In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Patrick Weil, author of The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023). Weil discusses the beginnings of a book published in 1960 by Ambassador William C. Bullitt, who wrote on the mental health of President Woodrow Wilson with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Delving into archival research, Weil found that Bullitt and Freud saw Wilson as a neurotic obsessed with his father, whom he both deeply loved and hated, and that the image of his father was later projected into other characters who first were his friends and later his enemies. Bullitt and Freud also found that Wilson had an unconscious bisexual desire that drove his love-hate relationships. Finally, the conversation offers some reflections on the difficulties presidential systems have in screening mentally unfit candidates for their positions and getting rid of them when they seem unable to fulfill their duties.

John Torpey 

Who was Woodrow Wilson? He’s well known for having had the project of creating a world that would be safe for democracy. He also helped to create the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. And yet, when push came to shove, he decided to discourage the Senate in the United States from signing the treaty in support of the League of Nations. And of course, that ultimately sealed its doom. What was Wilson psychology in doing this? It turns out there’s a book that was written about that question and about Wilson psychology in general by an Ambassador William Bullitt and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. We’re going to explore that book today and its arguments about Wilson’s psychology of holding and wielding power.

John Torpey 

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  We are fortunate to have with us today Patrick Weil, a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris 1-better known as the Sorbonne– and a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He recently published The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023). He has also recently published De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021) and The Sovereign Citizen, Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). In 2006, Patrick Weil founded the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières), of which he remains chairman. Thank you for joining us today, Patrick Weil.

Patrick Weil 

Thank you, John, for inviting me.

John Torpey 

Great to have you with us. Looking forward to talking about this very interesting book. Your new book concerns a long lost book manuscript by us diplomat, William Bullitt who was a close confidant of Woodrow Wilson’s and also authored by the founder of psychoanalysis, as I’ve already mentioned,Sigmund Freud. So can you tell us about the history of the book, and how you came to write about it?

Patrick Weil 

So I will tell you about how I found this manuscript because in fact, I am teaching at Yale Law School since 2008. And in the summer of 2014, I was in New York onto a huge bookshop and found the book Bullit and Freud as published in 1966. The psychological portrait of Woodrow Wilson, I had read it when I was a student in France. I liked it because it’s it was an attempt by Freud to decypher leaders, something we do every day, we are speaking every day about the psychology of different leaders and he did with Wilson, something very systematically and scientifically, something we do randomly as citizens every day. And I bought the book for $6. And I opened it, Oh, I remember there is current and house was the main advisor Wilson, and I was in house papers at Yale because he had become friends with Clemenceau, the French premiere of the First World War and I was editing article came also wrote from the US when he was a correspondent for a very important French newspaper. And so maybe there is a correspondent with this ambassador, as you just mentioned. I looked for names at Yale and “oh, all the buried papers are there.” Immediately I found the boxes related to the manuscript. I was very impressed. There was some handwritten manuscript by Freud in German, etc. But that was not the discovery I made a few weeks later, which was the original manuscripts. A manuscript that is signed at the end of each chapters by the two authors. And when I compare the original manuscript and the printed published manuscript in 1966. it was not the same. It was the original manuscript has been cut 300 times; major analysis made by the two authors has been cut as disappeared, and say what should I do, I can announce published that I found an original manuscript thrown and I will have five minutes of publicity, or I can investigate, I can try to understand how they worked this book, and why it was censured by the co-author. Why was it postponed for more than 30 years, etc.

Patrick Weil 

So I had first to understand the Treaty of Versailles. Because the book is focused on how Wilson on his role played in designing the treaty, and as you just say, destroy it, at the end of the process, and then I discovered that I had not understood major things about the treaty. I had not understood that as much as you say, you have the League of Nations which preceded the UN, there was a NATO before NATO, a treaty which was called the Treaty of Guarantee that was signed by the United State President Woodrow Wilson, the British premier that would permit any fact of law obliged the United States and the UK to support military France in case of German aggression. And the other thing I didn’t understand, and you told it immediately, it is that Wilson, who are told Democratic senators to vote against the treaty only for one reason, which was that there was a reservation coming from the Republicans saying, in case of declaration of war, the president of United States has to respect the Constitution and get approval of Congress. For that reason, he ordered the Democratic senator to vote against the treaty. So as proof said, Wilson is a man who achieved almost the exact opposite of that which has wished to accomplished. When a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of affinity to the Commonwealth –and that was written in 32, just before Hitler was coming to power– so when a man who declared he wants to bring peace to the world, provoked a situation that bring a new World War to the world, he started to investigate. That was the purpose of their book.

