It is a logical assumption that most sane people would not want to become president of a nation. Who in their right mind would want the unceasing stress, the death threats, the vicious criticism, and the constant chaos? The majority of those in possession of good mental health would choose peaceful, middle-class anonymity hands down over bone-grinding torture in an impressive palace.
When George Washington’s vice president, John Adams, considered running for president in 1796, his wife, Abigail, warned, “You know what is before you—the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.” Yes, yes he did. And he wanted it anyway.
And, indeed, there is a dark side to the dazzling confidence, the charm, and the talent to persuade and inspire possessed in such stunning quantities by many world leaders. In 2009, a team of psychologists identified a disorder they called “hubris syndrome.” This illness is not genetic or inherent; it does not appear by early adulthood as most personality disorders do, including its evil twin, narcissistic personality disorder. Hubris syndrome is acquired by wielding power over a period of time. In other words, power triggers the illness. And when the power is gone, the illness subsides.
Characteristics include impulsivity, restlessness, recklessness, contempt for the advice of others, and overweening pride. Those who have it see the world as an arena in which to wield power and seek glory. They focus obsessively on their personal image, lose contact with reality, and see themselves as omnipotent messiahs. Unable to admit they have made a mistake, they find themselves increasingly isolated. No matter what horrors occur on their watch, they believe that history will vindicate them.
Long before the 2009 study, nineteenth-century American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton noticed the correlation between imprudence and power. She wrote, “I have known statesmen, soldiers, scientists, men trusted with interests and empires devoted to the public good, whose patriotism no one doubted, yet reckless of their business and family affairs.”
Lillian Parks, a White House seamstress who observed presidents from 1909 to 1960, said, “Maybe you’re a lot better off married to an average American. As far as I can see, no average man ever became President . . . The White House uses people up like soap.”
Some of the characteristics of world leaders are also the manic symptoms of bipolar disorder: increased energy and restlessness, euphoria, irritability, wild mood swings, unrealistic beliefs in one’s abilities, poor judgment, increased sex drive, the need for little sleep, and a denial that anything is wrong.
Lyndon Johnson exhibited clear symptoms of both bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders. As president, he had an obsessive need for secrecy and labeled anyone who disagreed with him a Communist, a traitor, or a spy in the pay of the Kennedy family. Refusing to take any personal responsibility for poor choices—such as sinking the country ever deeper into the Vietnam conflict—he blamed all his failures on a conspiracy of his enemies. For days on end, he would lie in bed with the covers pulled over his head, then jump up and make a hundred phone calls in a row. Johnson’s press secretary George Reedy said that he walked “on air” one minute and then was ready to “slash his wrists” the next. Worried about Johnson’s behavior, his special assistant Richard Goodwin consulted psychiatrists, who provided him some comfort. Johnson’s personality type, they said, in its inspirational, indefatigable expression, could achieve great things like leading “a Senate or even an entire country.” Which was true. On the domestic front—with Medicare, Head Start, and the Voting Rights Act—Johnson accomplished as much as Franklin D. Roosevelt. In other words, some leaders are successful because they are crazy.
While not all politically ambitious men have hubris syndrome or bipolar disorder in their full-blown expression, many are narcissistic risk-takers with feelings of invincibility. Seekers of high sensation, risk-takers feed upon the thrill of knowing they could get caught doing something they shouldn’t. Afterward, they triumph in knowing they didn’t get caught. They outsmarted everyone. And they are, primarily, in love with themselves.
Easily sexually aroused, they are always searching for the next burst of excitement. On his trips abroad, French president François Mitterrand, in his sixties, often disappeared with young women for a couple of hours after his speeches. A friend of his once remarked that he already had a wife and a mistress of many years, and a revolving harem of other lovers. “You are no longer twenty,” she chided. “What’s the point?”
Mitterrand replied solemnly, “You cannot understand. When I descend the tribunal, after the effervescence of the speech, I need to end in the arms of a woman.”
There appears to be little difference between the thrills of seeking public power, with crowds of adoring fans, to seeking pubic power, with an adoring audience of one. The same compulsions that send a man hurtling toward the White House can also send him into a foolhardy tryst with a woman. High political office and dangerous sex are, in fact, all about hubris and power.
