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258 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
tration for being well-represented in a case that was regarded as
extremely crucial, it did seem that the deck was stacked.
Amazingly enough, the government psychiatrists' report on
Pound, with the exception of the statement "was a precocious student",
was an accurate description of Pound's long-time enemy,
Franklin D. Roosevelt! Pound was described as "eccentric, querulous,
and egocentric"—one would need only to add the noun
"megalomaniac" to bring any Washington correspondent to his feet
with the exclamation, "Why, that must be FDR!" "Abnormally
grandiose, expansive and exuberant in manner": the analogy is too
close to be accidental.
During the early years of the Roosevelt regime, one of his advisers
was the highly respected historian W. E. Woodward, the
only American historian, so far as I can find out, who claims that
Wilson suffered his mental breakdown before he went to Versailles.
Pound was in correspondence with Woodward, and occasionally
suggested items that he might pass on to the President. Hence this
passage in Rock-Drill:
"Don't write me any more things to tell him
(scripsit Woodward, W.E.)
"on these occasions
HE
talks." (End quote) 19
When Pound was released, the Chicago Tribune printed a brilliant
editorial entitled "Who's Crazy Now?" The editorial pointed
out that although Pound had been examined by psychiatrists, no
clinical study of Roosevelt's mental condition had ever been made.
The writer suggested that Roosevelt's costly crusade to save Soviet
Russia from the German armies may have been due to mental illness,
rather than to deliberate treason, a very charitable conclusion.
The testimony given by the government psychiatrists at the
Lunacy Inquisition on February 13, 1946, fills more than one hundred
pages. Most of this testimony consists of verbal fencing on