Glad, Betty. "Personality, Role Strains, and Alcoholism: Key Pittman as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." Politics and the Life Sciences 7, 1 (August, 1988):18-32.
Introduction. Leadership roles, as this study suggests, may lead to breakdowns in individuals who have performed well in more routine positions. When the demand for creativity is high, but the routes to success ambiguous and the end goals controverted, vulnerable individuals may take refuge in drink and engage in public displays which undermine their performance. Such individuals may continue to provide positive contributions to national policy formation. Their loss of control, however, even if it is only episodic, is likely to cause significant others in the environment to depreciate their entire role performance, contributing further to their loss of influence.
The specific nature of the vulnerabilities which predispose an individual to this kind of breakdown and the way in which contextual variables contribute to the problem will be delineated in this case study of Key Pittman. In a brief concluding section some comparisons will be made between Pittman and Wilbur Mills, another congressional leader whose distinguished public career was harmed by his drinking.
Pittman is an apt subject for this kind of study because of the nature of his papers. Throughout his life he wrote his wife, from whom he was often separated, of how he felt about himself, his role, his drinking. When he died, there was no one around to sanitize his papers. He had no children, and the wife who survived him was old and never got around to culling his files. Beyond that, important new letters surfaced by accident in 1979. Three boxes of papers were discovered by the proprietor of a secondhand furniture dealer in the state of Washington, who recognized Pittman’s name, and he turned over the materials to the Skagit County Historical Museum. Containing letters Pittman received from his brothers, friends, and relatives while he was at college and first out West, these new materials provide considerable insight into the nature of his personality and relationships during the formative years.