As with Sherman, we have important insights into McClellan’s mental states based on near-daily letters to his wife. These letters weren’t fully appreciated as a whole and made public until recent decades, and they provide a good record of his thoughts and emotions throughout much of his life. McClellan rarely, if ever, expressed any doubts about himself; his usual attitude was to blame others; he almost never expresses a hint of sadness or anything resembling depression of any kind. If sanity means not being mentally ill, and lacking anxiety and unhappiness, then George McClellan was an eminently sane man.
The son of a Philadelphia surgeon, raised in a wealthy family, McClellan entered the University of Pennsylvania at age thirteen and graduated in only two years. At fifteen he entered West Point, which waived its minimum age requirement of sixteen years. After years of private schooling among the elite in America’s most prominent city, McClellan easily handled the academic work of West Point.
He served in the Mexican War under General Winfield Scott and Captain Robert E. Lee, and then, as a twenty-one-year-old veteran, returned to West Point as faculty, becoming a devotee of an unofficial postgraduate officers’ course (called the “Napoleon Club”) on the recent Napoleonic conflicts. McClellan prepared two papers, one on the battle of Wagram, and a 111-page tome on the Russian campaign of 1812. The core of this Napoleonic teaching was the notion that wars were won by strategy (rapid marching and flanking movements) combined with massive direct assaults focused on the enemy at one point. In Napoleon’s era, these tactics were needed partly because the main weapon of war, the musket, was inaccurate. Many soldiers had to line up side by side and shoot in the same direction if they had any hope of hitting a target; a single soldier could not aim and hit a specific target. Movements of masses of men, and concentration of those forces, were needed.
After the Crimean War of 1854, the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, sent McClellan (then age twenty-nine) and two senior West Point officers on a yearlong tour of Europe to study the conflict. The young McClellan had audiences with Napoleon III in Paris and Tsar Alexander II in Russia. He visited the Crimean battlefields and studied the siege of Sevastopol. He became fluent in French and German, taught himself Russian, and translated the first Russian military textbook into English. Yet his long military report did not recognize the key novelty of the Crimean War, soon to be tragically proven in the American Civil War: the rifle was now much more accurate than muskets had been a generation before. Soldiers could kill with much greater accuracy, making Napoleonic mass assaults nothing but scenes of slaughter. McClellan saw the immense losses in Russian assaults but did not appreciate their cause.
When McClellan returned to America, the booming railroad industry courted the young officer, offering him a far higher salary than the military. He became chief engineer and vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad. In 1857, when the financial crash ruined Sherman’s banks, the railroad industry endured. By 1860, McClellan, then president of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, was wealthy and had just married a high-society wife.
Unlike Sherman, McClellan’s career before the war was a series of unbroken successes.
AFTER THE NORTHERN LOSS at Bull Run, McClellan, who had succeeded in skirmishes in friendly West Virginia against Robert E. Lee, was brought to Washington, promoted to major general, and given command of the main Union army force. At age thirty-four, he was second in rank to his old chief, the now aged General Scott. McClellan chalked up one more triumph, writing to Ellen, “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self-denial.” He settled in a large house in Washington and shared formal dinners with dignitaries like Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon III, with whom he conversed in fluent French.
General Scott had already prepared a war strategy: conduct a naval blockade of the South, preventing any imports or exports, thus weakening the Southern economy over time; focus military attack on control of the Mississippi River, attacking through Tennessee down through Georgia toward New Orleans, thereby dividing the South in two and further impairing any commerce within the region. Northern newspapers dubbed this the “Anaconda” plan, since Scott seemed to want to strangle the South from the periphery, like a snake, rather than to attack it at its heart. The Northern press preferred the latter approach, calling for a direct assault on Richmond, the Confederate capital.
