As Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel is arguably the second most powerful man in America. It's a job tailor-made for the unflappable—but that's not a description anyone would ever apply to Emanuel, not even when he was a political rookie raising money for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. If donors didn't agree to quintuple their normal contributions, Emanuel scolded them for their stinginess and hung up the phone. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who has known Emanuel for decades, contends the method displayed a level of chutzpah that "redefined the term." And it worked. Emanuel broke all fund-raising records.
Two things are absolutely clear about Rahm Emanuel. He is effective and he is extreme.
Emanuel says f*ck more frequently than "if, and, or but," insists political scientist Larry Sabato. Obama himself regularly jokes about Emanuel's profanity: "For Rahm, every day is a swearing-in ceremony." These days, Emanuel is making deliberate efforts to tone himself down. "I'm not yelling at people; I'm not jumping on tables [anymore]," he told Mark Leibovich of The New York Times.
Still, Emanuel displays many characteristics of a hypomanic temperament. This mildly manic disposition—which is not a mental illness—comes with assets that could propel someone to the top of his field: immense energy, drive, confidence, creativity, and infectious enthusiasm. I have found through interviews and historical accounts that hypomania has animated many leaders, from Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Carnegie to Emanuel's former boss Bill Clinton.
But it also carries a cluster of liabilities: overconfidence, irritability, and especially impulsivity that often pitches the hypomanic into hostility. Drives are heightened and impulse control is weakened, making the hypomanic brain like a Porsche with no brakes. In keeping with his hypomanic temperament, Emanuel doesn't need much sleep and he can't stay still. "He's like a shark that always has to keep moving or he dies," says John Lapp, who worked for Emanuel. And, like Clinton, Emanuel is highly creative, not least because his hyperkinetic mind can't stop generating ideas. "He's an idea machine," Sabato says.
While there are no strict estimates of the heritability of hypomania, it runs in families with bipolar disorder. In fact, Rahm Emanuel is one of three remarkably successful brothers who share many of the same traits. All three have risen to the heights of their professions—Hollywood, medicine, and politics. Ari, the youngest, is founder of the Endeavor talent agency, which represents many of Hollywood's biggest stars. He is the inspiration for Ari Gold, the lovable, fast-talking agent portrayed on HBO's Entourage. Zeke, the oldest, is head of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. He currently works at the White House as a special adviser for health policy.
According to Chicago Tribune White House correspondent Naftali Bendavid, who tailed Rahm while chronicling the 2006 Congressional election in The Thumpin', Emanuel epitomizes "unyielding aggression in pursuit of his goal," but not impulsivity. Unlike Clinton, whose "purple fits" of rage were legendary, Emanuel never lost control despite running 435 Congressional races. Even when he got in people's faces, there was a clear purpose in grilling his staff, district by district, at staccato speed, making his displeasure known if anyone stumbled.
If you picture the id and ego as a horse and rider, Rahm has a gigantic horse—like other hypomanics. But he's also a highly skilled rider. He's more heat-seeking missile than loose cannon.
His personality owes as much to his upbringing as to his biological inheritance. To learn more about the Emanuel family, I interviewed Zeke. We met at a coffee shop across the street from the working entrance to the White House. He walked in briskly—tall, wiry, with salt and pepper hair. He didn't order coffee, didn't take off his coat off, just plopped down, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: Go. He wasn't unpleasant; there were just no pleasantries.
When I mentioned that he and his siblings have been called the "hyperkinetic Emanuel brothers," he laughed. "Yes, we're very active." He spent the next 35 minutes spinning the track ball on his Blackberry and reviewing his emails—while warmly engaged in our conversation. The Emanuel boys were so active from an early age that the family had to move from their second floor apartment because of the constant commotion.
The center of the Emanuel universe was the family dinner table, a boisterous place where all the meaningful issues of the day were hotly debated. While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there "gladiatorial," Zeke described it to me as more of a Talmudic debate—the Jewish tradition of argument where one's opponent is viewed as an ally in the search for truth. "It's a sign of love to take someone's view seriously," says Zeke, who has fostered at NIH a style modeled directly on the Emanuel dinner table; he calls it "combative collegiality."
The most important measure of mental health, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein believed, is a capacity to integrate caring and aggressive feelings in relationships. In that regard, the Emanuels grew up extremely healthy. While a great deal of aggression was tolerated and sparked "a lot of competition, a lot of bloodshed, and plenty of fights between the brothers," it was also tempered by the underlying warmth. The warmth factor not only counterbalanced the aggression—this was not The Sopranos—it reduced the hostility that so often accompanies hypomania.
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