Personality
When the President Has a Stroke
Shedding light on the psychological travails of Woodrow Wilson
Posted November 25, 2009
When the President Has a Stroke
Shedding light on the psychological travails of Woodrow Wilson
by W. Barksdale Maynard, Ph.D.
Can we psychoanalyze the dead?
That is what historians have tried to do with Woodrow Wilson, one of the most perplexing men ever to hold the U. S. presidency. At times Wilson could be conciliatory, mild, and friendly. But unexpectedly he could turn angry and even vindictive, and his bullheadedness concerning the League of Nations treaty after World War I (which he insisted be ratified without any compromise whatsoever) had disastrous historical consequences--perhaps including Hitler and World War II.
So what was wrong with Woodrow Wilson? His contemporaries ascribed his testiness to his Scottish background or his Presbyterian fundamentalism, but subsequent biographers have pointed instead to deep psychological issues. Sigmund Freud himself wrote a book psychoanalyzing Wilson, blaming his overbearing father for his neuroses.
In recent years, attention has turned to Wilson's cardiovascular health. Famously, he suffered a stroke in the White House, which his wife and advisers tried to downplay. It was that stroke that made him so pugnacious concerning the League.
As historian Arthur Link pored over Wilson's papers in the 1970s, he made an astonishing discovery: That 1919 episode was not Wilson's first stroke. There had been earlier ones, and they probably account for Wilson's unpredictable and self-defeating behavior all along--as I describe in my new book, Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency (Yale, 2008).
Two Strokes in Mid-Life?
In 1896, the 39-year-old Wilson, then a college professor, suddenly lost the use of his right hand. He experienced sharp pain and forced himself to write with his left hand for months, a typically Wilsonian act of steely self-discipline and defiance. He thought he was suffering from writer's cramp, but this may have been his first, small stroke. Probably he had untreated high blood pressure, a condition that would claim his father's life a few years later.
Jump ahead one decade: Wilson was president of Princeton University and under great strain. One Monday morning in May 1906, he awoke to find himself blind in the left eye. He never again had more than peripheral vision in it, a blood vessel having ruptured. A Philadelphia doctor diagnosed arteriosclerosis and "an almost complete breakdown" and declared that Wilson's working days were over. "He has lived too tensely," Wilson's distraught wife said, and "prolonged high pressure on brain and nerves" had caused damage.
He was "very nervous," she added, and "annoyed by the things he usually enjoys." Sudden new irritability can be a symptom of a lacunar infarction or small stroke, as little blood vessels leak into the brain. A modern medical analysis by Dr. Bert E. Park says that Wilson at fifty was already a very sick man, a burst blood vessel in the eye ordinarily being a symptom of the final stages of cardiovascular disease.
As would happen again in 1919, Wilson's personality swiftly hardened. The college president who had been reasonable and careful in instituting reforms now became hasty and imperious. He tried to ram through controversial schemes without regard to others' feelings. He shocked his friends by acting reckless and haughty.
Was Woodrow Wilson suffering from post-stroke symptoms? Stroke victims often act speedily, disregard details, ignore contradictory viewpoints, and withdraw into a citadel of self-importance. And they can become exceedingly harsh towards their enemies.
It is difficult if not impossible to psychoanalyze the dead. Perhaps Wilson didn't suffer strokes in 1896 and 1906, but something else altogether. Perhaps his hellbent behavior was a deliberate strategy to baffle his opponents. But historians increasingly agree that Woodrow Wilson was surprisingly sick with cardiovascular disease, even early in his life, and that erratic behavior was the result.
A Final Blow
The culmination of years of overwork, stress, and hypertension, the 1919 stroke finally decimated Woodrow Wilson. The White House servants were aghast at the change, the illness leaving him a shadow of his former self, a half-paralyzed wreck painful to see. Lying in his bed the first day, he appeared dead. Later he improved only enough to be wheeled around in a special chair for a few hours, sitting in his wife's sunny new Rose Garden or watching a film at noon in the East Room. His speech was mumbled, his personality hardened, now "unreasonable, unnatural, simply impossible." And he was deeply suspicious. A Washington observer was reminded of Princeton days by these "swift, pitiless, unexplained changes from friendly relations to cold dismissal."
When he left office in 1921, attendants lifted his legs in turn so he could descend the White House steps and enter the automobile that would drive him to the Capitol for the inauguration of his hated successor, Warren G. Harding. Onlookers were shocked by Wilson's appearance. He was "waxen, drawn and stooped"; "stricken, almost pathetic." As the car passed through the crowds, Harding signaled to them to stop cheering, in deference to the broken figure beside him. He tried to entertain him by telling a story, but when he looked over at Wilson, it was obvious that his mind was elsewhere. His stroke having robbed him of his precious self-control, he was helplessly crying.
W. Barksdale Maynard, Ph.D., is the award-winning author of four books, including a new biography of Woodrow Wilson. He has taught at Johns Hopkins and Princeton.
