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Assessing Presidential Character

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BarberJames David, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1972, 479 pp., $10.00.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Alexander L. George
Alexander L. George
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Shortly after James Forrestal resigned as Secretary of Defense in late March 1949, the nation was shocked to learn that he was under treatment for a severe mental illness. Within a few months Forrestal committed suicide. This tragic occurrence, coming after Forrestal's highly successful career in government, directly challenged the long-standing mental-health mythology prevalent in Washington. The essence of the myth, as noted by Albert Deutsch at the time, was the belief that “no Very Important Person, under any circumstances, can possibly suffer from a psychosis.” The denial of this possibility in official Washington was of a piece with widely shared beliefs that to suffer a mental illness was a disgrace that automatically and permanently rendered one unfit for public office.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , January 1974 , pp. 234 - 282
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Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1974

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References

1 Deutsch's remarks, delivered at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, are quoted in Rogow, Arnold A., James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (New York 1963), 44Google Scholar.

2 The possibility that mental illness could strike political or military leaders in the era of push-button warfare has been dramatized in films and novels such as Dr. Strange-love, Seven Days in May, and Night of Camp David. A sober statement of this stark possibility was also offered by political scientist Arnold Rogow in his perceptive biography of Forrestal (fn. 1), 346. In a later publication Rogow noted that the serious consequences of illnesses such as Forrestal's for policy decisions tend to be checked by various built-in safeguards of officeholding in a hierarchical, bureaucratic form of government: “Most key policy decisions are distributed over a number of persons and a variety of agencies,” and there is a tendency within the bureaucracy “to remove or reduce the decision-making authority of the sick official while leaving him in office.” “Private Illness and Public Policy: The Cases of James Forrestal and John Winant,” American Journal of Psychiatry, cxxv (February 1969Google Scholar), 1096.

3 Ray, David, “The Psychiatric Screening of Political Leaders: The Goldwater Case and Beyond,” seminar paper, Political Science Department, Stanford University 1972Google Scholar. See also the brief account in Rogow, Arnold, The Psychiatrists (New York 1970), 125Google Scholar–27.

4 Despite these admonitions, Ralph Ginzburg (publisher of FACT, which had since expired, and now publisher of Avant Garde) announced four years later that more than 2,000 psychiatrists had responded to questions about the psychological fitness of President Johnson. The results, however, were never published, perhaps because of Johnson's announcement that he would not be a candidate for reelection. Rogow (fn. 3), 128. Also, in 1968 Senator Goldwater sued the publishers of FACT for libel and was awarded a judgment of $75,000 in punitive damages by a Federal District Court. The judgment was subsequently upheld on appeal.

5 Public discussion of this possibility was triggered by the disclosure, after his nomination as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket, that Senator Eagleton had been treated for depression on several occasions earlier in his career. See, for example, Halberstam, Michael J., M.D., “Who's Medically Fit for the White House?” New York Times Magazine, October 22, 1972, pp. 39ffGoogle Scholar; Reston, James, “The Need for a System of Health Checks,” reprinted in San Francisco Sunday Herald Examiner and Chronicle, August 6, 1972Google Scholar.

6 The preceding paragraphs draw in part upon the seminar discussion of David Ray's paper in which Dr. Rudolf Moos and Dr. John Adams, M.D., of the Psychiatry Department, Stanford Medical Center, participated.

7 “The Question of Presidential Character,” Saturday Review of the Society, LV (October 1972), 62–66Google Scholar. In this article, Senator McGovern is diagnosed as exemplifying one of Barber's four character types, the active-positive, which presents him in a favorable light; however, Barber also noted possible limitations in McGovern's performance if elected President.

8 Speculation on these matters in mid-July of 1973, when I had an opportunity to revise an earlier draft that had been written before the Watergate scandal began to unravel in March of 1973, seemed not only hazardous and premature, but also necessarily of limited value to those who would read this review some six or more months later. Accordingly, in revising the manuscript I decided to make no alterations in the substance of my earlier assessment of Barber's book which might benefit in some way from Watergate hindsight. However, I have permitted myself to add a few observations that have come to mind since then in reflecting on the emerging Watergate scandals.

9 With Watergate hindsight, I would emphasize this point even more. Some aspects of Nixon's behavior which appear to have contributed substantially to the crisis of his Presidency occurred in situational contexts other than those that Barber singled out as being most germane.

