Adrienne M. Harrison - A Powerful Mind: The Self-Education of George Washington

George Washington and I go back a while. My obsession with everything related to Washingtons life and world began years ago when as a child I was captivated by the 1984 miniseries George Washington, which was sponsored by the General Motors Corporation and starred Barry Bostwick and Patty Duke. Im sure my parents quickly came to regret their choice of programs to record on their shiny new VCR because I was instantly hooked and soon watched the six-hour series over and over again, nearly wearing out the tapes in the process. My parents probably assumed at the time that this newfound interest would pass, much as any fad that captures the attention of a five-year-old. Little did they know that George Washington would remain at the center of my scholarly interests from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond.

When I was young, the stories of Washingtons dangerous exploits in the wilderness and on the battlefield were the most captivating. The details about how Washington survived a plunge into an icy river only to then escape a would-be assassin while returning from his first-ever military mission, how he had four horses shot from under him during Braddocks defeat, and how he personally led his army across the Delaware River one fateful Christmas morning all were endlessly fascinating and made him seem larger than life. As I grew older, my interests and questions about Washington continued to evolve. Over time I became more interested in how he rose to such prominence in his lifetime and how his popularity endured long after his death. When I was a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, my senior thesis centered on Washingtons tour of the southern states in 1791 and argued that he used the tour to shore up faith in the federal government and demonstrate his tacit support of Alexander Hamiltons funding and assumption plan. I was, however, not done with Washington after I earned my bachelors degree. My thesis experience left me with several lingering questions that I kept in the back of my mind as I packed my books away and headed off to begin my career as an army officer.

There was no doubt that my classmates and I, commissioned in 2002, were destined for service in Afghanistan and, as was to become evident in early 2003, Iraq. I served three tours in Iraq and all in successive leadership positions: platoon leader, company executive officer, and finally company commander. During those long, seemingly endless days in combat, my fellow soldiers and I each did what we could to maintain a sense of normalcy in our lives by devoting the odds and ends of free time we had to hobbies that passed the time and kept us connected to our homes halfway around the world. Some people became gym rats and spent hours lifting weights. Others, like my platoon sergeant, were enthralled by the latest advent in entertainment technology at the time television shows made available on DVD and devoted hour after hour to watching everything they could get their hands on from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos. As for me, I did spend some time in the gym and watched DVD s along with the tiny snippets of news that were beamed to us courtesy of the American Forces Network, but I spent the bulk of my free time reading, thanks to my considerate friends and family who sent history books to me. I also placed orders with Amazon, one of a few merchants that shipped to our overseas army post office addresses.

The combination of my continued interest in reading history and my real-life experiences of leading troops, many of whom were older and had spent considerably more time in the army than I had, in a seemingly endless conflict led me to reconsider those old questions about the nature of Washingtons success and subsequent fame that had stuck with me since completing my undergraduate thesis. As I learned how to plan and make decisions based on constantly changing intelligence while doing my best to earn my soldiers respect and keep them motivated during a war that nearly everyone in the media had deemed hopeless and unwinnable, I thought about how Washington executed the same basic leadership tasks in his career, although obviously the times and the context were hugely different. In the middle of Baghdad the enormity of Washingtons leadership challenges hit me from a totally different perspective than I had ever previously considered, for the art of leadership is a relative constant; only the circumstances change over time. Faced with my own contemporary challenges, I thought about the tremendous handicap that crippled Washington that is, his lack of formal education and military training (apart from a few fencing lessons) before he assumed an enormous military responsibility when he was my age. I therefore became enthralled all over again by the question of just how Washington did it. This book sheds new light on the subject.

Given that I have spent the majority of my life studying Washington, I freely admit that I have a deep and abiding respect for him despite his faults. His natural talent for leadership was remarkable, and he had a keen understanding of how to perform in a manner that magnified his strengths while simultaneously camouflaging his weaknesses. Over the course of his long career in the public light, Washington had more failures than successes, yet he inspired loyalty from those around him and retained his hold on power even in the face of mounting criticism. Moreover, he mastered the art of relinquishing authority, thus ensuring that the institutions he helped to establish would endure after he was gone. All of that said, Washington had a volatile temper and was incredibly thin skinned. Many of his contemporaries thought his natural aloofness signaled a wooden or even an icy personality. He lacked self-confidence and obsessively sought approval from those around him. Ambition drove him in all of his pursuits, and he was aggressive in matters of business. In other words, Washington was flawed. The real Washington, whom historians have relentlessly pursued since he rose to international prominence after America gained its independence, had his positive and negative character traits, much as we might rationally expect. In the nineteenth century, historians and biographers, buying into the idea of Manifest Destiny, tended to portray Washington as a demigod and duly gave him pride of place in the pantheon of American heroes. Over time, however, the experience of two world wars, the emergence of the United States as a superpower that nonetheless experienced serious a setback in the Cold War with the loss of Vietnam, and the social upheaval wrought by the civil rights movement collectively reshaped the lenses by which more modern historians viewed the early American past. The result was an emphasis on interpreting history from the perspective of the populace, sparking a wave of revisionism that tended to minimize the role of the founding fathers, including that of Washington.