A Fresh Portrait of a Founding Father

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The New York Sun

How to write a biography of a monument? This question has plagued George Washington’s biographers. They have described the father of our country as a Roman stoic and a marble man, deliberately honing every facet of his character to the shape of his public role. Washing ton himself is partly to blame: He and his wife, Martha, carefully destroyed their personal correspondence. And in his diaries the great man is all business – preferring to record the day’s temperature rather than the temper of his own mind.


Early on, biographers like Parson Weems understood that Americans wanted at least a glimpse – though not too much – of a flesh-and-blood figure. So Weems concocted that famous fable demonstrating that even as a boy Washington remained in character, felling a cherry tree and admitting his transgression while confessing to his father he could not tell a lie.


Other biographers from Washington Irving to James Thomas Flexner have failed to fully capture the human side of Washington, suggests Joseph J. Ellis in “His Excellency: George Washington” (Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95). Nevertheless, he pays tribute to Flexner, the dean of Washington biographers, who produced a monumental four-volume biography, and then a condensed one-volume version, “Washington: The Indispensable Man” (still available in a New American Library paperback). Now we need a “fresh portrait,” Mr. Ellis contends, not an “epic painting” that by its very size makes Washington larger-than-life rather than revealing the man of turbulent emotions that “His Excellency” had to keep under strict discipline.


Washington so became his public role that one of his biographers, Marcus Cunliffe, an English-born historian, concluded that the monument had subsumed the man. Mr. Ellis singles out Cunliffe’s concise 200-page study, “George Washington: Man and Monument” (1958), for praise, and I can see why. Cunliffe’s first chapter is drenched in the history of Washington biographies, showing how Washington’s laconic style encouraged biographers to project their own sensibilities and those of their countrymen upon that indispensable man. Subsequent chapters deftly follow Washington’s career and dovetailed into a magnificent concluding chapter, titled “The Whole Man.” John Updike remarked that he “read through” Cunliffe’s book” the “breathless way one reads a detective novel, and thought it very gaily carried an immense amount of scholarship.” After Cunliffe, what to do?


Still, the nature of biography is that it should be rewritten even if there are no new sources. It is also a sad fact that worthy books such as Cunliffe’s go out of print, and the times seem to call not for a reprinting of what has already been eloquently stated, but books that speak the language of the day – or seek to establish an authority over the subject by taking a novel approach. A brilliant biographer like Richard Brookhiser, for example, was innovative in returning to the Plutarchian notion of “moral biography.” Mr. Brookhiser named his 1997 book “Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington” and structured his narrative in chapters simply titled “War,” “Constitution,” “President,” “Nature,” “Morals,” “Ideas,” “Fathers,” “Patriarchs and Masters,” “Father of His Country.”


Mr. Ellis refers to his competitor only once: “As Richard Brookhiser has so nicely put it, he [Washington] is in our wallets but not in our hearts.” Mr. Ellis himself is justifiably admired for nicely put books such as “Founding Brothers” and “American Sphinx,” his biography of Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Mr. Ellis thinks of himself as a stylist, not just a historian or biographer. I heard him once express his disappointment that no reviewer had commented on the fact that in every chapter of his Jefferson biography, he had his subject enter seated on a horse.


So how does Mr. Ellis saddle up Washington? I mean no disrespect when I say the biographer has written a novel, attempting to make this reticent man into what Cunliffe sought – “the whole man.” And, it is Cunliffe, I believe, who inspired the writing of “His Excellency.” Mr. Ellis confronts head-on Cunliffe’s conclusion that Washington, in the end, became his own effigy – that the personal life vanished in the monumental task of running a revolution and creating a new nation. The one biography does not refute the other so much as turn it inside out, demonstrating, in fact, that the best-worn biographical subjects are reversible.


Mr. Ellis’s title is a stroke of genius, for it plays on the fact that Washington stood alone among his contemporaries – until the very end of his days a man of no party, the only president to ever personally lead his troops into battle, a man who seemed entirely self-sufficient and independent, and virtually unapproachable – at least in public. His long silences were legendary. As Mr. Ellis concludes, Washington became the first president not only because of what he had achieved but also because of “who he was.” He personified the office of president. He was not “Your Majesty,” but “Your Excellency,” a term that perfectly captured both his innate sense of dignity and his record of achievement.


Cunliffe argued that it would be a mistake to humanize Washington – that is, to see him as only performing a role while safeguarding a different, private self. Washington’s reticence was not merely a ploy; it was a habit. He was not holding back what he had to say or what he felt; he had schooled himself in feeling only what his role required him to express.


Washington’s rare departures from decorum (usually when he lost his temper in volcanic flashes of anger) can be regarded in Cunliffian terms as just that: a momentary breakdown out of his school of cool. Mr. Ellis, on the other hand, sees an abiding tension in Washington’s personality, a rashness that did not merely result in blowups but, for example, in reckless plans to attack the British – disastrous assaults that his staff and foreign military observers had to oppose firmly before Washington would calm down.


One distinguished historian, David Hackett Fisher, has already objected to this psychologizing of Washington. Mr. Ellis is aware of the problem:



Modern sensibilities make it difficult to comprehend Washington’s psychological chemistry … and dispose us to interpret his routinized reticence as either a disingenuous ploy or a massive case of denial. But in Washington’s world no prominent statesman regarded the forthright expression of political ambition as legitimate; and anyone who actively campaigned for national office was thereby confessing he was unworthy of election. What makes then so different from now is the aristocratic assumption that any explicit projection of self-interest in the political arena betrayed a lack of control over one’s own passions, which did not bode well for the public interest. Washington carried this ethos to an extreme, insisting that any mention of his willingness to serve as president prior to the election violated the code.


Washington – certainly as ambitious as any of his contemporaries – took the code to an extreme; after all, it resulted in his being elected twice unanimously in the Electoral College. A third term was out of the question – not merely because Washington was aging, but because he realized that while he could win another election, the vote would not be unanimous.


Mr. Ellis cannot solve the mystery: How much of Washington was political, how much personal? But “His Excellency” vibrantly explores that mystery, making history live again, and ensuring that yet another biographer will one day stand Mr. Ellis on his head.


The New York Sun

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