A First-Rate Madness (46 page)

This is the only known official psychiatric evaluation or treatment of Hitler in his life. While Lewis and others make the mistake, in my view, of thinking that Forster's hypnotic suggestion “invented” the grandiose Führer, the overall story of PTSD is consistent with Hitler's many psychiatric symptoms and his high level of anxiety (which is called the personality trait of neuroticism), a well-established risk factor for PTSD.

In 1923, after the Munich putsch, Hitler was again psychiatrically examined, though this time by the chief physician of Landsberg prison, Dr. Joseph Brinsteiner, who was not a psychiatrist. Documented in a January 8, 1924, report titled “Report of the Mental Condition of Prisoner Adolf Hitler,” it was described as follows by one biographer: “The doctor, who was obviously very impressed by his prisoner, wrote very general comments stressing that he was a man of very high intelligence, extraordinary range of knowledge and great oratorical ability. At the time of his arrest, Hitler was very depressed, the doctor said, and suffering from ‘a very painful neurosis' (
sehr schmerzhaften Neurose
). No details are given. The report emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the condition and that the prisoner was soon in excellent spirits.” Robert G. L. Waite,
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 350. A prison guard, Otto Lurker, who later published in 1933 a hagiographic memoir of Hitler's time in jail, called “Hitler Behind Fortress Walls,” reported that the painful neurosis diagnosed by Dr. Brinsteiner was due to a shoulder dislocation Hitler suffered when hurt during the melee of the putsch. Lurker quotes Brinsteiner as telling the court, while attesting that Hitler was mentally fit to stand trial, “The patient . . . has no symptoms of psychic disorders or psychopathic tendencies.” Quoted in Milan Hauner,
Hitler: A Chronology of His Life and Time,
2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Yet the earlier possibility of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment for PTSD would be consistent with the known fact that the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg, Karl Willmans, had stated publicly that Hitler had suffered a hysterical reaction during World War I. In 1933, Willmans was forced to resign. Ruth Lidz and Hans-Rudolph Wiedemann, “Karl Wilmanns (1873–1945) einige Ergänzungen und Richtigstellungen,”
Fortschritte der Neurologie-Psychiatric
57 (1989): 161–162.

211
Grinker decided to take on this task:
Roy R. Grinker Sr., Roy R. Grinker Jr., and John Timberlake, “ ‘Mentally Healthy' Young Males (Homoclites),”
Archives of General Psychiatry
6 (1962): 405–453.

213
“Within the general population of the United States”:
Ibid., 445–446.

213
“People like the George Williams students”:
Ibid., 446.

213
“To have a population of relative stability”:
Ibid., 448.

213
“I often described my subject-population”:
Ibid., 446.

214
Sigmund Freud's dictum:
Ibid., 448.

214
No
ideal
standard of mental health works scientifically:
Karl Jaspers,
General Psychopathology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). S. Nassir Ghaemi,
The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

214
“Standards of health on the basis of admirable traits”:
Leston Havens,
A Safe Place: Laying the Groundwork of Psychotherapy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28.

214
“muscular Christian” normality:
Grinker, “ ‘Mentally Healthy' Young Males,” 444.

215
what happens when homoclites rule:
Grinker's work gives us a framework to understand mental health, and if applied to leaders it would head us in the direction of looking at personality and seeing whether our leaders are similar to or different from the rest of us in their personality traits. Historians and psychologists have worked out ways to do this, not only for personality traits, but also for intelligence, another psychological attribute commonly seen as important for leadership. (Dean Keith Simonton,
Greatness: Who Makes History and Why
[New York: Guilford, 1994].) For intelligence, this involves quantifying leaders' achievements in childhood and early adulthood, such as grades and academic degrees, and correlating those achievements with population averages. Assuming a population IQ norm of 100, one can then infer higher or lower levels of intelligence for historical figures. This method has been used in psychology research now for over eighty years. For personality traits, historians and scholars are given biographical data—anonymized and altered enough to try to remove specifics that would identify the individuals—based on which they complete assessments of major personality traits, as in the NEO scale, which assesses the three major personality traits of neuroticism (one's baseline level of anxiety), extraversion (one's sociability and outgoingness), and openness to experience (one's willingness to take risks or tendency to follow routines or habits). These estimates are then correlated with objective (number of bills passed, reelection) and subjective (consensus of historians) estimates of presidential success. (In the normal population, we all score somewhere on each of these traits, and we do so in a way that statistically is called the “normal” curve, also referred to as the bell curve. Most of us score in the middle, while 2.5 percent of us score at either extreme—very high or very low—on each trait. These traits can also be translated into the abnormal temperaments discussed previously. Thus those with hyperthymic personality will tend to be very high on extraversion and openness to experience.)

