Are dictators mad geniuses?

A couple of these men are ruled by Lady Macbeth types, particularly Jean-Claude Duvalier, who lost one extravagant, fiscally ingenious and Machiavellian wife only to gain an enterprising "companion," Véronique Roi, who has dedicated herself to resurrecting his reputation and perhaps his reign. Milosevic's political career appears to have been masterminded by his wife, the fearsome Mira Markovic of the Marlo Thomas bangs and uncanny ability, during her husband's rule, of predicting just which inconvenient political figure would next be killed in a mysterious bombing. Orizio overhears her speaking baby talk with Milosevic, who calls from the prison in The Hague where he is being tried for war crimes. Nexhmije Hoxha, the imprisoned surviving member of the couple who ran perhaps the world's creepiest totalitarian regime, in Albania, still has her former subjects so spooked that they avoid using her name, referring to her only as "the Widow."

But as lurid as the biographies of all these despots may be, to a man (and woman) they are now primarily wallowers in aggrieved resentment. They sulk. Not one of them expresses any regret for the hordes of people they slaughtered, robbed and oppressed. Quite a few of them are clearly crashing bores, ranting on in endless refutations of their critics and referring Orizio to books they have written that supposedly contain definitive proof they've gotten a bad rap. Like Hoxha, Mengistu -- whose "Red Terror" campaign of repression killed a half million Ethiopians in a single year and charged the families of executed "enemies of the people" for the bullets used to slay their relatives -- complains of having been "betrayed" by the Soviets, by the African National Congress, by Ethiopia itself. "I did what I did only because my country had to be saved from tribalism and feudalism. If I failed, it was only because I was betrayed. The so-called genocide was nothing more than a just war in defense of the revolution."

The eerie thing about all these former dictators is that, in carping about their falls from power, they might as well be describing an ugly divorce or the job they lost because of that person in the office who was out to get them -- rather than some of the marquee horrors of the 20th century. There are harmless psychotics who have grander and deeper conceptions of their own moral character than this lot. In "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," Post cautions against characterizing a tyrant like Saddam as a "madman," a "pejorative diagnosis" he dismisses as "not only inaccurate but also dangerous" because it suggests that the former Iraqi leader is "unpredictable."

Of course, Post's entire profession (and the continued funding of it) is based on the premise that the actions of men like Saddam Hussein can be predicted and that political psychologists are the ones to do it, but it's still remarkable how much Saddam's own statements echo those of Orizio's dictators. The cruel measures of his regime are "justified by the 'exceptionalism of revolutionary needs,'" which are all in fact "Saddam Hussein's needs and messianic ambitions." As grandiloquent as Saddam's rhetoric may be, though, Post stresses that "there is no evidence that he is suffering from a psychotic disorder. He is not impulsive, he acts only after judicious consideration, and he can be extremely patient; indeed, he uses time as a weapon." (Not that time proved much use against a U.S. administration determined to get rid of him whether or not it could establish that he possessed the weapons of mass destruction it used to justify the invasion of Iraq.)

Some of the contributors to "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders" specialize in a peculiar form of statistical verbal analysis in which certain words or expressions are sorted into such categories as "qualifiers," "retractors," "explainers" and "adverbial intensifiers," each indicating a particular trait or disposition. The most spontaneous samples available of a leader's speech are then fed into this system, the incidence of words in each category counted up and thus the various aspects of the speaker's personality can purportedly be quantified.

It's a Poindexterish sort of theory, and it leads to nearly unreadable chapters with titles like "Assessing Integrative Complexity at a Distance: Archival Analyses of Thinking and Decision Making." Mostly this method grinds its way through impenetrable charts and citations to fairly obvious conclusions -- for example that Saddam has "a proclivity to master situations rather than react passively to events." (Well, he was a totalitarian dictator, after all.) But some of the tidbits are intriguing. Richard Nixon's White House tapes provided a wealth of data for these researchers, who compared the speech of the principals to that "of a normal control group and of populations of delusional, impulsive, depressive and compulsive psychiatric patients." They found that John Dean and John Ehrlichman showed fairly normal verbal behavior, while Nixon talked like the depressed and impulsive patients and "[H.R.] Haldeman's style appeared to be abnormal but unlike any of the patient groups previously studied."

If you work hard enough at reading "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," you might glean that Gerald Ford used more qualifiers than any other chief executive studied, "giving his style of speaking a halting, indecisive flavor"; that Bill Clinton said "me" when attacked, a word used most often by children, women and elderly people that tends to paint the speaker as a victim; and that Hillary Clinton's frequent use of "explainers" makes her come across as didactic. Also, that Saddam Hussein's verbal manner, with its "few expressions of feeling" and "frequent use of adverbial intensifiers and direct references" probably strikes his listeners as "cold, aggressive intrusiveness ... the speech pattern of a menacing speaker, a bully."

The American political figure whose speech most resembles Saddam's, interestingly enough, is Pat Buchanan. The chief difference between the two is that Buchanan makes jokes, and as glad as I am that Buchanan hasn't got any real power in the U.S., I suspect the difference is crucial. With the possible exception of Idi Amin -- there's always a wild card -- none of the dictators Orizio interviews shows any sign of a sense of humor. That would require some capacity for perspective, which is also the faculty that enables someone to realize that what they're doing is wrong -- or, for that matter, absurd or boring. All of Orizio's tyrants are not just oblivious to their monstrosity, they're also blind to their own silliness, from the deluded "13th apostle" on his ludicrous gilded throne to the hen-pecked Baby Doc Duvalier. They are, in essence, cranks.

They are also a whole lot less interesting than seemingly more ordinary leaders -- like Clinton or Woodrow Wilson (a favorite subject of the political psychology crowd). We call the bloody deeds of tyrants "enormities," and it's true that the suffering they inflict is immeasurable. But the men and women who perpetrate those crimes aren't complex and fascinating in their wickedness, like Professor Moriarty or Dr. Hannibal Lecter. They're actually little people with little minds, however big their ambitions. And wherever they are, Saddam included, you can be sure they're not laughing.

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