The loss at Bull Run increased fears that Northern morale might not withstand the protracted conflict that Scott’s strategy envisaged. When Lincoln asked him to provide his own plan of attack, McClellan came down strongly against Scott. Proposing a Napoleonic strategy of maneuver followed by direct assault, McClellan returned to what he had learned in West Point. He told Lincoln that the North needed to raise 500,000 troops, most of whom would be put under McClellan’s command. With the center of operations in Virginia, the simple plan was to “crush the rebellion in one campaign” by taking the Southern capital, followed by South Carolina and Savannah, then moving through the deep South, and ending in New Orleans. In the face of Scott’s resistance, McClellan argued, “Shall we crush the rebellion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall we leave it as a legacy for our descendants?” All other military activity in the western regions of the South would be merely diversionary to the main focus on the eastern coast. One historian summarized this strategy: “One Napoleonic grand army, perfectly prepared; and one grand campaign, perfectly executed and with nothing left to chance, and the secession impulse would be crushed.”
Lincoln vacillated at first, partly in response to the opposition of Secretary of State Seward, before going with McClellan’s plan. Referring to Seward, McClellan wrote his wife, “How does he think that I can save this country when stopped by General Scott—I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor!—that confounded old General always comes in the way—he is a perfect imbecile.” And again: “I am here in a terrible place—the enemy have 3 to 4 times my force—the President is an idiot, the old General in his dotage—he cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.”
McClellan, never having failed in anything, was certain he knew what to do.
HISTORY RECORDS MCCLELLAN to be a dismal failure; his defeats are rather commonplace in Civil War history. Here I will briefly summarize. When he first took command, he sought to flank Richmond by a sea route, moving troops down the Virginia coast to advance on the rebel capital from the east. In this Peninsular Campaign, he proved adept at moving and organizing troops, but he failed when the moment of battle came. His attacks were weak and ill-timed, easily repulsed by the new Southern leader, General Robert E. Lee. After a few losses, McClellan packed up and came back to Washington. Lee, in contrast, rapidly moved into counterattack mode, sending Stonewall Jackson up the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington, winning the Second Battle of Bull Run. McClellan, by then removed as commander, watched as new Union generals tried to directly attack Lee, losing repeatedly in the process (at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville). Lee, as usual, followed defensive victories with offensive attacks, entering Maryland in late 1862. Others having failed, Lincoln reluctantly reappointed McClellan to repulse Lee from the north. Luck gave McClellan Lee’s written orders, which a Confederate officer had dropped and a Union soldier found, so McClellan knew exactly what Lee would do and when. Still, at the bloody one-day battle of Antietam, all McClellan could manage was a draw. Lee withdrew to Virginia, and Lincoln practically did somersaults trying to get McClellan to counterattack. The cautious general refused, and Lincoln fired him again, this time for good.
In all, McClellan rarely won a battle, infrequently attacked the enemy successfully, and barely held off Lee while on his own ground, with superior numbers and the enemy’s written battle plan in hand.
Like many healthy failures (such as Richard Nixon, see below), McClellan commonly is judged, in retrospect, in unflattering terms: historians ca
ll him grandiose, paranoid, narcissistic. Like Nixon, McClellan may have approximated such epithets—like most healthy, normal people would in such circumstances—because he suffered from the hubris of power. He had not failed enough to realize that he was really not as great as everyone said he was. The historian James McPherson has documented McClellan’s foibles well. For instance, early in the war, McClellan judged Lee as follows: “Cautious and weak under grave responsibility . . . likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” As McPherson points out, “A psychiatrist could make much of this statement, for it really described McClellan himself. It could not have been more wrong as a description of Lee.” I believe that McClellan was too healthy—not depressed enough (unlike Lee, who seems to have been dysthymic in his baseline personality) to be realistically accurate in such judgments.
McClellan started out as the new Napoleon; he ended as a comedic shadow of the tragic original, called “McNapoleon” by his detractors. The crisis and strain of war would prove his undoing. Until he was tested by battle, McClellan’s claim on power went unchallenged. One is reminded of Plutarch’s comment about a failed ancient ruler: had he not become king, no one would have doubted his fitness to rule.
THIS ANALYSIS of failed homoclite leaders is convincing, I hope, but I realize that some readers may be thinking of counterexamples: what about Reagan, Eisenhower, Truman? They all seemed levelheaded and relatively successful. I would say they were homoclites, but that their presidential successes did not include handling major crises, like World War II (almost over when Truman took office), or nuclear standoff (Reagan never faced a Cuban Missile Crisis), or the civil rights crisis (Eisenhower briefly intervened in Little Rock, and otherwise avoided conflict).