John Torpey 

It’s a fascinating story. Can you tell us more about why did it take so long for the book to actually get published? I mean, this had to do with people’s other ambitions and actions in the political world, I guess, Bullitt in particular. But tell us about that story.

Patrick Weil 

So they worked. First of all, Bullitt went to see Freud as a patient at the end of 26. Then he wrote a play on Wilson, that was never produced, but was very smart, in fact, and then he came back to Freud and say, “I offer you to write a chapter of a book, I write on diplomacy” and Freud said, “I not very comfortable with that proposal, but I’m excited of working with you. If you find enough material, we can do a book.” Bullitt brought back a lot of material in the fall of 1930. And they the book was ready to be published in the spring of 1932. But it was postponed mainly because 32 was the presidential election year for Franklin Roosevelt. Bullitt has being working for Wilson, the Democrat. The Democrats were back to power. He needed diplomats in the State Department, Bullitt when he was working for Wilson, starting in 1917, was sent to a secret mission to visit Lenin in February 1919. And he got a proposal of Lenin to have a truce in the Russian Civil War. Wilson did not even want to read, but he was kind of hero in Soviet Union. So who’s they’re asking him to negotiate with him the recognition by the United States of Soviet Union, and he’s choosen by Roosevelt to be the first ambassador to Soviet Union. That, of course, three degrees, we have to postpone the publication who have a very important diplomatic mission. And in fact, mission to Moscow was very important for Bullitt because he discovered the order of studies. And he was a very radical liberal, when he was younger, and he became totally afraid of the power of communism, as he as he described as a religion, promising that if you give power to the communists, you will have a paradise, so it was a kind of religion. And then he was ambassador in Paris, it was an extremely important position. He was like the representative of Roosevelt for the whole Europe.

Patrick Weil 

He tried to prevent the war by organizing big aircraft command for the French and the British Army in the US. He has he was a visionary, for example, when the war started in 1939, he wrote to the US envoy in Berlin that Hitler had already lost the war, he might crush the French and the British, but then he will be eaten like a concept by the Bolshevik up to Berlin. And then the question will be, are we going to win all of them. And it was because he was obsessed by prevision which was quite prophetic in some way. And so he was totally involved in the Cold War, when he started in 1945. And as he has analyzed communism as a religion, he felt that only another religion was able to beat the communists on any thought or the only Christianity. So he connected with the Pope, he visited the pope Pius XII three times. He became a kind of freelance secretary of state when he has been sidelined by Roosevelt and then become has become a Republican. He became Nixon Kissinger’s friend because he has met with Nixon at the time of Algeria’s affair investigation committee. And so until he felt he was too old to become Secretary of State of a Republican who was never elected, like Nixon–of course, Nixon fell in the 60– he postponed the publication of the book. Also, Mrs. Wilson died only in 1962, and he was not totally at ease of publishing the book while she was still alive. And he started thinking about publishing it in 1963. And finally published in 66. So it took him time to edit to cut etc. And, and the issue is, what did he cut? Because? And why? And that’s another question.

John Torpey 

Well, it’s a great story. And obviously, the fact that Sigmund Freud is involved, I mean, obviously, Bullitt is an interesting figure. But you know, Sigmund Freud is obviously more famous. And I guess I’m curious what’s the nature of the analysis that they offered not your analysis, but they’re what they offer, you know, it’s widely thought or believed or known that Wilson had a stroke in 1919, and was generally thought not really to be capable of carrying out the duties of President and that his wife supposedly was doing a lot of this stuff. And so I’m curious, what do you think is most compelling in their understanding? I mean, the main event, in many ways in the book, is this sort of scuttling of the League of Nations endeavor by keeping the United States out of it? And, what was that all about? How could he have sort of been such an important force in creating the League of Nations and then sort of trying to get the United States not to join this?