Research has shown that the severity of hubris syndrome, bipolar disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder spikes with increased power, resulting in ever riskier behavior. Warren G. Harding routinely had sex in a closet in the Oval Office, in one case when his wife was pounding angrily on the office door. As governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt assigned his secretary and mistress, Missy LeHand, the bedroom next to his so that she could take dictation at any hour of the night, he said. In the White House, she lived a floor above Roosevelt but still wandered into his bedroom in her nightgown with no steno pad in hand, shocking the servants.
John F. Kennedy had sex with secretaries and prostitutes in the White House swimming pool and in his wife, Jackie’s, bed. Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, once walked into the Oval Office to find him in flagrante delicto with one of his secretaries on a sofa. A furious Johnson ordered the Secret Service to install a buzzer system. “If we saw Lady Bird heading for the elevator or stairs,” an agent recalled, “we were to ring the buzzer.”
As governor of Arkansas in the 1980s, Bill Clinton suggested he and his mistress, nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers, have sex during a party at the governor’s mansion in the first-floor bathroom—with Hillary in the next room. According to Flowers, she turned him down. He also wanted to have sex with her in the state capitol building. “He liked the idea of having sex on his desk or on the floor with all his staffers right outside,” she recalled in her 1995 memoir, Passion and Betrayal. “Bill felt an enormous sense of power from leading me into sexual adventures. He thought he was bulletproof in his relationship with me . . . He seemed to think nothing could ever touch him in an adverse way.”
Donald Trump’s risk-taking surprised former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, with whom he reputedly had an affair from 2006 to 2007. She told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump didn’t care whether people saw them together and didn’t seem to feel at all guilty about cheating on his wife. She said they made love in his home in New Jersey and once in his gilded Trump Tower apartment in New York City, where he lived with his wife and their young son, Barron. According to Karen, she asked, “Aren’t you afraid to bring me here?”
Trump replied, “They won’t say anything.”
Porn star Stormy Daniels has a similar Donald Trump story. In an interview with In Touch magazine, she said, “He didn’t seem worried about [anyone finding out about their tryst]. He was kind of arrogant. It did occur to me, ‘That’s a really stupid move on your part.’”
In 1912, the charismatic British politician David Lloyd George, who became prime minister in 1916, began a lifelong relationship with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, eventually fathering her child. It was an affair that could have ruined him politically had it come to public attention.
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi went a tad further in his narcissism than his political colleagues, hanging up placards in all his palaces that read “Long Live Silvio!” He had private orgies, one of which featured twenty young women in naughty nun costumes dancing around an eight-foot-tall phallus, singing, “Thank God for Silvio!” In 2009, a psychiatrist said he suffered from “a personality with unlimited egocentricity.”
“I am, far and away, the best prime minister that Italy has ever had in its one-hundred-and-fifty-year history,” he said as he prepared to step down from office after a scandal involving sex with an underaged prostitute. He seemed to have forgotten that under him the Italian economy had tanked, unemployment had skyrocketed, and government services had ground to a halt.
According to their lovers, the risky behavior of Harding, Johnson, Kennedy, Clinton, Trump, Lloyd George, Mitterrand, and Berlusconi involved unprotected sex. In at least three cases (Lloyd George, Kennedy, and Clinton) this resulted in unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Not only did Lloyd George father a child with his mistress, but Harding, Mitterrand, and possibly Johnson did, too. Kennedy suffered from chronic chlamydia, a venereal disease, which may have caused Jackie’s difficulty in having healthy children; out of a total of five pregnancies, she had one miscarriage, one stillbirth, and one infant who lived thirty-nine hours. There is a clear pattern among these men of recklessness, feelings of invincibility, and little concern for the collateral damage they caused to their wives and lovers.
Perhaps Michigan representative Candice Miller summed it up best in 2011, when she responded to a question about New York congressman Anthony Weiner tweeting photos of his wiener. “What is it with these guys?” she asked. “Don’t they think they’re going to get caught?”
Sadly, the answer is no. Or worse: they don’t even care.