An excerpt from Selwyn Ryan’s Eric Williams: The Myth and the Man.
Williams’s wildly fluctuating moods, and his chameleon-like and multi-faced behaviour were the subject of comment by several of his political colleagues and mandarins who had the opportunity to observe him up close. Opinion is sharply divided as to whether he was bipolar or just paranoid. Many medical doctors and persons who knew him deemed his behaviour abnormal. Former president, Sir Ellis Clarke, described him as being paranoidal and as a man of ’varying moods’; one had to determine what phase the moon was in before raising certain matters with Williams. Clarke said that Williams had ’more sides to him than the Pentagon’. He also talked about Williams’s ’Monday Morning Blues’ and his penchant for running to the governor on Mondays to recount all the rumours he had heard over the weekend that he deemed to be fact. A.N.R. Robinson also found Williams’s behaviour ’aberrant and strange’. So too did Solomon Hochoy, Trinidad’s first indigenous governor, who told Norman Costar, the British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago in 1963, that the British were not dealing with a ’rational man’ but with a ’madman.’ Costar himself told his principals in London that Williams was a man of ’unpredictable moods’, someone who ’rotates his friendships and his enemies’ and that ’Britain and I in particular could [one day] become the victim of Williams’ anger and be put in the dog house for the next six months or so.’ Costar, like Hochoy, considered Williams ’not to be a rational man by normal standards, but someone who had a very difficult and notorious temperament which we will have to be prepared to deal with. When he is in these moods, our best policy is to do nothing for him and ask nothing of him and wait for the thaw which would come after several months when he lets it be known that his mood has changed and he is looking for an excuse to bury the hatchet.’
Gerard Montano, one of Williams’s close ministerial colleagues, claimed to have observed on more than one occasion that his ’boss’ was ’depressed’.
’Williams was a manic depressive. He was right down when Robinson was presenting his 1966 budget, which announced an economic recession. He was slumped in his chair . . . he kept sort of going lower and lower, and I turned to him and said, Bill, you are very depressed.’ In 1962, Sir Stephen Luke, the federal interim commissioner, had similarly found Williams ’depressed and morose’ because of what he considered the ’niggardliness of Britain’s post-independence settlement.’.
Medical practitioners disagree sharply as to whether or not Williams was mentally ill and about the extent and nature of the affliction, if there was any at all.
One doctor advised the author that the prime minister was not clinically depressed but that Williams himself had formed a judgement that he became paranoid in later life. Dr Halsey McShine, who attended Williams for many years, also had no knowledge of Williams being clinically depressed. Asked whether he ever considered him paranoid, McShine replied that he was not a psychiatrist and did not know what was in Williams’s mind. He did not like using the word paranoid, but noted that Williams at times behaved ’strangely’. For example, he would avoid eating in restaurants out of fear that he might be poisoned.
McShine confirmed that Williams believed that the CIA was spying on him, and that his daughter’s lover, a white American, was a CIA agent. McShine says that Williams told him ’I can’t trust the US Security’. For this reason, the prime minister refused to attend his daughter’s wedding in Miami when she decided to marry the very man whom he suspected of being a spy. McShine surmised that this type of behaviour was an occupational hazard for prime ministers who might come to suspect that people would plot against or even attempt to kill them. Nevertheless, he believed that Williams began to deteriorate after 1973, and felt that Williams should not have returned to office that year. ’It would have been better for him and for Trinidad and Tobago if he had not. He did not however listen.’
According to McShine, Williams became progressively bitter, suspicious, and reclusive.
Another practitioner, who also knew Williams socially, was of the view that Williams had a mild bipolar problem that was aggravated by the many political crises he had to face, and the corrupt behaviour of the men who formed part of his inner circle. This explanation for Williams’s behaviour was offered by several commentators who saw him as a victim of all that was taking place. Other observers strongly disagreed with this diagnosis, which they viewed as part of an unarticulated conspiracy to protect a tribal icon and a national brand name. One view held that Williams’s mood variability was not an illness, and that his behaviour was merely strange and idiosyncratic at times. Those who were of this opinion conceded that his behaviour was often deliberately ill-mannered, boorish, abrasive and abusive.
