Patrick Weil

This book is great if you're wanting an overview of William Bullitt's political career (and a dash of his marital life). Curious about the politics surrounding the Treaty of Versailles? Got that. Never read about Freud's flight from Vienna after the Anschluss? This book will introduce you to the subject. Wait, aren't we supposed to be reading about the "lost psychobiography" on Woodrow Wilson written by Bullitt and Freud? Yeah, well, that's about two chapters out of the whole book. This book show more overall isn't a terrible read, but it is NOT what is advertised. show less

Americans revel in analysing the state of their president’s mind, especially when it helps score political points. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson recently ‘diagnosed’ Joe Biden with ‘cognitive decline’, dementia and senility. Biden’s predecessor in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, was probably the most psychoanalysed president in history. Journalists routinely pronounced him a sadistic narcissist with delusions of grandeur. His niece, the clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump, show more even got in on the act with an explosive book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, in which she argued that her uncle ‘meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder’. More than one million copies were sold in its first week. As Patrick Weil shows in The Madman in the White House, this is nothing new. In the 1920s, Sigmund Freud and the US diplomat William C. Bullitt co-authored a study of Woodrow Wilson. Almost a century later, in 2014, Weil found the original manuscript in Bullitt’s papers at Yale University.

Though today Bullitt’s fame is far overshadowed by both Freud and Wilson, during the first half of the 20th century he was an American diplomatic grandee. He had contacts in all the major chancelleries and served as US Ambassador to the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1936, and then to France until 1940. Bullitt had begun his career as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe in the Wilson administration during the First World War. After the Armistice, he became part of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, where the terms of surrender between the victorious Entente and the defeated Central Powers were to be negotiated. Bullitt admired Wilson’s idealism and strongly supported the president’s plan to build a liberal world order from the ruins of the war. But in Paris he found himself perplexed by Wilson’s erratic behaviour: his unwillingness to receive counsel, his constant flip-flopping, his repeated concessions and then his pompous denials that he had made concessions.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Theo Zenou recently finished a PhD in US history at the University of Cambridge. show less

More a biography of Ambassador Bullitt than an in depth accounting of Wilson’s actions while President, though there is plenty of info surrounding the Negotiation and failed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. An interesting but at times tedious read.