The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson

by Patrick Weil

Overview

“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.”—Wall Street Journal

The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.

When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson’s inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president.

After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project.

For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674293250
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	412,337
File size:	647 KB

About the Author

Patrick Weil is Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Fellow at Yale Law School and a research professor at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. The founder and president of Libraries Without Borders, he is the author of The Sovereign Citizen and How to Be French.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction 1. The American Collapse of the Treaty of Versailles 2. The Making of William C. Bullitt 3. An American in Paris and Vienna 4. Sigmund Freud, Coauthor 5. The Failure of the First Atlantic Alliance 6. Princeton Nightmares 7. Neurosis on the World Stage 8. Analyzing Wilson 9. Signing On with FDR 10. Ambassador Bullitt Goes to Moscow 11. Diplomacy to the Rescue? 12. After Munich 13. A Phony War 14. Liberating France, Confronting the “Red Amoeba” 15. America’s Freelance Secretary of State 16. The Wilson Book, at Last 17. The Return of the Father 18. The Secret 19. Wilson in Retrospect Conclusion: Personality in History Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

04/03/2023

Woodrow Wilson was “a victim of his own psyche,” according to this thought-provoking study of a psychological profile of the president written by American diplomat William Bullitt and Sigmund Freud. Political scientist Weil (The Sovereign Citizen) recaps how Wilson’s puzzling behavior during negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles—abandoning the principle of “universal self-determination” he originally called for, agreeing to impose “humiliating and onerous financial burdens” on Germany, and stubbornly refusing to assuage concerns that the treaty’s security arrangements would abrogate Congress’s authority to declare war—led Bullitt to not only testify against the treaty at a U.S. Senate hearing, but also collaborate with Freud on a “psychobiography” that delved into Wilson’s sexuality, Oedipus complex, and self-identification with Jesus Christ. An expurgated version was published by Bullitt in 1966, but Weil draws from the original manuscript to make the case that while the authors may at times have gone “too far,” they were essentially correct in their assertion that Wilson’s “neurosis” was a key factor in the treaty’s failure to prevent WWII. Though the mix of psychoanalytical jargon and geopolitical analysis can be jarring at times, 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.” (May)

Publishers Weekly

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 Halliwelln Literary History

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.

New York Journal of Books - Francis P. Sempa

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.

Wall Street Journal - Dominic Green

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.

History Today - Theo Zenou

[Weil’s] depiction of Bullitt is remarkable and compelling.

New York Sun - Carl Rollyson

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 Starobinn Affairs

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.

The Atlantic - Franklin Foer

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.

Harper's - Dan Piepenbring

‘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.

The Spectator - Simon Ings

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.

Inside Story - Nick Haslam

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

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

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. Sempan Spectator

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

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