The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
Patrick Weil
(Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $35)
William Bullitt was one of the most interesting Americans of the 20th century. He turns up at key moments in history. He met Lenin in 1919 while on a secret mission for the Wilson administration to assess the feasibility of recognizing the Bolshevik regime. He accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to Paris after World War I, but later testified before Congress against Wilson’s proposed peace treaty and League of Nations. He married the widow of John Reed, the pro-communist author of Ten Days That Shook the World. He later befriended Sigmund Freud and co-authored with Freud an unflattering psychological study of Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt became a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, was appointed by FDR as our nation’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, where he drank with Stalin, but later became a leading foe of Stalin and communism, and a Roosevelt critic. He knew Charles de Gaulle, fought with Free French forces in the latter years of World War II, interviewed Pope Pius XII, and wrote anti-communist articles for Life magazine. He was also a friend of Richard Nixon. (READ MORE: William Bullitt’s Search for Permanent World Peace)
Political scientist Patrick Weil’s new book The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson 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. Weil, who is a distinguished fellow at Yale Law School, found the original manuscript for the Wilson book in the archives at Yale University. Though written in the mid-1920s and completed in the early 1930s, the book about Wilson wasn’t published until 1966 — long after Freud had died and a year before Bullitt died. The reasons for the delay included Bullitt’s involvement in Democratic Party politics (where for a time Wilson was revered), his service in Roosevelt’s administration, the Second World War, and disputes about the manuscript between Bullitt and Freud’s heirs.
Bullitt and Freud in their psychological study attempted to explain Wilson’s refusal to compromise with Senate Republicans over the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. At the time and for a long time thereafter, historians blamed Republican senators, not Wilson, for America’s refusal to join the League and America’s supposed “isolationism” that failed to prevent the Second World War. Bullit and Freud instead blamed Wilson’s personality and traced its roots to Wilson’s relationship with a dominant father and Wilson’s efforts to repress his “passive homosexuality.” Freud also found in Wilson’s behavior evidence of “narcissism, castration anxiety, repression, sublimation … and Christianity.” Some of this, however, was redacted from the published version of the book, but Weil discovered it in the original manuscript.
One of Wilson’s aides told Bullitt that Wilson, a deeply religious man, “was convinced he could convert the U.S. and the world by his words.” The professor and college president turned politician, Bullitt and Freud wrote, “never doubted the righteousness of his acts” and believed that “[w]hatever he did was right because God directed him.” Wilson went to Paris, Bullitt and Freud explained, “as the delegate of God” not the United States. Wilson believed that “God had ordained that he should bring eternal peace to the world.” And he departed Paris “convinced that he was immortal as the man who had at last brought peace to the earth.” He was mimicking the Prince of Peace.
Wilson, Bullit and Freud wrote, treated the Treaty of Paris as if it was Divine, the word of God. Who dared to change the word of God? Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and others dared, and Wilson treated them as if they were devils, not political opponents. After Republicans defeated the treaty in the Senate, Wilson, who suffered several strokes in his fight for the League, lived on, in Bullitt’s words, as “a pathetic invalid, a querulous old man full of rage and tears, hatred and self-pity.”
But enough about Wilson. Bullitt’s life and career are more interesting. Weil gives us all of the highlights noted above, and more. And 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.
On Jan. 29, 1943, Bullitt wrote a memo to President Roosevelt that predicted a postwar clash with the Soviet Union. He told Roosevelt that the memo was “as serious a document as any I have ever sent you.” Stalin’s Soviet Union, Bullitt wrote, is a “totalitarian dictatorship.” At home, Stalin represses his own people, while abroad, he controls “in each country of the world a 5th column” composed of “public or underground Communist Parties,” which he uses for “espionage, propaganda, character assassination of opponents, and political influence.”