Readers may also be thinking of another sort of counterexample—the insane failure. In American politics, the standout here is probably Richard Nixon. His fall is legendary, and so is the popular perception of him as paranoid, depressive, and even delusional. But in fact he was none of these things, except during a relatively brief period at the end of his presidency, when he was engulfed in a crisis of his own making. Before that crisis, he might well have been called successful and, as I will show, mentally healthy.
A problem here is that I will need to prove a negative: that Nixon was not mentally ill or abnormal. By trying to rule out one after another diagnosis, I will be making no positive diagnosis. We will be left with normality. That leftover conclusion will not satisfy some readers; but that is all we can do when trying to “prove” normality in general. In the process, I will admit that Nixon was not a classic homoclite: he was not in the middle of the normal range for most personality traits; he had his quirks. But he was not highly abnormal either. He still falls within normal variations of personality, and he certainly did not have a mental illness.
Richard Nixon had the misfortune to become president at the cultural peak of psychoanalysis. During the 1970s, six books and a dozen professional journal articles were devoted to psychoanalytic interpretations of him. In August 1973, when he shoved and yelled at his press secretary in public, Newsweek wrote that he was “on the naked edge of a nervous breakdown.” One psychiatrist was quoted in Time magazine as saying that Nixon’s behavior was consistent with schizophrenia. No president before or since has ever received such unwanted psychoanalytic attention.
Historian David Greenberg summarized all this Nixon psychoanalysis thus: “Almost uniformly, Nixon’s psychobiographers saw him as a narcissist with a frail ego who lashed out when he felt wounded.” A sometimes violent father instilled fear in young Dick, who then “identified with the aggressor.” The doctors discovered oral-anal meanings in a school project Nixon had prepared when he was ten years old. They unearthed unconscious aggressive impulses in his childhood fondness for mashing potatoes. Psychoanalytic writers agreed, Greenberg writes: “Each painted Nixon as an insecure, narcissistic personality whose childhood injuries instilled a drive to achieve, a sense of guilt over his success, and a frail ego to which small injuries triggered angry outbursts.”
This jibberish is scientifically meaningless. “Narcissism,” in particular, is just a Greek myth translated into English; it has no scientific meaning, unlike the law of gravity, or the synaptic stimulation of dopamine receptors (or even clinical depression or mania; or the temperament trait of extraversion). Narcissism has never been empirically validated as a psychiatric diagnosis or mental illness, using scientific methods; it is an idea, a belief, like any Greek myth, but not a scientific diagnosis. The failures of Nixon’s psychobiographers were the failures of their psychoanalytic presumptions—belief systems with little scientific grounding—as relevant today for psychiatry as the Marxist theory of surplus value is to economics.
As a psychiatrist, I would have to agree with Richard Nixon’s denigration of psychiatrists. The psychobiographers of his day, like Freud himself, used speculative notions to advance their own political agendas. Nixon’s verdict on Freud’s biography of Woodrow Wilson—“so outlandish as to be downright silly”—is now widely accepted. Whatever one’s political views, psychological honesty supports the plea of Gore Vidal (whose politics were hardly Nixonian): “Do not inflict this Freudian horseshit on Nixon, my Nixon.”
Putting pejorative psychoanalytic labels aside, the right question is whether Richard Nixon possessed any major mental illness, or any extreme (scientifically valid) personality traits.
Of the four validators of psychiatric diagnosis (symptoms, family history, course of illness, and treatment), psychobiographers focused on symptoms. But family history is relevant: there is no documented evidence of mental illness in Nixon’s family. Course of illness is key: he did not have recurrent mood episodes throughout his life. Toward the end of his presidency he was depressed, even suicidal, and drank excessively, but if this was a clinical depression, it was his only one ever. Unlike King and Gandhi, who also experienced serious depression in later life, Nixon had a normal childhood and adolescence, with no suicide attempts or prior mood episodes.
