bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1997) — Winter 1997 // Hiver 1997, pp. 39–42
SHAME AND HUMILIATION: PRESIDEN-
TIAL DECISION MAKING ON VIETNAM by
Blema S. Steinberg, Montreal and Kingston,
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995,
p. Ix, 397, $45.00
Reviewed by Greg Donaghy
Several years ago, Paul Martin Sr., who spent a lifetime observing Canadian politics as a minister in the cabinets of Mackenzie King, St. Laurent, Pearson and Trudeau, dismissed personality as a substantial influence in political decision-making. What really mattered over the long-term, he insisted, were ideas, interests and institutions. On the other hand, a rookie Member of Parliament recentiy exclaimed to me that in Ottawa “personality was everything.” These two views reflect one of the most enduring problems in modern historiography — the influence of the individual psyche in decisions of state. A new study by the McGill political scientist and Montreal psychoanalyst Blema S. Steinberg, Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam, can be located at the core of this debate.
Steinberg adopts a neo-Freudian perspective to explore the personalities of Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and their role in three crucial decisions about American policy in Southeast Asia. Naturally, the childhood experiences of all three future presidents figure prominently in Steinberg’s analysis. As infants, Johnson and Nixon were “singled out as special” by their mothers, accomplished women trapped in emotionally and materially unsatisfying marriages. As their mothers sought their own fulfilment through the success of their sons, both Johnson and Nixon learned that maternal “love was contingent on performance.”
Johnson and Nixon developed strategies to cope with the fragile and vulnerable personalities that grew in their mothers’ shadows. Johnson, whose self-esteem was further eroded by the presence of competitive siblings, his father’s taunting and his mother’s anger at his lack of academic success, created a private “grandiose and omnipotent self that [was] immune to feelings of shame or humiliation.” In order to maintain this self-image, he sought throughout his career the constant approval of those around him — voters, political cronies and advisors. When faced with the humiliating prospect of South Vietnam’s collapse in 1965, Johnson sought reassurance in the sophisticated and experienced group of foreign policy advisors that Kennedy had assembled. Despite his own doubts about the wisdom of sending American troops to help Saigon, Johnson accepted the “hawkish” advice offered by advisors like the secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, and the national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy. He did so, argues Steinberg, essentially because “his self-esteem was dependent on maintaining his advisors’ respect.”
Nixon addressed the problems created by his mother’s conditional love through hard work at school and in his early professional life. To achieve the kind of autonomy and independence that his mother wished him to develop, Nixon was forced to control his needs and emotions. The feelings rienced when humiliated and shamed by of envy and impotent rage which he expepersonal or professional failure were projected onto outsiders, who were increasingly seen as “harmful and dangerous” and likely to attack his “vulnerable personality.” Distrustful and reserved, Nixon’s mature character was “infused with paranoia”
Nixon interpreted opposition to his presidential policies — both at home and abroad —as attempts to humiliate him personally, and he reacted with rage. In his first few months in office, there were plenty of • ’ targets for the president’s fury. A North e Vietnamese offensive in February 1969, the f Senate’s efforts to limit his capacity to wage war and domestic resistance to the war worked Nixon into a passion. In March 1969, he decided to bomb North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia as a prelude to invading the small Southeast Asian country. “Cambodia,” concludes Steinberg, “became the convenient displacement-object for Nixon’s anger, rage, and frustration.” Eisenhower stands in striking contrast to • Johnson and Nixon. (Steinberg adopts a curiously ahistorical arrangement which treats Eisenhower last.) The general’s childhood, as reconstructed by Steinberg on the basis on published memoirs, was normal and comparatively happy. The third of six boys, Eisenhower was loved by his parents for himself, and in growing up, was made aware that sibling rivalry and competition were normal aspects of family life. The successes a child were easily integrated into his person- and failures that Eisenhower experienced as ality, and he developed a healthy and stable sense of his own worth and capabilities. Unlike Johnson, Eisenhower was able to avoid grandiose ideas; unlike Nixon, he could tolerate humiliation. Consequently, when France faced defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and requested American military assistance, Eisenhower did not overvalue the opinions of his “hawkish advisors” or react personally to the North Vietnamese threat. Instead, he conducted a careful cost-benefit analysis and decided to oppose American intervention in Vietnam. Steinberg’s effort to reveal the psychological considerations which may have affected presidential decision making on Vietnam is credible and sensibly presented. Her evidence, which has been garnered from a wide variety of sources, is carefully marshalled. Her argument is clearly stated and easily followed. However, there are a number of interpretative and methodological problems in this study. First, the theoretical chapter underpinning her approach treats some very complex ideas in a confusing manner that will not be easy for the nonspecialist to penetrate. Indeed, the central concept of a “narcissistic personality” is imperfectly defined throughout the work in wholly negative terms. Yet Eisenhower, who apparently lacked a “significant narcissistic component,” is curiously labelled “the healthy narcissist.”
More important, however carefully Steinberg treats her evidence, one must wonder if the three brief psycho-biographies of Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon presented here are sufficiently detailed for her purposes. It is notoriously difficult to draw firm conclusions about the psychological motivations of live, co-operative patients. It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to ask that a psycho-biographer produce a full-length study of the life of an individual president, isolating and examining a series of similar decisions made under similar circumstances, before she drew hard and fast conclusions about the limits his psyche placed on his decision-making abilities.
• Finally, how accurately do the three decisions documented by Steinberg reflect the nature of Washington’s descent into war in Vietnam? It is not nearly as clear as Steinberg implies by her chosen case studies that the United States was plunged into war through a series of discrete and isolated decisions. At the same time as Eisenhower decided not to assist the French at Dien Bien Phu, for instance, his adminstration adopted a strategy of undermining the Geneva Accords and helping South Vietnam resist Communist Hanoi. Steinberg omits Kennedy (surely a rich vein of psychoanalytical data) on the grounds that his administration did not substantially escalate the war. Nevertheless, Kennedy adopted his predecessor’s policies and steadily increased the American commitment in Vietnam. In doing so, he created the circumstances in which Johnson and Nixon subsequently found themselves trapped. There remains a good deal of truth in the old argument, advanced most cogently in 1967 by Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedy advisor and Harvard historian, that the United States slipped into war in a series of small, incremental steps that appeared to follow one another with a great deal of logic. There is one final point worth making about the general problem created by the Freudian approach to the role of the unconscious and irrational in the policymaking process. It was made succinctly by W.H. Walsh over thirty years ago in his Philosophy of History:
But though we cannot (and should not) return to the naive confidence of our 42 bout de papier Vol. grandfathers in these matters, it must none the less be pointed out that the antirational case … cannot be stated without contradiction. It undermines not only the theories of which its proponents disapprove, but itself as well. For it asks us to believe, as a matter of rational conviction, that rational conviction is impossible. And this we cannot do.
Steinberg’s mono-causal explanations for US policy in Vietnam are too deterministic a basis for exploring and understanding presidential decision making. The insights generated in Shame and Humiliation need to be incorporated into a broader and more sophisticated conceptual framework. This should be capable of tracing the process of individual psychological growth over a lifetime as one’s personality interacts with one’s experience. (As Karl Jaspers noted “Man … is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process.”) Moreover, this model must treat the psyche as only one element in the host of structural, ideological and rational factors that shape the decisions that presidents — and prime ministers — make.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1997) — Winter 1997 // Hiver 1997, pp. 39–42. Read the rest of this issue →