The individual who was most open about Williams’s illness was Dr Winston Mahabir. In his book In and Out of Politics, Mahabir, who trained as a psychiatrist following his break with Williams in 1961 and his return to Canada in 1962, frequently alluded to Williams’s emotional immaturity. Mahabir drew attention to the prime minister’s capacity to embrace mutually contradictory positions.
He was a veritable chameleon:’Eric Williams (and consequently the PNM) has exhibited curious and sometimes astonishing ambivalence . . . over the past nine years. I use the word ambivalence to mean the coexistence in one person of opposing emotional attitudes towards the same object, person or objective, and the manifestation in both word and deed of these conflicting attitudes...I speak not of flexibility and compromise which are at the core of the art and science of politics. I speak of observable, documentable, recurrent, mutually contradictory pronouncements and operations. I speak of ambivalence with respect to Indians and whites, ambivalence towards the trappings of colonialism, ambivalence towards West Indianism and to a lesser degree, ambivalence towards the heightened educational needs of an expectant population.
One can also add to Mahabir’s list Williams’s ambivalence towards federation and the extent to which he flip-flopped on the issue of a strong central federal government. Mahabir notes that Williams even failed to mourn the collapse of federation for which he had campaigned with such fervour. ’Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note as the Federal corpse was buried...By then, he had good cause to be less excited about Federation as a politician than when he wrote about it as a scholar.’....
Mahabir observed and commented on Williams’s emotional instability, his suspiciousness of others, his tendency to see demons and shadows everywhere, his paranoia, his melancholia, his insistence on loyalty to the party that invariably meant loyalty to him, his inability to accommodate setbacks of any kind, his disposition to trample relentlessly upon the reputations and careers of friends, and his sense of indispensability and irreplaceability that was the party’s Achilles’ heel as well as the sword of Damocles that he held over the heads of others. The list of those who were casualties in the first decade of PNM rule was ’terrifyingly long’. It included Mahabir himself, Albert Gomes, David Nelson, Patrick Solomon, Ulric Lee, Brinsley Barrow, Carlton Gomes, Elton Richardson, J.H. Steer, his economic adviser J. O’Neil Lewis, Doddridge Alleyne, Gerry Gordon, Gil Thompson, de W. Rogers, and above all his academic and spiritual godfather C.L.R. James, whom he ruthlessly off-loaded when Williams wanted to do a deal with the Americans on Chaguaramas.Williams, it seems, believed, as did Caligula, that it was ’much safer to be feared than loved when of the two, either must be dispensed with’.
Mahabir claims that the ’disturbing aspects of Williams’ personality were evident to him in their pre-political association, but that he made allowances for the emotional problems being experienced by a friend’. Still, he experienced ’a constant mental tug o’war between admiration of the greatness of Williams and wariness of his evil potential’. Mahabir also noted Williams’s ’deficient ability to accommodate set-backs of any kind’, but he continued to hope that the prime minister’s ’essential greatness would eventually prevail over his manifest weaknesses’....
Another senior psychiatrist with whom the author discussed the Williams case at length, but who prefers to remain anonymous, emphatically disagreed that Williams’s affliction was of the mild variety. He urged the author to ’tell the truth about Williams’, that is, that he was often a sick man, exhibiting a classic case of bipolar disorder. Williams’s high energy and verbose performances, especially during the Chaguaramas episode; his excessive irritability, narcissism, megalomania, grandiosity, paranoia (which was said to have been aggravated by his deafness); his pugnacity, aggression, arrogance, haughtiness, bluster, rudeness, pervasive suspiciousness and distrust of people, especially those who were once close to him; and his tolerance for and encouragement of sycophancy and news carrying-all were seen as symptoms of his illness, which would at times incapacitate him for months. Williams was also known to be an insomniac, to have an inflated sense of his self-importance, and to have delusions about being persecuted, all classic symptoms of the affliction. Correspondingly, when he was down, he was misanthropic, morose, indifferent or pessimistic, gloomy, lethargic, indecisive, impaired in judgement, and given to loss of energy, anger, desire for solitude (or alternatively, a craving for company), secrecy and social withdrawal.
