(FORTUNE Magazine) – We turn now to a fascinating and strangely unanalyzed moment in recent history. It is Wednesday, August 17. President Zia of Pakistan has just died in a plane crash. Senator Quayle of Indiana has been unexpectedly anointed by George Bush. Danny tells an interviewer that the loss of strongman Zia is bad news for Americans. A bit later, ABC's David Brinkley and Peter Jennings ask Jesse Jackson to offer a perspective on current events, and Jackson responds by criticizing the Quayle statement on Zia. Jesse's critique: ''He said so long as it's an ally of America, it's kind of basically all right. He must know Hitler was an American ally and Botha in South Africa is an American ally, and Somoza in Nicaragua was an American ally.'' Huh? Hitler an American ally? Why would Jesse proffer so counterfactual a proposition? Might the techniques of psychohistory illuminate this matter? Friends, that last one is a rhetorical question. You probably haven't heard much about psychohistory lately. But back in the Seventies it was big stuff on many a campus -- on 200 of them, according to one knowledgeable estimate. Some eminent historians, including Peter Gay of Yale, found themselves in mid-career suddenly feeling a need to study psychoanalysis. Even then, to be sure, many scholars were dubious about the use of psychiatric insights to explain historical events and personages, and the movement had an unfortunate tendency to parody itself, as in the statement by the editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, who proclaimed: ''All historical movements are the acting out of infantile group fantasies.'' And yet we always felt the discipline had possibilities. Some of these were on display in the psychohistorical portrait of Jimmy Carter produced during this person's Administration by journalist Edwin Diamond and MIT historian Bruce Mazlish. Their book, Jimmy Carter: A Character Portrait, portrayed the man as a contemporary Janus and did much to explain his amazing success in persuading both liberals and conservatives that he was one of them. The Diamond-Mazlish analysis insistently reminds you that Jimmy as a child had a strong-willed superliberal mother, a harshly conservative father, and powerful pressures to please them both. This is how you learn to be ''fuzzy on the issues'' (a phrase that followed Carter all through his presidency). Back to Jesse. We begin by assuming that the bizarre reference to Hitler was a slip of the tongue. But we know from Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and especially the chapter ''Mistakes in Speech,'' that such mistakes often reflect the speaker's psychic tensions and thus reveal more than he would like. Freud mentions the time the president of the Austrian House of Deputies started off one of its meetings by sonorously proclaiming that the session was hereby ''closed.'' He meant of course to say ''opened'' but choked on the word because he knew that when the session was opened, the deputies would give him nothing but trouble.

If ''Hitler'' was a slip, what did Jackson mean to say? Given the context, the answer is fairly obvious. In modern American history, the most extreme and clear-cut instance of the country's aligning itself with a foreign despotism for reasons of state was in the World War II alliance -- the one against Hitler. What Jesse was required by logic to say was ''Stalin.'' We think we know why he couldn't get that word out: As particularized earlier in this space (April 25), Jesse has a long history of pro-Communist pronouncements and no history at all of attacking Soviet-sponsored despotisms. When the time came to say out loud that Stalin was a bad guy like Botha and Somoza, the psychic tension must have been unbearable. So he choked on Stalin and out came Hitler. The other possibility, of course, is that he's a bit weak on modern history.