10 Barber, , “Classifying and Predicting Presidential Styles: Two ‘Weak’ Presidents,” Journal of Social Issues, xxiv (July 1968), 62Google Scholar, 78.

11 See, for example, the well-developed typologies of the various functions in the role of legislator, and the typologies of the ways in which each of these functions can be defined by the role-incumbent. Wahlke, J. and others, The Legislative System (New York 1962Google Scholar).

While useful for a differentiated study of the variance in role orientations adopted by legislators, these typologies are not relevant for study of the role definitions of other political positions; nor do they provide a direct and useful way, as Barber's concept of style does, for assessing the interaction between role and personality in the incumbent's performance in the legislature.

12 Barber, , “Adult Identity and Presidential Style: The Rhetorical Emphasis,” Daeda-lus, xcvii (Summer 1968), 938Google Scholar–68.

13 This point is emphasized particularly by Geyelin, Philip, LBJ and the World (New York 1966Google Scholar); see also Polsby, Nelson W., Congress and the Presidency (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1971), 33–41Google Scholar, 64–66.

14 Particularly useful approaches for conceptualizing the relationship between personality and role are to be found in Thomas, Edwin J., “Role Theory, Personality, and the Individual,” in Borgatta, E. R. and Lambert, W., eds., Handbook of Personality Theory and Research (New York 1968Google Scholar); Hodgson, R. C. and others, The Executive Role Constellation: An Analysis of Personality and Role Relations in Management (Boston 1965Google Scholar).

15 Lasswell, Harold D., Power and Personality (New York 1948), 101Google Scholar–4. The adverse impact small-group dynamics can have on political decision making is intensively explored by Janis, Irving L., Victims of Groupthink (Boston 1972Google Scholar).

16 The shift of emphasis from style to character can be seen by comparing the two articles Barber published in 1968 (both of which focus on style with hardly any mention of character) with his paper, “The President and His Friends,” given at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York, September 1969, in which the importance of character begins to be stressed. A further shift in emphasis from style to character—and the conversion of his earlier typology of style into the present one of character—took place during the revision of this APSA paper, for subsequent publication under a new title, “The Interplay of Presidential Character and Style: A Paradigm and Five Illustrations,” in Greenstein, Fred I. and Lerner, Michael, eds., A Source Book, for the Study of Personality and Politics (Chicago 1971), 384–408.Google Scholar

See also Barber's, “Some Consequences of Pluralization in Politics,” in Perloff, Harvey S., ed., The Future of the United States Government: Toward the Year 2000 (New York 1971Google Scholar).

17 One can sympathize with his desire to avoid becoming drawn into the quagmire of competing and unsatisfactory theories of character. Barber is not the first (nor will he be the last) political scientist to discover that the task of borrowing responsibly from the neighboring field of psychology cannot be discharged by attempting to find a single, neatly packaged, authoritative book or article written by a psychologist that tells you all you need to know about the problem.

For a review of developments in psychoanalytic conceptions of character, see chap. 2 of Ernst Prelinger and Carl N. Zimet, An Ego-Psychological Approach to Character Assessment (New York 1964).

18 “Why might we expect these two simple dimensions to outline the main character types? Because they stand for two central features of anyone's orientation toward life. In nearly every study of personality, some form of the active-passive contrast is critical; the general tendency to act or be acted upon is evident in such concepts as dominance-submission, extraversion-introversion, aggression-timidity, attack-defense, fight-flight, engagement-withdrawal, approach-avoidance” (p. 12).

19 The brief statement in Appendix A of The Lawmakers (New Haven and London 1965) was cautious, carefully qualified, and, it must be said, only a small step in this direction. In it, Barber suggested that one can find “some reflections, some common themes” similar to his own types in the accounts of those “who have observed humans acting in similar circumstances.” He referred the reader to specific portions of some thirty studies where “relevant evidence or theory” could be found. However, limitations of space did not permit Barber to quote, summarize, or analyze these materials; thus the reader was left to pursue the matter for himself.

20 The second dimension (“positive-negative affect toward one's activity”) constitutes a significant reformulation of what Barber called “commitment to the office” (or “willingness to return”) in The Lawmakers, ibid., 18, 212. This reformulation and recon-ceptualization of the second dimension, as Fred Greenstein suggests [personal communication], was apparently necessary in order to accommodate to the fact that the vicissitudes of presidential recruitment are likely to screen out those who utterly reject the presidential role.

