BIOGRAPHY: Washington: A LifeBy Ron Chernow Allen Lane, 904pp. £35
AMONG THE many pleasures of teaching in the history department at University College Dublin for more than a decade was the company of those scholars who held the Mary Ball Washington chair in American history. Named after the mother of the first US president, this visiting position would bring to Ireland each year distinguished historians who were characterised by their collegiality, conviviality and general willingness to throw themselves into the life of the college. How poorly, it turns out, they served the reputation of the woman in whose name they served. For one of the many colourful portraits in Ron Chernow’s enjoyable new book is that of the sour Mary Ball Washington – a woman always prepared to enjoy life to the minimum.
Mary’s lowering spirits always extended to George, whose accomplishments she was only too happy to ignore or denigrate. “His excellency?” she spat loudly on one occasion, when her son was announced at a reception. “What nonsense!”
Many an amateur shrink has tried to use Washington’s difficult relationship with his mother to explain his apparently aloof and austere character. Perhaps it was a lack of maternal affection that led to his hatred of being touched. At the Philadelphia constitutional convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton apparently tricked Gouverneur Morris by means of a wager to slap Washington on the shoulder, saying, “My dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well.” Morris may have won the wager, but Washington’s reaction ensured it was a gesture that neither Morris nor anyone else ever repeated.
Washington’s aura of detachment may have had something to do with his mother; it probably had more to do with his teeth. Chernow spends a great deal of time on the general’s prosthodontological agonies. Although legend had it that Washington had wooden false teeth, they were in fact human ones, pulled from the mouths of his own slaves, who sold them to him for a shilling each. These were fastened to Washington’s last remaining natural tooth with a complicated arrangement involving gold wire. Not only did these distort his features; they were also incredibly painful. Biting on food was often agony. Then there was the constant worry that the entire contraption might fall out.
When Washington made a tour of the 13 American states immediately after becoming president, observers were amazed as he listened in patient silence to the petty complaints of ordinary citizens. It seemed yet further proof of his elevated nature. In fact he was simply terrified that if he spoke his dentures would fly out. This lends Washington the element of faint ridiculousness that so often accompanies true greatness; think of Dev, Churchill and de Gaulle.
CHERNOW ATTENDS to this kind of personal detail with the same mastery he brought to his prize-winning biography of John D Rockefeller. Like that monumental work, Washington: A Lifeis a doorstopper of a book, coming in just short of 1,000 pages. That might seem too great for a subject who was the president not of a superpower but of a nascent state on the edge of the British empire. Yet such is Chernow's skill that the pace never flags. Every character is brought to life. We fight each battle and stand beside Washington through every triumph and frustration. Washington: A Lifeis a very long book that reads like a short one, because Chernow is not just an accomplished researcher but also a terrific storyteller.
The extended length gives Chernow room to bring out the nuances in Washington’s character. “From a laudable desire to venerate Washington,” he writes in his introduction, “we have sanded down the rough edges of his personality and made him difficult to grasp.” That was a process started by Washington himself. He understood better than anyone the ferocious temper that lay beneath; he spent his entire life wrestling at all costs to keep it under control. That rigid self-control and ability to mask his feelings were the route to power. “Where other founders gloried in their displays of intellect,” says Chernow, “Washington’s strategy was the opposite: the less people knew about him, the more he thought he could accomplish.”
The question remains: what was it about Washington that made other men so willing to follow him? Certainly it was not that he was a brilliant thinker, orator or strategist. He was not even a particularly good general. Thomas Jefferson thought Washington was just plain lucky, complaining about “his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good acts of others and leaving to them that of errors”. Yet few doubted that Washington conveyed a sense of command that compelled others to ask him to lead.
Washington definitely looked the part. “Nothing adds to the appearance of a man more than dress,” he advised his personal Life Guard. But he did not achieve his pre-eminence because people liked the cut of his jib. Chernow shows time and again that what they respected was his strength of character. When so much in America was in flux, he always seemed the essential still point. Time and again Americans turned to him: to command the revolutionary army; to preside over the constitutional convention; to serve as the first president of the United States. It is the kind of leadership that is easy to spot but impossible to define. When, in 1792, Washington said that he was not going to serve a second term as president it caused such a panic among the governing elite that even Jefferson was forced to plead with him to stay on.
CHERNOW BRINGS Washington brilliantly to life even if in the end the source of this founding father’s power remains opaque. Perhaps that tells us more about ourselves than it does about Washington and his age. We live in a time when the president of the United States is castigated even by his own supporters for his cool reserve and distance, the very attributes that 18th-century Americans so admired in Washington.
Contemporary Americans may continue to revere Washington as the first president, but they would not want him as commander-in- chief. It is not hard to imagine Washington’s reaction to the glad-handing required of a modern president or, worse, the demands to show that he was “feeling our pain”.
Even his own mother wouldn’t have wished that on him.
Richard Aldous is Eugene Meyer professor of British history and literature at Bard College, New York. His most recent book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli, is published by Pimlico