Patrick Weil 

So that’s a very important question. And in fact, the answers are occur before the stroke, where after the stroke, she was still having a lot of activity. She was like a barrier to meetings for him because he was feeble, etcetera, but he’s, he has been tested between two senators went to visit him and they said, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s fine. His brain is still functioning still. But so everything that is described in the book about his neurosis had an impact before the stroke. Let me explain. So neurosis means that he was doing things he felt. He said, “I am afraid of repeating things that I’ve already done in the past. That is something I don’t control.” So that’s classical neurosis, when you feel that kind of other in you is doing things that you cannot resist, doing things that feel foreign to yourself. And in fact, I told you that Bullitt when he came back to start gathering, collecting data about the projects and in testimonies, etc, he has incredible results. First of all, he was able to interview intimate collaborators of Wilson. And Wilson has a very particular personality, in the way that he was talking to intimate collaborators the way you talk to a psychoanalyst. So he was speaking about his personal feelings, his angst, his excitement. The way you can imagine in a session you will talk to your psychoanalyst. And so many of this collaborators has either written diary or audition with Wilson, or were able to give testimony. And Bullit interview his doctor, who was at the end of his life his only friend, his official biographer, his Secretary, his Chief of Staff and got access to the 2000 page diary of Coronel House. House was dictating to his secretary every day what has happened with with in his relation to Wilson and others, everyday. So, first of all, in the house what did he discover? That Wilson why being President of the United States until the half of the second term, was paralyzed many days because he couldn’t sleep because of Princeton nightmare. He had a nightmare about what happened to him in Princeton. Can you imagine?

John Torpey 

 Where he was president?

Patrick Weil 

Where he was president.

John Torpey 

President of Princeton, sorry, president of Princeton.

Patrick Weil 

President of Princeton University. So, what has happened to him in Princeton? two things that are very important.  Wilson needed a best friend. As, as Wilson biographer told Bullitt, Wilson had to have a woman at home, his wife, on much loved friend. And then could be hard as steel to any man outside that circle. He needed a best friend, and he had in the faculty, a best friend, a professor of philosophy, he will talk to him every day, they will work they will travel together in vacation with two couples, etc. And one day in a faculty meeting, he’s got to disagree with him and speak. Yes, told him I am not agreeing with you in that project, and we shouldn’t say it’s okay, no problem. Of course, our friendship would not be damaged by that. But then, when (John Grier) Hibben talked, it was an earthquake in Wilson’s mind, he could not sleep because he had to go, he had to break, he had to go to vacation, and he wrote to a friend that he could not recover from that moment. It was completely a trauma that could not be explained only by a classical friendship, I would say.

Patrick Weil 

And then there was another story which resemble exactly what happened in this matter, which is his friendship with House. House was the most extraordinary friend. The White House Butler, who has been there for like 10 President, so he has never seen that. House  was staying at the White House days and nights and he was the best. Everything was for House. And suddenly in the middle of the peace negotiation in February 1919, House friendship is transformed in hatred. He couldn’t stand talking to him. He was telling his butler, “don’t open this letter, from love in some way, it became hatred. That was the first feature.” And then he became completely obsessed, again in Princeton, with an enemy; an older colleague, who had a project of graduate school. There was no big graduate school at Princeton, the guy had a project, and Wilson was totally agreeing with the project. He has edited the documents that were submitted to the board of Princeton, and then he denied yet ready to lie to the body was almost fired. But he was obsessed that with guy he could not stand he could not stand having this guy sharing with him the success of the graduate school to the point that he was almost fired by Princeton. At the moment, he jumped in New Jersey politics. And of course, nobody remembered that moment that he remembered it very well. And, Princeton University, remembered it.

Patrick Weil 

So it’s exactly what happened with Cabot Lodge. In the Senate, (Henry) Cabot Lodge, he admired Cabot Lodge, Cabot Lodge was the majority leader in the Senate. Cabot Lodge, published as an academic his first academic article, Cabot Lodge is quoted three times in this major book, congressional government. And suddenly, this respect is transforming in obsessional hatreds. And to the point that he said, “I will never–that is very important–I will never sign the same document than Cabot Lodge.” So the issue is here. If you have a reservation from the Senate, it is a document written and signed by the majority leader before the President on documents in the process. So yet, it would be co-authoring in some way the treaty which covered law. He said he could not imagine having his name. So, Wilson, had a kind of identification to highest figures to be able to face the very imposing figure of his father. He had an attachment to his father, with a double meaning of attachment. Attachment can mean love and strong feelings and it can also be means jail, and being like feeling like you are you cannot get out. It’s imposed to you. And it’s exactly what happened to Wilson in relation with his father.

