Editor’s note: This is an updated and revised version of an article that was first published on October 25, 2017.
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This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026.
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In September of 1964, the serendipitously named Fact magazine presented readers with a series of articles under the heading “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.” The cover was even more emphatic, blaring, “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit To Be President!”
Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president, was outraged, and eventually won a substantial libel judgment against Fact. But this was cold comfort considering his landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson. The archconservative’s legal victory did, however, chastise the headshrinkers, whose professional association ruled that, going forward, no public figure could be diagnosed long-distance. The “Goldwater Rule” decrees, in part, “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination [of the subject] and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
That a World War II vet and two-term United States senator from Arizona could be judged unfit to be commander in chief seems a quaint notion in contemporary America, since the presumptive Republican candidate for president in 2024 is a businessman with a checkered financial history whose ongoing financial dealings and actions when he was president, from 2017 to 2021, have led to scores of criminal counts. But Donald Trump’s first administration, and his quest for a second, do not present the first time serious questions about presidential competence have arisen. In 1987, according to the PBS program American Experience, incoming White House chief of staff Howard Baker was told by his predecessor that President Reagan was “inattentive, inept,” and “lazy,” and that Baker and his staff should consider invoking the Constitution’s 25th amendment. This stipulates, in part, that the vice president can become “Acting President” if he and a majority of the cabinet believe that the commander in chief is unable “to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — whether due to insanity, paranoia, debilitating disease, or what have you. But the Great Communicator impressed his new chief of staff with sunny banter, and Reagan finished out his term with high public approval ratings, only to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.
In 2017, a much more public debate raged between psychiatric associations as to whether the Goldwater Rule should be lifted to enable professionals to probe the motives (and manias) of then President Trump. At that time, a group of concerned mental health professionals created an organization, Duty to Warn, that flouted the Goldwater Rule. They boldly proclaimed themselves “an association of mental health professionals (and other concerned citizens) who advocate Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he is psychologically unfit.” The Duty to Warn group also sponsored a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Today, in 2024, Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece and a trained psychologist, regularly posts about her uncle’s mental health problems; when he was president, she wrote extensively about whether psychiatric experts should be allowed to diagnose his public behavior.
As America’s psychiatric experts continue to fight over the efficacy of a long-distance diagnosis of the former POTUS, we do have an earlier example of an astral-couch session with another teetotaler of authoritarian bent — Adolf Hitler — which can perhaps give us insight into our current situation.
In late 1943, psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer was commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services to gather a team of compatriots and plumb the workings of the volatile Führer’s mind. A number of typos betray the haste under which “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend” was compiled. In 1943, victory for the Allies was far from certain, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government was seeking any way possible to divine what the madman across the water might do next. Despite often misspelling the subject’s name (“Adolph” rather than the correct “Adolf”), Langer and his team accurately predicted many of Hitler’s moves as the war went south for him, including his suicide in Berlin as the “1,000-year Reich” collapsed, having lasted not much more than a decade. (They also spent quite a few pages speculating on rumors that Germany’s supreme leader was fond of having women urinate and defecate upon him.)
The report includes quotes from the Führer himself, and others, as well as analysis from Langer’s team. Following is a sampling of Langer’s findings from a version of the report, released in 1999, that is available on the CIA’s website (which is more legible than Langer’s hastily typed original). Where notes are unattributed and not within quotation marks, they are taken from the report’s various authors.
“Do you realize that you are in the presence of the greatest German of all time?” —Adolf Hitler
“I cannot be mistaken. What I do and say is historical.” —A.H.
“There is only so much room in a brain, so much wall space, as it were, and if you furnish it with your slogans, the opposition has no place to put up any pictures later on, because the apartment of the brain is already crowded with your furniture.” —A.H.
It makes little difference whether the field be economics, education, foreign affairs, propaganda, movies, music or women’s dress. In each and every field he believes himself to be an unquestioned authority.
His passion for constructing huge buildings, stadia, bridges, roads, etc., can only be interpreted as attempts to compensate for his lack of confidence. These are tangible proofs of his greatness which are designed to impress himself as well as others. Just as he must be the greatest man in all the world, so he has a tendency to build the greatest and biggest of everything. Most of the structures he has erected he regards as temporary buildings. They are, to his way of thinking, on a par with ordinary mortals. The permanent buildings he plans to construct later on. They will be much larger and grander and will be designed to last at least a thousand years. In other words, these are befitting monuments to himself who plans on ruling the German people for that period of time through his new view of life.
[Hitler] also prides himself on his hardness and brutality:
“I am one of the hardest men Germany has had for decades, perhaps for centuries, equipped with the greatest authority of any German leader … but above all, I believe in my success. I believe in it unconditionally.”[American journalist] Howard K. Smith makes an interesting observation:
“I was convinced that of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolph [sic] Hitler, himself.”His power and fascination in speaking lay almost wholly in his ability to sense what a given audience wanted to hear and then to manipulate his theme in such a way that he would arouse the emotions of the crowd. Strasser [a Nazi leader murdered on Hitler’s orders during “The Night of the Long Knives” in 1934] says of this talent:
“Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph … enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation.”Loyalty means so much to him that the inscription over his door at Berchtesgaden reads, “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” [“My Honor is Loyalty”].
