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He's like Chickenman, He's Everywhere, He's Everywhere, but who is He?

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The essence of George Washington is everywhere in America. When we take out our billfold to pay a bill, there he is. When we watch the news of TV we always have reports from Washington. George Washington is the American version of Mount Olympas. He's there looking rather stoic on Mount Rushmore. Mr. Ellis goes into great detail in giving us a read on who George Washington really was. As Ellis has found out, George Washington was a rather ordinary person who was neither a military genius nor an intellectual. What Ellis discovers is a man of ambition and stamina who had the ability to learn from his mistakes and also capitalize on the mistakes of his adversaries. We find out that Washington realized that America would not survive without a strong central government base. He saw that a loose confederation of States would never survive nor prosper. Ellis probes into Washington's use of power and his laying the basic tenets of the office of the President. The fact that his title was Mr. President and not Your Excellency can be attributed to Washington never wanting to base the office as a Monarch. Washington also set the precedent of 2 term stays at the White House until it was broken by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. FDR did indeed tamper with Washington's precedent and Congress followed with the 22nd Amendment on February 26, 1951 limiting the President to 2 Terms in Office. As Michiko Kakutani states in her New York Times book review, this book by Joseph Ellis breaks no new ground, but "it nonetheless provides a lucid, often shrewd take on the man Mr. Ellis calls the "primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all." And it does so with admirable grace and wit." Well I do agree Ms. Kakutani! Five Stars!!

A Great Man not an Deity

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Several years ago I decided to read at least one biography on every US President. Hearing a short lecture about Washington at a museum was a big catalyst for my decision. Here was a man that had transcended humanity in so many minds to be more of a iconic symbol of our nation's birth and it's ideals. I wanted to learn more about the person - not just the icon. Ellis' book is the second biography I've read on Washington. (John Ferling's is the other.) While there is certainly plenty of personal interpretation on Ellis' behalf, there's also plenty of reality. I know some readers are put off by this. They want to remember and recognize Washington for the great man he was and deem any attempt at adding to that picture as sacrilegious. I disagree. I think seeing a more complete and flawed image of the man himself makes him more accessible. Washington is no longer this man way up there on a pedestal that we can never connect with or identify with. He's a real person that did some amazing things in his life because of his integrity and his fortitude. Nothing in this biography (or Ferling's for that matter)takes away from that. For me, today sitting on the other side of the cover of these two books, George Washington is a real human being that had his faults as well as his strengths. He's a guy that capitalized on what he's good at and who was able to hold together an infant nation of wildly diverse people's simply because of who he was and the leader he was. Washington isn't less of gifted leader to me after reading this book - in fact, seeing "all of him" makes him *more* of an awe inspiring man.

A suspect treatment

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The modern "pyschological" biography attempts what is probably an impossibility: to penetrate and elucidate the core "personality" or "character" of an historic figure. The danger that the resulting portrait may be a novel masquerading as a biography, a creation of the author rather than a rendition of the subject, is great. Still more so when the author has clear psychological quirks of his own, and a contemporary political axe to grind. When he also has formidable literary skills, the danger of creating a cogent, compelling lie is acute. This is certainly so in the works of Joseph J. Ellis. He has admitted telling lies about his alleged role in the Vietnam War, demonstrating that his own character and personality are not wedded to the truth. Stranger still, in light of the content of his self-aggrandizing fabrications, he is an avowed political liberal. Something very odd was going on in his own psyche. More recently, he has written that the political vision of Barack Obama accords with that of the Founding Fathers (or, as Ellis calls them, the "so-called founding fathers"). There are thus multiple reasons to be skeptical of Ellis' several attempts to psychoanalyze the Founders. In this volume the patient on the couch is Washington. It is altogether too convenient that Ellis' Washington is a man whose primary impulse is to seek control in all things, but above all in the attempt to control his own reputation (or, as we might say, his "image"), both for contemporaries and for posterity. That's the psychology; as to the politics, Ellis' Washington is the Founding Liberal, prescient in his perception of the need for a strong national government that would curb the rights that Jeffersonians, and today's conservatives, regard as reserved to the states and the people. According to Ellis, the psychology and the politics are linked: Washington's belief in a strong national government was an external projection of his inner control. As is typical with this sort of work, any behavior or pronouncement that departs from the general "insight" is just the exception that proves the rule. Ellis even manages to turn Washington's Farewell Address, with its admonition against foreign involvement, into a harbinger of Kissingerian internationalism. Although this book is well written, indeed a joy to read, and is superficially convincing, I am deeply suspicious.

the de-mythed myth

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While it's totally hip to de-mythify things our parents (silly things) thought were good, Ellis's de-mythification of Washington is not satisfying. His basic thesis is that Washington was a nincompoop who happened to be in the right place at the right time his whole life. That's unlikely, and it doesn't explain why Washington was a legend in his own time as well as our own, unlike most "mythical" legends, whose myths grow in time. Five stars for doing what everyone else does. Two stars for insight.

Excellent

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Some have wanted to reserve 5 stars to a "War and Peace" type book. To me 5 stars means the book did what it set out to do and did it well. "His Excellency" indeed did. It is an excellent short biography of the father of our country. When I picked this book up, I realized all I knew about Washington was what I had been taught in grade school. Ellis is an excellent biographer who delves into many aspects of Washington's life. The narrative moved well and was entertaining. Some may be put off by Ellis' style of going into analysis of issues. I found that this added to my understanding. Washington indeed was a great man who's influence reaches us to this day. Now I know why!