honourable men with wide experience and fine records in the Great War condone a policy so cowardly? It is sordid, squalid,
subhuman, and suicidal.”
What made Churchill see the truth where Chamberlain saw only illusion? A key difference was that Chamberlain was mentally healthy (which we’ll discuss more in chapter 14), while Churchill was clearly not.
Churchill never surrendered to the black dog that gnawed at him from the inside. Having survived thus far, he didn’t intend to surrender to other dogs, whether Hitler or Mussolini. He had courage beyond reason, as Storr put it, because he had faced death many times before 1940, and not only during pitched battles fought in exotic lands, but within his daily life. His doctor, Lord Moran, relates a discussion with Viscount Brendan Bracken, a longtime Churchill friend, who remarked, “Winston has always been a ‘despairer.’ Orpen, who painted him after the Dardanelles debacle, used to speak of the misery in his face. He called him the man of misery. . . . Then, in his years in the wilderness, before the Second War, he kept saying, ‘I’m finished.’ He said that about twice a day. He was quite certain that he would never get back to office, for everyone seemed to regard him as a wild man. . . . Winston has always been wretched unless he was occupied. You know what he has been like since he resigned [the office of prime minister in 1946]. Why, he told me that he prays every day for death.”
A SKEPTICAL READER might argue that Churchill was just a pessimist, always imagining the worst; his negativism just happened to be correct in the 1930s. Or one might think of him as an anomaly, an exception to the conventional wisdom that mental illness impairs leadership. Neither is the case.
Churchill is hardly the only example of depressive realism; we’ll meet others elsewhere in this book—Lincoln, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. One can see depressive realism playing out in a wide variety of circumstances: it guided Churchill and Lincoln to realize that war was necessary; it led Gandhi and King to reject violence. It is mistaken to focus only on Churchill, as some do, and view realism as a rationale for war, a logic for jingoism. Our greatest proponents of peace were also depressive realists.
CHAPTER 5
BOTH READ THE SAME BIBLE
LINCOLN
Historians have written more books about Abraham Lincoln than any other American political leader, and yet they hadn’t fully studied his depression until recently. In Lincoln’s Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenk lays out the case for the beneficial impact of depression on Lincoln’s leadership, especially in how the disease fostered empathy and tenacity. Here we’ll focus on how Lincoln’s depression enhanced his political realism.
First, as with Churchill, we should establish the reality of Lincoln’s mental illness. Lincoln undeniably experienced symptoms of depression. Historians only disagreed about whether such depression represented mental illness. Here is an account of his most severe depressive symptoms, which began shortly after his proposal of marriage was spurned: “In early January 1841, Abraham Lincoln was in very poor shape. He began to miss votes in the legislature. . . . The next week he missed many sessions. . . . ‘Lincoln you know as desponding and melancholy . . .’ wrote Edwin Webb. . . . ‘He has grown much worse and is now confined to his bed sick in body and mind.’ ”
Just before this episode, Lincoln had pseudonymously published a poem on suicide. Earlier, in 1835, after the death of a young woman whom he loved, he had been actively suicidal:
Lincoln “told me that he felt like committing suicide often,” remembered Mentor Graham, and his neighbors mobilized to keep him safe. One friend recalled, “Mr. Lincoln’s friends . . . were compelled to keep watch and ward over Mr. Lincoln, he being from the sudden shock somewhat temporarily deranged. . . .” Another villager said, “Lincoln was locked up by his friends . . . to prevent derangement or suicide.” People wondered whether Lincoln had fallen off the deep end. “That was the time the community said he was crazy,” remembered Elizabeth Abell. . . . After several weeks of worrisome behavior—talking about suicide, wandering alone in the woods with his gun—an older couple in the area [Mr. and Mrs. Bowling Green] took him into their home. . . . When he had improved somewhat, they let him go, but he was, Mrs. Green said, “quite melancholy for months.”
In the 1840s, Lincoln admitted to a fellow politician that he “was the victim of terrible melancholy” at times, and thus never carried a pocketknife; he couldn’t trust himself with it.
