Washington--A Forgotten Giant

Forty years ago, today was Washington’s Birthday. It still is—he was actually born on February 22—but now we celebrate “President’s Day” on any Monday that falls between February 15 and February 21. So the holiday will never again fall on Washington’s actual birth date.
That’s too bad. Washington deserves his own holiday—certainly if Columbus and Martin Luther King rate their own holidays! He stands preeminent among both our founding fathers and our presidents. No one will ever, no matter how great or how many Nobel Prizes or what victories or policies he or she may have pushed through, replace Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first [he should be] in the hearts of his countrymen.”
I suspect most Americans really don’t have a handle on what makes him Great, what makes him “First”. Yes, he commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. No, he was not a Napoleonic military genius—he lost most of his battles.
But he hung in. By sheer force of character he not only hung in himself he induced a starving, badly equipped and sometimes trouser-less army to hang in with him. He did it by sheer force of character and by feeding his desperately hungry troops out of his own pocket.
He became, by sheer force of character and persistence, one of our first international celebrities. Prussia’s Frederick The Great (a real military genius) addressed Washington, “From the world’s oldest soldier to the world’s greatest soldier.”
The French government unhesitatingly, made him Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in the American hemisphere. No imaginable way could we have won the Revolution—or even hoped to have stayed in the war—without General Washington.
Then he went home to his plantation, happily. They called him back four years later to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He didn’t bring the bright ideas or forge the brilliant compromises—he just sat in the Chair and made very, very certain they came to pass. All he had to do was look at you—and you became a whole lot more cooperative. Without Washington, most likely no Constitution.
He went back to his plantation—and they elected him first president under the new Constitution. Only time a man was ever elected and re-elected without an opponent. He walked into a single executive office with no cabinet, no judiciary and no rules of order.
Just as he had held the army together and held the Constitutional Convention in order, he presided over the Judiciary Act that created the Supreme Courts, the Federal Court system and the Attorney General’s office. When he left office, the Government of the United States—as we know it today—was pretty much in place. And the man in the Chair was still capable of wringing cooperation out of all sorts of people, with all sorts of points of view.
The point is—HE DID NOT HAVE TO LEAVE OFFICE. EVER. This is what makes him a giant without peer in human history. He was a victorious revolutionary, a world renowned general whose countrymen would have re-elected him for life. He probably could have become “king”, certainly like Simon Bolivar, “President for Life”.
He served two terms and went home to his plantation. Ships from all over the world sailed up the Potomac and fired their guns in salute. He would go to his little signal gun and fire a salute in return. But he was very content to be a farmer—rather than a ruler.
Shall we talk about other victorious revolutionaries? Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Henry Christophe, Cromwell, Stalin, Robespierre, Simon Bolivar , San Martin and Trotsky (who were thrown out by fellow revolutionaries), Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe—and I could go on.
Power is as hard to give up as liquor or narcotics for many people. Washington simply walked away from it—establishing the most important American tradition of them all. For this, alone, we owe a debt we cannot pay—and Washington deserves his own Day.