The Madman in the White House

Tue 30 April

Jesus College

When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do?

Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president, interviewing members of Wilson’s inner circle, his doctor, his secretary, and his most intimate advisers. After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, and even then it was heavily redacted.

For nearly a century, the mysterious original manuscript was considered lost or destroyed. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, historian Patrick Weil happened upon the original Bullitt and Freud manuscript. Join Weil at the Intellectual Forum as, based on his reading of the original manuscript, he offers a major reassessment of Wilson, of 20th-century American diplomacy, and of how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.

Cost: Free of charge