By Sydney Trent, Washington Post
As a pioneering psychological profiler for the Central Intelligence Agency and later as a consultant, Jerrold M. Post plumbed the lives, leadership styles and, at times, the mental illness of foreign heads around the globe. Over decades, his expertise and instincts were greatly in demand, especially at the White House.
The Yale- and Harvard-trained psychiatrist advised former president Jimmy Carter about how best to negotiate with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat before the Camp David Peace Accords. He explained Sadat’s “Nobel Prize Complex” — his desire to be remembered as a great leader — and Begin’s biblical preoccupation and obsession with detail.
Post warned about labeling Saddam Hussein simply as “the mad man of the Middle East,” lest it mislead political leaders into thinking Hussein was unpredictable, when in fact he was not. As an expert in the psychology of terrorism, Post produced psychological profiles of suicide bombers in Israel and opined on the corporate leadership style of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.AD
And yet in late 2019 — a year before his death on Nov. 22 of covid-19 at the age of 86 — Post found himself doing what at one point would have been unthinkable: publishing a book about the alarming psychological makeup of an American president.
In writing “Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers,” Post risked violating the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” which forbids the diagnosis of public figures without full evaluation and consent.
“He was a Life Fellow of the APA, but he said if they kicked him out, he didn’t care,” said his wife, Carolyn Post. “He felt it was that important and that psychiatrists have a duty to warn.”
Those we have lost to the coronavirus in Virginia, Maryland and D.C.
By then, Post had had a storied two-decade career as founding director of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior. He then used his expertise to found Political Psychology Associates, a research and consulting firm that specialized in industrial espionage, counterterrorism and leadership assessment. All along, he lectured as a professor at George Washington University, wrote 14 books and continued to see patients in a private practice he ran out of the basement of his Bethesda home.
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