by Jack El-Hai
Hitler’s fear of death, evident in his employment of up to five physicians simultaneously, gave Kelley insight into the leader’s attitude toward suicide. At first Hitler would not allow anyone to discuss the subject in his presence. For years, even as the momentum of the war shifted against him, Hitler often said, “No one but a weakling or a fool ever would commit suicide.” But his opinion changed as the Nazi defeats piled up and his own health deteriorated. After 1944, now burdened with a tremor and weakness of his left hand and leg that doctors had diagnosed as hysterical in origin, “he was heard to say that he could easily understand how someone who was no longer healthy could kill himself. . . . [H]e expressed a terrible fear that this affliction might spread to his right hand,” Kelley reported. “One day he said flatly that if this happened, he would put an end to himself.”
Another factor in the attraction of suicide for Hitler was the fate of fellow fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose body his enemies strung up in public after his execution. After seeing photos of this desecration, Göring told Kelley, “Hitler went into a frenzy. He seized the pictures and went up and down the hall shouting, ‘This will never happen to me!’ And he waved the pictures in his hand. Afterward, Hitler several times brought up the subject spontaneously.” Göring recalled, “He swore that he would never be taken alive and that no angry Germans would ever have the opportunity to befoul his corpse.” For that reason, Göring maintained, Hitler declined to lead his army in a final stand against the Russians, fearing that the enemy would take possession of his body. Ultimately, in the days before he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker with Eva Braun, Hitler wrote in his last testament, “My wife and I choose to die in order to escape shame and overthrow or capitulation.” Kelley found other peculiarities in Hitler’s psyche—including his reluctance to touch animals without wearing gloves, his interest in and fear of horses, his obsessive repetition of daily routines, and his finicky attention to personal hygiene—but nothing that branded the Nazi psychotic or mad.
Kelley knew that the Nazis had committed atrocities and crimes of war on an unprecedented scale. Even the German leaders were surprised to realize what they had done and where they had ended up. But men whose personalities fell within normal parameters had set in motion the Nazi outrages, making Kelley worry that they could happen again. “With the exception of Dr. Ley, there wasn’t an insane Joe in the crowd,” he told a reporter for the New Yorker. The leaders “were not special types,” he wrote. “Their personality patterns indicate that, while they are not socially desirable individuals, their like could very easily be found in America” or elsewhere. Consequently, he feared that holocausts and crimes against humanity could be repeated by psychologically similar perpetrators. His concerns differed from those of Hannah Arendt, who famously commented upon “the banality of evil” in her writings on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. Arendt asserted that Nazis followed orders from above, viewed those orders as routine, and accepted their own actions as unremarkable. On the contrary, most of the Nazis that Kelley had studied continued to see their regime and their own part in it as special, favored by the course of human evolution. That kind of thinking allowed Göring to liquidate former colleagues and issue murderous decrees—to revel in his power—even as he enjoyed a loving family life.
The psychiatrist could have easily accepted conclusions from his Nuremberg studies that cast the Nazis as psychopaths or as people in Arendt’s mold. He could have rested easy believing that Germans were so culturally distinctive that such men could only have risen to power under unique circumstances. Instead, he reached a different conclusion, one that shocked and troubled him: the qualities that led the top Nazis to commit and tolerate acts of horror existed in many people, living in many places. True, the Nazis rose to power in Germany partly because of their nation’s cultural training. But they “are not unique people,” Kelley told American lecture audiences during the fall of 1946, following the execution of the condemned men:
They are people who exist in every country of the world. Their personality patterns are not obscure. But they are people who have peculiar drives, people who want to be in power, and you say that they don’t exist here, and I would say that I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public if they could gain control of the other half, and these are the people who today are just talking—who are utilizing the rights of democracy in anti-democratic fashion.
His observations of the Nazis in Nuremberg suggested to him that Germany’s problems could, in theory, become America’s. His countrymen commonly reassured themselves that in the United States the few could not control the many, civilization could not sink to such barbarity, and the nation’s democratic traditions would not tolerate totalitarianism. Kelley found such optimism naive. He grew convinced that “there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.” Even worse, fascistic bigotry already riddled American culture. “I found the same anti-minority feeling shot through the American population,” he told one lecture audience.
American politicians, like white supremacists Senator Theodore Bilbo and Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi and Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, Kelley maintained, exploited racial myths “in the same fashion as did Hitler and his cohorts. They use racism as a method of obtaining personal power, political aggrandizement, or individual wealth. We are allowing racism to be used here for those ends. I am convinced that the continued use of these myths in this country will lead us to join the Nazi criminals in the sewer of civilization.” Although he declared the threat to America was not immediate, Kelley pointed to the political machinations of and harnessing of police control by such figures as Huey Long as evidence that Nazi power techniques were well advanced among demagogues in regional pockets of the United States, just as Hitler had launched his fascist movement from his ideological headquarters in Munich.
