A First-Rate Madness (30 page)

Readers may also be thinking of another sort of counterexample—the insane failure. In American politics, the standout here is probably Richard Nixon. His fall is legendary, and so is the popular perception of him as paranoid, depressive, and even delusional. But in fact he was none of these things, except during a relatively brief period at the end of his presidency, when he was engulfed in a crisis of his own making. Before that crisis, he might well have been called successful and, as I will show, mentally healthy.

A problem here is that I will need to prove a negative: that Nixon was
not
mentally ill or abnormal. By trying to rule out one after another diagnosis, I will be making no positive diagnosis. We will be left with normality. That leftover conclusion will not satisfy some readers; but that is all we can do when trying to “prove” normality in general. In the process, I will admit that Nixon was not a classic homoclite: he was not in the middle of the normal range for most personality traits; he had his quirks. But he was not highly abnormal either. He still falls within normal variations of personality, and he certainly did not have a mental illness.

Richard Nixon had the misfortune to become president at the cultural peak of psychoanalysis. During the 1970s, six books and a dozen professional journal articles were devoted to psychoanalytic interpretations of him. In August 1973, when he shoved and yelled at his press secretary in public,
Newsweek
wrote that he was “on the naked edge of a nervous breakdown.” One psychiatrist was quoted in
Time
magazine as saying that Nixon's behavior was consistent with schizophrenia. No president before or since has ever received such unwanted psychoanalytic attention.

Historian David Greenberg summarized all this Nixon psychoanalysis thus: “Almost uniformly, Nixon's psychobiographers saw him as a narcissist with a frail ego who lashed out when he felt wounded.” A sometimes violent father instilled fear in young Dick, who then “identified with the aggressor.” The doctors discovered oral-anal meanings in a school project Nixon had prepared when he was ten years old. They unearthed unconscious aggressive impulses in his childhood fondness for mashing potatoes. Psychoanalytic writers agreed, Greenberg writes: “Each painted Nixon as an insecure, narcissistic personality whose childhood injuries instilled a drive to achieve, a sense of guilt over his success, and a frail ego to which small injuries triggered angry outbursts.”

This jibberish is scientifically meaningless. “Narcissism,” in particular, is just a Greek myth translated into English; it has no scientific meaning, unlike the law of gravity, or the synaptic stimulation of dopamine receptors (or even clinical depression or mania; or the temperament trait of extraversion). Narcissism has never been empirically validated as a psychiatric diagnosis or mental illness, using scientific methods; it is an idea, a belief, like any Greek myth, but not a scientific diagnosis. The failures of Nixon's psychobiographers were the failures of their psychoanalytic presumptions—belief systems with little scientific grounding—as relevant today for psychiatry as the Marxist theory of surplus value is to economics.

As a psychiatrist, I would have to agree with Richard Nixon's denigration of psychiatrists. The psychobiographers of his day, like Freud himself, used speculative notions to advance their own political agendas. Nixon's verdict on Freud's biography of Woodrow Wilson—“so outlandish as to be downright silly”—is now widely accepted. Whatever one's political views, psychological honesty supports the plea of Gore Vidal (whose politics were hardly Nixonian): “Do not inflict this Freudian horseshit on Nixon, my Nixon.”

Putting pejorative psychoanalytic labels aside, the right question is whether Richard Nixon possessed any major mental illness, or any extreme (scientifically valid) personality traits.

Of the four validators of psychiatric diagnosis (symptoms, family history, course of illness, and treatment), psychobiographers focused on symptoms. But
family history
is relevant: there is no documented evidence of mental illness in Nixon's family.
Course of illness
is key: he did not have recurrent mood episodes throughout his life. Toward the end of his presidency he was depressed, even suicidal, and drank excessively, but if this was a clinical depression, it was his only one ever. Unlike King and Gandhi, who also experienced serious depression in later life, Nixon had a normal childhood and adolescence, with no suicide attempts or prior mood episodes.