Patrick Weil 

So, in the first part of his presidency, when he was dealing with domestic affairs, his identification to Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Great Britain permitted him first of all,  to succeed in his political ambition. He read an article when he was a student at Princeton. He read an article on Gladstone oratory talents being Prime Minister. And after reading this article, he wrote to his father, “I discovered I admire him.” And it is Bullitt in conversation with Freud–that found it was a Lacanian discovery in some way–he says, Wilson’s father wanted him to be a minister. He could be a minister and obey his father, but he will be a prime minister. And when he arrived in Princeton, in his speech as president, he says, “I feel like a prime minister.” And as you know, it was the book of congressional government. And as you know, the first thing he does when he’s president is the first presidents since Jefferson who delivered the State of the Union address in person like a prime minister, he comes to Congress. So that works very well.

Patrick Weil 

When he becomes involved in foreign affairs and his father has died, the competition with his father becomes of a higher standard because he becomes the Christ. And even sometimes God the Father. In fact, there are many testimonies. For example, in Lloyd George’s memoir, he reports that one day they were meeting and he says “the Christ did well, in principle, but it didn’t turn out well. So I’m here to adapt and correct, etc.” So, Fred wrote about that. And when you speak, I am here to correct, then he’s got the father is not only is the Christ, he is correcting the son. And so you cannot correct the 10 commandments. I mean, he brought the 10 commandment to the United States, he almost say that he made a speech, “God, come on us, etcetera.” He thought the text he has come back with was like a new God’s father, God’s mission, and he could not accept that this guy Cabot Lodge makes a reservation on a document on that. So to summarize, he had towards his father, official absolute love to the point that I have never seen a man so worshiping of his the father, but in fact, he had an aggressivity he never could express, which was expressed to one representative of his father, like Cabot Lodge, or like this older professor in Princeton.

Patrick Weil 

And the second dimension, which is something I can mention that I found in the archives, quite impressive: While working with Freud in the 1930s, Bullitt was taking notes of their conversation. And on November 1, 1930, he recorded the following dialogue with Freud: “Freud, you and I know that Wilson was a passive homosexual, while we won’t dare say it.” He said, “certainly we will say it, but surreptitiously for that’s the equivalent of not saying it at all.” And in fact, they wrote it 12 times in the book. Of course, his relations with his dear friends completely, if he has done a psychoanalysis, he would have discovered that in a dimension, it was unconscious, but he had this bisexual dimension that he was never conscious of, but played a major role in the terrible affective break he had, and that had an impact in his life as president of Princeton, and then as President of the United States.

John Torpey 

Well, this is obviously going to change the historiography of Woodrow Wilson and it’s a fascinating story. I mean, when it comes to being a minister or not, of course, I was raised Catholic. But, the idea of being a professor is–I’m not the first one to observe it– is a is a kind of secularized version of being a minister. So, but I didn’t need to be Prime Minister, I just being just being a regular secular Minister seemed like enough to me. But anyway, I want to ask you, because we’re running out of time, I wanted to ask you, I mean, it seems to me in a way that the book is really a kind of a plea for a return, if you like, to a kind of history that says, “it’s not all about large social forces, but rather, it’s about the outcome of individual people’s decisions and actions.” And more particularly, on the very last page of the book, you ask the following questions: By what means shall democracies prevent those who cannot be trusted with power from obtaining it, and using it to the detriment of their constituents, the wider world order and democracy itself? Now, it’s hard for an American not to hear worries about Donald Trump in that passage. So I wonder if you could say how is the book contribution to rethinking  what history should be about? And how is it more specifically, perhaps, about this other more specific…

Patrick Weil 

So that’s a very, very important question. In fact, it depends. What do you study? If you study the transformation of agricultural production between the 18th and 20th century, of course, individually, stories doesn’t matter much. But when you discuss what happened in a closed door meeting between three people, and that, for example, Wilson, who didn’t want to have any American Secretary accompanying him in the negotiation was Lord Lloyd and Clemenceau as most of them had secretary and diplomat assisting them. Confused when it was about Italy, he gave Trento to Italy. And in fact, before discovering what was most important for the Italian was Trieste. And then that was another feature of Wilson; once he has said something he was totally attached to his own words. He had a stenographer who were 12 years with him every day, taking note of everything he was saying. And then he was correcting. So as you follow Italian history know that probably not giving Trieste to the Italian probably contributed to Mussolini rise to power. So, I mean, it has a big impact. In fact, many people who have worked with Wilson felt he had a psychological problem. First of all, Churchill  in an op ed he wrote in the New York Times in 1929, says “Wilson wanted the German and the French and the British to make love with the German after four years of war, and could not sit at the same table with Republican senators.”