Americans, Kelley concluded, needed to look closely at their own culture and politics if they were to avoid the extremism and brutality of the Nazis. In a way, Streicher and Rosenberg had been right to warn of impending upheaval in the United States. Instead of the racial chaos involving African Americans and Jews that the two condemned Nazis had predicted, however, the biggest danger to America came from ideological demagogues. Kelley believed that Americans should scrutinize “our thoughts and our education, our policies and our political methods, if we are to avoid the sad fate of the Germans.”
Consequently Kelley argued that Americans needed to prevent people with these kinds of personalities from gaining political control in the United States. With anticommunist hysteria and resistance to civil rights on the rise, he pointed out, America had ultranationalists and racial bigots aplenty. The Germans had long taught themselves ideas of Nordic superiority, tales of heroes who would arise from the masses to lead triumphantly, and the acceptability of an elite ruling class bulldozing the rest of society. “Americans are only [now] getting it ground in,” Kelley declared. To combat this threat, Kelley advocated removing all restrictions on the voting rights of US citizens, convincing as many Americans as possible to vote in elections, and rebuilding the educational system to cultivate students who could, in Korzybskian fashion, think critically and resist using “strong emotional reactions” to make decisions. Finally, he urged his countrymen to refuse to vote for any candidate who made “political capital” of any group’s race and religious beliefs or referred indirectly or directly to the blood, heritage, or morals of opponents. “The United States [would] never reach its full stature” until it had undergone this transformation.
While professing faith in America’s traditions and potential, Kelley revealed his distrust of its politicians and the common Americans in their sway. Holders of public office were often manipulative and hungry for power, and their constituents were ignorant and gullible, he believed. Without the vigilance of intellectually evolved people, fascism could ari
se at any time. Authority was always nefarious. Without his realizing it, Kelley’s suspicion of government institutions and officials mirrored that of many of his bigoted opponents.
Starting in 1946, Kelley undertook a busy schedule of lecturing to spread his views on the Nazis and build demand for his yet-to-be-completed book. (He also wrote several articles, including an unfortunately titled essay for Collier’s, “Squeal, Nazi, Squeal.”) He focused on speaking engagements in California, where he had many contacts who could help him obtain bookings. Lecturing around the state, he covered a variety of topics, including psychological factors of the Nuremberg trials, the strategy of war psychiatry, and the physiological background of recent German history.
With his book manuscript mostly complete by the end of 1946, Kelley approached many New York publishers and, to his astonishment, was rejected. He ended up signing a contract with the Greenberg publishing firm for a meager advance of $300. Founded twenty-two years earlier by Jacob and David Greenberg, the company had a wide-ranging list, turning out Westerns, cookbooks, and gay erotica, as well as books on history, sociology, criminology, and architecture. It surely occupied a lower rung on the publishing ladder than Kelley had hoped to reach with his manuscript, but Greenberg’s offer was the best he received, and he probably believed that any publication of his book would gain attention and advance his academic career. It took months, however, for Greenberg to edit and release the book, which was titled 22 Cells in Nuremberg. Since his book was not going to make him rich, Kelley needed a job right away.
During 1946 he tried to land a teaching job at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually he “was offered an instructorship at the University, and was told that if he was a good boy he could become an assistant professor in about 20 years,” one of his friends and colleagues in the US Medical Corps, the neurologist Howard D. Fabing, later recalled. Kelley thought too highly of himself and his talents to accept such an offer, and he resumed his search for a position better befitting the former psychiatrist to the Nuremberg defendants.
Kelley soon found a new job 365 miles away from his home in Chattanooga, as associate professor of psychiatry at the Bowman-Gray School of Medicine, a part of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There Lloyd Thompson, his old supervisor in the US Army, had founded a department of neuropsychiatry just weeks earlier. Initially the job focused on teaching responsibilities, but within a year Kelley was back to working with patients as the director of Graylyn, the medical school’s thirty-five-bed psychiatric rehabilitation and convalescent center that opened during the summer of 1947. It occupied the Norman Revival mansion of Bowman Gray, the former president and chairman of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and his wife Nathalie. After Bowman’s death, Nathalie and her sons had given the estate to Wake Forest University. Visitors entered the fifty-acre estate on drives that curved among tidily trimmed lawns and gardens. Graylyn was huge and sprawling, “an English-style manor house of the type only an American with a long-accumulated bank account possibly could build,” a newsman once reported. The house was filled with ironwork, fine tiles, and expensive furnishings.
This job gave the Kelleys their first real chance to settle down since their wedding. They moved to Winston-Salem in December and found a brick house with a library large enough to accommodate Kelley’s six thousand pounds of books, which he described as one of the nation’s largest private collections of volumes on psychiatry.
As a highly regarded thirty-six-year-old psychiatrist fresh from intriguing military experiences, Kelley was Graylyn’s headliner, brought in to supervise all of the patient care. (Like the rest of the Graylyn staff, Kelley received a straight salary and did not maintain a private practice.) The university had filled the house with all sorts of testing apparatus and equipment. Graylyn could give patients a wide variety of treatments, including insulin shock therapy, occupational therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy. Doctors could even experiment with lobotomy, the technique of psychiatric surgery that Kelley believed brought improvements ranging from “considerable” to “spectacular” to half the patients operated upon. (The use of lobotomy eventually declined worldwide because of the procedure’s significant side effects, its low actual effectiveness, and the greater benefits of psychoactive drugs.)
