Woodrow Wilson was possibly the most consequential president of the 20th century. His presidency has alternatingly been praised and condemned throughout the century since he left office in 1921. Wilson has been looked upon through an almost bipolarized lens as a man of dignity, integrity, wisdom, brilliance, pride, condescension, unconstitutional perspective, and self-destruction.
Patrick Weil, the author of the new book “The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson,” focuses on a moment in Wilson’s political career that was most prominent, consequential, and destructive―to himself and, arguably, to the world.
Weil presents the famous president of the early 20th century in short biographical form but through a psychoanalytic view. The scope of the book, though indeed not its entirety, is the psychoanalysis of Wilson by two men: William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud.
Bullitt and Freud’s Study
Weil references Freud’s hesitance about conducting a psychoanalysis of a person he had not met. He had never done so before, and it was, as Freud admitted and is obviously true, unfair to the subject. But Bullitt believed Wilson to be a most intriguing and, as aforementioned several times already, highly consequential figure.Wilson was consequential for the fact that, as Weil states at the beginning of his book, “the president had instructed his fellow Democrats in the Senate to vote against ratifying the Treaty of Versailles.” Wilson believed his legacy, and the security of global peace, hinged on the passage of the treaty and the creation of his League of Nations. To sabotage his own Herculean efforts rang of madness.
So why would Wilson do such a thing? Weil makes a convincing argument through the psychoanalysis of Bullitt and Freud that Wilson was mad. For all his brilliance, there were insurmountable mental cliffs that Wilson seemed to never notice, or care to notice, even while he tumbled over them.
His father’s influence, according to the psychobiography, created recurring relational conflicts―though oddly, and Weil mentions this, these conflicts did not always resort to dismissing people. I say oddly because the crux of Wilson’s supposed madness is that he would dismiss anyone who challenged him in the public square; and yet, he was not consistent in his rage and dismissiveness to those types.
In the first section of the book, Weil describes the Bullitt-Wilson relationship, their falling out, Bullitt seeking out Freud, and their working together on Wilson’s psychobiography. In the final section, Weil discusses why the psychobiography, which was finished in 1932, was not published until 1966, the controversy that followed its publication, and why the 1966 version was not the original work.
Weil explains thoroughly why that original form was not published, and indeed it was for good reason. As if the tamed down version did not create enough controversy, Bullitt and Freud’s unredacted version, which Weil discovered in 2014, would have caused even more controversy, if not harm Wilson, Bullitt, and Freud’s reputations.
A Segmented Work
The book is broken into segments. The aforementioned first and final section account for approximately half the book. The middle, which accounts for the other half, is practically a biography of Bullitt, covering his life from Wilsonian diplomat to Rooseveltian ambassador.Franklin Delano Roosevelt tabbed Bullitt to become the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt was an influential voice in the Roosevelt administration and, when he was no longer an official U.S. diplomat, his writings proved societally influential. He was an adventurer and brilliant thinker. He displayed great prescience concerning Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In a sense, Weil’s semi-biography helps defend Bullitt’s ability to study and analyze great leaders―from Wilson to Roosevelt to Stalin.
“The Madman in the White House” seems to be a study within a study. Wilson is the subject of Bullitt and Freud’s psychoanalysis, while Bullitt and Freud’s psychobiography is the subject of Weil, and therefore the reader. It leads us to wonder about the mental fitness of Wilson at one of the most crucial moments in world history.
Given their assessments, it leads us to also wonder how well one person can know another, and how believing that one knows another so intimately that they can make critical judgments. Was Wilson truly mad, and if so, did that madness stem from the sources assessed in Bullitt and Freud’s investigation?
Or were they, as Freud suggested about his own standing with Wilson (that he had never met him and that Wilson had fallen out of favor with him), being unfair to him? Was Wilson mad or just vastly complex? Was he insane or just unhealthy (he suffered debilitating strokes during this post-World War I period)?
Weil’s work is one that leads to many questions―some new, some not―and answers―mostly new. Without doubt, “The Madman in the White House” is a fascinating and insightful read about the men who shaped the 20th century and the world as we know it―both politically and psychologically. It is a complex subject of major import that Weil has made entirely readable, and that I suggest indeed should be read.
