In Sickness and In Power

David Owen

Description

In Sickness and In Power looks at illness in heads of government, business and military leaders between 1901 and 2007. It considers how illness and therapy - both physical and mental - affect the decision-making of heads of government, engendering folly, in the sense of foolishness, stupidity or rashness. Owen is particularly interested in leaders who were not ill in the conventional sense, whose cognitive faculties functioned well, but who developed a 'hubristic syndrome' that powerfully affected their performance and their actions. As we learn here, they suffer a loss of capacity and become excessively self-confident and contemptuous of advice that runs counter to what they believe, or sometimes of any advice at all. Long fascinated with the inter-relationship between politics and medicine, David Owen uses his deep knowledge of both to look at sickness in political leaders. Owen expertly scrutinises such diverse political personalities as Sir Anthony Eden at the time of Suez in 1956; John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961; the last Shah of Iran; and President Mitterrand of France who suffered from prostate cancer. The author also devotes a chapter to the hubristic behaviour and relationship between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. The book ends by outlining some of the safeguards that society needs to address as a consequence of illness in heads of government. Revised and Updated Edition for 2016 including a new chapter entitled Hubris Syndrome in the Military.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Methuen
• Date de parution: 17 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780413777706
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2008 in hardback This revised ebook edition published by Methuen in 2016, 2022
Methuen & Co Orchard House Railway Street Slingsby, York, YO62 4AN
www.methuen.co.uk
2
Copyright © 2016, 2022 by David Owen
The right of David Owen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record or otherwise) without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
Typeset (print and ebook) by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex SS6 7EF
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Surrey CR0 4YY
Cover design: Bouyan Fitcher/BRIL
ISBN: 978 0 413 77769 0 Ebook: 978 0 413 77770 6
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library


To Maggie Smart
Who has worked with me for thirty-nine years
and for whom no words of thanks can be enough.


Contents
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Part 1 Illness in heads of government 1901–2014
Part 2 Case histories
Part 3 The intoxication of power
Part 4 Lessons for the future
Appendix
Notes
Illustrations


Acknowledgements
Many people have helped in the discussion and writing of this book and to all of them I offer my personal thanks. It was first published in 2008 and revised in 2011; this is in 2016 its second and most extensive revision.
John Wakefield, whom I have known since the late 1970s and with whom I have campaigned politically against British membership of the euro, deserves very special mention. With surgical precision, he cut one fifth of the initial manuscript but in doing so he enhanced the argument and greatly improved the book.
Doctors of medicine, including my son Gareth, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, have been an immense help, as has Argyrios Stringaris, also at the Institute of Psychiatry. I have been lucky to have the advice of Paul Flynn, a metabolic physician at the University of Cambridge; Dr Kevin Cahill, professor in tropical medicine and director of the Center for International Health and Cooperation in New York; Professor Gabriel Kune, emeritus professor of surgery, University of Melbourne; Dr David Ward, consultant cardiologist, St George’s Hospital, London; and Professor Anne Curtis, Yale University. I have also been fortunate to have been able to interview Dr Claude Gubler, President François Mitterrand’s personal doctor, and Dr Georges Flandrin and Dr Abbas Safavian, who treated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
A number of writers and journalists have helped: Dr Lawrence Altman, medical editor of the New York Times ; the late R. W. Apple, also from the New York Times ; Daniel Finkelstein of the London Times ; Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror ; and Norbert Both, who also helped with my previous book, Balkan Odyssey . I have been given valuable advice by Richard Reeves, presidential biographer of Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan; his assistant, Peter Keating; D. R. Thorpe, biographer of Anthony Eden; and Peter Merseburger, biographer of Willy Brandt. Thanks are also due to Lord Skidelsky and Lord Desai, to Jean Rosenthal from Paris, and to Simon O’Li from Paris and more recently from California.
I am grateful to the following libraries whose staff have gone out of their way to help. First and foremost the House of Lords library; then the University of Birmingham, whose library houses Anthony Eden’s ‘Avon papers’; the British Library; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston; and the library of the University of Liverpool, which holds all my personal archives.
After this book was first published, I wrote an article in Brain in 2009 with Professor Jonathan Davidson, entitled ‘Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?’, which enhanced and built on the case made for hubris syndrome in the first edition. I am indebted to my co-author, the distinguished emeritus professor in psychiatry at Duke University, for his invaluable contribution. He was also the lead author of an independent article quoted in this book on mental illness in US presidents (see note 6 in the Introduction).
The chapter notes are extensive. They are designed to provide background information on illnesses for non-medical readers and detail about international and domestic politics for readers who have a non-political background. Medical terms have been drawn from Black’s Medical Dictionary , 41st edition, edited by Harvey Marcovitch (London: A. & C. Black, 2005) and Oxford Concise Colour Medical Dictionary , 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Very special thanks go to my wife and literary agent, Debs. Also to Alan Gordon Walker, Jonathan Wadman and Peter Tummons at Methuen, who published the previous editions of this book. This revised edition has a new chapter in Part III, ‘Hubris Syndrome in the Military’, and much new material in Part IV, particularly in Chapter 10 on hubris in relation to the global financial crisis, which at the time of first publication in 2008, was in the future.
Any errors of fact or mistaken interpretations are solely my responsibility.


