The Madman in the White House Woodrow Wilson

The Madman in the White House’ Review: Freud Diagnoses a President
Opinion by Dominic Green

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Portrait of Woodrow Wilson (1919) by William Orpen.
© Bettmann/Getty Images

Abiographer, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1939, must “give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.” For Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars, the creative fact was the externality of fate, expressed through divine and astrological influence; he read the facts of politics and character in physiognomy. For Sigmund Freud, the creative fact, the suggestive fact, was sexuality; the psychoanalyst traced the facts of public life back to the suggestive ferment of the unconscious.


If psychoanalysis was, as Freud hoped, a “science of the mind,” then it applied to everyone everywhere. Given enough information, a Suetonius of the inner life could dredge up the motives of a dead person or a complete stranger, then trace their consequences in public life. Freud pioneered this “psychobiography” in essays on Leonardo and Michelangelo, heavily emphasizing what Woolf called the “accent on sex.”
Patrick Weil’s “The Madman in the White House” is the extraordinary untold story of how a disillusioned American diplomat named William C. Bullitt came to Freud’s couch in 1926, and how Freud and his patient collaborated on a psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt had advised Wilson in the post-World War I negotiations that produced the Treaty of Versailles. To make future wars impossible, Wilson insisted that this blueprint for an American-led world include the League of Nations. In case the Germans did the impossible again, he also agreed to a Treaty of Guarantee, a mutual defense pact with Britain and France.


In July 1919, Wilson returned to Washington, confident of securing Senate ratification. Yet in March 1920 Wilson instructed his fellow Democrats in the Senate to vote against ratification. He believed that “the hand of God” was guiding him, and preferred self-destruction to accommodating Republican senators with what he called “compromise or concession.” This was odd: Wilson had already compromised on his principles at Versailles by conceding to French and British demands for German reparations. Though not as odd as his behavior at Versailles, where he had told his counterparts Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George that, while Jesus had failed at “inducing the world to follow His teaching,” Wilson’s League of Nations was the “practical scheme” that would succeed where the Son of God had failed.

Rather than negotiating with Congress, an affronted Wilson refused to address the reservations of senators who sought exemptions for the Monroe Doctrine and Congress’s constitutional right to approve military action. He refused to return to the Senate to save the treaty after Britain, France, Italy and Japan accepted the reservations. He discredited his handiwork by misleading the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, firing his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, and falling out with his adviser Col. Edward House.

Wilson had destroyed his vision in Washington, ruined the Versailles Treaty before it had come into effect, and killed the Treaty of Guarantee, which Clemenceau called “the keystone of European peace.” This spectacular political unraveling puzzled and exasperated many observers and contemporaries. “The President’s psychology was essential to explain how it came about, in spite of the President’s sincerity, that a perfidious peace was enacted,” John Maynard Keynes, a member of the British delegation, wrote in 1919’s “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”

House called Wilson “temperamentally unfit to deal with the Senate.” Keynes called him a “blind and deaf Don Quixote” with a “Freudian complex.” Bullitt, who had exposed Wilson’s duplicity in a Senate hearing, had left Washington in disgust and had written a bestselling novel, was also a Freudian. When he arrived in Vienna in 1926, his second marriage was in crisis and Wilson was dead. Bullitt desired to expose Wilson once more, this time in a play. Freud, living amid the consequences of Wilson’s diplomatic folly, admitted a “deep ongoing antipathy” to the late president. As Mr. Weil relates, instead of analyzing Bullitt, the two men analyzed Wilson, using Bullitt’s memories and a “mosaic” of 421 pages of material about Wilson that Bullitt had amassed from Wilson’s biographers and doctors and House’s diaries.

Wilson, his analysts determined, got his dreams from his father. Joseph Wilson was a Presbyterian pastor, a professor of theology and rhetoric, and an overbearing, mocking autocrat. His nervous, dyspeptic son Thomas Woodrow Wilson gave his first speeches to the empty pews from his father’s pulpit. He later dropped his forename: “Woodrow Wilson” was a catchy “trademark in advertising my literary wares.”

Wilson’s Christian faith was inseparable from a faith in what his campaign biographer, William Bayard Hale, called the “instrumentality of words.” Wilson, who traveled with his own stenographer in case he said something brilliant and a stomach pump for easing his tormented digestion, admitted to feeling “an absolute joy in facing or conquering a hostile audience.” His burial of his verbs in a pile of adjectives, Hale surmised, reflected a propensity for talk over action.