21 Post-Watergate hindsight makes more noticeable the importance of old-fashioned moral character and the difficulty of incorporating this concept into character typologies such as Barber's.

22 Before we can attribute a validating function of some kind to die case studies of die Presidents, we have to consider whether the character-type constructs themselves have been formulated in part via induction and incorporation of findings from die case studies. Thus, if some of the postulated psychodynamics of a general character type are drawn from the historical case studies, an element of circularity may be involved. To die extent that the type constructs are extracted pardy from the case studies, they cannot be assessed and validated by those case studies.

Admittedly, exploratory research and circularity are often hard to distinguish; die issue is of secondary importance for the development and statement of a theory as against its testing. Barber is not too clear in indicating how he arrived at the composite of characteristics he imputes to each type. That the case studies are part of the empirical material from which the theory is derived is suggested by some of die language Barber employs in summarizing and drawing together “the main character themes emerging from these three cases” (Wilson, Hoover, and Johnson). He notes diat die “active” and “negative” variables diat define diis type were “relatively accessible to even the casual observer” of die biographical materials on these three Presidents. Continuing, Barber then makes a statement which suggests that he enriched the skeletal active-negative category via the case studies of die three Presidents: “What makes these simple dimensions interesting beyond mere description is their power in highlighting a whole range of personality qualities which emerge from the case studies and which explain why we find in the Presidency men who strive so mightily and enjoy it so little” (p. 95; emphasis added).

23 Sometimes the validity of the four character types is boldly asserted in Barber's biographical profiles of die Presidents. Thus, for example, Harding is said clearly to display “the typical passive-positive theme: the hunger for love, die impelling need to confirm one's lovableness” (p. 199; emphasis added). As for Coolidge and Eisenhower, “Both shared with other passive-negative people in politics a propensity for withdrawal . . .” (p. 172; emphasis added). The clear implication of such language is that a much larger number of political leaders have been studied from the same characterological perspective and that the results have confirmed the clustering of characteristics under each of Barber's types. For this, however, no documentation is provided in Presidential Character. (On die other hand, perhaps such a “claim” is not intended and the statement should be regarded merely as a rhetorical embellishment of the descriptions of the Presidents.) Nor can one find adequate documentation in Barber's earlier book, The Lawmakers. That study contained few references to character per se; but some of the distinctive personality characteristics Barber inferred as being associated with his four legislative types (“Lawmakers,” “Advertisers,” “Spectators” and “Reluctants”) do indeed bear a close resemblance to die characteristics he now imputes to his four character types. It should be noted, however, that die personality characteristics associated with his legislative types were impressionistically derived, being suggested by Barber's observations of Connecticut legislators. Indeed, with exemplary rigor and explicit caution, Barber noted that the hypotheses he advanced in The Lawmakers were “speculative generalizations, not verified results,” and discussed in detail the methodological problems of his study (pp. 271, 16). Since the hypotheses advanced in The Lawmakers were evidendy not subsequently assessed systematically against a new body of data, the earlier study offers useful impressionistic support at best; it does not contain rigorous empirical evidence on behalf of the validity of the four character types advanced in his latest work.

24 For a systematic discussion of the conditions under which personal variability among different actors may affect behavior in a given role, see Greenstein, Fred I., Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization (Chicago 1969), 46–57Google Scholar. See also Greenstein's discussion of the circumstances under which ego-defensive needs are likely to manifest themselves in an actor's political behavior, ibid., 57–61.

25 During the course of an individual's maturation and development, he develops a variety of constructive ego strategies in addition to his ego defenses. As Brewster Smith, Jerome Bruner, and Robert White noted many years ago, the early psychoportance of constructive strategies [employed by ‘normal individuals’] as a means of avoiding the vicissitudes that make crippling defenses necessary. . . . [They] often prevent things from occurring that might disrupt them or, more positively, they . . . plan events in such a way [so as to] operate effectively. . . .” Opinions and Personality (New York 1956Google Scholar) 283; see also 22.