Patrick Weil 

So, he you have here personality impact on very important decisions, it depends what do you say. When Keynes wrote the economic consequences, people don’t remember the economic dimension of the book, he wrote the psychological portraits of Wilson and Clemencau also and much less of Lord Lloyd, because it’s a bias book. And in fact, he insisted a lot in his book. And this book is still playing a major role in the common understanding of the Treaty of Versailles. And I challenged it in my book, The Keynes narrative. So Keynes, instead of being an economist, and a major economist, focused on the personalities of the leaders to explain the peace treaty, so I am exactly following his past in this book, but I’m challenging first of all his data, and and the explanation he gives. And, in fact, where you are totally right, it is that without knowing, of course, Trump in advance, Bullitt thought that the presidential regime was dangerous. He was far–like Western was at the beginning–he was for a move to a parliamentary regime. In a parliamentary regime, when you feel a leader become nuts, you can fire him from Congress. I mean, in one day. In the American system, or the French system, if the President is nuts, it’s extremely complicated to get rid. And so the issue is, how do we manage that? After all, you, John, me and all the people who will listen to us when they are recruited in their jobs, we have a lot of screening, you have a lot of assessments who have evaluation testimonies, you have people, your previous colleagues, we are assessed before being recruited. Presidents are not much assessed, except by their speeches, by their words, by the talent they have to seduce crowds. And there is here something that should be thought about, shouldn’t we create some way of screening with the approval, of course of the people, but I mean, after the Trump experience and with other experience around the world, maybe it’s time to consider a way of assessing the quality of our leaders in another way than just saying, “Oh, he has been elected.” Yes. But perhaps before being elected, we should have some form if… I mean, there is something to be thought about. And of course, we could also say let’s move to a parliamentary system. Look what happened in the UK, they fired that Prime Minister when they don’t like him anymore. We cannot do that in the US or in France. We have to keep them for four years (and in my country is five years). And so that’s a problem which is not resolved. And it’s not something that we should neglect.

John Torpey 

But we do have this amendment, right?

Patrick Weil 

Yes.

John Torpey 

The Fifth amendment that could be invoked and people discussed it in the Trump administration. I don’t remember a lot of the details about it but there was a concern of this kind, probably tracing back at least to Wilson, and being raised again, as an issue with Trump. But people are out with the…

Patrick Weil 

Fith amendment. I think it’s a cabinet words, and the cabinet is chosen by the President. So it’s exactly that your point, maybe you should change the amendment say it could be raised by 25% of Congress or something like that. You should have a method of having… it’s very difficult for a member of the cabinet chosen by the president himself or herself to say…  so yes, you are absolutely right. But I think it’s perhaps, I could be time to assess the means we have after we discover the natural… So there was a journalist who, after reading the first section of the book in Washington said exactly that that is in the conclusion of my book. He says, “state papers or whatever, they’re not final measure of a president influence on the lives of others. They are also his secret laid  long before he thought he could call it his own, and in which he like other men, must sick to the law without acknowledging them to exist, they matter.” And it is the things we don’t know, but the best way to call leaders and that can be revealed only when they are in power, and what do we do them? So you are, you are proposing something very interesting. There are some mechanics, but they are not fitting perfectly with the need. I think it should not be the cabinet, it will not be invoked easily because if the opposition invokes it permanently, they will lose credit in the public opinion. And when it’s obvious that the person in the White House cannot manage the country. The fact that you say 20% of Congress can ask for after signing the Declaration, they want an assessment. I mean, there is something to be thought about.

John Torpey 

Right. Well, let’s hope we don’t have to fight to our displeasure that we don’t have a good way of moving beyond a sitting president who’s not a “compos mentis,” as they might say at Yale Law School. All right. Well, thanks very much. I appreciate you doing.

Patrick Weil 

Thanks very much, John.

John Torpey 

Want to thank Patrick Weil for taking the taking the time to discuss with us his recent book, The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. Look for us on the New Books Network and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song International Horizons is the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.