A First-Rate Madness (17 page)

There's other evidence for the steeling effect. For instance, in a study of well-being in two thousand adults, thirty-seven common harmful life events were studied, like losing a loved one, or divorce, or a serious illness. Subjective well-being, one's sense of personal happiness, was highest in those with some (two to six) but not too many or too few (zero to one) life traumas. Other research suggests that we might learn from trauma. One study began with the observation that although stress generally increases symptoms of depression, some people do not experience much depression, even with severe stress. So in seventy-eight women who had experienced a serious life event in the prior three months (such as sudden unemployment, a new serious illness, or the death of a family member or friend), researchers studied how depressed those subjects became after watching a sad film clip. The main factor being studied was the ability of subjects to interpret what had happened in a positive way (called “cognitive reappraisal”). In other words, it is not just what happens but how one feels about what happens that makes it a seriously negative or harmful experience. Some people are able to see an event as less harmful than others: after the death of an old beloved pet, for instance, one might focus on the many good years that had been spent together. The researchers found that those subjects who showed good cognitive reappraisal ability (using a standard measure, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire) showed very little increase in depression after viewing the sad film clips, while those with poor cognitive reappraisal became much more depressed. One might thus think of depressive episodes as being learning experiences where one learns, or is forced to learn, how to reinterpret and reframe harsh life experiences if one is to survive. When future life stresses are faced, the depressed person may be in a better position, armed with methods of cognitive reappraisal, to face them.

Resilience grows out of exposure to, not complete avoidance of, risk. Recall the vaccine metaphor: trauma itself is not a disease, just as a virus is not itself an infection. Many of us get exposed to viruses or bacteria without developing any symptoms of disease. Similarly, we can experience traumas without developing any symptoms of PTSD. And yet that trauma can vaccinate us against future problems (like PTSD) when faced with future, perhaps more severe, traumas.

The vaccine metaphor leads to another metaphor (Nietzsche once said that truth is a mobile army of metaphors): immunity. The reason a virus itself fails to produce infection is dependent on the “host response,” meaning how the body reacts to the virus. If one's immune system is strong, even a lot of virus exposure is harmless. If one is immune compromised, even a little virus can cause disease. So it is with hyperthymic personality. With that temperament, one can withstand a great deal of trauma, and even get stronger, whereas someone with a highly neurotic temperament may succumb to PTSD after being exposed to relatively slight trauma.

Hyperthymic personality is like an innate immunity to trauma. It is a harbinger of resilience. So too, often, are mental illnesses like manic depression. Mental illness and biologically abnormal temperaments may give great leaders—like Churchill and, as we'll now see, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy—just such controlled exposure to risk throughout their lifetimes, perfecting the cocktail of resilience.

 

 

 

On March 8, 1933, four days after the inauguration, one era paid its respects to another when a newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt called on Oliver Wendell Holmes. The elderly Supreme Court justice (who turned ninety-two years old that day) was a Civil War veteran, a man who as a child had played at the knee of Ralph Waldo Emerson and had come of age with the philosopher William James. As a Civil War officer, he had even accompanied Abraham Lincoln on a visit to the battlefront. (When a Confederate sharpshooter's bullet almost shot off the president's stovepipe hat, Holmes yelled at Lincoln, “Get down, you fool!”) Roosevelt's wheelchair couldn't easily maneuver the narrow doorway of Holmes's house, so he put on his braces and struggled into a parlor, where Holmes rose slowly with the aid of a cane to greet him. Despite the dire depression that gripped the country, their conversation was light and banal: reminiscences about Harvard and mutual friends. FDR asked Holmes if he could do anything for him; Holmes requested permission to remove some of his money from the bank. At the end, FDR, facing the greatest economic crisis of American history, asked Holmes if he had any advice to offer. Holmes thought back to his army days and mentioned that when the troops were in retreat, all one could do was “blow your trumpet” and “give the order to charge. And that's exactly what you are doing.” It is often held that soon after Roosevelt left, the old judge, turning to an aide, gave this verdict: “A second-class intellect, but a first-rate temperament.”