When applied to presidents (Simonton, 2006), these studies of intelligence and personality support, in my view, the idea that most presidents are homoclites, and that the most successful of them are the least homoclitic. Using the above methods, about one-half of presidents (twenty-three out of forty-three) had IQ estimates in the average, but not gifted, range (100–120). (The average college graduate has an IQ of 120, while the population norm is 90–110, above average is 110–120, gifted is 120–140, and above 140 is considered “genius” level.) Among twelve recent presidents from FDR onward, only four score in the gifted range (FDR, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton). For those presidents considered by some as not particularly intelligent, like George W. Bush (IQ estimate 111) or Reagan (IQ estimate 118), estimated intelligence is above the population average (though not greater than the average college graduate). These are not stupid men, nor are they highly intelligent; they are just normal. (Just to show that intelligence is overrated as a measure of success, by the way, one might note that the estimated IQ for George Washington was 125, lower than Clinton or Carter.) Personality seemed a more robust predictor of presidential success. Specifically, of the three traits in the NEO (Simonton, 2006), only openness to experience correlated with presidential success, and even this was not straightforward. The three highestrating presidents for openness to experience were Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln; yet Adams is generally seen as ineffectual. Clinton and Kennedy ran distant seconds on this personality trait, and some presidents viewed as successful, like Reagan and Washington, scored low on it. I would turn the usual interpretation of these personality tests around. The standard view is that these studies show that neuroticism, for instance, is “irrelevant” to presidential personality. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that extremes of neuroticism, and indeed all personality traits, are not found in our presidents. They are mostly average in their personality traits, and even their intelligence. Much as we yearn for heroes, our presidents are, by and large, normal people—homoclites like you and me. And yet when one picks out those who are extreme on any of these features, whether personality or intelligence, one finds names like Jefferson and Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy—those who are seen as the “best” presidents, the ones full of charisma and creativity. They are not “normal” people: they are the ones with abnormal temperaments, like hyperthymic personality, or even frank mental illness.

Most presidents, however, are normal and thus homoclites. Hence research about the psychological basis of political beliefs in the general population (who are also homoclites) might help us understand the psychology of these homoclite leaders. The classic work in this area is that of British psychologist Hans Eysenck (
The Psychology of Politics
[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954]), who observed that the left/right theory of politics could not account for the many similarities between communism and fascism—apparent extreme opposites. Eysenck interviewed middle-class and working-class persons in 1950s England and classified their political beliefs along the above labels; he then gave them NEO-like personality tests. (Eysenck himself was a founding father of personality research.) Statistically grouping people with similar political beliefs versus their personality traits, Eysenck found another factor besides political ideology (leftwing versus right-wing) that seemed to relate to how practical versus how idealistic people tended to be. In other words, political behavior needed to be seen on two dimensions, the first being political ideology, as is commonly accepted, and the second not being political at all, but psychological, correlating with personality traits, which (borrowing from the philosopher William James) Eysenck labeled
tender-mindedness
versus
tough-mindedness
. This produces a new two-dimensional picture, when combined with the original dimension of political ideology. Over the years, numerous genetic studies on identical twins have repeatedly confirmed that Eysenck was right:
temperament is an important biological predictor of political beliefs
(Lindon Eaves, Hans Eysenck, and Michael Neale,
Genes, Culture, and Personality: An Empirical Approach
[London: Academic Press, 1989]).

Eysenck's thesis may help explain why apparently opposite political figures, like Bush and Blair, could find so much common ground: their personalities were similar—they were tough-minded “normal guy” leaders, taking pride in their toughness, arms swaying beside them as they strode to a press conference podium together, like two gunslingers at a shootout. Other homoclite leaders, differing in the normal range of personality traits, will be tender-minded instead, and thus likely to make different political judgments. It goes beyond available evidence to speculate how these considerations apply to other recent or contemporary leaders, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, but Eysenck's theory provides testable hypotheses for historians and psychologists to assess.

216
Chamberlain was a commoner:
Nick Smart,
Neville Chamberlain: A Biography
(London: Routledge, 2009).

216
“a good mayor of Birmingham”:
George Lichtheim,
Thoughts Among the Ruins
(Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1973), 177.

216
“a nice man”:
Robert C. Self,
Neville Chamberlain: A Biography
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 97.

216
“rigid competence,” “indispensable for filling subordinate posts”:
Peter Rowland,
David Lloyd George: A Biography
(New York: Macmillan, 1976), 707.

217
“If Germany could obtain her desiderata”:
Ibid., 219.

217
“In one phase men might seem to have been right”:
Graham Macklin,
Chamberlain
(London: Haus, 2006), 97.

218
The son of a Philadelphia surgeon:
Most of the material on McClellan is drawn from Stephen Sears,
George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon
(New York: Da Capo, 1999).

220
“I almost think”:
Ibid., 95.

220
“Shall we crush the rebellion”:
Ibid., 99.

221
“One Napoleonic grand army”:
Ibid.

221
“How does he think”:
Ibid., 103.

221
“I am here in a terrible place”:
Ibid.

222
“Cautious and weak” . . . “A psychiatrist could make much”:
James McPherson,
Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44.

222
unlike Lee, who seems to have been dysthymic:
Michael Fellman,
The Making of Robert E. Lee
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

223
what about Reagan, Eisenhower, Truman?:
Historians may disagree. Truman did have to deal with Korea. And at the end of World War II, he had to make the massive decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whether the latter decision in particular was the correct one, and the mark of a successful crisis leader, is something about which Japanese and American readers may have differences of opinion. Reagan certainly has his fans, as did Eisenhower. I cannot and do not attempt to cover every major leader of the twentieth century in this book, and I especially try to avoid recent ones. The most recent leader I study in detail is Nixon. As for the others, I can only make tentative comments while awaiting the clarifying impact of time and distance. This all depends, of course, on historians' having open enough minds to even consider some of these theses.

224
six books and a dozen professional journal articles:
David Greenberg,
Nixon's Shadow
(New York: Norton, 2004), 235.