Probing Psyches of the Candidates

Gail Sheehy wanted to know what made Gary Hart, Robert Dole, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, George Bush, Michael S. Dukakis and Albert Gore run--for the White House.

Did one pursue power to exorcise private demons, including the horrors of a hellfire-and-brimstone upbringing that bordered on child abuse?

Sheehy, best known as the author of the 1970s best seller “Passages,” believes Hart--the Democrat who dropped out of the race once because of a sex scandal and a second time because the voters scorned him--was such a candidate.

Was another forever changed by a Nazi bullet that left him crippled but also sparked his driving ambition?

That’s Sheehy’s assessment of Dole, the Kansas senator who mounted a futile bid against Vice President George Bush, the Republicans’ presidential nominee.

Sheehy’s conclusions, relying on extensive interviews and investigations into the candidates’ backgrounds--particularly their early years--have been published in “Character: America’s Search for Leadership.” Based on articles first published in Vanity Fair magazine, “Character” contains profiles of six current and former 1988 candidates and a concluding chapter on President Reagan. In each case, as Sheehy explains in the opening chapter, she was looking for “a pattern of behavior” in the candidate.

Such patterns’ qualities, Sheehy contended in an interview here, reflect her own definition of character: “The inner engravings that have been left by the significant people and events in one’s life that make one stand out from others.”

Part reporting, part pyschobiography, “Character” is one of the latest attempts to penetrate the carefully constructed images of this year’s candidates. It is also one of a number of attempts over the years to plumb the psyches of would-be and actual Presidents, predict their chances of winning based on behavior or physical traits and forecast their performance if elected. For instance, candidates have been measured for their optimism and their height, with researchers claiming that a sunny outlook and an extra inch or two in elevation often indicate a winner.

Reaction to Packaging

Books such as “Character” are partly a reaction to the packaging of presidential candidates as commercial products and to superficial media coverage of candidates that dwells on “what they had for breakfast,” said James David Barber, chairman of Duke University’s political science department and author of a landmark 1972 study on presidential performance, “The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House.”

Barber, who was consulted by Sheehy, called “Character” a “good book,” adding that he is especially impressed by Sheehy’s reporting on the candidates’ backgrounds through interviews with schoolmates, relatives and friends. This kind of probing is “much more important even than interviewing the candidates,” he said, because “if you ask them now, they’ve been spun around by their media guys.”

But even the formidable protection of the White House public relations machine can’t protect Presidents from long-ingrained habits, Sheehy said in the interview, citing the recent furor over the Reagans and astrology.

“I think it just fits right in,” she added. Ronald Reagan, Sheehy said, “is a lifelong dreamer,” a man who “has always lived in an imaginary world. He is able to concoct an illusion, and that then becomes his reality.”

As a consequence, Sheehy said, “it is no accident” that Bush and Dukakis, “the two least dramatic performers,” have emerged as the 1988 presidential front-runners.

‘A Middle-Dial Guy’

Sheehy found the Massachusetts governor to be “a middle-dial guy, temperature-controlled, never too hot or too cold. I think he gets genuinely exasperated at certain (Reagan Administration) policies that he just can’t understand--Central America, for one big example--but he doesn’t let it get him down.”

Of the vice president, Sheehy said, “The strongest thing he has going for him as a presidential contender is this obligatory optimism of his. He has to see the world in a continually rosy way in order to please people.”

Character, Sheehy said, has long been an important element in the choice of national leaders. Colonial Americans, she said, took heart from what they saw as the strong character of George Washington, who reassured them that a Constitution really was a viable foundation for their young nation.

“People looked at character a lot when they looked at the Adamses, James Madison, Jefferson,” Sheehy said. “Then there have been other times when character was, for various historical reasons, less important.”

But in 1988, Sheehy said, character is once again a key ingredient. Voters in recent elections have been dealt a steady diet of image, Sheehy said, “momentary, evanescent statements that are meant to play on your emotions.”

What matters more, she believes, are “the throughmarks” in a candidate’s life, “the patterns of behavior that have been evident in one’s life all along.” These patterns, Sheehy said, provide “the additional perspective to interpret the candidate’s behavior.”

World Without Connections

In the case of Ronald Reagan, for example, a look at his childhood as the son of an alcoholic father reveals a long pattern both of denial of unpleasant realities and of what Sheehy calls “childish loyalty to the few people who have been slavishly loyal to him, like (Attorney General) Ed Meese.”

And Reagan, Sheehy said, “lives in a world without any connections, with no attachments, except to Nancy. Mrs. Reagan, “the one consistent figure in his life,” Sheehy said, “apparently” has the same quality as the mother to whom he was so close as a child, “being a nag.”

