Above All, the Man Had Character

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Each year George Washington gains more luster in our reveries on how we got where we are. Our sophisticated scholarship and painstaking restoration, which so often dismantle heroes, have revealed the human dimensions of the father of the country but have failed to dim the aura of greatness that clings to Washington, whose 251st birthday we mark next week.

His contemporaries felt the same awe and wonder. In Washington's last years, Mount Vernon became a mecca for the great and the grateful, for the curious and the ambitious. So many people arrived at the doorstep that Washington, who would turn none away, finally engaged a social secretary to handle the flow. Sometimes he did not attend the dinners he gave because the company was so numerous and foreign to him. One night when he dined alone with Mrs. Washington, the event was so unusual he made a note of it in his diary.

The legend of the man is safely sheltered these days behind high fences of respect. Were the real Washington on hand today, that might not be the case, and therein may lie a lesson. We have in this nation erected standards for our public people that dim anyone's glow if he or she falls short of perfection. It is reasonable, then, to wonder if people can enter public life and make a difference as they did in the first years of the Republic. Even as our expectations have grown, our respect for and sympathy with Presidents have diminished.

By our modern measures, George Washington did not read the right books. He relished how-to-do-it texts, with their new ideas on the use of manure, turning soil and animal husbandry. But he did not delve very far into art, philosophy or science. When John Kennedy was coaxed into supplying a list of his ten favorite books, the collection was heavy with history, biography and geopolitics, the kind of reading that he knew critical journalists would admire. Twenty years ago, we took Presidents at their word. The suspicion now is that the list was a bit fraudulent.

Washington knew no foreign languages (Thomas Jefferson spoke or read five). Washington never traveled to Europe, while Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Jefferson all spent years there. He was not an accomplished public speaker. His military achievements were judged for their perseverance rather than their brilliance. Yet the battle of Trenton might have been as important a battle as this nation ever won. The Trenton victory brought the Revolution back to life. The colonies dared hope again for independence. France began to look with more favor on the American struggle, and Britain began to lose heart. But the battle was technically a shambles.

Three columns were to have crossed the Delaware River. Only Washington made it across. The powder of his troops was soaked by a freezing rain, so they could not fire their arms. They had to depend on bayonets several times during the night. Washington's officers pleaded with him to call off the attack. The story goes that he stood on an old beehive in a muddy New Jersey field and turned aside every entreaty. The battle of Trenton was won by the determination of one man, but certainly not by his military expertise. Would he have done what he did on that miserable night if the failing campaign had been on the evening news with closeup shots of the ragged men?

Washington sometimes looked on his 22 years of public service as a kind of prison sentence that took him away from his land. Washington was not one of the boys. The thought of him in blue jeans around the graceful drives of Mount Vernon is, thank goodness, still shattering. Once, when Gouverneur Morris, a friend and supporter, put his hand on Washington's shoulder to show doubters how close he was to the chief, Washington coldly took Morris' hand and removed it. Nobody in Washington's inner circle tried that again. Sometimes, the stories go, when Washington was with his old Army friends and had a few glasses of wine, he became what they called "merry," and he would talk and reminisce into the night. But that was rather rare, according to the scholars. With this kind of record, one wonders how George Washington might have fared in the Style section of the Washington Post under the arch questioning of Sally Quinn: "Mr. President, do you and Mrs. Washington have separate bedrooms?"

George Washington accumulated nearly 100,000 acres of land in his last years and was judged one of the wealthiest men in the nation. He would have been suspected of conflict of interest at every turn. Investigative reporters would have been in clover--literally, perhaps, because Washington might have cornered the clover-seed market and been nabbed for restraint of trade.

Washington was meticulous about dress, selecting with care his shoes and their buckles, the cloth for his suits and shirts. In our time we are a little uneasy with Presidents who pay too much attention (or too little) to their dress. That may be changing. Grubbiness has proved less of a political asset than some thought a few years back. Still, any hint of vanity is deplored. John Kennedy became angry when the fashion magazine Gentlemen's Quarterly put him on its cover and announced that he had posed for the magazine in his new two-button suit. Kennedy told an astonished group around his desk that he would now be remembered as the President who posed in his new suit, just as Calvin Coolidge was most renowned for having been pictured in an Indian war bonnet.

Mount Vernon was almost totally George Washington's creation, another dimension of the man that would have been of dubious value in this age. Correspondents would have reported during the war that after a battle (with the fortunes of America ebbing, soldiers hungry and sick) the Commander in Chief sometimes penned many pages of instructions to his plantation manager, telling him what to build and plant and harvest. Neglect of duty? Washington designed his home, laid out the drives, selected the colors (green was his favorite), chose the trees, plants and flowers. The only decorating that Martha did was to choose some curtains. Surely today's social analysts would have been delighted at such domestic concern by Washington, but just as surely there would have been criticism of such dominance by the general of his wife.

Washington's favorite recreation was fox hunting. Consider that now: a President pounding over the hills on horseback, his hounds in full cry after a scraggly fox. Environmentalists would have jumped out at him from behind every hedge, waving placards. A "save the foxes" society would have been organized. Columnist Ellen Goodman would have rushed to detail the plight of the ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-treated foxes of Fairfax County. Newsmagazines might have noted that photographs of Washington mounting his horse revealed he had wide hips. The temptation would have been too much: "President Washington, displaying a broad beam and a narrow mind, last week chased a 10-lb fox to an unseemly death in the lovely hills of Virginia."

