Robert Strauss - John Marshall: The Final Founder

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WOODY ALLEN CREATED A CURIOUS CHARACTER, LEONARD ZELIG, FOR his 1983 mockumentary movie, Zelig. Throughout, Zelig appears in vintage photographs and actual historic events during the mid-twentieth century. Zelig preternaturally assumes the demeanor and style of those who inhabit these famous scenes, becoming a patrician with refined tones among the affluent, at a formal dinner, say, and then going to the kitchen to become folksy and coarser in speech among the back of the house.

The famed and the observant comment on Zelig in the movieSusan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Bruno Bettelheim, and the musician Bricktop among them. A psychiatrist played by Mia Farrow discovers that Zelig is a transformative character, and is all the more so because of his desire to please those, the noted and the not, around him in these vaunted circles.

John Marshall may well be the Zelig of the Founding Era. He apparently lived through precisely the right years, and was at the right age at the right times, to be just about everywhere of note. From the early Virginia frontier, to service at Valley Forge, to the debates over the ratification of the Constitution by his home state of Virginia, to the XYZ Affair in France, to the Adams Cabinet and, most assuredly, the chief justiceship of the Supreme Court in its most crucial decades, Marshall had quite a resonant six decades or so of adulthood in the American political pantheon.