I don’t think you have to guess the subject of this
photo I took last November. Even so, George Washington’s star has dimmed slightly. The last Gallup poll that I saw of how Americans viewed their Presidents, back in 2013, ranked
him only fifth, trailing Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, and John
F. Kennedy. Only one of the names preceding the Virginian deserves to be that
high. I’ll let you figure that one out.
Historians, not as present-minded as their
countrymen, invariably rank Washington among the top three. There’s a reason
for that.
Washington did not have the communication skills,
the humor or the wiliness that made Frank Roosevelt perhaps the master American
politician of the 20th century. He did not have the literary
brilliance or on-his-sleeves humanity of Lincoln. But he was fully their equal
in courage, and surpassed them as a manager and a mentor to brilliant younger
men (like Alexander Hamilton).
Lincoln and Roosevelt are justifiably acclaimed for
saving the U.S. in its hours of maximum danger. But without Washington, there
wouldn’t have been a country to save at all. He was, as his Pulitzer
Prize-winning biographer James Thomas Flexner dubbed him, the “Indispensable
Man”—the soldier who held the country together during the American Revolution,
the man who renounced power immediately after the conflict (still a relative rarity now,
and inconceivable back in the 18th century), and the statesman
realistic enough to know the young republic was still too weak to fight another
war during his administration.
And then there was slavery. Washington was the only one of the
nine slaveholding Presidents to set them free in his will—and the only Founding
Father to do so. He did far more than speak dreamily of emancipating slaves in
a far-off future, as Thomas Jefferson was wont to do. He took pains to figure
out how to make it possible for his ex-slaves to survive on their own, and how
to keep himself out of debt in life so that he could achieve his objective of
manumission in death.
(The photo, by the way, is a bust at the entrance to
George Washington University’s Medical School in the Foggy Bottom section of
Washington, DC.)
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