US Presidents And The N-Word

The N-word in this case is "narcissism". Last week I ran across this more or less typical piece of pop psychology:

Based on an analysis of the 19 presidents who served between 1897 and 2009 (from William McKinley to George W. Bush), the degree to which a commander in chief exhibited grandiose narcissistic personality traits is correlated with the duration of any wars they presided over.

. . . [Ohio State political scientist John P Harden] used data pulled from the Correlates of War database, which tracks conflicts involving at least 1,000 deaths in battle within a one-year period – so 11 operations for the US during the study period.

This was cross-referenced with previous research that analyzed the characters of US presidents, in part through their biographers. High levels of assertiveness and excitement-seeking, and low levels of modesty, compliance and straightforwardness were used to measure narcissistic tendencies.

US chiefs who scored lower on narcissism, including McKinley and Eisenhower, tended to put the interests of the state first. Wars were pursued only as a last resort, and were ended as quickly as possible – see Eisenhower's quick exit from the Korean War, for example.

Those presidents who ranked higher for narcissism, such as Roosevelt and Nixon, were less likely to separate personal and state interests, carrying on conflicts for longer. For example, Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, and continued it for another four years.

So I'm puzzled. McKinley, apparently thought not to be a narcissist, or at least not a big one, waged the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most attention-seeking of US presidents, won the Nobel Peace Prize and pursued a foreign policy of mediating international disputes. No wars began during his administration. The same might be said of Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, even though Coolidge was a "highly visible president":

During his 67 months as President, he held 520 press conferences or an average of nearly eight each month, "bringing himself almost daily," wrote a reporter in 1927, "into the American home." He spoke on the radio at least monthly to national audiences. Coolidge also enjoyed having himself photographed. To the delight of cameramen, the President posed in old-fashioned overalls (when working on his father's farm), full Indian headdress (speaking to a crowd of ten thousand Sioux), and cowboy chaps and hat (on vacation in South Dakota). He was the first President to appear in a talking film--a recording of one of his speeches.

On the other hand, regarding his highly ambitious and self-satisfied successor,

Coolidge thought Hoover boastful and derided him as "Wonder Boy." "That man," he said, "has offered me unsolicited advice every day for six years, all of it bad."

Yet neither started a war. Franklin Roosevelt had the Second World War effectively forced on him and followed policies aimed at shortening the war, such as aiding the Soviet Union against Hitler. He appears to have followed Eisenhower's advice of avoiding unnecessarily expensive maneuvers to secure Berlin, leaving that to the Soviets. His successor Truman, as much a publicity seeker as any other president, accepted the atomic bomb as a means of hastening Japanese surrender.

What can anyone say about Nixon? He's as much a nebbish or a neurotic as a narcissist. This goes to the problem that "narcissist" has become a meaningless term. I've been culling my bookshelves for books that are long out of fashion and that I'll never read again, and I came across two by the once-popular psychiatrist M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie (out they went). Although Peck does use the term, he wrote before "narcissism" became the effective universal descriptor for nearly any personality trait.

In fact, just ten years ago, a young and ambitious "continuing Anglican" priest who had discovered Peck while in seminary (I can only think belatedly; People of the Lie was published in 1983) decided the problem with a more senior priest he wanted to edge out in the transition to the ordinariate was that the senior man was a person of the lie and denounced him in Peck's terms to all who would listen. It says something about the whole situation that he must not have understood the current expression should be "narcissist", not "person of the lie", and neither, apparently, did his listeners -- and it says something about the ordinariate that the older man was passed over in favor of the younger with those advanced ideas.

Getting rid of books I'll never open again is turning out to be a big job. So far, though, I haven't run into any books about narcissism.