Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.

• Author: Hayward, Steven

George Washington is the neglected founder. He is either debunked at the hands of revisionist sophisticates, or sentimentalized through what might be called the eternal return of cherry-tree iconography. Richard Brookhiser has produced a valuable and, I predict, enduring contribution to the literature on Washington that turns a deserved cold hand to the debunkers while keeping sentimentalism to a minimum. Along the way, Brookhiser's "rediscovery" of Washington shines a refracting light on the afflictions of our historical outlook today, and supplies the material for useful reflection on what is possible from public figures.

Of the two hazards to Washington's reputation, sentimentalism is probably, the worse foe. Brookhiser rightly notes that "The humanizers have done more damage to Washington than the debunkers." Certainly Parson Weems's fable of the cherry tree is a bit of noisome bunk that deserves the contempt of the debunkers. But our generation's recoil from sentimentalism and filial piety has left Washington "in our textbooks and in our wallets, but not our hearts." This condition has made Brookhiser's task - "a moral biography in the tradition of Plutarch," as he describes it - very tricky indeed. Brookhiser wants to reestablish Washington's reputation as more than just a subject of antiquarian curiosity. To attempt such a "moral biography" in an age that prefers Fawn Brodie to Plutarch requires that the author reacquaint readers with the possibility that the moral horizon of Washington's time is plausible in our own.

This would seem an especially tough sell to today's so-called liberals, who dismiss the American Founding as irrelevant to modern politics. But the more serious objections to Brookhiser's Washington project may come from the contemporary champions of classical liberalism (or at least its "public choice" variant), who generalize from the ample evidence in modern politics that all ambition can be reduced to calculations of self-interest. Washington appears as either an insincere or simply incredible figure. "The pursuit of power with the capacity and in the desire to use it worthily is among the noblest of human occupations," Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of Marlborough. Today power is so distrusted - with all good reason - that it has become difficult even for the friends of liberty to imagine that a noble and self-limiting ambition for power is even possible. Hence the incredulity over Washington.

Washington was often compared in his day with Cato the Younger, of whom Plutarch had written that "every class of men in Utica could clearly see, with sorrow and admiration, how entirely free was everything that he was doing from any secret motives or any mixture of self-regard." Brookhiser's account is entirely harmonious with this seemingly archaic view. "Washington was worthy of honor," Brookhiser concludes, "because the last thing he had done with...