Regarding
treatment,
we now know that from 1954 onward, Nixon saw a New York internist who was also a psychoanalyst (Arnold Hutschnecker). In the midst of the scandal that led to his famous “Checkers” speech, agonizing over whether he should resign the vice presidency, Nixon suffered from tension, insomnia, and gastrointestinal symptoms, which the psychosomatic doctor rightly associated with stress-related anxiety. Sleeping pills were prescribed (probably barbiturates, which Kennedy also took), and Nixon likely received psychiatric counseling during his regular visits to Hutschnecker. Though Nixon insisted the treatment was for medical, not psychiatric, purposes, his doctor did not distinguish between the two. Hutschnecker, though publicly denying a relationship with Nixon at the time, could not resist self-satisfied psychoanalytic speculation after Watergate, writing in an op-ed article, “I cannot help thinking if an American president had a staff psychiatrist, Watergate would not have happened.”

I wouldn't be so sure. Psychiatry may not be the solution when sanity—not illness—is the problem.

 

 

SKEPTICS STILL might not be convinced. Yes, Nixon was depressed, drinking, perhaps even suicidal in the spring and summer of 1974, as he agonized over whether to take a humiliating and unheard-of step: resigning the presidency. Nixon's mental state during Watergate was certainly not calm. Reporters watched for the ultimate mental collapse; afraid to whisper the word “insane,” they allowed Nixon's enemies to give them quotes, like labor leader George Meaney's comment that Nixon suffered from “dangerous emotional instability.” One journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, was explicit: Nixon was “crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair.” Even friends like Barry Goldwater (speaking before the Watergate tapes were discovered) saw problems: Nixon sounded “as if he were a tape with unexpected blank sections. . . . His mind seemed to halt abruptly and wander aimlessly away. . . . Nixon appeared to be cracking.” Nixon was reported to be conversing with White House presidential portraits. Alexander Haig, his military aide, told Nixon's physicians to remove his sleeping pills for fear of suicide.

Yet Nixon's drinking, in particular, appears to have been exaggerated. Numerous aides report that the man, raised as a Quaker to avoid alcohol, tolerated no more than a few drinks without inebriation. Nixon may have been drunk, but it was on a few, not dozens, of glasses.

Lacking close friends (as Reagan did), and introverted (as was Carter), Nixon knew his limitations. “I think I've got a lousy personality,” he once commented. He cursed horribly: favored phrases, revealed in White House tapes, included “cocksucker” and “damn Jews.” (For Kennedy, “screw” and “fuck” were preferable, while Johnson, holding staff meetings from the presidential loo, favored metaphors of urination and defecation; but when poor polite George McGovern told a heckler to kiss his ass, the media made a fuss.)

None of this indicates mental illness or even an especially abnormal personality. Given that Nixon was faced with the stresses of Vietnam and Watergate, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl would have known what it all was: a normal response to an abnormal situation.

Nixon was not routinely vindictive, as many believe. Throughout his years in and out of power, he showed generosity to his foes, especially the Kennedys. Nixon constantly encouraged the sick JFK of the 1950s personally, and they supported each other politically on anticommunism. They were close enough that when Democratic liberal icons like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman tried to prevent JFK from winning his party's nomination in 1960, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. sent word to Nixon that if JFK was not nominated, Nixon could count on the elder Kennedy's support for president. (Robert Kennedy, who served Adlai Stevenson as a campaign aide in 1956, nonetheless quietly voted for Eisenhower and Nixon that year.) After the Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy appealed to Republicans for help, Nixon made phone call after phone call, cajoling Republicans to support a president in crisis. “I just saw a crushed man today,” Nixon remarked. “He needs our help. I told him to go upstairs and have a drink with his wife.” After JFK's assassination, Nixon was the first president to invite the widow and her two children for a White House visit. In 1971, Nixon graciously shared dinner with Jackie, JFK Jr., and Caroline. The kids toured the White House, romped around as they wished, and slept overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom. The visit was kept entirely confidential.

 

 

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.