Bp Barron, Richard Nixon, And President Brandon

Somewhere in his book The Strangest Way, a Catholic apologetic he wrote while a professor at the Mundelein seminary, Bp Barron notes a remark by Norman Mailer about Richard Nixon, that Nixon always seemed to have a little Nixon on his shoulder whispering in the big Nixon's ear telling him how to behave, advice like, "Now look sympathetic"; "Now smile." Bp Barron said no matter how you feel about Nixon, this was a good illustration of the divided self: there's no room for authenticity; you've always got to be gauging how you're coming off to other people.

(I've kept looking for this in my copy but so far have been unable to find the specific reference. If anyone knows where it is, I'll be delighted to update the post here.) But this brings out other associations for me. Mailer covered Nixon in at least two books, Miami & The Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather, which were about the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns. Mailer was by his own admission strangely drawn to Nixon and even tempted to be something of a closet Republican. I suspect he found something human in Nixon that wasn't in the public personae of his political opponents.

He perceived a basic insecurity in Nixon, a neuroticism that made him attractive -- maybe even a little like what made Humphrey Bogart an attractive figure in the Hollywood of the time; he wasn't conventionally handsome like, say, Clark Gable; he was skinny and slight; he was aware of his demons. (Indeed, Bogart went by his mother's name; Humphrey Bogart was a well-known illustrator in the 1920s.)

I think this is perhaps what drew Bp Barron to Mailer's observation of Nixon: Nixon was human enough to use as an example of the fallen condition. He was no Kennedy, no conventional hero, no movie star. He was visibly flawed, as all of us are, whether secretly or not.

But this brings up a different question. The American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity in 1941. According to Wikipedia,

The title refers to the normal "mask" that conceals the mental disorder of the psychopathic person in Cleckley's conceptualization.

Cleckley describes the psychopathic person as outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions. Cleckley questions whether this mask of sanity is voluntarily assumed to intentionally hide the lack of internal structure, but concludes it hides a serious, but yet imprecisely unidentified, semantic neuropsychiatric defect.

Ted Bundy might be the stereotypical example of this kind of personality, handsome, charming, even apparently vulnerable as he sometimes used a cast or a crutch to lure his victims, impressing even the judge who ultimately sentenced him to death. But even if we accept Mailer's characterization of Nixon as someone who needed constant prompting to maintain a mask, this simply acknowledges that in Nixon's case, the mask was always in danger of falling off. Ted Bundy was the conventional movie star; Nixon was the Humphrey Bogart.

But this brings me to Joe Biden. If we continue with the Norman Mailer model of Nixon's personality, the one thing Biden simply lacks is any sort of little Biden on his shoulder telling him the right thing to say or do. His gaffes, his misstatements, his hot mic moments, his fabulations, his insults, his outbursts are constant and unapologetic. There is simply no neuroticism. On one hand, he's no Nixon. Despite his nerdiness, Nixon defeated McGovern in a historic landslide. But neither is he a Kennedy, with no aristocratic movie-star glamour. The likelihood of Biden prevailing in the 2024 election is not high.

Nor is Biden a Truman, or if he is, a Truman-like strength of character and authenticity are yet to emerge. I briefly considered Warren G Harding, who seems not to have been apologetic about his own flaws, but Harding was nevertheless a more conventional back-slapping, baby-kissing politician whose demise came about in a highly extroverted political tour. Biden is retiring, even secretive, not a barnstormer.

As a type, Biden strikes me as completely new. He isn't neurotic like Nixon or Bogart; he isn't a hero like Kennedy; he isn't a conventional psychopath like Bundy, but there's pretty clearly some pathology there that he isn't making much effort to conceal, no mask. We're simply told to deal with it. I'm not sure what to do with this.