NIXON’S CAREER DISPLAYS the hallmark of homoclite leadership: like McClellan and Chamberlain, he was a success in peacetime, a failure in crisis. His failures are most remembered, but often in simplistic terms; his successes also deserve recounting.
To start with the failures first, the grandest is Watergate, leading to the only resignation of a sitting president. This failure, by far his worst, came, ironically, at the crest of his political power. In fact, it seems to fit rather nicely the paradigm of the Hubris syndrome (which I explain below in relation to Tony Blair). Nixon had finally achieved all he had hoped for: he had been elected president, and reelected with a landslide. He was the undisputed leader of his party, his nation, and the free world. His foreign policy successes, still legendary, reflect the homoclite leader at his best during times of political stability and economic prosperity: the opening to China, détente with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, the beginnings of a Middle East peace process. Nixon showed good diplomatic skills, an outgrowth of the social skills of the proficient homoclite. He succeeded at home and abroad, in large measure, because of his abilities as an excellent homoclite leader. By 1973, he was at the pinnacle of his power. And then he seemed to feel that he could abuse that power, to go beyond what the law allowed even the president to do. His goals were minor: to cover up attempts to hassle his Democratic enemies during the 1972 campaign. But it all blew up, as the president refused to listen to the advice of his close associates, as he tried to ignore Congress. Faced with the greatest crisis of his political life, he handled it the way an average homoclite would handle it: he lied, and he dug in, and he fought. He could not humbly admit his errors; he could not realistically see the limits of his power; he could not weather the stress without succumbing to a typically normal all too human response: blaming others rather than himself (hence the claim of “paranoia” so often leveled against him).
This grand failure is best understood in the light of his many earlier successes, for Nixon’s earlier career of non-crisis homoclite leadership success is itself remarkable.
It was 1946; communism was the new enemy, and young educated veterans were ideal political protoplasm, ready for old pols to mold them for a new generation. Kennedy ran in Boston, Nixon in Whittier. Unlike JFK’s father, Nixon’s grocer father could not advise like an ambassador. Kennedy, aided by family connections and finances, won an open race in a Democratic district. Facing a long-standing Democratic incumbent, Nixon won on his own.
Almost. He really won with the essential help of his new political father, Murray Chotiner, a Beverly Hills public relations man whom Nixon hired for $500 a month. Chotiner would be Nixon’s Svengali until the day Chotiner died (in 1974, three weeks before Nixon’s resignation, in a car accident in my hometown of McLean, Virginia, in front of Ted Kennedy’s house; Kennedy called the police to report the wreck).
Chotiner taught Nixon attack politics, summarized thus by Chris Matthews: “Chotiner had two working precepts. The first held that voting was a negative act: People don’t vote for someone; they vote against someone. Chotiner’s second rule was that voters possessed the mental capacity for grasping just two or three issues at one sitting. The goal of every campaign was therefore to limit the number of issues to two or three, all of them tied to the opponent, all of them negative. ‘I say to you in all sincerity that if you do not define the opposition candidate before the campaign gets started,’ Chotiner taught his disciples, ‘you are doomed to defeat.’”
Richard Nixon was a good student. Facing a popular incumbent, he had little chance to win—until he claimed that his foe had ties to a communist-influenced labor union. That one issue, repeated and rehashed, with much raising of the voice, was enough: Nixon pulled the upset.
Soon, on the House Un-American Activities Committee, Nixon faced State Department diplomat Alger Hiss, who was accused of being a Soviet spy. With the support of senior diplomats, Hiss denied it all dismissively. When Nixon once mentioned Hiss’s Harvard Law School education, Hiss interrupted: “I understand yours was Whittier.” Nixon sensed a cover-up and proved it well enough to win a perjury conviction. Hiss went to jail, and Nixon became a national celebrity.
Thus began, as some have remarked, McCarthyism before Mc-Carthy.
By the time the Wisconsin senator was in full throttle, Nixon had turned his attention to higher office. First, in 1950, he won a Senate seat, destroying his opponent (an actress who was also Lyndon Johnson’s mistress) as the “Pink Lady.” (Nixon never impugned her, or later Kennedy, for sexual misbehavior; despite JFK’s concerns that Nixon would assail him for “girling,” Chotiner’s pupil focused on political, not personal, attacks.) The vice presidency followed in 1952, at Eisenhower’s side, but at the price of a newly created hate-Nixon crowd. The attacker was attacked soon enough, accused of helping his family receive kickbacks. Eisenhower wanted to dump Nixon. The “Checkers” speech followed, in which Nixon denied the charges and acclaimed his dog. The homoclites of America recognized one of their own, and Eisenhower relented.
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 fift
y 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.
A First-Rate Madness Page 23