The Press: The Couch & the Stump

IS BARRY GOLDWATER PSYCHOLOGICALLY FIT TO BE PRESIDENT? asked the full-page ads in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco News-Call Bulletin. Readers who went beyond that provocative question discovered that a magazine called Fact, which paid for the ads, had sought answers from the 12,356 psychiatrists listed by the American Medical Association. Last week Fact published the results.

Why any psychiatrist would respond at all to such an appeal, from such a quarter, is of itself fit subject for analysis. The simplest inquiry could have informed the doctors that Fact is the by-blow of Publisher Ralph Ginzburg, 35, whose first venture, Eros, was put out of business by the U.S. Post Office on 28 obscenity counts. Yet Ginzburg got 2,417 responses. And of these, two out of three were willing to have their names printed; all but 571 saw nothing wrong in judging Goldwater's mental balance without ever having examined the "patient."

By a vote of 1,189 to 657, the psychiatrists declared the Republican presidential candidate unfit for the office he seeks. Sample diagnoses: "His public utterances strongly suggest the megalomania of a paranoid personality" (Dr. Randolph Leigh Jr., Cincinnati); "a very mature person, mature enough to be a realist, and to adapt to the world as it is" (Dr. John P. McKenney, Imola, Calif.). Ginzburg could not help adding his own conclusions, along with a clutch of malevolent cartoons.

Fact's poll invoked a prompt protest from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association as a vicious example of "yellow journalism." But the A.P.A. did not totally absolve its members either. Those who responded, said the A.P.A. in effect, were practicing personal politics and not medicine. Which scarcely explained how and why so many psychiatrists confused the analytical couch with the political stump.