“There are no great men,” the famed U.S. Admiral “Bull” Halsey declared, “There are only great challenges which ordinary men are forced to meet.” Halsey, a gruff commander famed for his exploits in World War II, was no woke academic. But the idea that great men, or great women, don’t exist is very much a late 20th-century invention.
George Washington is the best illustration of how wrong that idea is. The American Revolution, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has said, “turned the world upside down.” Burns, noting that it created the concept of a “citizen,” called it “the most important event since the birth of Christ.”
But the Revolution’s success, and ultimately that of America’s, hinged on one man: Washington.
America’s Founding Fathers were men of genius. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, among many others, were an all-star cast.
They were profound thinkers and astute strategists steeped in history and the Enlightenment. Their judgment, character, and deep learning were essential to the United States avoiding the sordid fate of other revolutions that would follow in France, Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Those revolutions birthed tyranny. Ours eventually forged a democracy.
The Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution are seminal tracts. Washington didn’t write them. But his very existence made their existence and implementation possible.
The American Revolution could have survived without a Jefferson or an Adams. It could not have worked without George Washington.
From his wartime leadership to chairing the Constitutional Convention and then ascending to the presidency, Washington is America’s indispensable man. America would not have existed without him.
Washington has long been the unknowable man. The person to thank for this isn’t Parson Weems, his early biographer, who claimed that Washington chopped down a cherry tree and couldn’t tell a lie. Rather, the person to thank is Washington himself.
Washington wore a deep and impenetrable mask. He worked hard–very hard–to conceal his inner thoughts and fiery temper.
“In reading the lives of great men,” Harry Truman would write a century and a half after Washington’s death, “I found that the first victory that they won was over themselves…self-discipline with all of them came first.” Truman was thinking of other individuals, Washington foremost among them.
Some biographers have tried to penetrate the veil. Precious few, Ron Chernow and Paul Johnson among them, have been successful.
Washington’s skill at concealing his inner thoughts made him seem as if he were cast from marble. But he was a man made from flesh and blood, and possessing a deep temper and, at some level, a reservoir of insecurity that could be traced back to the death of his father when he was a mere boy of 10.
But it isn’t just Washington’s famous reserve that makes him, even from the vantage point of the 21st century, seem distant and remote. Washington’s “overwhelming ambition was to be thought unambitious,” Johnson quipped.
Like another wartime leader, born 150 years later in the heyday of the British Empire, Washington long felt that he was “walking with destiny.” Washington, Johnson notes, “seems to have known from an early stage in his career that he would be a figure in history.”
He sought to construct the historical record accordingly, even taking his archive with him when he went to war and “instructing his personal guard to “protect it with their lives and hustle it to a secret place of safety if the headquarters came under threat.” This was a man who was acutely conscious–obsessive even–over appearances and reputation.
Yet ultimately it was the sheer size of Washington’s own deeds that made him pass into legend.
Washington, his biographer Paul Johnson noted, “was one of the most important figures in world history.”
He was, by unanimous consent, the man chosen by the Continental Congress to lead their fledgling army. Washington was chosen for a variety of reasons — he was the only delegate to wear a military uniform, he physically towered over other members, and he went out of his way to be as inoffensive and polite as possible to other delegates.
One of the first decisions by the new nation would prove to be among its most fateful.
As a general, Washington lost more battles than he won. But he understood the mission. As the military historian Rick Atkinson pointed out, whereas “the British had to win” to keep their American Empire, the Americans merely “had to not lose.”
That Washington was no Napoleon doesn’t detract from his greatness. Indeed, Washington’s greatest achievement was keeping his ragtag army together in the face of poor provisions, unpaid salaries, and numerous mutinies. This achievement is all the greater when one considers how disparate and divided the colonies were.
SEAN DURNS: OUR LAST FOUNDING FATHER
As the nation’s first president, Washington kept together the nation that he had built. Washington is rightly lauded for the precedents that he set, from recognizing that he needed a cabinet of advisers to stepping down after two terms. The latter decision, King George III famously declared, made Washington “the greatest man in the world.” He could have held onto power. After all, most military commanders who obtain ultimate power do precisely that.
But ultimate power wasn’t Washington’s chief objective. The success of the American experiment was. And for that, on America’s 250th anniversary, we have George Washington to thank more than anyone else. The first American was our nation’s most indispensable.