March 28, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 44

Book Reviews – Please Stop RubbingYour Eyes

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi. Penguin, 340 pp., $27.95, Kindle edition $14.99.

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By Michael McMenamin

This “psychological history” by a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University argues that mentally ill persons make better leaders in times of crisis than the mentally healthy. It was respectfully—and uncritically—re- viewed in The New York Times.

Ghaemi’s “mentally ill” leaders are Lincoln, Gandhi, Jack Kennedy, FDR, Hitler, and, of course, Churchill—the internet’s poster child for Bipolar Disorder, what used to be termed manic- depression. (See “The Myth of the ‘Black Dog,'” page 28.) The “mentally healthy” include such prominent Nazis as Göring, Ribbentrop, Hess and Alfred Rosenberg. No, I’m not making this up. The others are Truman, Nixon, General George McClellan, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Neville Chamberlain.

The book’s psychological evaluation of these leaders produces one superficial, inaccurate portrait after the other. But here we concentrate on Churchill.

Churchill’s father was not the Eighth Duke of Marlborough, nor did he not have “a special fondness for sex” and “many dalliances throughout his life.” Nor did he leave £20,0000 to Lady Colin Campbell, “the ‘sex goddess’ of Victorian England.” Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald did not lead a government of national unity “for about ten years.” MacDonald was not called “the Boneless Wonder” by “some leftists,” but by Churchill in the House of Commons.

Churchill did not “want to send more troops to India rather than negotiate peaceful independence.” He supported Indian self-government at the state and regional level, and never called for more British troops. Neville Chamberlain was not the “successor to Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer” in 1924-29, nor did he “remain” Chancellor in 1931. Chamberlain did not “remain oblivious” to the Nazi threat until Munich in 1938. He did believe Hitler could be appeased by diplomacy, but his support for rearmament, if less than Churchill wanted, shows he was keenly aware of the Ger- man threat long before Munich.

Why so many howlers? Well, the only full Churchill biography Ghaemi cites is John Pearson’s The Private Lives of Winston Churchill (1991), about which the Sunday Telegraph wrote: “… counting up the factual errors might provide some amusement, but other- wise there cannot be any reason to buy this book.”

Finest Hour 73 disagreed: “This book is invaluable in demonstrating the depths to which Churchillphobia can sink, and the comparative value of honest and valid critiques.” Yet Ghaemi cites Pearson more than any other Churchill title, including two books by Martin Gilbert.

Though Ghaemi can’t get his facts straight on Churchill’s and Chamberlain’s careers, he feels sufficiently informed to offer detailed psychological critiques of both, asking, almost incredibly: “Was Churchill’s insanity linked to his wisdom? Was Chamberlain’s sanity linked to his blindness? Sanity prevented realistic assessment and rational decision making; one had to be somewhat depressed, a bit out of the mainstream, a contrarian rebel—as Churchill was—to see what was coming.” Please stop rubbing your eyes.

On Churchill’s alleged Bipolar Disorder, facts are few. At page 59, we learn that WSC “had severe periods of depression” because, evidently, “he was open about it.” On pages 61-62 is a cursory list of Churchill’s “depressive episodes,” starting with Cuba in 1895 and continuing with “at least two episodes per decade into his forties and fifties.” The only source for this is Pearson’s biography.

The author does cite Martin Gilbert’s In Search of Churchill but, like a vampire recoiling from the cross, he fails to confront Gilbert’s conclusion: “From a careful study of the archives, and from long talks with Churchill’s colleagues, drink and depression seemed much exaggerated, yet much repeated (and embellished) in recent popular accounts.”

Ghaemi fails again when he offers no rebuttal to Jock Colville’s comments in Gilbert’s book: “I suppose that this hypothetical state of depression into which Lord Moran alleges Sir Winston used to fall will become accepted dogma….[Lady Churchill] was quite positive that although her husband was occasionally depressed—as indeed most normal people are—he was not abnormally subject to long fits of depression. The expression ‘to have a black dog on one’s back’ was one that my nanny used to use very frequently….this does show what dangerous errors historians can make, by being ignorant of the jargon of an age preceding their own.”

Ghaemi’s failure to confront such primary source statements contradicting his thesis can only point to his failings as a historian through his choice of the wrong model. Pearson was convinced the Churchills were a scurrilous family and set out to find the evidence, even if manufactured. Ghaemi is convinced that the best leaders in crises are mentally ill, and followed in Pearson’s footsteps, preferring the superficial and the secondary to accurate testimony by principals. When evidence turned up that contradicted his beliefs, he suppressed it or failed to refute it. Scholars of the other figures in this book will laugh. Well they should.