Freud and Bullitt’s creativity with such facts led to their detection of Wilson’s “abundant Narcissism” and “Christ complex.” Wilson, they thought, compensated for his “absolute passivity” before his father by trying to dominate others. Whether trying to reform Princeton University when he served as its president, or trying to rebuild Europe, he could not negotiate as an equal because Dean West of Princeton and Clemenceau and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge were the shadows of his father. The more dominant he became, the Freudian interpretation went, the closer Wilson got to supplanting his father, and the more necessary it became to martyr himself like a good son. He became deceitful, petty, paranoid and hostile, antagonizing aides and partners, and suffering psychosomatic collapses when his compulsion to fail succeeded.

Wilson’s attempt at partisan manipulation of the 1918 midterm elections backfired in the kind of swing to the Republicans that America’s second professorial president would call a “shellacking.” Wilson further weakened himself at Versailles by spurning House’s expertise, excluding the Republicans whose support he would need for ratification, and presuming, Bullitt recalled, that he could “organize the League of Nations as he had organized” college debating clubs. When the Senate blocked him, Wilson became “hysterical,” then suffered a stroke. Fated to build the Versailles Treaty as the capstone of his career, Wilson was fated to collapse the entire architecture on his own head—and everyone else’s.

Wilson died in 1924. Bullitt and Freud finished their manuscript in 1932. But Bullitt, who had always kept his sessions with Freud secret, wanted to return to diplomacy, so he decided not to publish the manuscript. Here Mr. Weil pauses for a 100-page detour into Bullitt’s subsequent career as FDR’s man in Paris in the 1930s, and then as a Cold War anticommunist of deep Christian faith. This path is fascinating on its own merit (and pursued in Alexander Etkin’s 2017 “Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt”), but most readers of Mr. Weil’s book will want to find out what happened in the case of the Princeton Oedipus.

Freud died in 1939. Bullitt revised their manuscript in 1953 and 1962, publishing it shortly before his death in February 1967. But Bullitt eventually came to regret his revisions. Mr. Weil has tracked down the 1932 manuscript, which Freud had pronounced “excellent” and “correct in all regards,” despite reservations about some of Bullitt’s “sweeping” conclusions. Bullitt’s revisions, Mr. Weil shows, excised the “fertile fact” at the heart of the 1932 manuscript.

“You and I know that Wilson was a passive homosexual but we won’t dare say it,” Freud said to Bullitt. Freud believed that mankind’s innate bisexuality had never found “overt expression” in Wilson, but had played a “vital role in his career,” shaping his “dominant sublimations and identifications,” inhibiting his youthful development, and “by a reaction formation, spoiling the latter years of his life.” Identifying with Jesus, Freud and Bullitt wrote, allowed Wilson to reconcile and satisfy his “exceptionally powerful and absolutely hostile desires” to be both “utterly feminine” and “completely masculine,” “entirely passive and submissive to the father” and also “almighty and all commanding” like a father. Indeed, they explained, “identification with Christ” was “frequently employed by men to settle the major problem of the Oedipus Complex.” This was a “satisfactory” resolution of “the most difficult conflict” of human psychology, they noted, and likely assured “a long life for the Christian religion.”

Mr. Weil suggests that Bullitt suppressed this “original and revolutionary” theory for political as well as professional reasons. Freud would have understood. In 1935, he told Lou-Andreas Salom; that analyzing the role of Christianity in Austria would lead to “the prohibition of analysis on the part of the ruling Catholic authority”—and it was “only this Catholicism which protects us from Nazism.” In the Cold War, Christianity was an ally against communism. Bullitt, once a liberal idealist, now endorsed Tocqueville’s opinion that Christianity was “the first of America’s political institutions.”

“Facts are more useful than faiths” was the last sentence in Bullitt’s 1932 manuscript. Freud, having the last word, then added: “Truth is a better ally than any deity.” Neither of these claims survived Bullitt’s edits. Neither is much use to a politician. Both are, however, fertile materials for the biographer. Mr. Weil reports just the facts about the strangest and most speculative story in Freud’s casebook.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.