Fawn Brodie and Richard Nixon: The Perils of Psychobiography

In a career full of controversial books, Fawn M. Brodie’s most provocative work may well have been Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, a psychobiography published in September 1981, eight months after her death. In putting Nixon on the couch, Brodie was hardly alone; her book joined a host of psychoanalytic studies of our most psychologically intriguing leader. But Brodie possessed a stature and a facility with Freudian ideas that outstripped most of Nixon’s other profilers, and her portrait was both eagerly awaited and uncommonly perceptive. Within a few years of its appearance, however, not just the book but also the very genre of psychobiography that she helped legitimize would fall from favor—its critics prevailing, perhaps temporarily, in the contest of academic fashions. Yet, ironically, Brodie and the psychobiographical project left a marked imprint on political discourse, as their analyses of Nixon, however flawed, cemented a link in the popular mind between politicians’ private, interior lives and their public, exterior actions.

The psychoanalyzing of Nixon marked a convergence of man and moment. Psychoanalysis exerted its greatest influence on political science, history, and popular commentary in the late 1960s and early 1970s—precisely when the nation elected as president a man patently ripe for (not to say in need of) psychodynamic treatment. Nixon was the subject of more psychoanalytic studies than any other president. “His compulsion to put himself on the couch in public, his obviously ‘psychological’ character, his heavily personalized policies,” wrote Bruce Mazlish, another of his more careful and responsible psychobiographers, “… convinced many otherwise skeptical people of the importance of personality in politics.” It was hard not to interpret Watergate in particular as at least partly a product of Nixon’s demons. Nixon’s own doctor, Arnold Hutschnecker, whom the president had consulted for insomnia, stress, and other psychosomatic ailments since the 1950s, went so far as to write in The New York Times in 1973, “I cannot help think[ing] that if an American President had a staff psychiatrist, perhaps a case such as Watergate might not have had a chance to develop.”

Still, Brodie’s 1981 biography stood out as a model of its genre. To be sure, the author lacked direct, sustained access to Nixon himself—he spurned her request for an interview—and without the benefit of his confidences, disclosures, and associations, her life of him was bound to fall short of the assured, nuanced portrait that a therapist might provide of a long-term patient. Yet she took pains to compensate for this built-in hazard of the genre. Forging beyond the public record, Brodie interviewed 150 sources and mined, as no one else had, the vast Nixon oral history collection at California State University at Fullerton. She concentrated her energies on Nixon’s youth and early career, the better to understand his formative experiences.

As a result, the book furnished valuable glimpses into Nixon’s character. Her examination of the theme of dead brothers in Nixon’s life—encompassing not only his own siblings Arthur and Harold, who died at ages 7 and 24, but also his sibling-like rivalry with the slain John F. Kennedy (and perhaps also Robert)—was revelatory. Brodie’s suggestion that Nixon’s success in the wake of both Kennedys’ murders may have activated the same brew of satisfaction and guilt that followed Harold’s

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demise helps make sense of the shift in his personality some saw in the late 1960s. Then, too, Brodie focused more than her predecessors on not just Nixon’s aggression but also his feral rage, finding traces of it in his youth, when he clobbered a playmate with a hatchet to get his jar of polliwogs. She unearthed an astonishing story of how Nixon, 47 years old, vice president, and candidate for president of the United States, repeatedly kicked the back of the car seat in which Air Force Major Don Hughes was seated. But more than any particular incidents, it was her close readings of such expressions of the unconscious as dreams, jokes, and slips—even the latent content of his public remarks—that made her book pop with insights.

Yet Brodie’s Richard Nixon met sharp criticism. Some detractors, of course, had never accepted the validity of psychobiography—or psychoanalysis—in the first place. When the work drew sneers from an anti-intellectual Nixon loyalist such as H.R. Haldeman (“100 percent baloney”) or a professional hatchet man such as Gore Vidal (who called Brodie “a certifiable fool”), their name-calling neither required nor admitted of any reply. Knee-jerk critics of psychobiography simply refused to reckon with those numerous instances where the traditional theories for explaining political behavior failed to make sense of Nixon’s actions.

If some attacks on Brodie were made from ignorance or prejudice, others had merit. Chief among these was the charge that her negative political opinion of Nixon distorted her psychological judgments. “Brodie thoroughly despised Nixon,” according to her biographer, Newell G. Bringhurst (Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, 1999). As early as 1973 she was writing op-ed pieces finding fault with the president, and she made no effort to hide her dislike. Her Nixon-hating had a personal dimension, too: Daniel Ellsberg, whom Nixon went after for leaking the Pentagon Papers, was a friend of Bernard Brodie’s from the RAND think tank, and Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s therapist, whose office Nixon’s “Plumbers” had broken into and searched before Watergate, was Brodie’s analyst as well.

