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A third point might be appropriately made here. Each of the four members present at this March 21st meeting shared and contributed to the development of the group-fantasy despite their quite different personalities. A more detailed biographical study would reveal how each contributed out of the store of his own personal psychosexual experience to the imagery of each stage of the group-fantasy. For instance, John Dean's unconscious homosexuality was often evident in his contributions, as in the language of his being "raped" and "made pregnant" with Watergate. Nixon, on the other hand, often showed a strong personal preoccupation with death, stemming from his unconscious guilt for the deaths of his brothers,(29) so that he was the one most responsible for the introduction of death imagery into the developing group-fantasy-as in "establishment is dying," 'growing cancer" and the like. Similarly, one can trace-as Rothenberg has done so well(30) - Nixon's preoccupation with burglarizinng, bugging, eavesdropping, taping, shadowing suspects, illegally opening mail, and eliminating "leaks," to his infantile voy-euristic desires. Our Fantasy Analysis of the tapes, by focusing at this point only on structural and content changes in order to describe stages of development, may seem to slight the biographical dimensions of the group process, which of course would be included in any full psychohis-torical study of the group. Even so, although it is always personal rage which we are examining, and although there is no group geist or "unseen hand" directing group "needs," each member of the group contributes out of his own storehouse of unconscious emotions, to the developing group-fantasy in ways appropriate to each stage of the group's dynamics.

What is perhaps most unexpected about the material we have seen so far in these initial Fantasy Analyses of what is secretly going on in the Oval Office is that the emotions being shared and developed by the President and his associates are also being shared and developed throughout America as a whole. When one performs Fantasy Analyses of the newspaper editorials, Presidential press conferences, Congressional meetings, newsweekly articles, cartoons and other shared emotional material, one finds the identical shift of content from the "cracking" stage near the end of 1972, with its fears of growing rage, to the paranoid "collapse" stage of March and April, with its more violent and more open rage.

As with the tapes, the media imagery is not primarily to be found in discussions relating to the Watergate developments-which actually were barely noticed in the national media at this point (the Senate Committee investigation didn't start until later) The group-fantasy is, instead, shared at the subliminal level in seemingly innocuous ways. In September, the fantasy language of the media in headlines and lead ar-

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ticles and cartoons centers around images of cracking, rising pressures and fears of coming explosiveness, just as our Oval Office Fantasy Analysis did. The newsweeklies, for instance, headlined their lead ar-ticles with language emphasizing "Rising Pressures for Longer Controls," "Crackdown on Crime," "Where Busing Issue is Hottest," and in cartoons such as one showing a ticking bomb labeled "Federal Tax Boosts Timed to Explode After Elections."(31) U. S. News, in a typical front cover and lead article on September 18th, asked "How Big a Boom Ahead?" which featured fears about a "big boom" coming, a Fantasy Analysis of which reads simply:

boom... boom... boom... danger... overstimulate... boom... steam... runaway... pressures(32)

It must be remembered that during September of 1972 American planes and tanks were slaughtering thousands of Vietnamese civilians, but that this fact was almost completely absent in the coverage which I found in the national newsweeklies. The group-fantasy, as usual, was relatively unconcerned with reality, focusing more on its "cracking" stage imagery and fears of a "coming boom" as oedipal rage at the fantasy-leader threatened to get out of hand, producing feelings which could better be projected onto domestic trivialities than on Vietnam in its final stage.

On October 2nd, U. S. News became excited about the supposed "cracking-up" of the Democratic Party, and in an article headlined "Can Democrats Rebuild Their Party?.. Breakup of the New Deal Coalition," they projected the country's shared internal feelings of cracking and coming violence as follows:

breakup... landslide... watershed... breakup... welded together... breaking away... slippage... war... impending disaster... collapsed... weakness... .disaster(33)

Now I would argue that it was not the breakup of the Democratic Party which was actually feared as a coming disaster by this Republican newsweekly, but rather it was the "impending disaster" coming from the hidden internal emotional state of the nation. Similarly, when at this same time Nixon made a Labor Day speech to the nation, his language was still at the milder "cracking" stage, which, in this case, he used in the sense of "cracking down on prices":

Treadmill... treadmill... war... cracking... cut... squeeze... cripples... cutting the pie... bake a bigger pie... hatred... fear... bedrock... sit out(34)

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bulls and boiling housewives were drawn independently during the same week by three cartoonists in Columbus, Georgia, Washington, D.C. and Louisville, Kentucky, all in response to "national mood" alone.

