A First-Rate Madness (28 page)

To say Hitler didn't suffer from depression and mania would require ignoring both reliable historical documentation and discounting the knowledge base of psychiatry. One might accept such a diagnosis and still ask whether it makes any difference; does it help us at all to understand Hitler as a historical figure? I believe it does. Up to 1937, I think his moderate bipolar disorder influenced his political career for the better—fueling his charisma, resilience, and political creativity. After that date, the harmful effects of daily intravenous amphetamine—to which he was especially susceptible because of his bipolar disorder—worsened his manic and depressive episodes, impairing his leadership skills with catastrophic effects.

Though he was ultimately one of the worst leaders the world has ever known, Hitler's story supports the basic view of this book that mental illness, especially in its mild to moderate forms, enhances crisis leadership. The Goldilocks principle applies in Hitler's case. An absence of mania might have reduced his ambition and creativity; too much mania made him unrealistic, bordering on psychotic, in his final, amphetamine-driven years.

 

 

THE DRAMATICALLY DIVERGENT trajectories of Hitler and Kennedy show us how important it is to factor in the role of drugs when assessing the nature and effects of anyone's mental illness. In leadership, and in life generally, drugs can make a major difference. If anything, this is more true now than it was half a century ago, because many more psychiatric drugs are available and millions of people are taking them. While we know much more now about the relationship between drugs and mental illness, it is still a challenging interaction to manage successfully. But in our time, as in Kennedy's, the right doctors and the right treatment can markedly improve a leader's effectiveness.

Still, given the challenges, some might well ask: Why take the risk? Why not just exclude the mentally ill from positions of power? As we've seen, such a stance would have deprived humanity of Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. But there's an even more fundamental reason not to restrict leadership roles to the mentally healthy: they make bad leaders in times of crisis—just when we need good leadership most.

 

 

 

 

Sanity is rightly seen as healthy, conducive to personal happiness and success in life. But it does not always, or even usually, produce good leadership. Some readers, sympathetic until now with the basic theme of this book—that mental illness enhances leadership in crisis situations—might yet balk at its corollary, that mental health hinders crisis leadership. I've mentioned some examples of sane leaders who faltered in crises—Chamberlain, McClellan—but there are counterexamples; and what, in any case, can explain the counterintuitive notion that mental health can hamper leadership?

About half a century ago, one of Sigmund Freud's last pupils decided to study mental health. The psychiatrist Roy Grinker—editor of the
Archives of General Psychiatry,
chairman of a department of psychiatry—had already spent decades studying mental illness when he began to wonder about mental health. Freud had written little about mental health. He and his followers saw neurosis as part of being human, and thus we were all more or less ill, so Freudians essentially avoided the concept of mental health. Grinker decided to take on this task.

In search of normal men, he turned to a YMCA-run college in his home city of Chicago; there he received permission to give psychological tests to half the student body of 343 people, from whom he selected sixty-five men who screened smack in the middle of the healthy range. Grinker interviewed them each personally and repeatedly over two years, and gradually assembled a detailed list of ingredients that make for mental health.

 

 

THE STUDENTS at George Williams College had been active in their local YMCA, and their connections to that organization, their church, and their communities were long and deep. “Uncertainty about the future is minimal,” Grinker noted, among these “upright young men.”

They came from white- and blue-collar families in the Midwest. They had slightly above average IQs, average college grades (mostly C's), and no childhood or adolescent conflicts with their families. Two-thirds said they had been disciplined firmly by their parents, with well-established boundaries for conduct, but they saw these constraints as beneficial and reasonable. Except for four people with abnormal mood states (two with hypomania and two with depression), two stutterers, two people who displayed paranoid thinking, and one person with recurrent nightmares, the great majority (85 percent) lacked even the mildest mental abnormality.

Grinker noted that though the subjects enjoyed team sports in high school, “only sometimes did one claim to be the leader of a social, work, or sport group.” These men were better designed to be followers than leaders: “The average subject has had practically no trouble with those in authority” and even “maintains that he would abide by rules which he considered to be unfair.” Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.”

Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them
homoclites,
a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.”

WRITING IN 1962, Grinker anticipated the Nixonian concept of the “Silent Majority”: “Within the general population of the United States this group is relatively silent. Its members are goal-directed, anxious only in striving to do their jobs well in which they will have moved up from their fathers' positions, but with little ambition for upward social or economic mobility. By the nature of their aspirations
to do well, to do good,
and
to be liked
they plan to carry on their lives quietly in simple comfort, marry and raise their families, and retire on small pensions plus social security.” (italics in original)

He saw the cultural benefits of homoclites: “People like the George Williams students form a solid steady core of stability. They are the middle-of-the-roaders in every way, neither liberal nor conservative, neither hoarders nor speculators, neither grimly tight lipped nor highsteppers. Without them the ambitious, fast-moving climbers would slip into the mire of political, social, and economic chaos. They are not only Kansas . . . they are America.”