And for each success, Hitler modestly accepted all the credit. It was always Hitler that did this, and Hitler who did that, provided these acts were spectacular and met with the approval of the public. If they happened to meet with disapproval, it was always one of his assistants who was to blame. Every effort was made to cultivate the attitude that Hitler was infallible and was carrying through his mission of saving Germany.
Unquestionably, as a speaker, he has had a powerful influence on the common run of German people. His meetings were always crowded and by the time he got through speaking he had completely numbed the critical faculties of his listeners to the point where they were willing to believe almost anything he said. He flattered them and cajoled them. He hurled accusations at them one moment and amused them the next by building up straw men which he promptly knocked down. His tongue was like a lash which whipped up the emotions of his audience. And somehow he always managed to say what the majority of the audience were already secretly thinking but could not verbalize.
He is a master of the art of propaganda. Ludecke [a Nazi leader who left Germany and wrote a book about escaping being murdered on the Night of Long Knives] writes:
“He has a matchless instinct for taking advantage of every breeze to raise a political whirlwind. No official scandal was so petty that he could not magnify it into high treason; he could ferret out the most deviously ramified corruption in high places and plaster the town with the bad news.”Perhaps the truest words that [Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda] Goebbels ever wrote are:
“The Fuehrer does not change. He is the same now as he was when he was a boy.”His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your en-emy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
His working day before the war was equally disorderly.
[Conservative German politician who moved to the U.S. in 1941] Rauschning reports, “[Hitler] does not know how to work steadily. Indeed, he is incapable of working.”He dislikes desk work and seldom glances at the piles of reports which are placed on his desk daily. No matter how important these may be or how much his adjutants may urge him to attend to a particular matter, he refuses to take them seriously unless it happens to be a project which interests him.
Very frequently he becomes so absorbed in the news or in his own photographs that he completely forgets the topic under discussion. Ludecke writes:
“… [Hitler’s] quick mind would run away with the talk, or his attention would be distracted by the sudden discovery of the newspaper and he would stop to read it avidly, or he would interrupt your carefully prepared report with a long speech as though you were an audience…”Rauschning says that the general attitude in the Party was:
“Do anything you like but don’t get caught at it.”The world has come to know Adolph Hitler for his insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, cruelty and utter lack of feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints. In the course of relatively few years he has contrived to usurp such tremendous power that a few veiled threats, accusations or insinuations were sufficient to make the world tremble.
Earlier in his career the world had watched him with amusement. Many people refused to take him seriously on the grounds that “he could not possibly last.” As one action after another met with amazing success and the measure of the man became more obvious, this amusement was transformed into incredulousness. To most people, it seemed inconceivable that such things could actually happen in our modern civilization. Hitler, the leader of these activities, became generally regarded as a madman, if not inhuman.
They will realize that the madness of the Fuehrer has become the madness of a nation, if not of a large part of the continent. They will realize that these are not wholly the actions of a single individual but that a reciprocal relationship exists between the Fuehrer and the people and that the madness of the one stimulates and flows into the other and vice versa. It was not only Hitler, the madman, who created German madness, but German madness which created Hitler. Having created him as its spokesman and leader, it has been carried along by his momentum, perhaps far beyond the point where it was originally prepared to go. Nevertheless, it continues to follow his lead in spite of the fact that it must be obvious to all intelligent people now that his path leads to inevitable destruction.
From a scientific point of view, therefore, we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuehrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany but, to a smaller degree, in all civilized countries.
Hitler may go insane. Hitler has many characteristics which border on the schizophrenic. It is possible that when faced with defeat his psychological structure may collapse and leave him at the mercy of his unconscious forces. The possibilities of such an outcome diminish as he becomes older, but they should not be entirely excluded. This would not be an undesirable eventuality from our point of view since it would do much to undermine the Hitler legend in the minds of the German people.
Whatever else happens, we may be reasonably sure that as Germany suffers successive defeats Hitler will become more and more neurotic. Each defeat will shake his confidence still further and limit his opportunities for proving his own greatness to himself. In consequence he will feel himself more and more vulnerable to attack from his associates and his rages will increase in frequency. He will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability by continually stressing his brutality and ruthlessness.
His public appearances will become less and less for, as we have seen, he is unable to face a critical audience.
It should be noted that there are differences (mostly in word choices) between Langer’s roughly typed original report and the later reformatted and illustrated CIA version, which apparently was based on a 1968 paperback version of Langer’s revised, declassified version. One example is at the end of the following, original, quote: “From a scientific point of view, therefore, we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuhrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany but, to a smaller degree, in all civilized countries. To remove Hitler may be a necessary first step, but it would not be the cure.” The next line read, originally, It would be analogous to curing an ulcer without treating the underlying disease,” which then became, “It would be analogous to removing a chancre without treating the underlying disease” in the CIA transcription (pages 143 and 96, respectively).
Perhaps the most curious change comes in the report’s final paragraph. First, we have the CIA’s version:
In any case, his mental condition will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency. The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one which seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and at the same time wreak the greatest vengeance on a world he despises.
Here is Langer’s original 1943 version:
In any case, his mental condition will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency. The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one which seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and at the same time drag the world down in flames.
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Watch this space for more essays as we count down to America’s Semiquincentennial. What kind of celebration it will be is up to us.
The post Before the “Goldwater Rule” and Trump: Diagnosing Hitler in 1943 appeared first on The Village Voice.