John Milton Cooper, Jr. on Patrick Weil’s *The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson*

You can’t judge this book by its cover, and you can’t judge it by its title or its subtitle, either.   All three are misleading, each in its own way.

The dust jacket cover features a photograph of a haggard-looking Woodrow Wilson, taken a little over a year before his death, and the last two words of the subtitle identify him by name.  Anyone expecting to read a book about the twenty-eighth president will be disappointed.  By a rough count, only about a fourth of the text is about Wilson himself.  Another fraction also treats the psychobiography of him written by William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud—about which more presently—but that fraction treats Wilson only tangentially and is really about how the two men produced that work and what techniques and assumptions they employed.

The title is no less misleading.   The portion of the book that addresses Wilson in no way proves that he was a “madman” at any time during his two terms in terms in the White House, or, for that matter, before or after.   That term is not one that any reputable psychiatrist would use, nor any other serious scholar.   The depiction of Wilson here recounts the events of his presidency and some of his previous life in an unremarkable way, with some emphasis of his inner tensions and inconsistencies—none of which makes him look much different from other presidents and many persons in public life.

The larger interpretative issue is how to judge Wilson’s behavior at the Paris peace conference and during the conflict with the Senate over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations.   In Paris, Wilson did depart from broad brush adherence to his Fourteen Points, and in Washington he refused to compromise with the Republican reservationists led by Henry Cabot Lodge.  An older school of interpretation has seen his behavior in both spheres as the  product of a damaged psyche that stemmed mainly from his relations with father.  A newer school holds that Wilson bowed to diplomatic necessities in the negotiations at Paris and suffered from the effects of his massive stroke in dealing with the Senate.  This author adheres to the first school and claims, incorrectly, that the weight of scholarly opinion inclines strongly that way.

The book’s subtitle points toward that earlier psychological approach by citing the Bullitt-Freud “psychobiography” of Wilson.   Here, too, anyone expecting an extended and deep delving examination of that book will be disappointed.   This occupies even less of the book than the portion on Wilson.  It consists of a brief account of the two men’s collaboration and, at the end, of the author’s discovery of the “lost” manuscript of the book in a chapter entitled “The Secret.”  That secret was what Bullitt and Freud  left out of  the printed version, which pointed to Wilson’s alleged homosexuality and his self-identification with Christ. The ascription of homosexuality flies in the face of abundant evidence of Wilson’s raging heterosexuality, and the Christ complex does not square with the humility ingrained by his deep and well-thought Christian faith.  These dubious sticks of dynamite turn out to be duds.

The subtitle’s other part, “Ambassador Bullitt,” is likewise a bit misleading one.  Bullitt was not a career diplomat.  He held only two ambassadorships for a period of six years, and he had earlier served as a junior member of the American delegation to the peace conference.   Anyone interested in seeing patterns in Bullitt’s life can find them in those three engagements.  The author makes an incisive comment when he observes, “As a diplomat, Bullitt was unafraid to act beyond the limits of his office”(226).  That was his problem.  Even as a twenty-eight-year-old in Paris, Bullitt harbored grandiose notions about the how America ought to shape world affairs, and each of these engagements ended in bitter disillusionment.  After them, he turned on his president and became a public adversary.  Bullitt spent the last quarter century of his life as an outspokenly militant critic of United States foreign policy, and he made himself one of the most hated and distrusted figures in many circles in Washington.  Nor was he above intrigue and skullduggery, such as when he outed Sumner Welles’s homosexuality.   Unfortunately, this part of the book, which comprises more than half, conveys little sense of the darker sides of Bullitt’s life and career, apart from some attention to his two failed marriages.

This book could have been much better.  The author has done extensive research, some of it in unexpected places, and he writes clear, readable prose.  He would have been better advised to stick to just one of the book’s three subjects, namely the biographical part on Bullitt, and he could have told the story of the venture with Freud where it belongs in the chronology.  The part on Wilson should have been left out entirely because it subtracts from the flow of interpretation of him and his presidency.   The treatment of Bullitt should have dealt with his less attractive character traits and actions.   For anyone who picks up this book, my advice is,  “Caveat lector!”