‘The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson’
By Patrick Weil
Harvard University Press, 400 pages

‘Kennan: A Life Between Worlds’
By Frank Costigliola
Princeton University Press, 648 pages

The title notwithstanding, Patrick Weil does not declare Woodrow Wilson mentally ill. He was, instead, a neurotic president with a father complex.

Many who served Wilson wondered about his mental health, as Mr. Weil amply documents. Yet like those reluctant to prosecute presidents who are in office, historians, diplomats, other public servants, and even psychiatrists dare not baldly assert that a president is off his rocker. 

Still, a renowned diplomat who had been close to Wilson and later to FDR, William Bullitt (1891-1967), risked his career in choosing to collaborate with Freud, his therapist, to expose the psychodynamics of Wilson’s self-defeating behavior that led to the destruction of his peace efforts that were to be crowned with the U.S. participation in the League of Nations.

Bullitt attacked Wilson publicly, but “Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study” was not published until 1966, at which time Bullitt was condemned, by and large, for the usual reasons psychobiographies are dismissed: reductive readings of personality and the historical process.

Freud’s daughter and others in his circle attacked a book that they said was really Bullitt’s alone. That charge Mr. Weil definitively destroys. Anna Freud could not believe Bullitt’s assertion that her father had signed his approval of each chapter. Well, Freud did do so, as Mr. Weil proved by discovering the original manuscript.

Scrape away the psychological jargon that Mr. Weill sometimes lapses into, and we see a remarkably weak man who constantly sought to idealize companions and confidants and then abandon them when they deviated in the slightest from Wilson’s own desires and plans.

Mr. Weil goes Bulllitt and Freud one better, saying they overlooked how those male intimates were substitutes for the cruel and demanding father that Wilson simultaneously loved and hated. The trouble is, Mr. Weil has to lean heavily on psychological theory for the hate part, since there is virtually no evidence of Wilson saying, let alone implying, that he hated his father.

Nonetheless, Wilson’s problems with authority and those who challenged him, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, are well evidenced in a kind of repetition-compulsion that will fascinate Freudians — or anyone, really, who gives any credence to psychological theory.  

Quite aside from whatever is to be made of Mr. Weil’s thesis, his depiction of Bullitt is remarkable and compelling. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Bullitt spoke his mind without much fear or favor, holding back only his collaboration with Freud, which he knew would doom his quest to be near the seat of power.

Diplomat George Kennan, whom Bullitt promoted when he was FDR’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, is quoted in Mr. Costigliola’s masterful biography on Bullitt’s powerful and commanding presence, his “huge forehead,” “engaging smile,” and “great vitality,” with the “easy poise of a cosmopolitan.” Bullitt might be the only American diplomat Stalin ever kissed — neither Mr. Weil nor Mr. Costigliola can resist reporting the moment when Stalin seemed smitten by Bullitt.

Mr. Costigliola reports that Kennan, author of the containment theory that ruled much of the U.S.’s strategy during the Cold War competition with the Soviets, called Bullitt a character “right of out F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Perhaps — though neither Mr. Costigliola nor Mr. Weil makes this point — Bullitt suffered the same fate as the grandiose Gatsbys of Fitzgerald’s world, who aimed higher than is supportable even in an America where Cole Porter said “anything goes.”

Ultimately, the blunt Bullitt lost favor with FDR as he had with Wilson, and became more and more conservative, even contemplating dropping an atomic bomb on Russia as the only way to stop an evil empire he opposed with considerable Christian fervor.

There are remarkably few references to Edith Galt, Wilson’s second wife, in Mr. Weil’s book, even though she had a crucial part to play in his presidency. Is it because the root of Wilson’s madness stems from his childhood, and therefore she comes too late into the explanations that Weil provides of the president’s aberrant behavior?

In the end, then, wrapping up biography and history into a Freudian drama — as compelling as Mr. Weil makes it — can be as obfuscating as it is illuminating.  

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography.”