26 We should also take note of complicating factors: (1) the role and situational requirements that impinge on a political actor may contain conflicting or ambiguous elements that make it more difficult for him to exercise effective control and constructive regulation of his personality needs; (2) the politician's role may itself include aberrant requirements which activate personality motives and needs that are ordinarily kept under control. In other words, as Willard Gaylin, M.D., has emphasized, the nature of politics and what it takes to be successful in politics—as in business—may attract sociopathic and paranoid personality types: “The capacity to be ruthless, driving and immoral, if also combined with intelligence and imagination, can be.a winning combination in politics as well as commerce. . . . Sociopathic and paranoid personality traits that are most dangerous in people of power are precisely those characteristics most suitable for the attainment of power in a competitive culture such as ours.” “What's Normal?”, New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1973Google Scholar.

27 There is ample evidence that cognitive dissonance mechanisms distorted Hoover's perception of reality vis-à-vis the scope and depth of the suffering of the unemployed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., notes striking examples of Hoover's tendency to downgrade and dismiss reports of suffering and malnutrition, and to favor more optimistic reports. He also notes that “the strain of maintaining his principles in the face of the accumulating evidence of human need doubdess led born to anxiety and to self-righteousness.” Schlesinger, A. M. Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston 1957), 241Google Scholar–43. But cognitive dissonance occurs in many circumstances other than the type of characterological rigidification postulated by Barber. Hoover evidently experienced an acute conflict at the cognitive level between his humanitarian values and his political philosophy, which he resolved in favor of the latter. One cannot exclude, of course, that the conflict experienced at the cognitive level was reinforced by personality needs and anxieties. But the precise nature of this personality involvement is, as I have suggested, another matter.

As this discussion implies, students of personality need to develop better ways of distinguishing and differentiating between explanations of behavior in terms of cognitive variables and explanations in terms of psychodynamic patterns aroused by the situation. In recent years attention has frequently been called to the danger of confounding these two explanatory variables. In addition to the need for finding indicators that will enable the investigator to discriminate between the two, ways must be found to investigate the relationship between cognitive and psychodynamic variables.

28 Thus, Barber concludes the chapter “Three Tragic Tales” with a general observation that fits into the explanation of Wilson's tragedy but not into that of Hoover and Johnson. Speaking of the way in which the process of rigidification leaves the active-negative President locked in mortal combat with an opponent wh o personifies a threat felt at the personal level, Barber states that for the beleaguered President “surrender is suicide, an admission of guilt and weakness. Having invested all his moral capital in the cause, he will—he must—plunge on to the end” (p. 57). Since such a prediction would be falsified by the Hoover and Johnson policy reversals, questions are raised regarding the adequacy of Barber's characterological theory which implies that an active-negative President loses the possibility of controlling or cutting short the process of rigidification once it has started.

29 Rather, he tries to explain why the characterological propensities to rigidification were not evident earlier in Wilson's (as well as Hoover's and Johnson's) careers (p. 99).

30 Compare Barber's emphasis on Nixon's negative affect towards his activity with White House correspondent Hugh Sidey's observation: “Nixon wears the Presidency like a comfortable coat of armor. It has been dented here and there and it has a few tarnished spots, but it fits him and it feels good. He loves the job.” Life Magazine, November 17, 1972, p. 4.

Bruce Mazlish, too, finds that Nixon “obviously enjoys his new role” as President, and that “in the office of President, Nixon believes that his role and his self have finally come togemer.” In Search of Nixon (New York 1972), 76Google Scholar.

31 It may be noted in passing that Barber evidently assumed that the kind of political tragedy he predicted would be plainly visible in public events. This would seem to exclude from the scope of the effort of prediction such events as the secret illegal activities of the special investigation unit Nixon set up in the White House in 1971. At first glance, it does not appear that the personality factors that may have entered into Nixon's authorization of such activities are the same as the psychodynamic process of rigidification postulated in Barber's theory. On the other hand, retrospective analysis of these recently disclosed activities may offer Barber an opportunity for a “correction by evidence” that would attempt to show that these activities, although not initially predicted by his theory, are at least consistent with an amplified and revised version of it

32 However, this coping strategy may in turn create a different set of risks for performance in the role. Long before the disclosures associated with the Watergate scandal, observers called attention to the dangers of isolation stemming from the President's preference for a staff system of tight buffers around him.

33 Mazlish's interpretation of the Haynsworth-Carswell affair emphasizes even more than Barber's that Nixon overreacted and became personally involved, experiencing his defeat as a humiliation (fn. 30, 127–31).