“There is no evidence,” Bullitt continued, “that [Stalin] has abandoned either the policy of extending communism or the policy of controlling all foreign communist parties.” Soviet expansion will occur “where opposition is weak [but] stops where opposition is strong.” America and its allies must “demonstrate to Stalin … that we will not permit our war to prevent Nazi domination of Europe to be turned into a war to establish Soviet domination of Europe.” He told Roosevelt that Stalin’s aim was to “overrun” Europe and set up friendly communist regimes. Bullitt compared Soviet expansion to the ”flow of a Red amoeba.” Only “armed strength” will prevent Soviet expansion, he said.
Bullitt followed up that memo with two more — in May and August 1943 — in which he recommended that the United States wage war to establish a favorable postwar balance of power. George Kennan — who Bullitt recruited to the Moscow embassy in the early 1930s and who went on to recommend the postwar policy of containment of Soviet Russia — described Bullitt’s memos has having “no counterpart … as a warning of that date to the American President of the effective division of Europe which would ensue if the war continued to be pursued on the basis of the concepts then prevailing.”
Robert Nisbet characterized Bullitt’s memos to FDR as a “matchless treatise on Soviet geopolitics, diplomatic and military history, and highly probable annexations of eastern European countries after the war.” David Fromkin wrote that Bullitt was “the first within the government to focus on the Russian threat.” But as Weil notes, “Bullitt’s recommendations had fallen on deaf ears.” FDR continued his fruitless courtship of Stalin. The peoples of Eastern Europe paid the price for FDR’s unwillingness to follow Bullitt’s advice.
In May 1944, Bullitt wrote an article for Life magazine that urged the formation of a NATO-like alliance to prevent Soviet domination of Europe (he had privately suggested this to FDR). Weil notes that Bullitt’s article “infuriated both the Soviets and pro-Roosevelt liberals.” At war’s end, Bullitt began writing a book that would appear in 1946 under the title The Great Globe Itself. Weil describes the book as “ambitious in scope” but notes that it had “limited impact” in Washington. Henry Luce, publisher of Life and Time magazines, however, took notice. Weil writes that Luce “knew that it was Bullitt who had prepared the ground” for the anti-Soviet policy proposals of Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and other early cold warriors. And Luce saw China as the next battleground between the United States and communism. Weil writes that Bullitt and Luce “became partners in a project of both educating and arguably indoctrinating the public” about the dangers of communism.
Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to take Bullitt’s advice likely doomed the peoples of Eastern Europe to more than four decades of communist rule.
Luce sent Bullitt to China. When Bullitt returned, he wrote what Weil describes as “an explosive article in Life which was also excerpted in Time.” Bullitt argued that the U.S. had a “vital interest” in the independence of China. He excoriated FDR for the Yalta accords: “No more unnecessary, disgraceful and potentially disastrous document has ever been signed by a President of the U.S.” Bullitt believed that Yalta’s greatest flaw was agreeing to allow the Soviets to establish bases in Manchuria behind the back of Chiang Kai-shek. He urged the Truman administration to provide more than a billion dollars’ worth of assistance to Chiang and suggested that Gen. Douglas MacArthur be sent to China. In a subsequent article in Life written in 1948, Bullitt accused both FDR and Truman of failing to stem the communist tide in Asia. Weil notes, however, that Truman”refused to renew U.S. aid to the unpopular Nationalist regime, and the Chinese Communists triumphed over the Kuomintang in November 1949.”
Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to take Bullitt’s advice likely doomed the peoples of Eastern Europe to more than four decades of communist rule. The Truman administration’s refusal to renew aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces — as Bullitt had repeatedly urged — assured the Chinese communist victory in the civil war, thereby dooming the Chinese people to more than seven decades of communist rule. We waged and won a lengthy and costly struggle against the Soviet Union and now face a lengthy and costly struggle with Communist China — the outcome of which remains in doubt. Had our leaders listened to William Bullitt, things might have been much different.
READ MORE:
The Failed Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: William Bullitt’s Warning
The Most Important Event of Modern Post-World War II History