It is a bit ironic That George Washington’s 268th birthday Tuesday comes in the middle of a furious presidential primary election campaign.
Washington never liked the idea of politics being organized around political parties. He probably would be aghast to see the momentous issues commanding this primary season: John McCain and George W. Bush sniveling over which one most legitimately can label himself as a political “outsider”; Bill Bradley and Al Gore having a dustup over which man most rightfully can brag of being the “underdog” in their race.
If he were alive today, Washington probably would be worthless as a candidate. The image he would project just wouldn’t be presidential enough, and, in truth, he had the sorts of skeletons in his closet that might be enough to hound him out of the race.
Today’s voters, who seem to like candidates who at least pretend to be populist and approachable, probably would not much like the stiff, staid, aloof Washington. There is a story historian Edmund Morgan recounted in his 1980 book “The Genius of George Washington” that illustrates Washington’s off-putting remoteness.
During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, two of Washington’s superlative young proteges, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, argued over Washington’s aloofness. Hamilton bet Morris dinner and wine for a dozen people that Morris could not–even at a social drinking party–rest an arm on Washington’s shoulders in an informal greeting without being rebuked by the great general.
Morris gladly took the bet and acted upon it a few nights later, when Washington attended one of their social functions. Historian Morgan described what happened:
“. . . Morris. . . walked up to Washington, bowed, shook hands, and then placed his left hand on Washington’s shoulder and said, `My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well.’ The response was immediate and icy. Washington reached up, removed the hand, stepped back, and fixed his eyes in silence on Morris, until Morris retreated into the crowd. The company looked on in dismay, and no one ever tried it again.”
This does not sound like a man who would tramp through Iowa, glad-handing farmers in rural coffee shops or belly up to a bar in a Detroit saloon in order to attract the vote of auto workers.
“He would have been a bust on television,” says Rick Pearson, the Tribune’s veteran political correspondent. “He was a very handsome man, but he had a problem with those false teeth.”
Those false teeth were not wooden, as popular lore would have it, but they were unsightly and ill-fitting, made of animal bones, ivory and human teeth. Through his glory years as Revolutionary War hero and president, Washington was so embarrassed by his unsightly choppers that he kept his mouth shut as much as possible. When he spoke, he did so through tight lips so as not to show his teeth. As a result, he was more of a mumbler than an orator.
This would not play well in today’s all-important campaign medium–television. People these days want their presidents to be great communicators, and it doesn’t hurt for them to have dazzling smiles, either. But that isn’t the half of Washington’s political downsides.
“He had another fatal flaw too,” jokes longtime political consultant Don Rose. “He couldn’t tell a lie.”
It’s true that Washington was a towering model of rectitude in all matters of leadership and governance, but he also carried around some secrets from his past that in today’s ruthless atmosphere some political enemy would be sure to dig up and use against him.
When he was 16 years old, Washington fell hopelessly in love with 18-year-old Sally Fairfax, who was married to his close neighbor and friend, the richest man along the Potomac, George William Fairfax.
This was no puppy love. Washington pined for Sally his entire life. It is unclear how serious their attraction for each other came to be, though he once wrote tantalizingly of “a thousand tender passages” they had enjoyed together.
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Even as an old man who cared deeply for his wife, Martha, and who basked in glory for defeating the British and leading a new kind of government into the family of nations, he wrote to Sally Fairfax that no honors or events he had experienced in his life compared to her: “. . . all of them together have (not) been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest of my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.”
He is not known to have ever inhaled marijuana, but Washington came to manhood in the wild and woolly frontiers of America, first as a teenaged surveyor, then as soldier. Wenching and drinking sprees were favored pursuits of young men on the frontier, and apparently Washington was no stranger to either of them. By today’s standards, as a young man he was a “hunk,” very tall for his time (about 6-foot-3), powerfully built and athletic.
“His movements and gestures are graceful, his walk majestic, and he is a splendid horseman,” a fellow militia officer wrote of him in 1758. By then, though just 26 years old, Washington’s exploits in the French and Indian War were well-publicized in print in both the Colonies and Europe.
Horses had been shot out from under him, and his hats and coats had been aerated by enemy gunfire as he led troops into battle. For the rest of his life, all heads would swivel in his direction when he entered a room, men in admiration, women attracted by his charms.
There is no indication that, once he married Martha, a rich young widow with two children, Washington was ever unfaithful. But he did like the company of ladies, and they returned his attentions. No prude, he loved parties attended by interesting and sophisticated women, occasions for flirting and bantering in double entendres.
“Now let me speak of our noble and agreeable commander,” a wife of one of Washington’s colonels during the Revolution wrote home to a friend after visiting her husband at Washington’s winter headquarters, “for he commands both sexes, one by his excellent skill in military matters, the other by his ability, politeness and attention. . . . (around females he) throws off the hero and takes on the chatty, agreeable companion. He can be downright impudent sometimes–such impudence, Fanny, as you and I like.”
If he were a candidate today, Sally Fairfax probably would be an issue, and Washington’s saucy attitude about women would be too. His lifelong fondness for an evening of drinking and his yen for gambling might crop up as issues as well.
They weren’t problems in his own time, obviously. What appealed to voters then were his will, stature and commitment to the American cause.
When the rebels had no army to speak of and no real sense yet if the majority of the colonists supported the Revolution, Washington stuck his head in a noose to become the leader of the uprising against the world’s mightiest army and navy.
He more than anyone understood that the war hinged not on combat but on whether the desire for freedom ran deeply or shallowly through the hearts and minds of the civilian population. He angered Congress when he refused to allow his soldiers, often hungry and cold, to take desperately needed provisions from civilians at gunpoint.
So civilian hatred instead grew for British and Hessian troops who stripped their farms to supply the king’s military larders. By the same token, when Washington caught them, he refused to persecute deserters and colonials who sided with Britain, a lenient impulse that often turned enemies into allies.
Though Washington had trouble arming, feeding, clothing and paying his troops, he took no salary and suffered alongside his men, winning their deep loyalty and love.
As revolutionary general and later as president, Washington’s aloofness and reserve were traits he carefully nurtured. He realized he was the best-known person in a newborn nation, which suffered deep divisions from the outset, particularly from northern versus southern regionalism and from class conflict between wealthy landowners and laborers, small tradesmen and small farmers.
He showed no favor to any competing factions, and by seeming to stand above the fray of political disputes, he became the sole trusted figure to mediate and settle them.
Until the American Revolution, every major revolution in history ended with the victors turning on their own people as new tyrants. Europeans expected nothing less from Washington. He stunned them by resigning his army command and retiring at the end of the war, then by voluntarily retiring again at the end of his second term as president, though many Americans gladly would have made him king.
Today’s politicians are treated like commodities whose images and messages are buffed and tweaked to maximize their appeal to selected demographic targets. Terms like “leadership” and “character” have the ring of empty sloganeering. In Washington’s time, they had meaning and weight, and he embodied them in all their human meaning.
In today’s world, he might be passed over as a mumbling old man with slipping dentures and an exaggerated sense of propriety and decorum.
“If I were to handle Washington as a candidate today,” said Don Rose. “I guess I couldn’t use him on television a whole lot. We would have to re-create a personality for him and run a different kind of campaign. But I doubt Washington would have anything to do with a consultant or taking part in that kind of reconstructive surgery.
“I often think how we would have been deprived of some of our greatest leaders if political campaigns had always been conducted as they are now. We probably wouldn’t have had Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson because of looks or personality.
“Washington, I think he’d be an almost impossible candidate to sell to today’s voter.”