The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression (review)

The Tormented President is a great title for a book, although it could apply to many more presidents than Coolidge. The problem is not just that the commander-in-chief has to make all of the hard decisions, as Dwight Eisenhower warned John F. Kennedy. Many presidents have also struggled with personal, political, and physical demons during their sojourns at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Oliver Stone's caricature of a drunken Richard Nixon talking to the White House walls is not necessary to convey that many presidents suffer traumas during their tenures: Abraham Lincoln, constitutionally tending toward melancholy, keenly mourned the deaths of his soldiers and of his son. Woodrow Wilson, stricken by a series of strokes, saw his dream of a League of Nations vanish along with his own physical powers. Jimmy Carter, struggling with failure after a career of triumphs in diverse fields, went gray before the all-seeing eyes of America's television cameras.

These dramatic and traumatic stories, combined with the highly personalized nature of the presidency, have triggered a cottage industry in diagnosing presidential psychopathology. At their best, such studies combine the arts, and sciences, of history, biography, psychology, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George pioneered this subfield of presidential biography. Their Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (Mineola, 1964; orig. pub. 1956) remains in print and continues to shape perceptions of both President Wilson and the broader field. More recently, Barber's oft-quoted 1972 book on Presidential Character absolutely begged for oversimplification with a subtitle promising the Holy Grailthat motivates much of this genre—"Predicting Presidential Performance."¹

Gilbert's valuable work on Coolidge emerges from this methodological backdrop, as well as the broader psychoanalysis of American culture in general, and the academy in particular. He suggests that Coolidge was not as "cool" as the 1924 slogan suggested, and was, in fact, sitting on a volcano of frustration and grief. The early deaths of his mother and sister scarred him for life. The sudden death of his beloved sixteen-year-old son and namesake from a fluke toe infection early in his presidency tormented him and resurrected early childhood traumas. As Gilbert writes, "Coolidge's presidency died when his son died, and he served out his remaining years in office as a mere shadow of his former self" (3). Gilbert makes a strong case to support these strong words, although a closer look at the Republican ideology which also shaped Coolidge's governing approach would have helped. Nonetheless, this book helps to complete Coolidge's portrait. Unfortunately, it is not methodologically pathbreaking, merely singing from the same historiographical hymnal that other psychologically inclined biographers have enjoyed.