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By Joseph J. Ellis
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During the last presidential election, I was on the road promoting my book about America's founding generation. Lots of folks wanted to know why, in 2000, they had to choose between George W. Bush and Al Gore, when 200 years earlier they got to choose between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It was really a prejudicial question, designed to dramatize the gap between political leadership then and now. Let's call it the "founders' gap" (i.e., can you imagine Bush or Gore on Mount Rushmore?). I rather shamefully played to the prejudice, quoting Henry Adams to the effect that, if you look at the American presidency panoramically, you've got to conclude that Darwin got it exactly backward.
As the presidential election of 2004 looms, let me try to make amends by reassuring both candidates that all the Founding Fathers, before they were marbleized and mythologized, were considered fallible and controversial figures. The president of Yale, for example, threatened to revoke the degree of any graduate who voted for Thomas Jefferson. When George Washington stepped down from the presidency, Tom Paine wrote him an open letter, denouncing him as a traitor and praying for his imminent death.
Washington, of course, was the Foundingest Father of them all. If one way to bridge the infamous founders' gap is to remind ourselves that he was a fallible man and not an icon, another way is to travel back to the time of his time and put some contemporary questions to him.
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Keep in mind that Washington does not know about weapons of mass destruction, CNN, Medicare or Osama bin Laden. He remains encased forever in that foreign country called the past. We must translate then into now--always a tricky business that many distinguished historians would find inherently impossible. Nevertheless, given our desperate need for wisdom at this propitious moment, let us give this risky experiment a try.
IRAQ. Washington faced a vastly superior British Army and Navy during the American Revolution, the reigning superpower of its day. He lost more battles than he won, but he gradually came to the recognition that he did not need to win the war, only not lose it. That recognition was rooted in his strategic assessment of the British predicament as a foreign occupation force loathed by a majority of the American citizenry. Washington almost lost the war in the first year, when the Continental Army was nearly annihilated. But once it became a prolonged war of attrition, if you will, a popularly supported insurgency, the improbable became the inevitable because even the British Empire, with all its financial and military resources, could not sustain such an open-ended commitment indefinitely.
TERRORISM. As commander in chief during the war, then as president, Washington oversaw a highly vulnerable country. All the major American cities were occupied by the British during the war, and afterward he was powerless to prevent multiple massacres on the Western frontier, which he tended to blame on land-hungry white settlers and British incitement of Native American grievances. Washington never used the term "national security," but its core meaning--the very survival of the United States as a viable nation--was at risk throughout his military and political career. (Islamic terrorists threaten national security in a secondary sense by placing lives and lifestyles at risk, but not the nation itself.) Despite this more primal threat, Washington's abiding posture was calm confidence. Rather than rally public support around fear, he reassured the citizenry that the liberal values created by the American Revolution--popular sovereignty, representative government and individual rights--would eventually triumph.
LEADERSHIP. Washington's final piece of wisdom is difficult for us to hear; or, once heard, even more difficult to heed. It is this: a president's ultimate constituency is not the people but the public, which is the long-term interest of the people that, at any given moment, might be unpopular. The only poll that really counted for Washington was posterity's judgment. The only person to be trusted with the powers of the office is someone who does not need them to make his life complete.
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