Washington cannot be reconstituted and placed in our century, of course, nor would he want to be. His time and his land were not necessarily more simple, but they certainly were different. The nation had 4 million people and only six cities of more than 8,000 souls each. The Federal Government, when Washington ran it, had 350 civil employees. If numbers and complexity were not the adversaries, then distance, time, disease, weather, Indians and ignorance were. It took a week to get to New York City. Early death stalked almost everyone. Washington was remarkably durable for his time--and lucky. His horses and uniforms were riddled with bullets at Braddock's defeat in the French and Indian War. He was untouched. But even his luck ran out finally. He died at 67 of a throat inflammation. A young physician in attendance wanted to open the trachea but was overruled by his seniors, still fearful of the new technique. A sturdy figure like Washington might have been around many more years with only a little bit of today's medical knowledge.

Writers who journey through the accounts of his life almost always confess some bafflement about why he was such a great figure in his time and remains so in ours. British Historian Marcus Cunliffe points out that Washington was a good man but not a saint, a competent soldier but not great, thoughtful but not brilliant like Alexander Hamilton. He was a respectable administrator but certainly not a genius. All this and more his biographers have put down. Washington was a prudent conserver but not a brilliant reformer. He was sober unto dullness. He lacked the common touch so much that not even his British enemies had a derogatory nickname for him during the war. He could strip off his coat and help the field hands, but he had no very close friends. The Marquis de Lafayette, his French ally, was as close as anyone. To humanize Washington, suggests Cunliffe, would be to falsify him, though of course many have tried to do that in the past two centuries.

We would do well in this age of total and instant analysis to ponder why it is we honor George Washington as we do, why the legend goes on in the face of the reservations and doubts that scholars keep raising. It is true that simply being an American and being around for the start of the United States would have assured Washington some place in history. There was more.

The sum of his rather normal parts added up to an exceptional figure. George Washington had character. That is easily said but not easily defined. Writers have been trying to do it since time began, but character defies scientific analysis. Duke University's James David Barber based an entire book about Presidents on the analysis of character. It was fascinating. But Barber raised as many questions as he answered. Nobody is quite certain what character is, but everybody captures a piece of the truth. Here are a few thoughts from Washington's contemporaries and his later biographers about the qualities that lifted him above others.

One writer noted Washington's "cool dignity." Washington's aloofness and reserve made him stand out from other men, several authors insisted. Washington understood power, wrote one. Another claimed simply: "Washington had quality." From there the scholars get more subjective. Washington merged his honor with that of America, recounted a writer, not to mention his fortune and everything he planned and built. During the Revolution, a British raiding party sailed up the Potomac and at Mount Vernon received some provisions from the farm manager. When Washington heard about it (he was off leading the Army), he was disturbed. He wrote that his people should have let the raiders burn down the place before they aided the enemy.

Biographers have written that "Washington proved the soundness of America" and that he "had a true American vision." By that they meant that he, almost alone among those great men understood in totality the wealth and strength of the land that lay before him and how it formed and held a society together "The man is the monument; the monument is America," wrote Cunliffe with a poetic touch. Those nine words may say as much as anything about the source of our reverence.

George Washington was sensible and wise. He was not the most informed or imaginative of men. But he understood himself and this nation-to-be. That understanding came from the many elements that make up any person. His heart and mind were shaped by his family, his land, his community and the small events that touched him every day. Those were the normal experiences. They were added to his natural endowments. Only one power can fully fathom such a formula--God. Washington had the tolerance of a landsman, the faith that comes with witnessing the changing seasons year in and year out, the sensitivity that accumulates from watching buds burst and colts grow. Optimism, perseverance, patience and an eager view of the distant horizon have always been a gift of the earth to those who stayed close to it.

We pay too much attention these days to college degrees, to public displays of so-called brilliance. We are overawed by the listings in Who's Who, by prizes and travels and speeches. We pay too much heed to organizational charts, office tension, human friction and how paper flows or does not. We busy ourselves too much in searching for minor flaws in our Presidents, finding petty shortfalls and mistakes, relishing pratfalls and humiliations.

The presidency to this day still rests more on the character of the person who inhabits the office than on anything else, try as we may in our books and papers to develop formulas and charts that explain success and failure. The founding fathers designed it that way. It was their idea to find a man in America with a great character and let him invest a tradition and shape a national character. They found George Washington. He did his job splendidly. He might even have known what he was doing. When he took the presidency he wrote, "I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent." That is at once beautiful and profound. It is no wonder he succeeded, entering office with such a code of conduct.

Our task is to rekindle the tradition, to search in our system for people of great character and then bring them to power and rally behind them; not blindly, to be sure, but with understanding and even sympathy and tolerance. Character like Washington's is not a blend of everything that is perfect. In fact, we have not done too badly through 39 men who became President. Even today, in the midst of great national worry, the quality in the presidency that helps keep a beleaguered nation together is the character of the man we glimpse in the White House. Over these past decades some of our Presidents have had more than others. We have not always been alert to those who have had outstanding characters, and sometimes we have been fooled by those who did not have the depths of character we thought they had. Character has come in different sizes and shapes, and some Presidents seemed to have enlarged it as time went on, while others have appeared to lose character under stress.

More than all the other Presidents, George Washington has marched through our centuries untouched by critics, growing larger under the baleful eye of history. An uncommon man made from common parts remains our grand legacy and our hope in this moment of bewilderment in our third century. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.