Flexner's Washington

Flexner’s Washington

James Thomas Flexner, biographer of George Washington, died this week in Manhattan at the age of 95. Here are some thoughts, written down a few years ago, about Flexner’s Washington.

I first read Flexner’s popular one volume biography of Washington, The Indispensable Man, in the mid 1980s. At the time all I knew about Washington was the generalities learned in childhood, and I wanted to know more. Though Washington at first seemed a distant, abstract figure, hard to understand, he gradually started to become tangible. This was a strange and interesting experience. I found myself thinking about Washington a lot, trying to grasp what he was. Then, at a certain point, it was suddenly as though I could see him in my mind’s eye, and he became real and present to me as a human being.

Years later, in the late 1990s, I finally got around to reading the last three volumes of Flexner’s four volume biography. (I haven’t yet read Flexner’s first volume, though I doubt that even Flexner’s treatment could surpass Willard Stern Randall’s enthralling account of Washington’s amazing early life). Volume Two, George Washington in the American Revolution, follows him week by week from his appointment as commander in chief of the Continental Army (of which he was the first member) in June 1775 to his return to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve 1783. During those eight and a half years he had stayed in 280 different headquarters and had slept at Mount Vernon a total of three nights.

Apart from the tremendous drama of the War of Independence itself, what struck me most about the book—and it’s a quality not normally associated with him—is Washington’s multifacetedness. He had qualities in himself which we would normally not expect to find in the same person, but which in him not only co-existed but seemed perfectly balanced, such as his instinctive nature as a man of action, and his highly organized, comprehensive approach to everything he undertook. Or his personal grace, charisma, and natural authority, combined with his constant worrying—he must have worried more than any major leader in history (a trait that was affectionately satirized in the musical 1776). He worried so much not just because the cause of independence was in fact so often on the brink of ruin, but because he was always thinking, always looking at the whole picture, and saw the myriad things could go wrong which less alert and less committed men did not see. Far from being dull or stolid, Washington with his many dualities strikes me as one of the most interesting and complex of men. This volume of Flexner’s biography, in which the reader almost feels that he is at Washington’s side through the whole of the American Revolution, ought to be required reading for every American.

In Volume Three, covering the years after the war and Washington’s first term as President, I was deeply moved by Flexner’s rendering of the real sacrifice Washington made when he returned to public life in the late 1780s. Especially poignant is the scene when, a few months before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, as Washington realizes that a new government will be formed and that he will very likely be the head of it, Flexner describes how, during his daily rounds of his farms, his beloved Mount Vernon and all his interesting plans for his future life there seem to fade from before his eyes.

As in the scene just mentioned, Flexner at rare, key moments in the narrative shifts from his usual objective tone to a depiction of the world as he imagines Washington is seeing it through his own eyes. He does this to great effect in the opening and closing scenes of Volume Two: Washington, on the night of his election as commander in chief in 1775, sitting in a Philadelphia tavern across a table from his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson; and Washington at the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1783 entering the Congress chamber in Anapolis to resign his commission, seeing with his physical eyes a handful of mediocre politicians who had so often let down the cause (the quality of the members the Congress had declined drastically from the heroic days of 1775 and 1776), but seeing with his mind’s eye the great nation that is to come from them.

I was also struck by the tragedy that unfolds in Volume Four, a scarcely known chapter in American history. “Anguish and Farewell” is exactly the right subtitle for this book. Having given up his highest values—the universal esteem of all Americans and his happy life in Mount Verson, achieved at such great cost—to become a political leader, Washington now endures an almost Christlike betrayal. The worst betrayer was Jefferson, who successfully urged Washington against his will to remain for a second term as President, even as, behind his back, he encouraged vicious attacks against him as a proto-monarchist out to destroy the Constitution. When Washington discovered what Jefferson had been up to (Jefferson had left the government at this point), he wrote him a letter in which he made clear his indignation, while expressing it in the most restrained manner. It was their last personal contact. Reading of Jefferson’s dishonesty and vindictiveness toward Washington is a harrowing experience that will forever alter your view of the man. Flexner’s account of the bitter politics of the 1790s, with its astonishing element of revolutionary hatred that had been triggered in the souls of many Americans by the French Revolution, should be read by anyone who wants to understand the long pedigree of leftism in American life.

Flexner was Washington’s ideal biographer because, as a writer, he evinces some of the same mental qualities that Washington evinced as a leader: classic balance and comprehensiveness, the ability to see the world whole, the ability to see each thing, the good and the bad, both in itself and in its proper relation to the whole. Like his subject, he seems rooted in tradition while engaged in the modern world.

These are just a few of the uplifting thoughts inspired by Flexner’s great biography.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 20, 2003 02:44 PM | Send

Comments

I haven’t read Flexner’s biography but this review of it certainly has made that a goal.

I’ve read that such was the impression which Washington’s unique character (and imposing physical presence) made on his contemporaries, that the framers of the Constitution subconsciously modeled the office of the presidency with Washington in mind, sort of using their image of him as a guide to the creation of the kind of presidential office they wanted to see preserved into the future for their country. It was as if they translated the Washington they knew into the words of the document they wrote, so that after he, the first, was gone, his replacements would have to fit his mold. I’ve also read that it was largely thanks to the personal respect which he inspired in people that the crises of the first years of the Republic were weathered and the basic precedents were set that allowed the continuation of the American experiment in self-government.

