My Amazon Review of Patrick Weil's "The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson"

 William Bullitt: Diplomat and Amateur Psychiatrist

 

Yale law professor Patrick Weil has really written two books in one. The first deals with the joint effort of William Bullitt and Sigmund Freud to write a psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. The second is an excellent biography of the extraordinarily well-connected diplomat, William Bullitt.  I found the biography of Bullitt far more interesting.

 

Bullitt hooks up with Sigmund Freud in 1926, first as a patient and later as a collaborator as they seek to understand why Woodrow Wilson failed so badly at the Paris Peace Conference and later in his attempt to ratify the Versailles Treaty though the U.S. Senate. Their explanation is rooted in Wilson’s “daddy issues” (my term) and his Christ Complex.  To me, even with Sigmund Freud at the helm, psychoanalysis at a distance is problematic. Further the title of the book calls Wilson a “madman” when in fact Freud used the term neurosis, not psychosis to describe Wilson’s personality. A simpler explanation would be somewhere along the way Wilson, became a stubborn old man, and systematically began to destroy what he had built.

 

Either way Weil shows the importance of personality in diplomatic affairs. Instead of buying into the older explanation the imperialist machinations of France and England combined with the isolationists in the Senate that worked to kill the treaty, Weil puts the blame directly on Wilson’s personality. Wilson didn’t like the advice he was getting from his two key advisors, Secretary of State Lansing and his longtime confidant, Colonel House, so he fired them. He was too stubborn to make a deal with the Senate Republicans that was already blessed by Britain and France that would have enabled passage through the Senate. Indeed, I learned that as part of the deal was a Treaty of Guarantee that would have established a mutual defense pact between the U.S., Britain and France, a precursor to the Atlantic alliance, if you will.

 

Now, as to Bullitt. At 25, Bullitt, as scion of Philadelphia society, was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. In the middle of the conference, he goes off to Russia to try and make a deal with Lenin, which Wilson rejects. He leaves the conference disillusioned by Wilson’s craven dealmaking. A few years later he marries Louise Bryant, John “10 Days that Shook the World” Reed’s widow. In 1933 he became Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia and later was his ambassador to Paris where he was his eyes and ears to Nazi Europe. Along the way he helped write speeches for Roosevelt.

 

As ambassador to Russia, he hired George Kenan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen and Loy Henderson, who would become mainstays of U.S. Russia policy during the early Cold War years. In Paris he befriended Charles de Gaulle on the right and Leon Blum on the left. In 1943 he wrote a long memo outlining the threats coming from Russia, that Kenan viewed as precursor to his 1946 Long Telegram. As a result, because of Russia policy difference and Bullitt telling Roosevelt about his friend and Deputy Secretary of State Sumner Wells’ homosexual proclivities, the two break and Bullitt endorses Dewey in 1944.

 

Now on the right with respect to Russia policy, Bullitt gets along great with John Foster Dulles, Chiang-Kai-Shek, and Syngman Rhee of South Korea. Indeed, Bullitt at the request of both Rhee and Dulles mediated a position between them that helped end the Korean War. Further Bullitt came very close with Richard Nixon as congressman and later as vice-president.

 

Weil did a huge amount of work going through all of the Bullitt papers at the Yale library, and his efforts show throughout this book. His work includes uncovering the original Freud-Bullitt manuscript. For a history buff like me, this is a terrific book.

For the full Amazon URL see: William Bullitt: Diplomat and Amateur Psychiatrist (amazon.com)