The Abuse of Profiling: Nixon, Ellsberg, and the CIA

How a President Went Astray--and Why Psychoanalysts Grew Concerned

The year 1968 was one of the most bitter political years in American history.

Leftists, inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society but appalled by the war in Vietnam, were divided over who to support. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy shocked the nation. To make matters worse, Mayor Daley violently suppressed protests at the Democratic convention in Chicago. “The whole world is watching,” chanted antiwar protesters—as tear gas drifted over Grant Park and television cameras rolled.

In contrast, there was no violence at the Republican convention in Miami that year. Norman Mailer thought there was hardly any drama at all. The most promising observation the provocative writer could come up with was the “unfortunate half-smile” on the face of presidential candidate Richard Nixon. At a press conference, Mailer watched as Nixon answered questions.

“You could all but see the signal pass from his brain to his jaw," wrote Mailer. "‘SMILE,’ the signal said, so he flashed his teeth in a painful kind of joyous grimace.”

As he worked a reception line, Nixon attended to each supporter, patting them on the back, passing them along to his wife with a special word of appreciation, and very often remembering their names.

When the smoke cleared in November, Richard Nixon had been elected president. Very soon, psychology became a political weapon in Nixon’s hands. As we saw in a previous blog entry, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been creating psychological profiles of world leaders for years. And since 1965 these efforts had been getting more and more sophisticated—a development that did not escape the notice of Nixon’s staff.

While protests over the Vietnam War continued, Nixon’s men wondered: Could the CIA put together a profile of one of Nixon’s enemies?

Daniel Ellsberg was a former employee of the RAND corporation who, while employed there, had access to the Pentagon Papers. The papers consisted of documents assembled by the government that showed just how confused and inept policymakers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had been in running the war. Ellsberg had leaked the papers to the New York Times and Washington Post, hoping that exposing the truth would halt or at least call into question the war. Nixon was furious.

The president's staffers Howard Hunt, David Young, and G. Gordon Liddy saw their opportunity. They approached the CIA with their request. As later investigations revealed, Nixon’s men were trying to tarnish Ellsberg’s reputation. A damaging psychological profile, they believed, would help.

Ellsberg, however, was not a foreign leader but an American citizen. The CIA’s charter explicitly limited its activities to the sphere of foreign policy. Thus the request put Agency psychiatrists in a quandary.

CIA psychiatrist Jerrold Post, who was assigned the job, initially objected on principle. Then he reluctantly put together a superficial psychological profile, relying on “open” (publicly available) sources. Nixon’s men found this unsatisfactory. A less scrupulous psychiatrist then expanded the CIA profile, including information from FBI and State Department files on Ellsberg.

Once again Hunt, Young and Liddy were not pleased. At this point Nixon’s staff decided to take the matter into their own hands and obtain compromising information for use in an enhanced profile. Their plan: a burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s former psychoanalyst.

Perhaps some compromising information on Ellsberg's sexual life could be discovered? Though the burglary was done ineptly and found nothing, it was illegal. And it served the personal interests of the president rather than the interests of the country. The eventual public disclosure of the Ellsberg burglary made headlines. When articles of impeachment were prepared against Nixon in 1974, they alleged abuse of power, specifically the creation of a secret White House investigative staff (the Plumbers) and the "misuse of the CIA." Rather than face impeachment and likely conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned.

Nixon was still in office in 1973, when the distinguished psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was invited to give the Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities in Washington. New revelations about the Watergate scandal, which would also be mentioned in the impeachment articles, were now a daily occurrence.

In the lectures, Erikson reflected that “humanistic insights and public issues” had “parted ways as never before.”

Speaking in support of ethical standards and humane values, Erikson never mentioned Nixon but instead discussed Thomas Jefferson. The contrast with Nixon was implicit. Erikson offered the idea of Jefferson as a “Protean President.” Borrowing the notion from the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton while adding his own caveats, Erikson advanced the idea that “changeability and multiplicity” could paradoxically indicate resilience and strength of character: something other than single-minded pursuit of self-interest that was all too obviously operative in the White House at the time.

In the early 1970s Erikson, Lifton, the historian Bruce Mazlish, and others were participating in an annual seminar in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, devoted to the interplay between psychology (particularly psychoanalysis) and history. In a recent e-mail, Lifton told me that in the Wellfleet meetings there was much discussion of Watergate and Ellsberg. In fact, “Ellsberg himself became an active member of the group.”

A psychological profile of Richard Nixon by Erik Erikson would be priceless reading. But it does not exist. “I don't think Erikson ever mentioned Nixon,” Lifton said. “He tended to be more general. He avoided activism but was sympathetic to mine.” Lifton himself, who went on to studying cults and thought control, concluded that Proteanism could serve as an antidote when totalitarian thinking emerges in society.

Nixon’s misuse of the CIA still echoes as a violation of the norms and ideals we hold for our complex democratic society. But the concerns of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts accompanied the president at every step along the way--and remain relevant today.

Next time: Ronald Reagan is asked to comment on the mental health of 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis—and gives a flip answer.