Are dictators mad geniuses?

Two new books suggest that demented world leaders like Saddam, Idi Amin and Baby Doc Duvalier might be more like that cranky guy in the next cubicle than Hannibal Lecter.

By Laura Miller

Apr 24, 2003 | When it comes to villains, who doesn't prefer a shameless fiend to a whining shirker? Milton's Satan, proclaiming that it is "better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n," or Iago, crowing over an opportunity for "double knavery," may be damnable, but their nihilistic bravado thrills us in a way that the plodding of an Adolf Eichmann cannot. Conscious, gleeful, unrepentant wickedness seems to crop up more often in fiction than in reality, though. When Hannah Arendt wrote of the "banality of evil" in "Eichmann in Jerusalem," she meant that it was precisely Eichmann's lack of imagination that made him capable of engineering the Holocaust, not the presence of some extraordinary malevolence.

But Eichmann was a middleman; what of the guys at the top, the strongmen or fanatics -- such as, for example, the Iraqi president recently deposed by the United States -- who give the horrific orders their underlings dutifully obey? Surely the buck stops somewhere, and when that buck is covered with blood, you find a towering monster standing there, dripping in gore to the elbows and cackling like Lex Luthor over the sheer, unadulterated badness of his own bad self, right?

Curiosity about just this question inspired Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio to pursue the seven deposed dictators he interviews in "Talk of the Devil." They include Idi Amin, Jan-Bedel Bokassa, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Nexhmije Hoxha, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Mira Markovic (wife of Slobodan Milosevic), who once ruled, respectively, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Poland, Albania, Haiti, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia. The roots of this slender volume lie in two newspaper clippings that Orizio carried around in his wallet for years, both referring to "personalities accused of cannibalism" (Amin and Bokassa). Eventually he made a project of tracking down "fallen tyrants," asking, "How does a one-time dictator, whom the history books describe as ruthless, immoral and power-crazed, grow old? What does he tell his children and grandchildren about himself? What does he tell himself?"

Along the same lines, Jerrold Post and fellow contributors to the new volume he has edited, "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," try to psych out heads of state, categorizing them according to various personality types and dissecting their actions. As a journalist, Orizio has no greater obligation than to amuse and inform, but Post and company are scientists specializing in political psychology. Orizio is just curious; Post et al. advise leaders on how their allies and adversaries might behave in negotiations or under duress. They work at institutions like the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, which Post founded.

And yet the authors of both of these books investigate more or less the same mystery: Why do powerful people do the things they do? Orizio mostly wants to know the motives and rationales for monstrous behavior, while Post and his fellow scientists don't really concern themselves with the greater moral perspective. Still, even the leaders of democracies can resort to terrible deeds (hence, Henry Kissinger avoids certain nations where the prosecution of human rights violations is taken seriously), and sometimes the devil is the prince of more than just darkness. One of the two lengthy sample profiles offered in "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders" is of Saddam Hussein. The other is of Bill Clinton.

Now officially a deposed despot, Saddam has made headlines with his past crimes of late, but he still has some stiff competition on the atrocity front. Take, to pick the most convenient example, those cannibalism accusations against Amin and Bokassa. Both men now deny the charges, and given the phantasmagorical element in African political culture, we may never know if they are true, but when Amin fled Uganda in 1979, "the decapitated heads of some of his adversaries were discovered in the fridges of the presidential residence," writes Orizio. (Amin broadcast decapitations on television, ordering that the victims be dressed in white to make the blood more visible.) He imprisoned, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his citizens, bankrupted the nation and earned himself a reputation as the "African Caligula."

Amin, as Orizio discovered after a labyrinthine quest for an interview, now lives quietly in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, where he is esteemed for his Muslim piety and claims, "I don't want to be mixed up in the affairs of the superpowers ... I've got five satellite dishes." One of his sons plays basketball at a Boston college. But another has formed "an unholy alliance with Sudanese tribal militiamen and former Hutu soldiers responsible for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda" to fight the Ugandan army from the Congo. And one of Orizio's sources, an Italian businessman, recalls being asked by the "jovial, self-confident" Amin to ship some large containers to northern Uganda, near Sudan: "Sensitive material, you understand. Important cargo."

Clearly, it's hard to stay out of the game, and unless he's caught, Saddam (who Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress insists is still in Iraq), could well resurface in a friendly state and get up to some of his old tricks. As Peter Suedfeld observes in "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," for an autocrat Saddam is remarkably resilient and resourceful, able to alter his tactics drastically to secure his own survival, even though he has in the past shown "rigid defiance in the face of his obvious misjudgments," according to another scholar, David G. Winter. Saddam has always had an eye for how his actions have gone over in the Arab world, and Post himself points out that what looks to Westerners like preposterous boasting has a different effect in the Middle East. "In the Arab world," he writes, "having the courage to fight a superior foe can bring political victory, even through a military defeat."

Former dictators, it seems, tend to be either ridiculous or sneakily impressive. Bokassa, who was also discovered upon his ouster to have stashed cadavers of opposition leaders in a gigantic freezer -- right by the kitchen -- moulders away Miss Havisham-style in a crumbling villa, attended by his former Cabinet secretary who now acts as a butler. He reminisces mournfully about the grotesquely lavish coronation ceremony where he had himself named emperor and tells Orizio that Pope Paul VI "secretly nominated me 13th apostle of Holy Mother Church." As with quite a few of the toppled tyrants profiled in "Talk of the Devil," his tale involves several scheming concubines, women who always seem to emerge from the ruins of dictatorships better off than the former dictators themselves.

Next Page: To this day, Albanians avoid saying Nexhmije Hoxha's name out loud

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