The old judge was inerrant. FDR's first-rate temperament—or in psychological terms his personality—was hyperthymic. He was high in energy, extremely talkative, outgoing, extraverted—in short, very good company. When the journalist John Gunther first met FDR, the president was so buoyant that Gunther concluded, “Obviously that man has never had indigestion in his life.” His talkativeness was famed. After Gunther made a trip to Latin America in 1937, the State Department asked him to brief the president in six or seven minutes set aside from the president's busy morning schedule; Roosevelt's appointments ran over, and the meeting was rescheduled for midafternoon. When Gunther finally got into the office, Roosevelt greeted him effusively and then proceeded to talk almost without interruption for forty-six minutes. Even when he wasn't speaking, his face was “never at rest, almost hyperthyroid.” When the journalist mentioned that he had visited all twenty countries in Latin America, FDR asked the only question of this supposed briefing: “What are the bad spots?” When Gunther mentioned Panama, whose president was from Harvard, he triggered a thirty-minute monologue that began with FDR's alma mater (“Not really, is he a
Harvard
man?”), and proceeded to a discussion of the president of Haiti, the notion of colonizing Argentina, how FDR once rode through Montevideo, how Iquitos, Peru, should become a free port, how FDR told the president of Brazil to nationalize the utilities industry, the need for tourism in Chile, how Gunther should meet a certain chap in Puerto Rico who liked dry martinis, and on and on. Then he shifted to Europe, and by the time FDR was interrupted by a telephone call, Gunther was “acutely embarrassed” that he had taken up so much of the president's time. He got up to leave, but FDR waved him to stay, finally saying goodbye after the phone conversation ended a while later.

“FDR's extreme loquaciousness” was not limited to this one occasion. One general, during his first meeting with the president, could not find the opportunity to speak a single word. White House visitors developed special techniques to get Roosevelt to stop talking. “My own method,” a well-known judge reported, “was to let him run for exactly five minutes, and then to cut in ruthlessly.” A cabinet secretary commented: “The simplest way to get at the President was to be invited to lunch. Then you could talk while he ate.” There seemed to be a method to Roosevelt's distractibility. He would change topics suddenly, as if to test or unnerve visitors, by, for instance, “asking somebody who had never been in Latin America what was the best hotel in Peru.”

Some observers thought that Roosevelt purposefully digressed at the beginning of meetings to loosen up often tense sessions. For instance, after Pearl Harbor, during a special meeting of six senior military and political advisers where all expected FDR to get right to the urgent question of war, the president launched into a twenty-minute story about lobster fishing in Maine.

His verbosity reflected a generally high energy level. Says Gunther, “His vitality was, as everybody knows, practically unlimited. . . . In one campaign he traveled 13,000 miles in about seven weeks, and made 16 major and 67 second-string speeches—not to mention innumerable back platform appearances . . . and never stopped having a wonderful time.” In thirteen years of presidency, he made 399 trips by rail, covering about 545,000 miles. In 1936, the strenuous campaign exhausted the physically healthy Republican candidate, Alf Landon; doctors advised him to take to bed in its final days. The paralyzed president, in contrast, showed no strain. Thinking also of FDR's distant cousin, the exuberant Theodore Roosevelt, journalist (and FDR critic) H. L. Mencken reflected, “The Roosevelt family is completely superhuman. No member of it ever becomes tired.”

Despite this high energy, FDR did not have a short sleep pattern (unlike many people with hyperthymic personality, like his cousin Theodore, who wrote about 100,000 letters during seven years of presidency and could read three or four books per night: Franklin once noted that TR needed only six hours' sleep nightly, while FDR felt he needed eight). It is said that throughout the war, Roosevelt maintained a regular sleep schedule, usually going to bed by 10 p.m. and waking around 7 a.m. One source reports that throughout his presidency he had only two sleepless nights, one on the day the banks closed and another on a night when Churchill was a houseguest. (Pearl Harbor did not keep him awake.)