I have usually found that the body images used by the cartoonists of the nation are by far the best index of the group-fantasy stages of the nation. During the "cracking" stage of September, 1972, Herblock focused his cartoons mostly on imagery of cracking-he calls his cartoon chapter of his book on this period "Cracks in the Dam"(36) - and showed the White House's locked doors about to break down (Illustration I) By June, for the "collapse" stage, he drew cartoons showing the walls collapsed and the cleansing torrents of water under way - calling his chapter on this period "The Flood" (Illustration 2):

Illustration 1 - ''Cracking'' September 17, 1972

Illustration 2 - "Collapse" June 26, 1973

Returning now from national media analysis to the Nixon tapes, a Fantasy Analysis of the next three meetings in the Oval Office continues even more overtly the previous meeting's theme of "clean out the shitty rage":

3/22: tippytoes... cross the bridge... fighting... unstuck... get the big fish out... loose... hang out... hang out... hanging out... heavy load... put the fires out... nailed down... come out... off the lid... clean... good boy... clean... clean... clean... 3/27: cut it off... ass in this thing... apples and oranges... shaken... sticky position... apples and oranges... big enchilada... red herring... bleeding... take the dive... stream... cross-currents... clean as a hound's tooth... 3/30: leak... in hand... cover up... cover up

By now, the illegal hush money had been paid to Hunt, and someone had

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to take the next step and delegate some member to go outside the group and reveal the illegality, as the fantasy language above puts it, in order to "get the big fish out" and "clean" the "ass" as "clean as a hound's tooth" so everyone can be a "good boy." The theme of relieving the intolerable emotional pressures, of "pulling the plug" on the built-up shit-rage, of purging the national group pollution, is introduced at the very beginning of the crucial meeting of April 8th, the Fantasy Analysis of which simply reads:

pulled the plug.. pulled the plug... pull the plug

That afternoon John Dean acts as unconscious delegate of the group's needs by going over to the Watergate investigators and telling them all he knows. Before he does so, Dean actually tells Haldeman on the phone he is talking to them, but not of course that he is acting out the delegated command to "pull the plug" on the group. Yet the next meeting, on the afternoon of April 8th, between Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, held at the very moment Dean is spilling the beans across town, shows that the group knows precisely what is going on between Dean and the prosecutors - and the group begins to imagine how "painful" the coming "purge" will be, how "pricking the boil" will feel like "poison," like "blowing up sky high," like a "bombshell:"

4/8: nail... nailed... blow... cut... bag job... busted... broke... my water can't rise any higher... nail... nail... straw that broke the camel's back... bite the bullet... kills... kills... blow last straw... dragged in by the heels... roll his eyes... cover-up... cover-up... bite the bullet... take the poison... caving... caving... heads up there on the dock... cover-up... cover-up... cover-up... rape is inevitable... breaking... bottling up... blow 'em sky high... take the gas... purge yourself... bite it... bit it... bombshell... pain... painful... unscramble the whole omelet... boil had to be pricked... take the heat... prick the boil... tuck this under the run... clammed up... chips fall

Later meetings continue the anal imagery of flushing the rage "down the drain," to the point of actually openly admitting that the group mood now feels like the group has "been constipated for eight months and all of a sudden was able to take a crap is going to enjoy it:"

4/14: down the drain... crumble... blow... kid gloves... fishing net... clean breast... freezing... freezing... dog fight... fight... drag it out of me... pealing off... big bag... on the peg... heat on... sticky wickets... dead in the water... leaked... cold turkey... lay a glove on him... lay a glove... sew up... drag kicking and screaming... big fish... constipated for eight months and all of a sudden was able to take a crap is

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going to enjoy it... beat on the head and shoulders... bouncing... apple sauce... stink... spongy... sticky... wild man... mixed bag... wringer... flowing around and leaking... swallow... thrashing around... Siamese twins... 4/15: big fish... tie in... up to his navel... little fish... ebb tide... full tide

The anal violence seems to be well under way of being flushed out in such imagery above as the "big fish" which is "stinky" and "sticky," the ''apple sauce,'' the ''crap'' which is going ''down the drain,'' ''through the wringer" of the cleansing "tide," en ding the "eight months' constipation" (it has been just eight months since the formation of the first House Committee, Patman's flanking and Currency Committee, which began investigating Watergate).

The next meeting, on April 14th, reflects the enormous decrease in rage and paranoid anxiety felt by the group after this purging. Despite the fact that publicly no changes have occurred in the Watergate situa-tion, this is the first meeting in the tapes where there is no fantasy language at all! The following two meetings after that have very little fantasy language ("snow job... splashed... feet to the fire... splashed... splashed... cut the cancer right off"), and then follows a second meeting, on April 16th, with no fantasy language at all. For the moment, the group-fantasy of those in the Oval Room is that the boil has been prick-ed. As in the Holsti and Norton study cited earlier, where the German "paranoia index" dropped sharply after the Kaiser decided to go to war, the construction of the group-delusional solution relieves the anxiety of the paranoid collapse phase.

Unfortunately, if the leader is to be the group scapegoat, if he is to be replaced by a new "strong" leader who can organize a new group-fantasy which can effectively bind the emotions of the nation, the sacrifice of lesser figures around the leader works only for a short time to remove the pressure. Once again, it is a Herblock cartoon which sums up what happens as one after another of those closest to the leader get pushed off the sacrificial cliff (Illustration 3).