REGARDING FAMILY HISTORY, insanity and melancholy abounded in the Lincoln clan. Lincoln’s father was gloomy; a neighbor commented that he “often got the ‘blues,’ and had some strange sort of spells, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them.” As Shenk recounts, other Lincolns also suffered:
His great-uncle once told a court of law that he had “a deranged mind.” His uncle Mordecai Lincoln had broad mood swings, which were probably intensified by heavy drinking. And Mordecai’s family was thick with mental disease. All three of his sons—who bore a strong physical resemblance to their first cousin Abraham—were considered melancholy men. . . . One of these Lincoln cousins swung wildly between melancholia and mania and at times had a tenuous grip on reality, writing letters and notes that suggest madness. Another first cousin of Lincoln’s had a daughter committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. . . . One family member who had frequent spells of intense mental trouble referred to his condition as “the Lincoln horrors.”
Regarding the course of his illness, Lincoln suffered his first severe depressive episode early in life, at age twenty-six, which is typical for this disease. He would recover from each episode (also typical), be well for a time, and then suffer another episode. (The next severe depression occurred at age thirty-two.) Life experiences triggered the episodes (the death of his love interest in the first episode, the refusal of a marriage proposal in the second, his imminent marriage in a third). For a century, historians mistook these environmental triggers as the sole causes of Lincoln’s melancholy. In middle age, his depressive episodes tapered off, leaving him at a mildly depressed baseline personality. As the Civil War dragged on, he became more morose, and then, after he lost his eleven-year-old son Willie to typhoid fever in 1862, he probably went into a final severe depression. In April 1865, when he went to see a play at Ford’s Theater, he was only beginning to recover.
Doctors also treated Lincoln’s mental illness. In 1841, Dr. Anson Henry intensively medicated the thirty-two-year-old state legislator. A friend related, “The Doctors say he is within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life. He was perfectly crazy for some time, not able to attend to his business at all. They say he don’t look like the same person.” Doctors apparently told Lincoln that he suffered from “hypochondriasm,” then as now a descriptor of physical symptoms originating from mental causes. In an age of “great and dangerous cures” based on little science, the most common treatment for mental illness—whether termed hypochondriasis, melancholia, or insanity—was bleeding: the removal of blood by the application of leeches to suck, or by using a lancet to cut. The theory, going back to the ancient Roman physician Galen, was that bleeding would put the body’s “humors” (fluids or substances: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) back into balance. Other approaches that sought to balance the humors involved purgatives (which induced vomiting) or laxatives. Doctors also recommended extremely cold showers. Dr. Henry adhered to these views and prescribed mercury tablets (Lincoln called them “my blue pills”) for their purgative and laxative effects. He probably also bled Lincoln. Doctors treated Lincoln intensively, but they could not help him; no Prozac existed to lift his gloom even for a day, and he knew it. He wrote in 1841, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
LINCOLN SUFFERED FROM severe depression, probably a version of manic-depressive illness (as was common in his relatives), more severe on the depressive side, with only mild symptoms, in his younger
years, of high energy and “fun and hilarity without restraint” (according to a fellow politician).
Most of the time, Lincoln was a highly depressed, even suicidal man. Yet his depression conferred upon him, I believe, realism and empathy that helped make him a superb crisis leader. In his personal letters of the 1850s, one sees Lincoln’s notable empathy when he describes seeing shackled slaves on a steamboat in 1841, and when he reacts to the white supremacist attitudes of the 1840s “Know-Nothing” movement:
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics .” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. (italics in original)
This natural empathy was tempered with hardy realism, even ruthlessness. The great man was not a consistent abolitionist. Lincoln opposed slavery, but until 1863 he also opposed abolishing it. He was the compromise Republican candidate in 1860, seen as a moderate who might still reach a peaceful accord with the South.
Lincoln saw a harsh and complex reality: the Constitution specifically sanctioned slavery. The South was fully within its constitutional rights to insist that slavery be protected. Lincoln the lawyer understood the law; but Lincoln the man believed that slavery was wrong; and Lincoln the politician realized that abolitionist views were spreading. Sooner or later, the Constitution would have to be altered and slavery outlawed; how was the problem.
A First-Rate Madness Page 7