It's been a while. I've been busy finishing up two books, both of which I will blog on later (HERE for blog link). One of them, for a Series I curate on behalf of Oxford University Press, "Inner Lives," zeros in on the life and personality of the writer Truman Capote. That book is set to appear in April of 2011. But, the first book in the Series comes out in a month or so. Its subject is George W. Bush, and it is written by one of the most important personality scientists working today, the narrative psychologist Dan P. McAdams.
Political psychobiography is tough. Real, solid facts are hard to come by. It isn't as if one can simply read Bush's autobiography and expect to find the truth revealed untendentiously. The same goes, incidentally, for Obama. Politicians of such stature don't actually want to express themselves honestly and openly; what they want is a smokescreen of self, a propagandized manifesto.
But McAdams hits the mark regardless. He sees things in the record that are new, and he does so by bringing to bear current, scientifically-validated research findings that shed a bright light on who Bush was and why he did what he did.
According to McAdams, for instance, Bush is an extravert. Extraverts (and that is how you spell it) are charming, sociable, energetic, but prone to impulsiveness and recklessness. Bush was also low on the cognitive side of openness to experience. He was incurious, the opposite of a thinker or deliberator. These two traits combined disastrously, depending on your political position, when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Bush moved impulsively to act, more or less thoughtlessly.
McAdams also focuses in on Bush's experience of Midland, Texas, his halcyon, flawless Nirvana. Midland became, for Bush, the physical image of perfection. He sought Midlands everywhere; and when he did not find them, he constructed them--another unconscious strategy behind the invasion.
There is lots more, and it's hard to summarize a book in a blog post. But if you've always wanted to know who Bush truly was, and found the few existing books on the subject wanting--as I do--then McAdams will be an eye-opener. Don't expect a hatchet job. McAdams really is "fair and balanced," unlike the network that coined the phrase. What I wanted to do, with the "Inner Lives" Series, is produce psychobiographical analyses resting on an intelligent, informed, insightful use of the findings coming out of personality science. McAdams's book on Bush--nominated by Oxford for a Pulitzer--gets things off to a terrific start.