34 The backlash against the Cambodian invasion would seem to provide precisely the kind of challenge to Nixon's power, virtue, etc., diat, according to Barber's theory, should have triggered the ruinous process of rigidification in Nixon. In fact, the opposite occurred (as Barber reports without recognizing its possible significance as a “test” that (frfconfirms his prediction); for when “the reaction [to the Cambodian venture] exploded across the country, Nixon began to back-pedal. On May 5 he pledged to Congressional committees meeting in the White House that the Cambodian venture would be over in three to seven weeks, with all Americans withdrawn, and that he would not order troops deeper into Cambodia than 21 miles without seeking Congressional approval . . .” (pp. 439–40; emphasis added).

35 In stating this reinterpretation of the materials Barber provides, I draw also on an unpublished study of Nixon's political personality and political style by Richard Born (Stanford 1970). Born concludes that both in his prepolitical period and during his political career Nixon has consistently evinced a strong need for respect rather than for power. As criteria that a high value is placed on respect by the person, Born utilizes Harold D. Lasswell's three indicators of this need: (1) constant need for reassurance about “how am I doing?”; (2) sensitivity to the admiration of others; (3) reactions of wounded pride and resentment to slights, real or imagined. See “Democratic Character,” in The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell (Glencoe, Ill. 1951), 499Google Scholar. Whether Lasswell's indicators are adequate is less germane than the fact that some set of explicit indicators is necessary to avoid the dangers of a purely impressionistic judgment.

The difficult problem of identifying valid indicators of a power need and related problems connected with this concept and Lasswell's general hypothesis regarding the compensatory nature of power need are discussed in George, , “Power as a Compensatory Value for Political Leaders,” Journal of Social Issues, xxiv (July 1968), 29–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 A useful and incisive account of the ambiguities that plagued much of the earlier research on the authoritarian type, with direct relevance to the problems encountered in the construction of Barber's character types, is provided by Greenstein, Fred I., Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference and Conceptualization (Chicago 1969Google Scholar), chap. 4.

37 For discussion of these developments see, for example, Cronin, Thomas E., The State of the Presidency (forthcoming); Johnson, Richard T., Managing the White House (New York 1974Google Scholar).

38 Neither does Barber mention or refer to the possible significance, if any, of Nixon's consultations, while Vice President, with Arnold Hutschnecker, M.D., who in 1951 had written a book on psychosomatic medicine—leading to rumors later on that Nixon had seen a psychiatrist. In an article written in 1969, Dr. Hutschnecker states unequivocally that “during the entire period that I treated Mr. Nixon, I detected no sign of mental illness in him.” He also states that, because of the rumors, he and Nixon came to “an understanding, years before the 1960 elections, that we should discontinue our doctor-patient relationship.” Hutschnecker also refers to having had “an amicable personal relationship” with Nixon “over the years” during which time they “became friends and, as such, we discussed many subjects in an open and relaxed manner.” Hutschnecker, A. A. M.D., “The Mental Health of Our Leaders,” Look Magazine, July 15, 1969, pp. 51–54Google Scholar.

39 The possibility of change and maturation in personality is dealt with more explicitly and with some degree of plausibility in Mazlish's psychohistorical interpretation of Nixon. While finding that Nixon has not changed “in any fundamental sense” (fn. 30, 143), Mazlish sees evidence that Nixon achieved a release from old emotions and attained stronger and more effective ego controls. Ibid., 105, 125, 144–45.

40 Similar observations about Nixon's “crisis” behavior are offered by Mazlish, ibid., 26, 77, 87–88, 92, 127, 138; and by Arthur Woodstone's psychoanalytically inspired journalistic study, Nixon's Head (New York 1972Google Scholar).

41 Among the changes Mazlish sees in Nixon's development since the nadir in his political career is that “his control of impulse, his planning and deliberation were greater than ever” (fn. 30, 125).

42 For a fuller discussion see George, “Adaptation to Stress in Political Decision-making: The Individual, Small-Group, and Organizational Contexts,” in Coelho, G. V., Hamburg, D. A., and Adams, J., eds., Coping and Adaptation (New York 1974Google Scholar). See also Ole R. Holsti and Alexander L. George, “The Effects of Stress on the Performance of Foreign Policy-makers” (forthcoming).

