Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington. - book reviews

National Review, March 11, 1996 by A.J. Bacevich

FACE it: George Washington has become virtually a nonentity. Although official iconography keeps the face familiar, the man and his deeds have long since faded into obscurity. Washington's contributions to the founding of the United States have lost their capacity to impress or to instruct. Indeed, his once-hallowed title, 'Father of his Country,' today sounds not only overblown but slightly comic, like King of Late Night or Queen of Pop. George Washington may be the most-honored forgotten man in American history. He is at the moment, writes Richard Brookhiser, 'in our textbooks and our wallets, but not our hearts.'

That reduced condition provides the inspiration for this thoughtful book. For Brookhiser, a senior editor at NR, Washington remains a colossal figure, pre-eminent in all American history. That others should have lost sight of Washington's greatness is for Brookhiser symptomatic of what ails America today, particularly our inability to recognize true character and true leadership and our continuing tendency in politics to throw in with the energetic charlatan or the mountebank with the engaging TV manner. So Brookhiser's purpose is explicitly didactic: he aims to imbue others with his own ardent appreciation of Washington's accomplishments and abiding relevance. Restoring Washington to his proper status may thus contribute in a modest way to advancing the cause of moral and political renewal.

The result is a lively, intelligent, eminently satisfying work. Founding Father is not a full-scale life-and-times portrait of the first President. Rather, it is 'a moral biography in the tradition of Plutarch,' a literary form consciously designed 'to shape the minds and hearts of those who read it.'

Founding Father divides into three sections. The first section, most closely resembling standard biography, recounts the three pivotal episodes in Washington's public life: commanding the Continental Army throughout the Revolution, presiding at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and serving two terms as President. The author's rendering of his tale is straightforward, concise, and informative. His tone throughout is admiring, almost worshipful, although punctuated with acerbic asides, usually at the expense of those causing grief for Brookhiser's hero. Thus, for example, Brookhiser attributes to Thomas Jefferson, Washington's not altogether loyal first Secretary of State, 'the deep deviousness that is given only to the pure of heart.'

The book's second section takes the form of an extended examination of the sources of Washington's greatness -- the qualities that made him an inspirational military leader, a sagacious statesman, and above all a virtuous man. Spurring Washington to accept great responsibility and guiding his conduct once in high office, according to Brookhiser, was a virtual obsession with reputation. Above all else, Washington the public figure was preoccupied with how others viewed him. This preoccupation had nothing to do with a yearning for fame or notoriety or the achievement of lofty estate. It had everything to do with a fixed resolve to be judged honorable by his peers. For Washington and his contemporaries, 'reputation was held to be the true measure of one's character.' Failure in a worthy enterprise could be forgiven but 'dishonor was an inexpungeable blot.'

The third and most insightful section of Founding Father takes up the theme of Washington as putative head of the national family. Although, as the author notes, Americans in Washington's own time and for generations to follow deferred to him as 'father,' the cultural upheaval of the past thirty years has rendered that honorific passe.

The problem is not with Washington himself, but with the very concept of family and the role traditionally attributed to fathers within the family unit. Advanced thinkers have come to regard family as a prop for Patriarchy. They have transformed fatherhood into a metaphor for oppression and the denial of freedom. Washington's slow fade into the shadows of national memory occurred as a byproduct of this radical reorientation. Indeed, writes Mr. Brookhiser, 'The contemporary failure of fatherhood is perhaps the subtlest barrier to our understanding of Washington, the greatest source of the distance between us and him.'

Brookhiser launches a direct assault against that barrier. He rejects the notion that Washington's claim to be Father of his Country rests upon grandiloquent tributes from another age now beyond our ken. Rather, it flows naturally from Washington's supreme accomplishment and greatest legacy.

For nearly a quarter century -- a length of time, Brookhiser reminds us, without parallel in American history -- Washington was the most powerful person in the land. Yet at the end of the Revolutionary War and again at the end of his second term as President, Washington voluntarily surrendered that power, despite the fact that there existed no precedent for doing so and indeed when many were urging him to retain it: this, according to Brookhiser, was Washington's ultimate and most telling contribution to his countrymen. Like the good father who understands that his children must live their own lives, Washington recognized that the republic he had labored mightily to create could survive and prosper only if he turned it loose. By removing himself from the stage and retiring to Mount Vernon, he returned power to the people, thrusting upon them the responsibility for shaping their own destiny. Washington, in Brookhiser's judgment, proved himself 'worthy of honor because the last thing he had done with power was to resign it.'