List of illustrations Theodore Roosevelt, in an unsuccessful bid for a third term as a third-party candidate in 1912. President Woodrow Wilson in March 1919 in Paris during post-war peace negotiations. Left to right: Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Wilson. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, worn out, arriving at the White House on 22 December 1941, having spent days at sea on HMS Duke of York , followed by a night flight from Hampton Roads Gate, Virginia, to the Anacostia Naval Air Station. Four days later he had a mild heart attack. Churchill on Christmas Day 1943 in Tunis. He had recovered enough from his pneumonia to lunch with General Dwight D. Eisenhower. President Franklin Roosevelt in a rare photograph of him in a wheel chair, February 1941. The little girl is the daughter of the caretaker of Roosevelt’s country retreat, where this photograph was taken. Yalta, February 1945. Behind Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are their foreign ministers, Anthony Eden, Edward Stettinius and Vyacheslav Molotov. Adolf Hitler at Potsdam, 21 March 1933, bowing to Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler pictured at the Berghof in 1944. The corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, strung upside down in Piazzale Loreto, Milan. President Dwight Eisenhower with ‘Much Better Thanks’ embroidered on his shirt. President Lyndon Johnson lifting up his shirt to show his operation scar. Shortly after the operation he suffered severe depression and wanted to resign. President Charles de Gaulle returning, depressed and disorientated, from Baden-Baden on 29 May 1968, having visited General Jacques Massu. Mao Zedong welcoming President Richard Nixon, Beijing, February 1972. Mao had been seriously ill only weeks before. President Ronald Reagan winces and raises his arm following an assassination attempt, 30 March 1981. The author with Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Gromyko in the Kremlin, October 1977. A vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev and an ailing Erich Honecker on the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in East Berlin, October 1989. By November the Berlin Wall had collapsed. President Boris Yeltsin in Rostov-on-Don, 10 June 1996. A remark able burst of energy from a man being treated for sleep apnoea and five months prior to a successful quintuple heart bypass operation. Anthony Eden’s one and only meeting with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cairo, 1955. Behind the civility there lay a deep unease. John F. Kennedy, a war hero. After serving in the South Pacific, he was in poor physical condition and already suffering from Addison’s disease. President Kennedy on crutches, 16 June 1961, his back problems having been exacerbated during a visit to Canada the previous month. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, June 1961. Hans Kraus, Kennedy’s White House back doctor and skilled rock climber. Kennedy presents a ‘50 Mile Hike’ award to an unidentified man in Florida, 23 February 1963. Prince Stanisław Radziwiłł has already received his ‘award’. Others pictured include Dr Max Jacobson, Lee Radziwiłł and Charles Spalding. Kennedy with Willy Brandt, mayor of West Berlin, and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. ‘ Ich bin ein Berliner ’, 26 June 1963. Five months earlier Adenauer had had a heart attack. Generalissimo Francisco Franco welcomes the Shah and Queen Soraya on a state visit to Madrid in 1957. The body of the former Iranian Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveida, shot in a prison cell. The Shah, very ill, in exile in Panama from December 1979 until March 1980. President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl clasping hands at the commemoration of the World War I battle of Verdun, 22 September 1984. Prime Minister Tony Blair, accompanied by General Sir Mike Jackson, the commander of the future Kosovo peacekeeping force, visiting the Army headquarters near Skopje in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 3 May 1999. Saddam Hussein executed by hanging on 30 December 2006 by order of the Iraqi government. This picture was taken illicitly on a mobile phone, which also recorded shouts of triumph. President George W. Bush viewing devastation at the Twi