From Time.com’s article “The Temperament Factor: Who’s Best Suited to the Job?“
When Barack Obama was 6 years old, he was the only foreign child in his neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. He didn’t know the kids, didn’t speak the language. At first the locals were a little freaked out, says Zulfin Adi, 47, who as a kid lived a block from Obama. “He was so much bigger than the rest of us.” So they decided to haze him. One day a group of children ambushed him, carried him to the local watering hole and threw him in. They had no idea if he could swim. But when Obama came to the surface, he was laughing. He could have broken free and crushed them anytime he wanted, but it was much better to play it cool, ride it out and make friends with his adversaries.
John McCain was not quite 2 years old when his parents despaired of managing his tantrums; he would go into a “mad frenzy,” he says, holding his breath until he passed out and fell to the floor. A Navy doctor offered a prescription: whenever McCain erupted, his mother would shout to his father, “Get the water!” Then his parents would fill a bathtub with cold water and drop their fully clothed son in. “Eventually,” McCain recalls in his memoirs, “I achieved a satisfactory (if only temporary) control over my emotions.”
