Presidents Are Not Known For Being Rational
Rop Zone, The Seattle Times, 1/13/05
Let's face it, you have to be a little different to get elected president. Normal people just don't want the job.
Remember how Lyndon Johnson used to insist aides meet with him while he was sitting on the john? That was a little weird.
So I wasn't too surprised by the title of a round-table discussion at the annual American Historical Association convention, held here last week. The program was titled"Hubris and the Irrationality Principle in the Foreign Policy of Recent Presidents: From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush."
The hubris part we can take for granted, since anyone who runs for the office has to start out thinking he is God's gift to the world, sometimes literally.
The irrationality part is probably there more often than we'd like to think. Generally, presidents are surrounded by handlers who make sure they don't touch hot burners or start nuclear wars, but that only goes so far. Presidents get to make a lot of decisions on their own.
The three historians who spoke on the topic all have done studies of Nixon and Vietnam, so they spent most of their time comparing then and now.
Being historians, not psychologists, they didn't actually come out and say Nixon was, or Bush is, crazy. Well, a couple of them did, but in a nonclinical sense, just as you or I might say that about someone who didn't seem to be thinking right.
David Anderson, dean of the college of undergraduate programs at California State University, Monterey Bay, is a Vietnam vet and an expert on that war.
He talked about the Cold War's effect on U.S. policies. We thought the Russians were unbalanced, so we had to be a little crazy too. Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, thought the U.S. had to be willing to go to the brink.
Being tough in the Cold War is what got us into Vietnam, but at first our policy, under John Kennedy, was to be flexible and reactive. Do only as much as necessary to keep the North from overrunning the South.
It was Johnson's policy too, but in the 1964 campaign Barry Goldwater kept calling Johnson weak. Here comes heavy mental stuff.
Anderson said Johnson didn't want to be a sissy. Plenty of people have psychoanalyzed LBJ. He didn't want to be labeled a failure like he thought his father was. So that he would feel better, we got a huge escalation of the war.
Decisions aren't just about facts and goals. The psychology of the president matters.
Jeffrey Kimball is a professor at Miami University who has written several books on Vietnam. He mentioned three kinds of irrationality.
There's the deranged policy-maker ? Nero or Hitler. People who really are unbalanced. Second is behavior that is erratic, reckless, obsessive or inconsistent with reality, whether the person is clinically disturbed or not.
And the third is called the madman theory. That's when a sane leader chooses to act crazy to frighten his adversaries. Nixon tried it on the Soviets, but the historians don't think it worked.
Bush has used it too. Kimball said some foreign leaders' view of the president as"excessively and even irrationally belligerent" is what Bush had hoped for.
Kimball said hubris and arrogance played a part in getting us into Iraq.
Hofstra University professor Carolyn Eisenberg, a diplomatic historian, said everyone knew the idea of attacking Iraq was nuts. No one has been surprised by the mess there, she said, except maybe Bush and Thomas Friedman (a New York Times columnist)."The Army, the State Department, the president's father, historians all knew it was crazy."
She and Kimball differed on how much of the craziness in Nixon and Bush policies was or is real and how much was or is strategic pretense, but they agree the outcome has been costly.
Eisenberg said people ought not be focused so much on the craziness of the leader, but on how the rest of us allow it.
She also put blame on the structure of society."The kind of society America had become as a result of the Cold War was a society organized for war. What kind of country was the U.S. on Sept. 10 that when a terrible tragedy befell our country [on Sept. 11] we reacted in an irrational way?"
Eisenberg thinks historians, journalists, politicians and a lot of others who knew better didn't do their jobs. That's why she joined Historians Against the War.
Speaking out as part of a group is a good idea. If you speak out alone, people might say you're crazy. Who has the chutzpah to deal with that kind of criticism? well, except a president?
Let's face it, you have to be a little different to get elected president. Normal people just don't want the job.
Remember how Lyndon Johnson used to insist aides meet with him while he was sitting on the john? That was a little weird.
So I wasn't too surprised by the title of a round-table discussion at the annual American Historical Association convention, held here last week. The program was titled"Hubris and the Irrationality Principle in the Foreign Policy of Recent Presidents: From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush."
The hubris part we can take for granted, since anyone who runs for the office has to start out thinking he is God's gift to the world, sometimes literally.
The irrationality part is probably there more often than we'd like to think. Generally, presidents are surrounded by handlers who make sure they don't touch hot burners or start nuclear wars, but that only goes so far. Presidents get to make a lot of decisions on their own.
The three historians who spoke on the topic all have done studies of Nixon and Vietnam, so they spent most of their time comparing then and now.
Being historians, not psychologists, they didn't actually come out and say Nixon was, or Bush is, crazy. Well, a couple of them did, but in a nonclinical sense, just as you or I might say that about someone who didn't seem to be thinking right.
David Anderson, dean of the college of undergraduate programs at California State University, Monterey Bay, is a Vietnam vet and an expert on that war.
He talked about the Cold War's effect on U.S. policies. We thought the Russians were unbalanced, so we had to be a little crazy too. Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, thought the U.S. had to be willing to go to the brink.
Being tough in the Cold War is what got us into Vietnam, but at first our policy, under John Kennedy, was to be flexible and reactive. Do only as much as necessary to keep the North from overrunning the South.
It was Johnson's policy too, but in the 1964 campaign Barry Goldwater kept calling Johnson weak. Here comes heavy mental stuff.
Anderson said Johnson didn't want to be a sissy. Plenty of people have psychoanalyzed LBJ. He didn't want to be labeled a failure like he thought his father was. So that he would feel better, we got a huge escalation of the war.
Decisions aren't just about facts and goals. The psychology of the president matters.
Jeffrey Kimball is a professor at Miami University who has written several books on Vietnam. He mentioned three kinds of irrationality.
There's the deranged policy-maker ? Nero or Hitler. People who really are unbalanced. Second is behavior that is erratic, reckless, obsessive or inconsistent with reality, whether the person is clinically disturbed or not.
And the third is called the madman theory. That's when a sane leader chooses to act crazy to frighten his adversaries. Nixon tried it on the Soviets, but the historians don't think it worked.
Bush has used it too. Kimball said some foreign leaders' view of the president as"excessively and even irrationally belligerent" is what Bush had hoped for.
Kimball said hubris and arrogance played a part in getting us into Iraq.
Hofstra University professor Carolyn Eisenberg, a diplomatic historian, said everyone knew the idea of attacking Iraq was nuts. No one has been surprised by the mess there, she said, except maybe Bush and Thomas Friedman (a New York Times columnist)."The Army, the State Department, the president's father, historians all knew it was crazy."
She and Kimball differed on how much of the craziness in Nixon and Bush policies was or is real and how much was or is strategic pretense, but they agree the outcome has been costly.
Eisenberg said people ought not be focused so much on the craziness of the leader, but on how the rest of us allow it.
She also put blame on the structure of society."The kind of society America had become as a result of the Cold War was a society organized for war. What kind of country was the U.S. on Sept. 10 that when a terrible tragedy befell our country [on Sept. 11] we reacted in an irrational way?"
Eisenberg thinks historians, journalists, politicians and a lot of others who knew better didn't do their jobs. That's why she joined Historians Against the War.
Speaking out as part of a group is a good idea. If you speak out alone, people might say you're crazy. Who has the chutzpah to deal with that kind of criticism? well, except a president?