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The title of this book, when read without the subtitle, would of course, make the reader immediately think they were encountering a book about our current president-elect, Donald J. Trump. Any anticipation of such immediacy and relevance is quickly converted, as conveyed by the subtitle, into a study of a much earlier president, Woodrow Wilson, who is largely unknown to today’s readers and the unexpected “madman” of the title. The average reader will undoubtedly be surprised at such an assessment of Wilson as a madman president. As presidents go, Wilson’s reputation has grown in stature since his presidential years. Apparently, during his two terms from 1912 to 1920 his involvement in World War I and in particular his role in the treaty of Versailles was the cause of much public consternation. Wilson had assumed a large role in the negotiations for the treaty of Versailles which he linked to the establishment of a league of nations that would ensure perpetual world peace. His was the plan to end war for all time. However, as presented by this author, his actions and stubbornness, as well as his hatred of the Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, resulted in the failure of the Senate to ratify the treaty. At the time this outcome was seen as cataclysmic.
It is in this setting that the dramatic narrative of this volume needs to be understood. It is very much linked to psychoanalysis through a connection between an American diplomat, William Bullitt, a figure of enormous, if concealed, importance in diplomatic history for most of the twentieth century. He served as ambassador to France before and during World War I and as ambassador to Russia shortly after the end of the war.
But Bullitt, whose life occupies great portions of this book to the extent that it could be seen as Bullitt’s story, was a larger than life character who appears to have had at least a cyclothymic character falling somewhat short of an overt diagnosis of manic depression. His intermittent depres