Regarding treatment, we now know that from 1954 onward, Nixon saw a New York internist who was also a psychoanalyst (Arnold Hutschnecker). In the midst of the scandal that led to his famous “Checkers” speech, agonizing over whether he should resign the vice presidency, Nixon suffered from tension, insomnia, and gastrointestinal symptoms, which the psychosomatic doctor rightly associated with stress-related anxiety. Sleeping pills were prescribed (probably barbiturates, which Kennedy also took), and Nixon likely received psychiatric counseling during his regular visits to Hutschnecker. Though Nixon insisted the treatment was for medical, not psychiatric, purposes, his doctor did not distinguish between the two. Hutschnecker, though publicly denying a relationship with Nixon at the time, could not resist self-satisfied psychoanalytic speculation after Watergate, writing in an op-ed article, “I cannot help thinking if an American president had a staff psychiatrist, Watergate would not have happened.”
I wouldn’t be so sure. Psychiatry may not be the solution when sanity—not illness—is the problem.
SKEPTICS STILL might not be convinced. Yes, Nixon was depressed, drinking, perhaps even suicidal in the spring and summer of 1974, as he agonized over whether to take a humiliating and unheard-of step: resigning the presidency. Nixon’s mental state during Watergate was certainly not calm. Reporters watched for the ultimate mental collapse; afraid to whisper the word “insane,” they allowed Nixon’s enemies to give them quotes, like labor leader George Meaney’s comment that Nixon suffered from “dangerous emotional instability.” One journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, was explicit: Nixon was “crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair.” Even friends like Barry Goldwater (speaking before the Watergate tapes were discovered) saw problems: Nixon sounded “as if he were a tape with unexpected blank sections. . . . His mind seemed to halt abruptly and wander aimlessly away. . . . Nixon appeared to be cracking.” Nixon was reported to be conversing with White House presidential portraits. Alexander Haig, his military aide, told Ni
xon’s physicians to remove his sleeping pills for fear of suicide.
Yet Nixon’s drinking, in particular, appears to have been exaggerated. Numerous aides report that the man, raised as a Quaker to avoid alcohol, tolerated no more than a few drinks without inebriation. Nixon may have been drunk, but it was on a few, not dozens, of glasses.
Lacking close friends (as Reagan did), and introverted (as was Carter), Nixon knew his limitations. “I think I’ve got a lousy personality,” he once commented. He cursed horribly: favored phrases, revealed in White House tapes, included “cocksucker” and “damn Jews.” (For Kennedy, “screw” and “fuck” were preferable, while Johnson, holding staff meetings from the presidential loo, favored metaphors of urination and defecation; but when poor polite George McGovern told a heckler to kiss his ass, the media made a fuss.)
None of this indicates mental illness or even an especially abnormal personality. Given that Nixon was faced with the stresses of Vietnam and Watergate, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl would have known what it all was: a normal response to an abnormal situation.
Nixon was not routinely vindictive, as many believe. Throughout his years in and out of power, he showed generosity to his foes, especially the Kennedys. Nixon constantly encouraged the sick JFK of the 1950s personally, and they supported each other politically on anticommunism. They were close enough that when Democratic liberal icons like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman tried to prevent JFK from winning his party’s nomination in 1960, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. sent word to Nixon that if JFK was not nominated, Nixon could count on the elder Kennedy’s support for president. (Robert Kennedy, who served Adlai Stevenson as a campaign aide in 1956, nonetheless quietly voted for Eisenhower and Nixon that year.) After the Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy appealed to Republicans for help, Nixon made phone call after phone call, cajoling Republicans to support a president in crisis. “I just saw a crushed man today,” Nixon remarked. “He needs our help. I told him to go upstairs and have a drink with his wife.” After JFK’s assassination, Nixon was the first president to invite the widow and her two children for a White House visit. In 1971, Nixon graciously shared dinner with Jackie, JFK Jr., and Caroline. The kids toured the White House, romped around as they wished, and slept overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom. The visit was kept entirely confidential.
A First-Rate Madness Page 22