Roosevelt was full of nervous energy, but not depressed or angstridden: Gunther wrote, “He was often restless, even agitated, but once a decision was made, he seldom worried. . . . ‘He must have been psychoanalyzed by God,' one of his early associates told me. He almost never showed serious dubiety, disappointment, or depression. He was full of nerves and conflicts . . . but these did not end in any ‘neurotic stagnation'; his buoyancy, gay resilience, and capacity to withstand shocks made him seem made of rubber.”

 

 

HE WAS HIGHLY SOCIABLE. On his Harvard alumni questionnaire, when asked his aversions, he replied, “None.” He spent about a quarter of the working day on the telephone. A circle of about one hundred advisers knew they could call him at any time on the telephone without means of an intermediary. He knew how to get people to do what he needed, even if they did not agree with him about why. Once, when asked why he asked political opponents to serve in his administration, he commented, “You know, a man will do a lot of right things for the wrong reasons.”

His longtime associate and secretary of labor Frances Perkins called him “incurably sociable,” even needing to read books aloud to others rather than by himself. His close aide Robert Jackson, who served him as attorney general and later as a Supreme Court justice, viewed FDR's sociability as his strongest asset: “It was here that Roosevelt was irresistible and inimitable. He liked people, almost any people. He liked their company, liked to pick their minds and see what they were thinking, liked to know the details of their lives and problems.” Jackson contrasts FDR with Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR had served and admired. In personality, though not in politics, Franklin resembled his Republican relative, the dynamo Theodore, rather than the professorial Wilson. For instance, Jackson recounts meeting in the 1930s with one of Wilson's old aides, who described how they advised Wilson to meet with American businessmen in order to ramp up the war effort in the early months of World War I:

“[Wilson] refused to see most of them, saying they were specialists who had nothing to teach him with his general problems affecting the whole nation. Finally they prevailed upon him to see Henry Ford, and after the interview, [an aide] entered and said to the President, ‘What do you think of Henry Ford?' Wilson impatiently answered, ‘I think he is the most comprehensively ignorant man I ever met.' He had complete contempt for Ford. Two or three days after that lunch with [Wilson's old aide], I noticed that Ford was President Roosevelt's luncheon guest. I happened to be at the White House that afternoon late and opened the conversation by saying, ‘Mr. President, I see you had lunch with Henry Ford.' ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I had a grand time with Uncle Henry.' ” Then FDR launched into an extensive account of how he tried to get Ford to discuss the problem of low wages, despite Ford's constant efforts to avoid that topic. “But he liked Ford and respected him for the things in which he was able.” The temperamental contrast with Wilson was sharp.

This sociability had its downside—a wish to be liked by everyone, which, in the context of his official responsibilities, led to some administrative disarray. Jackson viewed this as the president's main deficiency: “There was always considerable conflict of policy within the Administration and different factions favored different courses. . . . There were always those who were trying to get him to commit himself in a hurry, and too often he yielded. The remedy, instead of squarely backing up and undoing what he had done, was to promulgate some sort of compromise. He was reluctant to dismiss or demote anyone he liked, and he liked nearly everybody. Instead of dismissing someone who was pursuing a course inconsistent with his policy, he would create an additional layer of authority, which usually merely complicated matters.” Jackson draws a conclusion that reflects, I think, a core argument of this book: “Roosevelt certainly was not accomplished as an administrator and in normal times, when his office demanded only an orderly and efficient administration of settled affairs, it is doubtful if he could have been a distinguished President. He was just not a routine executive.” Frances Perkins confirms that FDR was not “a careful, direct-line administrator”; rather his method of “not giving direct and specific orders to his subordinates released the creative energy of many men. . . . His four-track mind proved invaluable . . . he could keep many activities operating at top efficiency.” Roosevelt was a whirlwind of a leader, an entrepreneurial president, always thinking ahead. (After the first wave of New Deal laws, Vice President John Garner advised the impatient leader, “Mr. President, you know you've got to let the cattle graze.”) He would never have made a good corporate boss, nor would he have left the country alone in good times, as Coolidge did. Roosevelt was too unhealthy to be a good leader in normal times; but in abnormal times he was just right.