43 Greenstein (fn. 36), especially pp. 65–68, 95–96, 102–44. For a briefer account somewhat differently stated, see Greenstein, “Personality and Politics,” prepared for The Handbook of Political Science (forthcoming). Harold Lasswell employs a different terminology (“nuclear,” “co-relational,” and “developmental”) in discussing similar problems. See his “A Note on Types' of Political Personality: Nuclear, Co-Relational, Developmental,” in Journal of Social Issues, xxiv (July 1968), 81–92Google Scholar; a helpful introduction to Lasswell's article is provided by Greenstein and Lerner (fn. 16), 231–32. Greenstein's terms (phenomenology, dynamics, genesis) are used here because their substantive referents are clearer and more relevant for our purposes than Lasswell's terminology.

44 Hempel, Carl Gustav, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York 1965), 157Google Scholar. See also the article on “Typologies” by Tiryakian, Edward A., in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, xvi, 177Google Scholar–86.

45 In The Lawmakers, Barber himself warned against the beguiling nature of typolo-gies such as his own: “At a certain stage in the development of a typology, one experiences a peculiar intellectual seduction. The world begins to arrange itself in fourfold tables. The lines separating the categories get blacker and thicker, the objects near the margins move quietly toward the centers of the cells or fade into invisibility . . .” (p. 261).

46 Hempel (fn. 44), 158 and 151–54; see also Tiryakian (fn. 44), 183.

47 This and the following paragraphs draw on an earlier, more detailed discussion in George, “Some Uses of Dynamic Psychology in Political Biography,” reprinted in Greenstein and Lerner (fn. 16), 78–98.

48 If the active-passive dimension is treated as a continuum, the objection may be raised that this obscures the conditions under which a person is active and the conditions under which he is not active.

49 On this point see, for example, Fried, Edrita, Active/Passive: The Crucial Psychological Dimension (New York 1971Google Scholar).

50 A similar observation is made by Fred Greenstein, who comments that Barber's two dimensions “need amplification to take account of individuals who exhibit mood and behavior swings and for emotionally ambivalent individuals.” “Political Psychology: A Pluralistic Universe,” prepared for The Handbook of Political Psychology, Jeanne N. Knutson, ed. (forthcoming).

51 In addition, special problems seem to arise in applying the dimension of positive-negative affect to the compulsively oriented active-negative type. Positive-negative, it will be recalled, refers to whether a person generally enjoys what he is doing. Barber finds that the euphoric reactions an active-negative person like Nixon displays are rare and short-lived and, besides, tinged with “a masochistic element” (p. 350). This acknowledges, at least, that the emotions a compulsive person experiences while at work, and the nature of his emotional reward, cannot be described very well with reference to the simple positive-negative dimension. While a compulsive person “worries” a decision, applying himself conscientiously to it, he also gains important satisfactions thereby. In some compulsives there may be a need to deny open or full expression of the positive affect experienced, as a kind of superstitious way of warding off danger and bad luck. Reliance on surface behavior for scoring a compulsive person on the positive-negative dimension involves the risk of overlooking the element of secret or controlled pleasures and the more complex nature of affect derived from activity.

52 Interesting from this standpoint is James Payne's effort to modify Barber's approach in order to avoid characterological issues. Payne, together with Oliver Woshinsky, has formulated a number of “incentive types” to characterize political activists and political leaders. The authors emphasize that “incentive” describes only a fraction of any individual politician's personality. See Payne, James L. and Woshinsky, Oliver H., “Incentives for Political Participation,” World Politics, xxiv (July 1972), 518CrossRefGoogle Scholar–46.

53 For a fuller statement of this possibility, see Hempel (fn. 44), 152–54, 158–59.

54 Hargrove, Erwin C., Presidential Leadership: Personality and Political Style (New York 1966Google Scholar).

55 For a review of several recent efforts of this kind, see Coles, Robert, “Shrinking History—Part Two,” New York Review of Books, xx (March 8, 1973Google Scholar). My own views and those of my wife, George, Juliette L., are elaborated in “Psycho-McCarthyism,” Psychology Today, vii (June 1973), 94–98Google Scholar.

56 Indeed, this direction has been taken with great caution by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in its recent study, “The VIP with Psychiatric Impairment,” VIII, Report #83 (January 1973).