Psychoanalytic Assessments of Character and PerformanceSullivan (1994, n), reviewing Woodward's book, faulted it for
"showing little sense of history and [being] unable to relate a narra-
tive to a larger argument," and for reflecting the "journalism of mere
process." On the other hand, as Lehmann-Haupt (1994, Ci8) points
out, "Readers with a solid background in Presidential politics will
probably find Mr. Woodward's book invaluable." These inside
accounts provide a crucial complementary set of data to supplement
and deepen our understanding of the public record and to cross-
check against it.
In examining political leaders, much benefit can be gained from
insiders' memoirs, if one is careful. Memoirs by or interviews with
major insiders about past events in which they were involved are
shaped by memories and views, but, above all, motives. In that
respect, there is something to be said for the freshness of contempo-
raneous accounts, when the actors are in the middle of their efforts.
In many memoirs, the real story is often how the author struggled to
wage the good fight against impossible odds (Reich 1997) or the
author's centrality to someone else's presidency (Morris 1996, 1997),
or both (Stephanopoulos 1999). However, in these cases, and with
any other partial account of a president's behavior, you cannot eval-
uate the "what" without knowing more about the "who."
CAVEAT EXPLICATOR: KNOW YOUR SOURCES
The psychoanalytically oriented analyst of a president's psychology
and performance can expect to have available a wide range of public
behavior for analysis. These data provide a very large pool of infor-
mation from which an analyst can develop a good understanding of a
president's psychology and assist in inferring the patterns that
underlie it. However, these sources can also be a swamp of misinfor-
mation, politically and personally motivated biases, and hidden fac-
tual dangers. It is no place for the factually ill-informed. It is imper-
ative for anyone doing such work to know the players involved and
their personal and political relationships to the subject. However,
even a determined effort to place the players may not always work, if
the real relationships are hidden and emerge only in retrospect. For
example, the political journalist Sidney Blumenthal (1993a, 1993^
1994) wrote a series of very positive articles about then candidate
Clinton and very negative ones about the Republican candidate