He also observed how unsuited they were to leadership: “To have a population of relative stability is necessary for the activity of those who possess creativity. . . . Every American boy
could
become President of the United States, but those that do need the common citizen to elect him and for him to govern. Every country needs its proletariat, using the word in Toynbee's sense. It constitutes the majority which is led by the creative individual who withdraws from his society, returning to lead it in the light of his discoveries.” (italics in original)

Roy Grinker identified a previously understudied biological specimen—the normal American male. Yet his colleagues were unsatisfied: “I often described my subject-population to various social and professional groups characterized by driven social upward-mobile or prestige-seeking people, who, although outwardly serene, were consumed with never-satisfied ambitions. The invariable comment was ‘those boys are sick, they have no ambition.' ”

Grinker's concept of mental health described the average person; but health—especially mental health—is often assumed to mean a more ideal state of well-being. He was well aware of this disparity, observing that at least three kinds of mental health can be defined. Some people represent the
norm,
the statistical average. Some represent the
normal,
meaning absence of illness. And some represent the
ideal,
meaning a “standard of perfection.” Grinker's homoclites met the standards of the norm and normal, but not ideal, mental health.

Of course, making these distinctions presumes that there is an ideal of mental health. If so, there is no consensus about what it is. As noted above, psychoanalysis held the concept of mental health to be almost meaningless because most of us are abnormal. Since neurosis, defined as unconscious emotional conflicts, is an inherent part of the human lot, we are all more or less neurotic. Hence Sigmund Freud's dictum that every normal person is only approximately normal, and Anna Freud's teaching that a “normal” adolescent, if defined as being free of crisis and conflict, will grow up to become an abnormal adult.

In this case, the Freuds had it right. No
ideal
standard of mental health works scientifically. Or, in the eloquent words of Leston Havens, “Standards of health on the basis of admirable traits ignore the way human situations can call up the need for the most bizarre qualities.” If this is true, then mental health can only be scientifically defined in its
norm
and
normal
standards, as defined above. Only Grinker's homoclites—average but not ideal—are mentally healthy. Searching for cultural references to help illustrate his newly defined class of people, Grinker called to mind a fictional depiction of “muscular Christian” normality, from a Thornton Wilder novel:

One couldn't have invented this irony—only the letter “r” in George Brush's name separates fiction from recent reality. In that coincidence we see a hint of what happens when homoclites rule.

 

 

WE'LL DISCUSS George Bush and Tony Blair as likely examples of the nature and pitfalls of homoclite leadership. But living leaders can easily arouse strong feelings in us, their contemporaries, that might cloud our understanding of the drawbacks of mental health in crisis situations. So first let's look back in history to other homoclite leaders who provide a sharp contrast to the insane leaders we've already encountered. We'll contrast Neville Chamberlain with his friend and fellow conservative politician Winston Churchill, and we'll explore the telling contrast between bipolar success William Tecumseh Sherman and homoclite failure George McClellan. This is not meant to be stick-figure compareand-contrast history; Churchill and Sherman were often quite sane; they were not mad twenty-four hours every day all their lives. Similarly, Chamberlain and McCellan were not monochrome homoclites, devoid of emotional and psychological nuance. However, when we apply general definitions of these terms, the great leaders were clearly mentally ill, and their failed counterparts were mentally healthy. This is either a strange coincidence or it is quite meaningful.

What we'll find is that homoclite leaders tend to make bad decisions in crisis situations: they make war when they shouldn't; and they don't make war when they should.

Let's begin with the distinctions between Churchill and Chamberlain. Unlike Churchill, who rose to fame through his war exploits and an aristocratic lineage, Chamberlain was a commoner who worked his way up in municipal politics in industrial Birmingham. Lloyd George, prime minister during the First World War, commented that though Chamberlain would have made “a good mayor of Birmingham in a lean year,” he was not up to being prime minister. Others viewed him in much the same light; the future prime minister Harold Macmillan saw him as “a nice man . . . very, very middle class, and very, very narrow in view.” He was something of a geek, with hobbies of entomology and ornithology. Chamberlain had entered the family manufacturing business; in college, he studied metallurgy and engineering. He managed well the family business, which consisted of making ships' berths, and his workers viewed him as “a model employer.” He married somewhat late, at age forty-one—a happy marriage with two children. His successes in business led him to active civic life, as leader of the Chamber of Commerce, fundraiser for the University of Birmingham, and founder of the city's orchestra. His older half brother, Austen, had entered politics, and Chamberlain followed suit. He ran for city council, then alderman, then lord mayor, and finally entered Parliament in 1918. Austen, already an MP, helped Neville come to the attention of the Conservative leadership, whom he impressed with his efficiency and seriousness of purpose. Lloyd George, prime minister at the time, later reflected on him as a man of “rigid competence,” “indispensable for filling subordinate posts at all times,” though he would be “lost in an emergency or in creative tasks at any time.” He became minister of health in 1923, and successor to Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924.