Listen / Download

You might say that anyone who runs for President is by definition clinically insane. Candidates, after all, are pathologically certain that they are destined to lead the free world, a sure sign of delusional narcissism. As Bush and Gore trade barbs in the waning days of the campaign, voters are judging their personalities as much as their policies. And the armchair psychobiographers among us want more than Oprah and Letterman can diagnose.

Does Bush’s smirk reveal a sense of entitlement? Or is it an unconscious reflex to cover up an Oedipal sense of inferiority? And what are the latent behavioral traits behind Gore’s self-serving exaggerations and rigid arrogance? Both men are privileged sons of powerful politician fathers who were voted out of office; and their mothers are steely, ambitious women who raised their sons to be leaders. So what would Freud say? We’re putting the candidates on the couch this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gail Sheehy, journalist and author

Samuel Shem, psychiatrist and novelist

Paula Caplan, psychologist and author.

Listen / Download

Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns after Robert Kennedy was killed, the what-ifs are still irresistible. If he’d won the 1968 campaign, we’d remember a Vice President Nixon sketchily from the 1950s and Watergate not at all. What if he’d really wanted to know, and tell the rest of us: “Who killed JFK?” What if he had lived to resolve the transition where his new biographer Evan Thomas puts him: “an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man.”

At the close of a Bush-Gore race with no heroic pretensions about it, a new biography of Robert Kennedy revives the Rohrshach romance of a black-and-white figure into whom we could project almost anything: a man who “hates like me,” his father said, and who embraced the weak, who lionized warriors and turned against the Vietnam war, the chancellor to an empire who thought of himself as a child, a man who died mid-passage to maturity at 43. RFK reexamined is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Evan Thomas, author of “Bobby Kennedy: A Life”