That Nixon unconsciously helped push each of his associates off the cliff to ward off the day of his own demise is clear. He even admitted it himself, in a "Freudian slip," while speaking on November 17, 1973 before the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, when he stated, regarding Haldeman and Ehrlichman: "I hold both men and others charged are guilty...," which the Times reported with the note that "Mr. Nixon misspoke here-he meant the reverse."(37) Even though the sacrifice of his friends was necessary, Nixon felt it was the only way to delay his own political death. In his Memoirs, he likens his decision to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman to self-castration: "I felt as if I had cut off one arm and then the other. The amputation [was] necessary for survival... "(38)

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Illustration 3-The Sacrificial Cliff
January 25, 1974

A Fantasy Analysis of the final weeks of the tapes which we have available show the return of group pressures after each substitute is sacrificed and renewed needs to "pull the plug," hopefully without the leader himself getting "splashed," hopefully without "pain," but eventually knowing that even the leader would have to "throw in the sponge" and suffer a painful "death:"

4/16: cleanly. ..pulling punches.. hung.. .up the road.. drag it out.. cold turkey.. cold turkey.. pull the string.. tied it down.. .tie it down.. .deep six.. .deep six.. clean.. burning.. burn.. pain... scream out.. my tail.. .flushed.. .big fish.. splashed.. walk the plank . splashes.. .deep six.. trash.. blow.. .guts. . deep six.. .deep six... plugging a hold.. pulled the plug... full breast.. .egg on his face... bite the bullet... painful.. thrown in the sponge.. .ironed out... ironed out...quite a plate full.. .4/17: nibbled...dragged up...drag-ged out.. .save his neck.. come out.. .come out.. .come out.. .eaten alive.. leaked.. leaked.. .ass.. .in the soup.. .bomb shelter.. nibbled garbarge. . full court press.. draw the wagons up.. tying our hands.. big fish... small fish.. flying from flower to flower.. plant-ing his pollen.. .ass. . .ass.. leaks.. .eaten away.. .eaten away.. .cancer at the heart.. drastic surgery.. deep six.. baloney.. bark.. leaks... leaks and leaks.. leaks.. .down the tube... pulled the plug.. blast hell out of all of us.. .cried like a baby.. broke down.. broke down.. .cry blow.. leaks.. leaks.. leaks.. poison.. leaks.. leaks.. kicked him around.. .out of pocket.. .twist. . hang.. .frighten. . rack.. nailed... sack.. hurricane.. death.. .hurts. . cooked.. .cried...breaks...rape was inevitable...washes away...4/18: leaking...leaking...leaking... powder keg.. .come out.. .4/19: killed.. .dead. . kills.. kill.. kills... sheep to the wolves.. .panic.. .4/27: ass... kill.. kill.. .tear hell out of him.. dice.. big fish.. pressure.. .cut the Gordian knot... kill.. kill

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same bag.. same bag.. clean.. .4/30: heart.. .trap

The operative term of the group as the end nears is, of course, the word "kill." Once again, Herblock pictures it most graphically, effectively using the image of the hourglass to portray the evacuation of the shit-rage, the demise of the fantasy-leader and even the symbol of birth:

Illustration 4 - The Slide to Death
March 12, 1974

Thus the drama of the Nixon group-fantasy is over, the rages of the group have killed off the weak fantasy-leader, his sacrifice has brought the cleansing purge, the nation feels as if reborn, and a new, strong fantasy-leader steps in to tackle the job of organizing the group's emotional conflicts.

It might at this point be argued that my choice of the Nixon period to illustrate the weakening and collapse of a group-fantasy leader is simply stacking the cards, since Nixon is the only president in American history to have been thrown out of office. What happens to strong leaders, like Eisenhower or Kennedy for instance, who have the confidence of the nation, and who are not personally prone to self-destructive acts? Surely they were not experienced by the nation as weakening and dying; surely the nation during the 1950s and early 60s did not experience cycles of growing pollution, paranoid collapse, group-delusional action and sym-bolic rebirth. Furthermore, might it also be that somehow the Nixon period was particularly prone to these anal cleansing images which form the bulk of our evidence so far? For one thing, the Watergate affair concerns secrets, and the keeping of family secrets, according to the psychoanalyst Theodore Jacobs, always stimulates fantasies centering around issues of anal control.(39) In order to answer these objections, in the next section of this paper I will give samples from my Fantasy

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Analyses of the public documents of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, and will follow the major stages of the three group-fantasy cycles which I found had occurred during this eleven-year span of American history.

THE THREE GROUP-FANTASY CYCLES OF THE EISENHOWER AND KENNEDY PRESIDENCIES

The presidential campaigns of both Eisenhower and Kennedy, like those of all presidential candidates, were filled with oedipal group-fantasies of how the "hopefuls" were busy "wooing" and eventually "winning the heart" of the national group. Even without getting into a detailed analysis of their campaign imagery, one can sense that there was something special about their elections, some "charismatic" leadership qualities due to the nation's grandiose expectations of them, which made them more idealized "husbands" to the maternal group than most. As traditional in American politics, the victorious candidate was most often shown in the media not as shaking the hand of his running mate nor of his campaign manager, but as hugging his wife. (The photo most often picked was taken from about three feet off the ground, the level of an oedipal five-year-old.) And, of course, their early weeks in office were characterized as a "love affair with the people," a "honeymoon period," full of hope and expectations. It is the group-as-mother who is the unseen audience and ultimate prize of all political action, and the winning of this group-mother by leader and opposition alike is the hidden agenda of daily politics.

The popularity of American presidents is, of course, carefully measured by the Gallup organization through nationwide polls asking about the nation's confidence in the presidency. The regular decline of the leader's popularity after his election, which is part of my psychogenic theory, is in fact found as a normal feature of every presidential term. The Gallup polls for the three terms examined in this section are shown in Illustration 4.1 have added a vertical axis in each term, representing what I found to be three similar turning-points, the military group-delusions which ended, in each case, a period of paranoid collapse: the Taiwan Crisis, the Lebanon Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. As can be seen in the graphs, in each case the nation's confidence in the leader recovered for a time after these group-delusional actions were under-taken, then resumed their decline once more.

Although all three group-delusions involved military movements and risks of war, all three also managed to avoid open violence-as might have been suggested by the fact that Eisenhower and Kennedy were both later-born sons. As Irving Harris has shown,(40) the only American war led by a later-born son was the shortest and least bloody, the Spanish-

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American, under McKinley. All other times, the nation chose a heroic parent-socialized first-born son rather than a more conciliatory peer-socialized later-born son to lead them in war. Although birth order is hardly a guarantee of war or peace, the evidence Harris gives is certainly statistically significant.

Illustration 5 - Decline of Confidence in the Presidency and
Temporary Recovery After Group-Delusional Action

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It is my intention in this section of the paper to illustrate through Fantasy Analyses of a selection of documents out of a much larger group I analyzed, how national group-fantasy pressures on Eisenhower and Kennedy produced these three crises as group-delusional solutions to recurring moods of collapse of confidence. Of all the Presidents whose public papers I have studied by Fantasy Analysis, Eisenhower is far and away the calmest in his language. The ratio of fantasy content to total words in his speeches usually runs as low as one fantasy word per thousand, compared to a rate ten times higher for other presidents. His calmness bored reporters listening to him, but it also soothed the country and helped him to become the only elected president in half a century to avoid both war and very dangerous confrontations during his term. He was consciously aware of the effect of group-fantasy projections being "put into" him, often responding to the anxiety-filled questions of reporters at news conferences with such statements as: "the mere fact that some little incident arises is not going to disturb me. I have been scared by experts, in war and in peace, and I am not frightened about this."(41) His ability to go out and putt on the White House lawn in the middle of what others termed a crisis was a national joke, but was nevertheless his most mature leadership trait.

Eisenhower's landslide election victory helped him end the Korean war while remaining a "strong" leader during early 1953. Even when Russia acquired the H-bomb, in August, 1953 - probably the most important real"; event of the 1950s-Eisenhower was able to stay relatively calm, answering anxious questions about this development at a news conference by saying that "You don't want to frighten anyone to death in this world... frightened people cannot make good decisions. So, therefore, you have to understand our own strength-the strength of the free world, the strength of America - at the very same time that you are weighing also our dangers and risks."(42) The full Fantasy Analysis of this critical news conference starts out with Eisenhower responding to the H-bomb news with a few "war.. death" references, but quickly returning to standard "cracking" stage imagery of "tensions" and "breaking":

9/30/53: heart... tension... war... war... war... death... death... leak... leak... leak... in the mill... tensions... broken... broken... broken... straining at the barrier... break(43)

By the beginning of 1954, despite his polls having dropped from 75% to 65% approval in the previous six weeks, Eisenhower continued his relatively calm response to growing Congressional pressure to get militarily involved in Indochina. When the French, in April, actually asked America to send help, Eisenhower startled everyone by saying this

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was obviously impossible without a formal declaration of war by Congress!

Even when Dienbienphu fell in May, Eisenhower stressed that the rest of Indochina would nor fall "like dominoes." Admiral Radford responded to this by saying we should drop an A-bomb on Vietnam, and Newsweek announced that "the low point of the postwar era has now been reached for American leadership."(44) With such headlines as "Western Alliance Cracking Up, Statesmen Seem Helpless" and statements such as that the "Eisenhower Administration was walking cautiously, a slip could be politically fatal," the media kept pumping out images of coming collapse of the group-fantasy and of national con-fidence in the fantasy-leader. Attacks on Eisenhower's peaceful efforts to negotiate with the Russians grew in the country, and everyone watched McCarthy's "soft on communism" crusade with delegating fascination.

By the end of 1954, Eisenhower's popularity had reached its lowest point. Some Congressmen feared America might be in an "atomic stalemate with Communism," and a few Senators began advocating a military blockade of China as retaliation for their shelling of some tiny offshore islands. Eisenhower's December 2nd news conference, for the very first time, began to make use of full "paranoid collapse" imagery:

12/2/54: war... war... breaking down... destroying... insulting... anger... frustration... lash out... war.. war... war... exhilaration... war... war... anger... resentment... war... war... war... war... war... war... war... tough... love... shot down

Most of this fantasy language in this December 2nd news conference came out of a long "aside" which Eisenhower delivered to the newsmen, one which is well worth quoting in full for its astonishingly acute awareness of the origins of war fantasy in the national mood and its restitutional purpose:

For us there are two courses, and here I should like, in a way, to talk a little bit personally: in many ways the easy course for a President, for the administration, is to adopt a truculent, publicly bold, almost insulting attitude. A President experiences exactly the same resentments, the same anger, the same kind of sense of frustration almost, when things like this occur to other Americans, and his impulse is to lash out.

Now I want to make quite clear that when one accepts the responsibilities of public office, he can no longer give expression freely to such things; he has got to think of the results.

That would be the easy way for this reason: those actions lead toward war. Now, let us think of war for a second. When this Na-

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tion goes to war, there occurs automatically a unification of our people. Traditionally, if we get into trouble that involves war, the Nation closes ranks behind the leader. The job to do becomes simply understood-it is to win the war. There is a real fervor developed throughout the Nation that you can feel everywhere you go. There is practically an exhilaration about the affair.

The great Lee said, "It is well that war is so horrible; if it were not so, we would grow too fond of it..." (45)

Because of this great awareness of the pressures toward going to war as a unifying purge, Eisenhower's solution to the paranoid collapse phase at the end of 1954 was a masterful one. He began by giving a special message to Congress asking for special war powers, thus satisfying the need for release of violent fantasy. But along with the public declaration of "our readiness to fight," and in conjunction with speeches by John Foster Dulles threatening China with the atomic bomb (Dulles told the National Security Council that "there is at least an even chance that the United States will have to go to war [and] we'll have to use atomic weapons"),(46) what Eisenhower actually did rather than just said was to evacuate the Tachen off-shore islands as China wanted! The group-delusion that America was finally "getting tough" with someone was pulled off by words and military bustle alone, and Eisenhower was able to displace the nation's hostility abroad while still being able to hope that the Chinese would not respond in any way to the military maneuver. The day after both Eisenhower and Dulles threatened China with the atomic bomb, Dulles, the Cold War fanatic, dizzy with the success of the military maneuver, announced that the Chinese were "dizzy with success" from their course of "aggressive fanaticism," which he likened to that of Hitler, and that China was "more dangerous and provocative of war" than even the Soviets.(47) The media further amplified the fantasies of violence with headlines such as those in Newsweek announcing the "Birth of a Policy," "To Battle Stations" and "Ike's Thinking On War," and speaking of our possible "headlong plunge into world catastrophe "(48)

After the evacuation of the Tachens, the media kept expecting a Chinese retaliation for our violent fantasies ("war may be weeks away"), but all in fact remained quiet. Newsweek announced that the country had just "shivered," and Eisenhower's popularity rating climbed to new heights. Because the country had, in fantasy, returned to the "strong leader" stage, it no longer needed to delegate its paranoid rage, and McCarthy disappeared from media attention.

After Eisenhower's re-election at the end of 1956, his strength again declined, but when the Mideast blew up and the Russians sent troops into Eastern Europe, he was once again able to hold back American military

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involvement because the fantasy language of the nation's media was still at a fairly stable level. When, for instance, China again bombed Quemoy and Matsu, the newsweeklies ran tiny articles each week on the event, hardly noticing an ' issue" once so urgent as to require the use of atomic threats. By mid-year of 1957, along with articles headlined "Ike's Popularity-Slipping?", the language of collapse and growing rage began again, only projected this time onto Russia, which Newsweek featured in a cover story on Khrushchev's "Blowup in the Kremlin," imagining a giant "explosion" and "shakeup" in Moscow.(49) The U.S., in turn, was pictured as being "In a Fighting Mood," and when Russia's sputnik was launched in October of 1957, American confidence in its "values" totally collapsed. We had "stepped into a new era" with the "Red conquest," and the country went on a masochistic binge about its "humiliating" defeat by the Russians in the "World War of Science."(50) The humiliation came from the projected critical superego, literally em-bodied in the Russian satellite; as the Portland Oregonian put it, "It is downright terrifying with [Sputnik] staring down at us."(51) "Not since World War II had there been such unity of purpose in the West,"(52) the media proclaimed hopefully, whistling in the dark, but after a few months passed at the beginning of 1958 questions about this "unity of purpose" began to rise, the press wondered about the "Mental Challenge: Are We Up to It?," and then retreated to its central preoccupation once again: "Mad at Ike?"(53)

By May, Eisenhower was so caught up in these continuous paranoid collapse messages that his language began to match that of the media. A Fantasy Analysis of his address at a dinner for the Republican National Committee on May 6, 1958, for instance, begins by evoking the image of an "evil force" which was "looming" before America:

5/6/58: menace... evil force... hostile... destruction... explosives... destroy... kill... deadly menace... tie the hands... disintegration... weakening... weakening... surge... forcing back... shot... war... war(54)

Since international events were in fact rather quiet at this time, a search for a group-delusional solution to the paranoid collapse began. Three weeks later, two minor incidents provided the triggers needed. The first was a scuffle in which demonstrators threatened Nixon during his visit to Venezuela, and Eisenhower rushed American troops to the Caribbean "in case the Venezuelan police can't protect him." The second and more important began with some routine street demonstrations in Lebanon against its pro-U.S. president. Americans reacted to the two incidents as though they had never heard of street protests before, and Newsweek headlined the two stories: "Shock Waves: The Impact of the Global Crisis on U.S."(55) The emotions released were so powerful they even in-

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fected the adjoining pages: a routine Newsweek article on Alaska statehood was headlined "There's a Heart-Quickening, Zero-Hour Feeling All Over Alaska," and an article on some routine investigations in Congress was featured on the cover as "Mania in Washington."(56)

Within a week, Eisenhower channeled these "heart-quickening shock waves" into group-delusional military action: he marched American marines into then-sleepy Lebanon, an action which his official biographer, Peter Lyon, depicted as "considerably astonishing the sun-bathers and ice cream vendors on the peaceful beaches of that country."(57) America had "moved to the brink of war," according to the press, because "intervention was less risky than the calamity of inaction." A great relief was felt that "disaster has been averted with not a moment to spare."(58) Predictably, Eisenhower's polls rose again.

By the time John F. Kennedy took over as president, however, Eisenhower's popularity had turned down once more, for all of 1960, and Kennedy could be elected on the anti-Eisenhower program of "get-ting America moving again." By electing the macho-image Kennedy, America proclaimed it had had enough of Fiflies' peace attempts. If there were to be "New Frontiers" to conquer, America would have to find some "New Indians" to fight, and there was little question against whom America wanted to "get moving again." Much of the New Frontier imagery also reflected the underlying feelings of despair and loneliness contained in the imagery of the frontier-which is an isolated outpost only tenuously in touch with civilization-an apt symbol for some of America's uncivilized behavior to follow during the period. Thus the depressive Fifties gave way to the manic Sixties-a decade which produced a brush with the nuclear holocaust, America's longest war, and a manic doubling of personal income, the largest economic expansion in any country in any decade in world history. This alternation between depressive and manic periods in national group-fantasy, a phenomenon well-known to political scientists(59) (but so far having eluded rational explanation), was felt by the whole nation as soon as Kennedy was elected. Action was "in the air" from the very beginning of his term, and was reflected in the grandiosity of the messianic imagery which was projected upon him.

The group-fantasy imagery in the press and in Kennedy's press con-ferences moved rather more rapidly than usual toward the collapse stage, perhaps aided by the failure of the Cuban invasion (into which, however, Kennedy could not throw American forces, because group-fantasy was still too stable at the beginning of his term to release the necessary group rage). It is possible that the initial grandiose expectations about Kennedy were really a defense against severe despair, so the quick disillusionment and collapse of confidence within a year should have been expected. In any case, by the end of August of his first year, when the Russians had

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built the Berlin Wall, the fantasy language of the media was already moving into the paranoid collapse stage, and Kennedy responded by ordering reservists to active duty and by sending U.S. tanks down the Friedrichstrasse. The media announced that "we stand at the edge of war" once again. Cover cartoons in several newsweeklies suggested that the United Nations was collapsing, schoolchildren were reported as having nightmares about nuclear destruction, a "Great Debate" began about bomb shelters, and U.S. News began to feature regular articles on "War-The Chances Now."(60)

The paranoid collapse feelings of America were now projected onto the Russians, who were suddenly seen to be "pulled in all directions" by big "trouble in the Kremlin," and were pictured as full of "strain, in-decision, tension [and] uncertainty as to who is in charge."(61) At this point in the early months of 1962, the media image of Cuba was fairly benign. Russian troops and equipment were already on the island, it was acknowledged, but no one seemed to mind, and "A Look at Castro's Cuba From the Inside" showed only photos of happy Cubans and Russians in swimming pools.(62) Kennedy himself told Ben Bradlee that Russian troops and equipment in Cuba were of little interest to us, for they differed little from the presence of our own troops in Turkey:

The President said the presence of 17,000 Soviet troops in Cuba, 90 miles from the U.S., was one thing viewed by itself, but it was something else again when you knew there were 27,000 U.S. troops stationed in Turkey, right on the Soviet border, and they had been there some years. He warned me against me releasing this information. . it would be politically suicidal for him publicly to equate the two. "It isn't wise, politically, to understand Khrushchev's problems in quite this way," he said quietly.(63)

Yet the internal group-fantasy feelings of collapse, rage and paranoid fears being experienced at this point could not be held objectless for long. Kennedy's confidence rating was plunging fast, and every new issue of U.S. News announced the complete "crack-up" of some enemy nation-China, Russia, East Germany, whatever-along with typical paranoid feelings of uncanniness about what it termed "The Khrushchev Mystery: What's Behind the Quiet Tones Now Underlying Talk from the Kremlin-The Growing Mystery of Khrushchev's Calm-Is he setting a trap, lying low?"(64)

These kind of paranoid suspicions could not continue to be repressed. Although nothing new was happening in Cuba or Russia, the Fantasy Analysis of Kennedy's news conference in July of 1962 reflected hidden language reporting the collapse quite clearly (even though the only thing he could refer to as "disastrous" was a vote on medicare):

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7/23/62: danger... danger... plunges... disastrous... drain... drain... weakened... chaos... chaotic... dangerous... blast(65)

The feelings of chaos and rage could not be held in any longer: suddenly, Kennedy "discovered" that there were thousands of Russians in Cuba, and suddenly the 90 miles between the two nations seemed provocative. By the beginning of September, although the only "missiles" he knew to be in Cuba were the usual surface-to-air (SAM) defensive weapons, with a 25-mile range, he nevertheless warned Khrushchev not to put "offensive weapons" into Cuba and called up 150,000 additional reservists to active duty. The news media finally got the "psychotic insight" on where the delusional solution would be played out: although Cuba had been virtually absent from their pages up until then, they now ran cover articles on "War Over Cuba? War over Cuba, involving the U.S. with Russia, is moving closer, now that the Soviets have an advanced military base just off the coast of Florida."(66)

Since no offensive Russian missiles were in fact in Cuba at that time (a careful reconstruction of previously classified material has shown that the U.S. had no evidence or even suspicions of Russian offensive missiles at any time in September), the best the press could do was to refer to the possibility that missile-carrying Russian submarines might be in the area. Yet despite continuing negative reports from U-2 and other CIA observa-tions, the die had been cast, and America had now moved into a group-trance. On September 17th, a secret joint Committee on Foreign Relations and on the Armed Services met to discuss resolutions enabling the President to prevent by force the establishment of a military base by Russia in Cuba. A full Fantasy Analysis of this long meeting reveals the true mood of the country prior to the discovery of any Russian offensive missiles:

9/17/62: aggression... aggression... weaken... aggression... invasion... invasion... die... suffer... fears... buildup... blockade... blockade... war... invade... collapse... collapsed... collapse... fall... buildup... force... blockade... blockade... blockade... war... war... war... blockade... war... barbs... fire... burn... heart... aggression... war... fight... fight... holocaust... angry... heart... cover... danger... threat... danger... nose to nose... hot... hot... war... war... blockade... blockade... war... blockade... war... blockade... blockade... war... war... war.. .war... fear... fear... war... blockade... blockade... blockade... war... blockade... war... blockade... war... war... war... war... war... war... blockade... blockade... war... war... war... blockade... choke... frightened... war... war... war... fighting... shooting... dead... dead... war... chicken and egg(67)

A nationwide roundup of the opinions of the American people by U.S.

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News was equally strong, and the only question seemingly unanswered was whether America should just blockade Cuba or invade the island without warning: "Invade and throw the Russians out.. We've got to do something... Right now is the time to lower the boom on this renegade and his Red cohorts. Blockade Cuba lock, stock and barrel.. use whatever means are at our disposal to clean out this flourishing nest of vipers.. .Cuba has become like a cancer. If Russians get killed-that's a risk they brought on themselves."(68)

It was not until a full month later, after a limited blockade had been put into effect, followed by demands from the media and much of Con-gress for full military blockade and/or invasion, that the very first discovery was made-on October 14, by a U-2 pilot-of a possible Rus-sian offensive missile base.(69) Finally, America had an "objective reason" for its group-delusion. Not that the new Russian missiles threatened to change the balance of power. Everyone from Kennedy to the military agreed that '(he challenge was solely psychological. As Eugene Rostow, former Under-Secretary of State, put it recently, "Why were we so excited by the Cuban missile crisis? . . . there are missiles on Soviet submarines. And missiles can reach the United States from the Soviet Union itself, and from bombers. But the Cuban episode is worth studying because we were ready to go then. There was a rage in the country and a sense of threat, and these were extremely dangerous."(70)

The "psychotic insight" that Cuban missiles were an insufferable threat to America which had to be removed immediately by military action rather than by diplomatic means required at least two major delusional elements as rationalizations, both of which required open lies by Kennedy to the American public. The first was the claim that America had to move militarily because negotiations might take time and the missiles might become operational, which would both be dangerous to American security and would make Kennedy's negotiation position weaker. This rationalization has been proven quite false by a little-known CIA report which was recently declassified, which showed that Kennedy knew as early as October 22nd that the missiles were already operational, and that he simply lied to the American public when he said otherwise.(71) There was no reason for the speed, no reason for the heart-quickening military confrontation at high seas with Soviet ships-none, that is, except group-delusional needs.

The second rationalization needed to sustain the delusion was that there existed no acceptable negotiable alternative to the game of "chicken" which the two countries played out as the ships approached each other and which necessarily risked a nuclear exchange. But there was in fact a perfectly acceptable alternative, which Khrushchev offered: that Russia would remove its Cuban missiles in exchange for America removing its Turkish missiles from the Russian border. Now American

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Turkish missiles were acknowledged by the Administration to be totally useless, and Kennedy had actually suggested their unilateral removal months earlier, so this alternative was quite reasonable in any rational definition of American interest. Yet even before Khrushchev's offer, when Adlai Stevenson suggested this solution to the ExComm group on October 20th, he was thought to be a "coward" by many, an accusation which dogged him to the end of his days at the U.N.(72) In fact, any negotiated solution was "cowardice" if military humiliation of the delusional enemy was the goal. The Turkish missiles were of so little real importance to the ExComm group that at one point in their considerations many members came to support what one historian calls "a crazy scheme ... first disarm the missiles in Turkey and so inform the Soviets; then bomb the missile sites and invade Cuba."(73) The scenario of first solving the problem but then going ahead with the violent invasion anyway sure-ly reveals the delusional motivation for the entire affair!

The group-trance was actually so powerful that when Kennedy told America that Russia's offer to trade missiles was impossible to accept, the country as a whole simply accepted his statement without question, preferring instead to risk tens of millions of lives. In fact, only 16 percent of the country opposed the military actions, even though three out of five Americans believed "some shooting" was inevitable and one out of five thought it would lead to World War III. The major responses to pollsters were opinions such as "It was long overdue" and "We've been pushed around long enough." This national mood made Kennedy extremely open about his military threats. Not only did he openly threaten invasion and mass a quarter of a million men and 180 ships at the tip of Florida to do so, but he also put 156 ICBM's at "ready for launch" and, according to the Air Force officer in charge of sending American messages at that time, sent the following communication to the Russians:

The message said the U.S. had 1300 nuclear weapons airborne-named Soviet cities which were targeted for the bombs. [General] Keegan states there was a Middle Eastern army officer visiting Nikita Khrushchev at his Black Sea dacha when Khrushchev got that message a few hours after its transmission. The officer said Khrushchev turned pale. He had four telephones on his desk and tried to pick them all up at once, calling Moscow. And that day the Russian ships turned back.(74)

Kennedy's military "humiliation" of Khrushchev, which was to lead to the Russian leader's removal-and which Kennedy undertook rather than suffer a "humiliation" himself-occurred, however, over too brief a time period to be a fully satisfying erotic purge of American rage. Although exactly what constitutes an adequate purge of emotions is

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unclear to me at this point, clearly the news media seemed to be saying it was all over too quickly, and wondering if America had really "won." U.S. News asked the disturbing question on everyone's mind: "Will It Now Be A World Without Real War? Suddenly the world seems quiet.. .Big questions: Why the quiet? What does it mean?"(75) Kennedy's confidence polls, which had jumped dramatically during the crisis, soon slid back to previous levels, and open attacks on him returned in full force. The lack of a full emotional purge remained. Nationwide media public opinion polls reported a "Big Puzzle: Strange Mood of America Today. Baffled and uncertain of what to believe.. .an odd mood... "(76) It is just this "strange mood" which leads me to speculate on whether Kennedy's assassination at the end of the year, linked as it was in Oswald's mind to Cuba, could in a sense be called a nationally delegated act, despite the fact that real evidence as to Oswald's motives will always be lacking.(77) Remembering the full-page ads that attacked Kennedy for be-ing soft on Cuba at the very time he was going to Dallas, and recalling his statement after the missile crisis that if he hadn't moved militarily he "would have been impeached," one cannot help but wonder how much American group-fantasy rage could have contributed to his death-and how such a fantasy could have been enacted "through" the confused mind of a sick assassin.

The next American group-delusion after Kennedy's assassination was, of course, the Vietnam War. As national confidence in Johnson began its inevitable decline during 1964, fears of "an impending collapse" were consistently projected onto "Khrushchev's Crumbling Empire,"(78) and cartoons began to appear(79) which were identical to the Herblock "collapse" cartoon, reproduced earlier in Illustration 1, of presidential doors collapsing from outside pressures. Shortly after, the first American troops began fighting in Vietnam. Likewise, after Nixon took over the war, and also began to experience collapse messages from the country in 1969, he invented what he himself termed the "Madmen Theory" of "appearing irrational... with his finger on the nuclear button,"(80) and by invading Cambodia plunged America into yet another group-delusion. However, rather than at this point giving my month-by-month documentation for these two group-fantasy cycles leading to the Vietnam and Cambodian wars, since they repeat so many of the patterns of the military group-delusions I have already documented, I would like to examine the one instance in the past 25 years of an attempt by a president to use a peace treaty to resolve the collapse of confidence in himself. Although we have seen above how Eisenhower used the peaceful removal of troops from offshore Chinese islands to appear heroic and restore public confidence in himself, there was at least ostensible danger in doing so-it was, after all, a military maneuver. The only time during the

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25-year old period we are here examining that a President succeeded for a time in restoring confidence in himself purely through peaceful efforts was in the case of Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Middle East summit meetings.

JIMMY CARTER: REBIRTH AT CAMP DAVID

It is difficult to recapture at the time of this writing (early 1979) the idealization and even messianic hopes which so many Americans felt upon the election of Jimmy Carter. In our book, Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy, John Rartman shows in his chapter on "Carter and the Utopian Group-Fantasy"(81) how the Democratic Convention was dominated by utopian imagery of fusion with an ideal mother, and with group-fantasies of millennial and messianic expectations of rebirth which only secondarily referred to Carter's personal religious history. Cartoons of Carter as a fetus inside a peanut, about to be born, as Christ walking on water, and other messianic references to him as a "savior" (J.C.) were widespread. The decay of this idealization is seen in the Gallup Poll on his approval ratings, which steadily declined until the mideast peace talks (see Illustration 6). The month-by-month story of this collapse and recovery pattern is a fascinating one.

Illustration 6 - Gallup Poll Showing
Decline and Recovery of Confidence in Jimmy Carter

As can be seen in the graph, it was not until September of 1977 that the polls began to turn sharply downward. This is reflected in my Fantasy Analysis of the media and of Presidential press conferences, which began

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Illustration 7 - Jimmy Carter in "Strong" Stage

to show the first signs of collapse at this time. The crucial symbolic event announcing the stage was the Bert Lance Affair, a minor incident which for the time was used for group-fantasy purposes and which thoroughly captured the rapt attention of the nation for the month of September. Since the central question of an overidealized leader is "Will he abandon us?," the Lance Affair was posed as an abandonment problem: Would Carter "abandon his closest friend" (proxy for the nation), and would Carter in turn be "deprived of his closest and most trusted confidant."(82) The drama was blown up into unbelievable proportions. Lance was pictured as a baby about to be abandoned, and though he was "a hulking man, [he] filled the witness chair as completely as Goldilocks in the baby Bear's rocker."(83) Soon the abandonment drama began to use the imagery of birth to express separation anxiety.

by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024

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