Had the founding generation not been blessed with this man’s presence, who knows in what ways things today would be different!

Posted by: Unadorned on February 22, 2003 1:14 AM

I wholeheartedly second Mr. Auster’s endorsement of the Flexner biography.

My initial understanding of the General was similar to Mr. Auster’s throughout my childhood. I was prompted to take a much more serious look at his life, about the same time as Mr. Auster, thanks to my Tae Kwon Do Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee.

Grandmaster Rhee, the first to teach Tae Kwon Do in America, listed among the top 200 immigrants in our history, understood well the significance of how one man could shape a nation’s history, himself having made a harrowing escape from North Korea as it fell to the despotic hands of Kim Il Sung.

Grandmaster Rhee spoke of the General often to us, his wide-eyed students. He talked of how when he spoke at colleges across the country he would ask his audience if anyone could name General Washington’s father. Not one time had he received an answer. (Augustine, a name we should easily remember.) He noted that Captain August Washington, though passing away when his famous son was quite young, still had an important role in raising the father of our country. Shouldn’t we at least know his name?

He also passed out free copies of a biography he had read called “The Making Of George Washington” by William H. Wilbur. He encouraged us to learn about the General and to emulate him. I read the book, and that got me started. (And thereafter, I never referred to him as “George Washington” — that’s _General_.)

Throughout my adolescence and teen years, my favorite of pasttimes was sitting back and reading about the General. I couldn’t read enough!

As I learned more about him, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t learned it already. My high school textbooks said so little about him, almost as it were in passing. What a great man this was! the leader of our Revolution, and our nation’s early years! The character of the man. The stories — how he so frequently and narrowly escaped death, how he always resigned himself to duty, placing his country’s best interests over his own, how he put principle above else even as he skillfully waded the political waves.

To me, his life was proof enough that God had looked on this people and had blessed us, bringing us up for His own purposes.

How many of us know that he literally spared this country from becoming a military dictatorship by the mere act of putting on his spectacles?

In my study today at home, a whole section is set aside with a bust of General Washington surrounded by flags and memorabilia purchased at different historical sites, always to serve as a reminder of what for me defines greatness — the greatness that can be achieved by a flawed, imperfect mortal man. The Second Cincinnatus!

Congress did well in 1976, when they posthumously promoted him to “General of the Armies of the United States, SIX STAR,” so that no would ever equal or exceed him in rank.

At risk of sounding judgmental, I was disappointed that there were not more posts in this thread. Does the General not mean anything to us anymore? But then I would not likely have done so myself had it not been for Grandmaster Rhee. The fact that it took a patriotic Korean immigrant to call my attention to the father of my native country has always been a source of great irony to me — if not outright shame.

Posted by: Joel on July 24, 2003 12:41 AM

Thanks to Joel for his appreciative comments about Washington; to have had such an absorption in Washington in your teens is really unusual. I also was disappointed that this article evinced so little response. But that’s consistent with my general experience of trying to interest fellow conservatives in Washington, and getting nowhere. The reasons for this are too large a subject for the moment; though the main reason is, I think, that Washington is simply too large a figure for modern people to want to take in. In any case, I believe the only way a person can get interested in Washington is by reading good books about him.

Also, Richard Brookhiser’s TV documentary about Washington was dead—as are Brookhiser’s occasional articles and talks (I just read one in Imprimis). Brookhiser has no interest in the active, striving, complex person Washington really was; all the qualities of Washington he looked at in the tv program were static, not active qualities; he just wants Washington as a static symbol of the American regime for people to gather around, sort of analogously to how neoconservatives just want America to be an idea, not a living people and culture. It’s amazing that someone with as little to say as Brookhiser, has this career that just goes on and on. But that’s also a subject for another day.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on July 24, 2003 1:18 AM

I read Mr. Brookhiser’s biography ‘George Washington, Founding Father’ and thought it wasn’t too bad, (not that great either.) I thought it might be an adequate introduction for the average American today, not too long or hard of a read. But after reading your comments above, I begin to wonder whether I had made that conclusion out of low expectations that were just taken for granted. :-/

Can’t say I was too impressed with Mr. Brookhiser’s commentary in the ‘Rules of Civility’ run he put out about the same time. But I think it’s just better to read the ‘Rules’ alone and draw one’s own conclusions about how they affected the General’s life through study.

What’s really sad is just how much our lack of interest in the General represents such a great loss. How many other nations in history can claim a man like this?

Posted by: Joel on July 24, 2003 1:37 AM

I haven’t seen Brookhiser’s book; maybe it’s better than the tv documentary.

On the invisibility of Washington in America, I think this is a major factor in our loss of national identity. He is the largest and most important (as well as the most interesting as far as I’m concerned) figure in our history. For Americans to know next to nothing about him, the father of our country, is a mark against us. It’s as though someone knew nothing and cared nothing about his own father, who just happened to be one of the greatest men who ever lived. There’s something seriously amiss here.

And as I said, I find this even among conservatives.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on July 24, 2003 1:51 AM