The Madman in the White House

The American Psychoanalytic Association has said that it ‘does not consider political commentary by its individual members an ethical matter.’ Nor should it. The father of psychoanalysis himself, in an oft-ignored divagation, co-wrote an entire volume about our twenty-eighth president, whom he detested from afar. Patrick Weil…[has] ferreted out the original, unredacted manuscript. This is the hottest gossip about Freud or Wilson in decades. Long-dead celebs seldom spill the tea. -- Dan Piepenbring * Harper's *
Weil’s book, and the manuscript by Bullitt and Freud, offer a unique interpretation among the many attempts to understand Wilson’s will to self-sabotage, which then led to one of the most catastrophic events in modern history. And the implications are radical. If the problem is not hypocrisy, cynical politics, or ignorance and political missteps, but rather a man’s divorce from reality, what do we do about that? We’re still trying to answer this question. -- Jamieson Webster * Los Angeles Review of Books *
A vivid shaggy-dog story about a curio that illuminates the possibilities (and perils) of studying the psychological soundness of presidents—a discipline as relevant as ever. -- Franklin Foer * The Atlantic *
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. -- Dominic Green * Wall Street Journal *
The Madman in the White House ostensibly is about the book Bullitt and Freud wrote about Wilson, but it is mostly a biography of Bullitt, and a good one at that…What comes through clearly is the mostly impeccable judgment Bullitt exhibited in his public life, judgment that political leaders should have listened to and followed—and had they done so, the world would have been less dangerous and perhaps millions of lives could have been spared misery and death. -- Francis P. Sempa * American Spectator *
A captivating analysis of the history of the Wilson psychobiography that doubles as a biography of Bullitt. Along the way it vividly documents the shifts in American engagement with Europe from the first world war through the cold war from the standpoint of high-level diplomacy…Both as a work of scholarship and as a sweeping, almost novelistic tour of twentieth-century political affairs, it deserves a wide readership. -- Nick Haslam * Inside Story *
[Weil’s] depiction of Bullitt is remarkable and compelling. -- Carl Rollyson * New York Sun *
‘Dictators are easy to read,’ Weil writes. ‘Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history.’ This is well put, but I think Weil’s portrait of Bullitt demonstrates something broader and more hopeful: that politics—even realpolitik—is best understood as an affair of the heart. -- Simon Ings * The Spectator *
Thought-provoking…Freud was fascinated by Wilson’s behavior as a world leader and embarked on a rigorous scrutiny of his psychological makeup—the exploration that Weil resumes. -- Paul Starobin * American Affairs *
The Madman in the White House has it all: political intrigue, momentous historical events, a charismatic central character who mixed with Churchill, Stalin, Hemingway and Picasso, a cameo by Sigmund Freud, an astonishing discovery in the archives and a champagne-drinking bear…The book excels as history, character study and intellectual thriller. Weil’s assertion that ‘democratic leaders can be just as unbalanced as dictators’ is more apt now than ever. -- Nick Haslam * The Conversation *
Excellent…Nearly a century since Wilson’s death, Weil’s monograph is the first to offer a comprehensive historical account of Bullitt’s career-long engagement with Wilson. -- Martin Halliwell * American Literary History *
An intriguing book that might be described as a biography of a biography. Deeply researched and scholarly, it tracks Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study from ideation to publication, analysing its contents and chronicling the lives of its authors and their subject…Its portrait of Bullitt is thorough and its treatment of Freudian theory rigorous. -- Theo Zenou * History Today *
What is clear from Weil’s book is that history is not just a result of impersonal forces acting upon human decisions. The personalities and views of political leaders matter. -- Francis P. Sempa * New York Journal of Books *
[A] thought-provoking study of a psychological profile of the president…Weil draws an intriguing profile of Bullitt and others involved in the negotiations. It’s a convincing case that ‘personality is very often at the heart of policy.’ * Publishers Weekly *
This is the wildly implausible and entirely true story of how Sigmund Freud, joined with a US diplomat, wrote a whole book about the ills of the psyche of Woodrow Wilson. For the first time, Weil brings the content of the original Freud manuscript to light, as well as giving a rich study of the role of personal psychology in the shaping of the new global order after World War I. So long as so much political power is concentrated in one human mind, we are all at the mercy of the next madman in the White House. -- Gary J. Bass, author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
A remarkable and valuable contribution which merits applause. There is unlikely to be another account to rival it. Weil has explored with great thoroughness—and detachment—the story of the enigma surrounding Woodrow Wilson and the fascinating events of 1919 which continue to remain such. -- Antony Lentin, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge
Patrick Weil has given us a vivid group portrait of Sigmund Freud, William Bullitt, and Woodrow Wilson—actors in and witnesses to the great drama of the Treaty of Versailles. Based on newly unearthed archival evidence that sheds light on how Freud and Bullitt wrote a biography of the twenty-eighth president of the United States, this is an urgent reappraisal of critical events of twentieth-century history. -- Élisabeth Roudinesco, author of Freud: In His Time and Ours
A generation ago diplomats could be real shapers of foreign policy, and not just the president’s messengers. William C. Bullitt was among the most influential of them. He served in the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and he represented the United States as ambassador in Moscow and in Paris as World War II approached. He was close to both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Along the way he met Sigmund Freud and collaborated with Freud in a controversial analysis of Wilson’s character. Patrick Weil uses Bullitt’s career to probe the significance of personality in American presidential decision-making. This unusual book enriches and completes a story that we may have thought we knew well. -- Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism