GEORGE WASHINGTON, for all his fame, is one of the least known and even less understood American presidents or Revolutionary War figures. Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review, sought to remedy that a few years ago in a short but riveting book, “Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.” And now he brings his explanation of Washington to television in a documentary on July 4 on PBS at 9:30 p.m. (That’s after the fireworks.) The book was fresh and interesting. The PBS special is even better, a 90-minute, fast-moving examination of why Washington came to be such a striking leader and a man of character willing to yield power and live up to his republican ideals.
The prospects for a documentary on George Washington being good television, in contrast to being a good book, could not have been very promising. But Brookhiser and director Michael Pack have managed to tell the story of Washington in a brisk and telegenic way. It’s not just still pictures and talking heads. They’ve made it a kind of travelogue that visits the location of historic moments in Washington’s life. It’s actually fun to watch.
Brookhiser doesn’t linger at Mount Vernon and hobnob with historians and curators. Instead, he goes everywhere–from the plot of ground where Washington’s boyhood home once stood to the top of a building in Brooklyn where he watched his ragged troops retreat, and to an auto body shop in New York City under which hundreds of revolutionary soldiers from Maryland are buried. He goes to reenactments of Revolutionary War battles and to the home of descendants of slaves who Washington didn’t free until his death. Washington, it turns out, was one of nine slaveholding presidents, but the only one who freed all of his slaves.
The aim of the broadcast, Brookhiser says, is to explain why Washington was such a singularly noble figure, so different from other famous leaders, and so much better. He wasn’t well-educated or born into Virginia’s high gentry. Yet he rose to power because of his skill as a warrior, his remarkable charisma that isn’t quite conveyed in his famous picture on the dollar bill, and his shrewdness as a politician. Washington had the same attributes of other political leaders in the 18th century, plus a lot more.
What intrigues Brookhiser was Washington’s willingness to give up power and go home when his job was done, first as military leader, then as president. No great military commander had done that, giving up the chance to rule with few restraints, since Cincinnatus’ day in Rome 2000 years earlier. Caesar and Napoleon, for example, became dictators. Washington’s decision to step down after two presidential terms was “without precedent in human experience” at the time, proving his sincere belief in republican ideas and his determination to make these ideas real and lasting by his behavior, according to Brookhiser.
The most surprising thing to learn about Washington is that he wasn’t a natural leader. Like Ronald Reagan, he honed his public appearances as a leader from popular culture–movies in Reagan’s case, plays in Washington’s. He turned himself into a polite and genteel person by studying the rules of civility from a book. As a politician, he was hardly an idea machine, but he “absorbed the best ideas of his day and made them real,” Brookhiser says. The result: Washington became “America’s first superstar,” and deservedly so.
Brookhiser focuses on one trait in particular that defined Washington’s character: “He excelled at the rare virtue of constancy. . . . He was true to his beliefs.” Brookhiser closes the show with this praise of Washington: “He used the charisma of a warrior and a politician to serve the ends of right ideas, mutual respect, and freedom. Whatever he did, from fighting a war, to freeing his slaves, to surrendering power time and again, he stayed firm in his original high principles.” Few have tried to match that. Fewer still have succeeded.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
