Marvin Kitman - The Making of the Prefident 1789: The Unauthorized Campaign Biography of George Washington

The Making of the Prefident 1789

Forerunner of the famed Lafayette Escadrille of World War I. This cryptic phrase also may be the origin of the persisting rumor that Lafayette was gay. I will deal with this canard later.

Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Answer: Rutherford B. Hayes. Also Grant, Garfield, Harrison, and, of course, Lincoln.

The Washington Senators, now known as the Minneapolis Twins. This Washington was called First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.

Washington Heights.

Scholars interested in further documentation should refer to the definitive work on the subject, The Number One Best Seller (the title, not the sales report), the first volume of my autobiography (Dial Press, 1966). Suffice it to say that now, every four years, there are postcards and letters from two or three of my supporters urging me to run again. You can become the Harold Stassen of New Jersey, my ex-campaign manager, Victor Navasky, explained. That was a mandate from the people that I have been able to resist thus far.

Nobody likes to argue with his superiors, especially a three-star general, the first one, about strategy. But take his famous retreat through the Jerseys in 1776, which everybody learns about in school. General Washington and his men went by my house in New Jersey. There is a bas-relief statue on our corner with a plaque that reads General Washington Went This Way. The state highway department put up signs for the Bicentennial (1976) indicating a path of retreat, two blocks past my house and through the shopping mall in Paramus. I think about the significance of that event a lot.

First of all, he went in the wrong direction. He should not have turned left (to Philadelphia) but turned right, toward the Poconos. With an army of ragged guerrillas, he never should have gone to Valley Forge but to the hills. From East Stroudsburg or Fred Warings Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, he could have sent his men on horses (since they didnt have shoes most of the time anyway) into the outskirts of Philadelphia and harassed the British army holed up there.

As a military man myself (within the space of only two years1953 to 1955I rose to the rank of Private First Class, United States Army), I intend to look at Washingtons war record with a professional eye. Suffice it to say now that if he had been fighting in the Civil War instead of the Revolutionary War, Lincoln would have fired him. If he had been manager of a big-league baseball team, he would never have made it out of spring training.

The wars correct title should have been the English-French-German-Austrian-Russian-and-Indian War of 17561763, or the Great North American Fur War, since the rivalry in the fur trade is what the war was really about. Europeans call it The Seven Years War.

One wonders why there was so much publicity about tea parties in the papers of 177374. The media hype over the landing of some surplus tea by the East India Company, which eventually was landed in the waters of Boston Harbor by political action groups of the day such as the Sons of Liberty, was so extraordinary, one would think the Rum Distillers Lobby was trying to make it a politically seditious act to drink tea.

For those who dont trust statistics and would rather cut the cards themselves, so to speak, the generals record in his own hand follows.

Actually the colonel hated tobacco. He didnt smoke. It must have reminded him of his mother, Mary Ball Washington, who smoked a pipe at the Fredericksburg farm and in her state appearances, of which there were few. Washington saw to that. His little old cantankerous mom embarrassed him. Smoking also reminded him of the losing battle he fought with the weed as a crop. It continually bewildered him as a planter.

In one of her letters to Washington she teased him about his continence to the ladies (March 611, 1787, manuscript, Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union).

It took place, of course, on the adjoining Breeds Hill, the first of many mistakes the media made in reporting the war, but perhaps the most inexplicable. Its not as if they were reporting Hill No. 692 versus Hill No. 693.

My grandmother, the one who looked like Washington, used to live on Dinwiddie Street in the Hill District, then a Jewish neighborhood on the edge of downtown Pittsburgh. It was a short street connecting two main avenues. It began at Fifth Avenue and ran, or walked slowly, straight up the hillto use a surveyors term, a 100-percent gradefor about an eighth of a mile. The street ended up at Centre Avenue, at the top of the hill, not far from the historic shrine where Willie Stargells ribs place was later located. Every summer during the Depression my parents sent me from Brooklyn to Dinwiddie Street. It was like going to camp.

All those years I thought the word Dinwiddie meant a very hilly street that knocked the wind out of fat little well-finished boys from Brooklyn. You had to walk up Dinwiddie Street a lot on hot summer days after getting off the streetcar line at the bottom of the hill. It was some climb when you were a city boy from Brooklyn, where the largest hill was Crown Heights.

Washington himself may have slept at my grandmothers house, though she never bothered to put up a sign. He at least stalked the redskins in the area. Of course, by the time I was born the only redskins they talked about in Pittsburgh were the football team in Washington. And the only violence I saw was steelworkers throwing beer cans at Howard Cosells face on Monday Night Football.

The Washington family was prominent in the management of the company. Half-brother Lawrence was especially active as its president. Also involved in the affairs of the company was half-brother Augustine Washington. His brothers stock became part of Georges portfolio on their deaths. Young George had every right, as a stockholder, to be furious about the encroachments of the French swine on his property.

Captain Mercer later rose to general on the staff, and could always be counted on as a reliable source by most historians.

The dumping of tea in the Wilmington, N.C., harbor in 1774 was just as outrageous as the Boston tea party. But, as David Brinkley of ABC News and Wilmington, N.C., has explained, all the historians are from Massachusetts.

Everybody has seen Paul Reveres engraving. Its one of the most popular of the revolutionary period etchings, soldiers in close neat ranks firing a volley into the crowd of decent-looking, sober citizens minding their own business. A dog stands in the foreground, contemplating his navel. Under the engraving there is a poem, beginning:

Unhappy Boston! See thy Sons deplore,

Thy hallowd Walks besmeard with guiltless Gore

It was a grossly inaccurate picture, including a fictitious sniper from an upstairs window. Nevertheless, copies of the picture were Faxed to every Son or Stepson of Liberty in America. If Britain ever needed a publicity agent, she needed one at that moment.

Sam also called for his poets and muses. The ballads were ground out at once. And the journalists. The headline writer suggested calling it A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston! Troops were shooting men down like dogs! (Prose was coordinated with photo opportunity by Adams.) A picture editor chimed in, Right! Put a dog in the picture to show the contrast! Shot down like dogs! No, nonot a black-and-white picture! Put red in it; soldiers coats must be red! The negro? Leave him out no, put him in, but make him white! It wont do any good to have a negro in it when it gets to South Carolina!

I am in debt to Rankin and Scheer and Woodward for this audit of Sam Adamss career as a steward of public monies.

Mobility was an eighteenth-century word meaning the common people, in distinction to nobility.

Johnson, it appears, was another good friend of long standing of the former Colonel Washington. The man who placed his name in nomination was eventually to be one of the three commissioners appointed by Prefident Washington for setting up the Federal District of Washington, a project of great interest to Prefident Washington and his friends, many of whom owned the land the city was built on or the ferry franchises across the Potomac.