Brodie partly contained her hostility toward her subject in Richard Nixon, but it still got the better of her. Because she wrote knowing that Nixon had uttered many big, consequential lies, she made too much of trivial fibs—“unnecessary lies”—in his past, seeing them as harbingers of his Watergate deceptions rather than routine political fudges. She made much of his statement in his 1952 “Checkers” speech that his wife was born “Patricia Ryan” on St. Patrick’s Day; Brodie noted that Pat’s given name was Thelma Catherine and her birthday was March 16. But like the journalist stumbling on a story that is “too good to check,” Brodie failed to seek out the full context of these facts. In fact, it was Pat’s father who affectionately rewrote his daughter’s history, nicknaming her “Pat” and celebrating her birth on the Irish holiday because she was born the night before. Brodie likewise followed other psychobiographers in treating a school assignment that Nixon wrote as a child, in which he pretended to be a dog, as an actual letter to his mother. Although the note’s content was still fair game for analysis, the context should clearly influence how it is read.

If Brodie overemphasized the negative, she neglected the positive—what her colleague Peter Loewenberg later called “Nixon’s many ego strengths and adaptations in a long political career.” Nixon’s ability to recover from major defeats, his skill at reading the public temper, and his success in commanding the loyalty of disparate blocs of Americans showed that his personality profile couldn’t be reduced to that of a vindictive, grandiose narcissist. Dwelling on his shortcomings, Brodie’s account was likely to leave readers wondering how Nixon ever rose so high.

In these respects Brodie differed little from Nixon’s other psychobiographers, who attracted similar criticisms. Given the intense emotions that Nixon aroused, it would have been remarkable if any biographer writing in the 1970s had been able to analyze him dispassionately. But if such a realization helps to contextualize Brodie’s biases, it poses a challenge to the viability of psychobiography itself. Reviewing Richard Nixon, the journalist Godfrey Hodgson wondered if it was even possible for psychobiographers, however adept, to overcome their own antipathies and analyze a politician as they would a private patient. Although Hodgson didn’t impugn Brodie’s motives—indeed, he praised her book for exhibiting “neither stridency nor malice”—he suggested that the Freudian approach had limited value in public affairs because it elevated the personal over the cultural and the political. “We are in danger of having the insights of psychotherapy,” Hodgson wrote, “used as a

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tool for character destruction, certainly for libel, potentially for revenge.”

Ironically, the qualities that made Nixon so well-suited for psychoanalytic treatment also made him a most unreliable subject. Polarizing, controversial, suspicious, and combative, he aroused an array of passions from different constituents. The author and editor Michael Korda once called him “the one American president of this century about whom it is absolutely impossible to be indifferent.” But if Nixon excited such strong feelings, how could any observer politically engaged enough to want to write about him avoid the pitfalls of political bias? The promise of the psychohistorical project, after all, was to provide answers for a seemingly post-ideological age—to move beyond unsatisfying readings of political behavior that reduced everything to ideology or self-interested calculation. But Nixon showed how difficult it could be to shelve political assumptions in pursuing a deeper interpretation. Some of Brodie’s critics urged that psychobiographers not tackle subjects they hated; another solution might be to avoid figures from the contemporary scene. Yet to disqualify Richard Nixon of all people from psychoanalytic inquiry was surely to call into question the worth of the very enterprise.

Soon after Brodie’s death, her style of head-on psychoanalysis of historical figures faded from academic fashion. Some analysts and historians continued to write such treatments (though only two of Nixon appeared in the next quarter century), but they never reached the wider audience that Brodie had found. Still, it would be wrong to say that their efforts failed.

To this day, it remains impossible to give a satisfying explanation for Nixon’s presidency without recourse to his character. Questions about why he was so driven to bolster his power that he broke the law or why he incriminated himself on tape—among many others—still lead inescapably into the domain of the unconscious. If straightforward works of psychohistory were often marred by undue speculation, such freewheeling conjecture was an asset for cultural creations in film or literature. Thus, a novella like Mark Maxwell’s Nixon/Carver (1998), which presented Nixon’s life as if recounted by short-story writer Raymond Carver, invested small, everyday acts and moments with psychological meaning. A film like Robert Altman’s 1984 “gonzo psychodocudrama” Secret Honor (the phrase is Pauline Kael’s), in which Philip Baker Hall plays Nixon rambling through a night of free associations about his brothers’ deaths and John F. Kennedy’s, takes us inside Nixon’s emotional life without having to worry that it contained more hypothesis than fact—since the movie was overtly a work of fiction.

Psychobiography also left its mark, for better and worse, in the emphasis that the political discourse now places on “character.” After Watergate, the public feared that any politician might be hiding Nixonian-like demons and tacitly deputized an eager press corps to scour the past behavior and private lives of candidates for high office. From Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid onward, the “character” issue pervaded campaigns, as new and arbitrary elements of one’s private life—past drug use, marital infidelity, and military service—drew scrutiny. Although this tendency would yield some miscarriages of justice, notably the prosecution of Bill Clinton, no one who remembered Watergate could reject the proposition that troubled psyches can lead to troubled presidencies. But now, instead of scholars, it was unreflective pundits—and average citizens—dispensing judgment. The legacy of Fawn Brodie and like-minded scholars may be, in the end, that we are all psychobiographers now.

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