THE PSYCHOLOGICA L ASSESSMENT OF POLITICA L LEADER - With Profiles of SADDAM HUSSEIN AND BILL CLINTON - By Jerrold M. Post, MD 2003

With the wisdom of hindsight, many of life's most consequential
decisions are often a matter of happenstance. In the spring of 1965,1
was in Washington, DC, completing my second year as a Clinical
Associate of the National Institute of Mental Health before I was to
return to Boston for a planned career in academic psychiatry, when a
friend from medical school approached me to discuss "an unusual job
opportunity." Despite having secured a position on the faculty of
Harvard Medical School, I could not resist this provocative invita-
tion. We met for lunch, and he offered me the opportunity to
develop a pilot program for assessing at a distance the personality
and political behavior of foreign leaders for senior U.S. government
officials. A service of common concern, the unit would be adminis-
tratively based in the Central Intelligence Agency. I thought it
would be an interesting divertissement and decided to delay for two
years my entering the groves of academe.
In what was to be a marvelous intellectual odyssey, the planned
two-year diversion lasted twenty-one years. On assuming my posi-
tion at the Central Intelligence Agency, it was immediately clear
that my training in clinical psychiatry, while useful, was clearly
insufficient for the complex and daunting requirements of the chal-
lenging task ahead. The clinical case study was designed to establish
a diagnosis in a patient suffering with mental illness, but the large
majority of political leaders are psychologically normal. Indeed,
severe mental illness would be incompatible with sustained leader-
ship. Yet political leaders from different political cultures differ pro-
foundly, and understanding those differences would be of ines-timable value to our senior leaders both in negotiating with them
and in dealing with them in politico-military crises. But what ele-
ments of leadership should be delineated?
When the pilot program was institutionalized, I sought out lead-
ing figures in the emerging discipline of political psychology and
developed a senior advisory panel to ensure that state-of-the-art
knowledge and methodologies were applied. Serving on the panel
were two of the contributors to this volume who specialized in the
psychological evaluation of political leaders at a distance: Margaret
Hermann, professor of psychology and political science at the Mer-
shon Center of Ohio State University, and David Winter, professor
of social psychology at Wesleyan University. The ranks of the core
group of profilers were augmented by Steve Walker, professor of
political science at Arizona State University, and Walter Weintraub,
a research psychiatrist at the University of Maryland, who had
applied a method of psycholinguistic analysis he had originally
developed working with patient populations to political personali-
ties in his analysis of the Watergate tapes transcripts.
Over the years at the annual scientific meetings of the International
Society of Political Psychology, it was rare when a panel of profilers
did not consider presidential candidates or the new Soviet Party chair-
man. The Gulf crisis again highlighted the importance of leadership
psychology. I had the opportunity to testify twice before congres-
sional committees holding hearings on the Gulf crisis—the House
Armed Services Committee under Les Aspin and the House Foreign
Affairs Committee under Lee Hamilton—to present my assessment
of the personality and political behavior of Saddam Hussein.
In 1991 Stanley A. Renshon, professor of political science and
director of the political psychology program at the City University of
New York, convened a conference on the political psychology of the
Gulf crisis, which became the foundation of an edited volume (S. A.
Renshon, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders, Publics,
and the Process of Conflict [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1993}). At the conference, I remarked to my long-standing col-
leagues Hermann, Walker, Weintraub, and Winter that a book
bringing these methods for the psychological assessment of political
leaders together was long overdue. The group seized upon the idea,
and the notion of an edited volume, in which each methodologist would first describe his or her method and then apply the method,
was born. Indeed, a unique feature of the book, chosen by its con-
tributors, is to illustrate these methods using two leaders from radi-
cally different societies, William Jefferson Clinton for a democratic
society and Saddam Hussein for a closed totalitarian system, showing
how personality manifests itself in such different systems. Renshon
and Peter Suedfeld, professor of social psychology at the University
of British Columbia, both major figures in the field of at-a-distance
personality assessment, were also invited to contribute.
This book represents the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream: to
bring together within the covers of one volume the specialized meth-
ods for psychologically evaluating the personality and political
behavior of world leaders pioneered by a small group of specialists,
many of whom I have been working with for nearly thirty years.