Apart from the First Lady, “people in his Administration are as interchangeable as cartoon characters,” Sheehy said. Since Reagan spent the bulk of his adult life in Hollywood, filming one movie every three or four months for more than 20 years, his inner circle, his chief advisers, Sheehy said, “are still stagehands, scriptwriters and directors, and they are interchangeable. When he drops them, that’s it. Goodby.

“It’s almost like he only sees what’s right in front of him,” Sheehy said, so much so that “long-range planning in the White House is lunch.”

Yet Reagan was able to project the kind of confidence, affability and competence that made Americans elect him not once, but twice.

“I think that the leaders are the projections of the fondest fantasies of the led,” Sheehy said. “In the case of Ronald Reagan, the fantasy that most Americans wanted, and the fantasy that Ronald Reagan lives in his head”--namely, “that America is the sine qua non, the best, the economic giant; that mean, nasty countries like Iran can’t cause us to lose confidence as they did under Carter”--happened to match up, “perfectly--and for eight years.”

One problem may have been a tendency on the part of voters to mistake personality for character. Charisma, Sheehy said, that much-touted term, often sells the superficial at the expense of real substance.

‘Genius of Personality’

“Jesse Jackson, for instance, is a genius of personality, and in some ways Dukakis is a kind of a primary-schooler,” Sheehy said. Unlike the theatrical Jackson, Dukakis “doesn’t know how to use his personality to win people to him.”

By contrast, Sheehy said, “George Bush uses his need to please. He’s running a popularity contest. Nobody doesn’t like George Bush.”

While they are important “for inspiring trust and joy,” these aspects of personality must be examined from all sides “to see what else they might reveal.”

Bush’s affability, for instance, “while it makes people like him,” Sheehy said, it “ought to make people question, how does a man become No. 1, the leader of the Free World, when he can’t confront anybody?”

Sheehy confesses she balked somewhat at taking on the matter of the Jackson candidacy. “I worried that some of my black friends were going to be upset with me because of what I said,” she admitted.

Calling Jackson “the flowering of the yearning of all black Americans to be taken as full partners in the political dialogue,” Sheehy lauds Jackson for having “forced, demanded and earned his way to that position.”

But Jackson, in Sheehy’s view, turns out to be a master of self-invention, a man, like Gary Hart, determined to reconstruct a less-than-satisfactory past.”

“Has Jackson changed his act?” Sheehy writes. “Or might the slow earthquake of change set in motion by his historic candidacy truly reshape the character of the man?”

For character can be altered, Sheehy said, shifted or restructured as an individual adjusts to major life changes.

‘He Finally Got Caught’

“But I don’t think you can reinvent character,” she said. “The people who try to put across a reinvented character are faking us.

“We’ve seen that with Gary Hart,” Sheehy said, “and he finally got caught.”

Robert Dallek, a professor of history at UCLA, disputed some of Sheehy’s findings on the motives and character of the presidential candidates. More generally, he decried what he labeled the “excessive preoccupation with psychology” in presidential politics, which he said is often “superficial.”

In particular, Dallek, who has written books about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Reagan and is at work on a biography of Lyndon Johnson, said that Sheehy’s assessment of Bush seems to miss the mark. Bush is not simply a crowd pleaser, Dallek asserted, saying that Bush “has an angry, nasty quality to him” and that the vice president has a “kind of hangdog quality to him and I think people can see it.” Sheehy, he said, may be “confusing Bush with Reagan.”

Dallek also said that Sheehy’s analysis of Jackson fails to take into account the purely political factors at work on the black presidential candidate. Jackson is “a politician and he’s trying to move to the (political) center,” Dallek said. What has happened to Jackson in his two campaigns for the White House is “is not a reshaping of character but a kind of classic move to the center,” the historian added.

Sheehy first began covering presidential politics with the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Still “very much a working journalist,” she took time off, briefly, to play author, conducting an interview in the vast, two-story living room of the apartment she shares with husband Clay Felker, editor of the magazine Manhattan Inc., the “mentor” to whom “Character” is dedicated.

Temporary Pundit

Here in a white leather suit no ballpoint-pen-toting journalist would dare wear on the campaign trail, Sheehy turned temporary pundit, offering her assessment of the role of character in a race that seems increasingly concerned with personal minutiae.

“I think it certainly gives us an inlook instead of just an outlook on what drives them, how truthful they are, how willing they are to take risks, how much they need social approval, whether theirs is a healthy drive for power and service, or a pathological compulsion,” Sheehy said.

But “none of this stuff is written in stone,” Sheehy said, dismissing the suggestion that she has taken the “Passages” formula and applied it to presidential aspirants.

“This is just an additional instrument for the voter to look at and interpret when they look at the packaged commercial.

“I mean,” Sheehy said, “we all know we’re being manipulated.”