Kelley brought to Graylyn the group psychotherapy approach he had pioneered with traumatized service members during the war. When working with groups of patients, he displayed a mix of earnestness; all-too-apparent intelligence; and an adroitness in sketching graphs, pictures, and processes on the chalkboard. He planned to expand the treatment’s reach by erecting at Graylyn a small stage with audience seating where scenes of a new form of treatment called psychodrama could be performed. There patients acted out their anxieties for discussion by fellow patients in the audience. The point of these group interactions was to relieve patients’ feelings of isolation. “A neurotic person invariably thinks his problem is a unique one,” Kelley told a reporter soon after his arrival in Winston-Salem, “that no one else ever had such a problem. We point out—and other patients point out—that many persons have had the same trouble and try to show them how they can overcome their own worries.”
Under Kelley’s supervision, Graylyn accepted no “mental defectives” or psychopaths, whom he regarded as beyond the therapeutic reach of psychiatry. Most of the institution’s patients were neurotic or mildly psychotic, and Kelley felt these people could benefit most from Graylyn’s help. A small number of alcoholics would be admitted—those without psychopathic tendencies.
Although Kelley himself frequently enjoyed a drink, he did not professionally ignore the problem of alcoholism. For many years he advocated treating problem drinkers with a new compound called Antabuse, available experimentally in tiny white tablets. “No man,” Kelley declared, “will fight through the effects of Antabuse to drink enough whiskey to make them [sic] drunk. Few can get beyond a first drink, once the drug has sensitized them to alcohol.” The drug reacted with alcohol in the body to form acetaldehyde and caused headaches, shortness of breath, and extreme nausea. Kelley believed that the resulting intense sickness would condition drinkers to keep their glasses empty. Antabuse, which Kelley tested at Graylyn, “guarantees that any alcoholic who sincerely is interested in a cure will find great help,” something that threats of damnation or laws restricting the sale of liquor could not accomplish, he told a reporter in 1948. Researchers could discover many other viable treatments for alcoholism if only there were enough money, and Kelley frequently proposed new taxes on liquor sales to fund such research.
General semantics, the use of words and their meanings to shape behavior, which Kelley had studied with Alfred Korzybski before the war, became part of the psychiatric toolbox at Graylyn as well. Just before Graylyn opened, Kelley had accepted the vice presidency of the Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski himself had founded to advance the discipline. Kelley continued to believe that general semantics was valuable in psychiatry as an approach to communicating the use of reason against emotion in the treatment of illnesses. “We actually will retrain [patients] in thinking, so that they can intelligently and scientifically face the problems of life,” Kelley explained.
In addition to patients suffering from neuroses and mild psychoses, Graylyn admitted many discharged military veterans in need of Kelley’s expertise in treating battle-shocked fighters. In the fall of 1948 Chester S. Davis, a writer for the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, witnessed the treatment of one such patient named Jonathan Worth (probably a pseudonym that Kelley asked Davis to use), who had survived an explosion in combat on Attu in the Aleutian Islands chain of Alaska, the scene of fierce fighting in 1943 after Japanese forces occupied the island the previous year. (The Battle of Attu was the only land engagement of World War II fought on US territory.) The fighting left Worth physically unharmed but psychologically scarred, and he complained of weakness and chronic headaches while having no memory of the blast that ha
d disabled him. He was diagnosed with psychoneurosis, indicating symptoms without organic cause, and went through a treatment regimen typical for Kelley’s Graylyn patients just out of the military. Worth received injections of insulin for three weeks, a treatment intended to produce episodes in and out of coma and a thorough rest of the patient’s mind and body. Kelley believed that insulin overdose would also sharpen Worth’s appetite, help him gain weight, and rebuild his central nervous system.
The insulin therapy left Worth feeling and looking better, but his headaches persisted. Now Kelley began the next phase of the treatment, which involved using one of his favorite antipsychotic aids. Moving the patient to his office, he gave him either sodium amytal or sodium pentothal to spiral him into the drowsiness of narco-hypnosis and played an unusual recording on a phonograph. As Worth slumped in half-sleep, the sounds of battle filled the room at high volume. Landing craft hit a rocky shoreline, airplanes dove and shrieked, bombs whistled and pulverized their targets, and machine guns spit bullets. The noises of Attu, or something much like them, surrounded the somnolent Worth.
Suddenly he rose up on the sofa and “in a moment, Jonathan Worth began to relive the Attu landing, a matter which, until then, was a blank in his memory,” Davis wrote. Under Kelley’s prompting, Worth said he believed himself transported back to his position as a machine gunner at the front of an invading US landing craft. He was firing at Japanese positions on the shore, and he saw many soldiers fall under his attack. After he landed, however, he discovered that the “enemies” he had killed were really US soldiers. He approached them and saw that one looked like his father. Overcome by shock, he collapsed on a heap of rocks and was later taken to a hospital.