Q&A: Ron Chernow

this week on QA the first of a two-part program with historian Ron chernow his newest biography is about George Washington and will be in bookstores this coming week mr. chernau has also written about alexander hamilton john d rockefeller and the JP morgan family ron chernow almost at the very end of your new book on George Washington you write late in the writing of this book I suffered a severe orthopedic injury that nearly derailed the project and then you go on to thank people what happened I broke my ankle I slipped on the top step of the stoop of my brownstone in Brooklyn and I smashed my ankle on three sides it may have in terms of the book though Brian been providential because it forced me to slow down and for three months I could do nothing but read so I did additional research and then when I returned to the book I found that I had a kind of sharpness and clarity not to mention energy that I might not otherwise have had so it was a terrible accident but there was a silver lining to it and thank God now I'm okay when did that happen in the process if that happened I towards the very end it was the it was June 2009 so I was very close to finishing the book but I think that it's good sometimes to step back from project that you've been very involved with and to be able to look at it coldly and with fresh eyes which can only happen if you put down the book for three months which I was forced to do what led you to write the first sentence as the following in March 1793 Gilbert Stuart crossed the North Atlantic for the express purpose of painting George president George Washington the supreme prize of the age for any ambitious portrait artist well I start the book with the Gilbert Stuart painting George Washington for simple reason his image of Washington became our image of Washington became the iconic image of Washington and Gilbert Stuart who was a genius as a portrait art is essentially was essentially in the same business that I am in terms of trying to penetrate the mystery and enigma of George Washington and I was not only fascinated by Stewart's portraits but I was fascinated by Stewart's comments on Washington because he spied another Washington lurking behind that very kind of reserved stoical facade he swore man with a tremendous force of personality in fact he said Brian that if Washington had grown up in the forest he would have been the fiercest among the savage tribes and interestingly enough the people who knew Washington best Hamilton Jefferson goona Morris did spy that same personality someone who was much more Moody and temperamental you know we tend to think of Washington as this rather bland but worthy character a kind of a suave shoe character and he was anything but there was a tremendous tremendously fierce will that furnace of his personality under this very reserved facade was boiling all the time you say and your pre your pre lewd to this book that you wanted a fresh portrait how you know after all it's been written about George Washington how did you go about finding a fresh portrait let me tell you how it started when I was doing the biography of Alexander Hamilton Hamilton had a feud with Washington late in the Revolutionary War and Hamilton quit his staff and Hamilton wrote a series of very perceptive letters about Washington where he said that Washington was Moody and irritable and actually something of a powder keg and I could remember being absolutely startled because I had read so much about Washington but these were significant dimensions of his personality that I felt had been overlooked by previous biographers and the more that I read about Washington I saw that in fact he was a man of many moods of many passions of fiery opinions but because it was well covered by this immense self-control people didn't see it and I think that what we've done in the very understandable very laudable desire to venerate Washington we've sanded down the rough edges of his personality and we've ended up making him bland and dare I say it boring a bit and people at the time saw Washington as is a very dynamic and charismatic figure and I would love for contemporary Americans to share that kind of excitement that Washington's contemporaries shared so how did you go about this well I had to pay tribute to the new edition of Washington's papers that the University of Bridgend is starting in the late 1960s that began to publish new edition of his papers every year another volume or two appears they've now published more than 60 volumes of a projected 90 volumes to give you an idea for and of how much more information there is available now than there was even a century ago the old edition from the 1930s was based on 17,000 documents the new edition is based on 135,000 documents collected from archives all over the world and what's wonderful about this you not only have every letter written by or to Washington published in sequence but you have lavishly annotated letters where you get extracts from letters diaries contemporary newspaper accounts and so really using this new edition I had hundreds maybe thousands of eyewitness accounts and it really made me feel that I could possibly do what has been so difficult for biographers to do with Washington to bring him alive as a fully three-dimensional character someone so vivid that if he walked in the room right now you would know what he looked like how he sounded how he thought that he would be that real to him and because he was a very reserved in many ways very repressed character it's been settled you kind of have to tease out this tremendous force of personality but suddenly we have you know so much anecdotal material that I feel that we really can try it out to recreate the man here's a couple of things you read right away in the beginning that he had a colossal temper how did you find that out well there are a lot of examples of Washington losing his temper there was one cabinet meeting where Jefferson said that Washington lost his temper he had been shown in a satirical cartoon that showed him being guillotine the way that the louis xvi was guillotine and Jefferson wrote in a memorandum afterwards that Washington lost his temper and had difficulty for several minutes regaining control of his emotions and there are a lot of stories like this and people had noticed these before that had thought that they were more incidental to his personality you know for me it suggests smore all of these emotions boiling under the service governor mara said Washington was such a passionate man he had passions boiling in his breast almost too mighty for any human being to control this is a very different from the way that we see Washington but the people closest to him sensed this tremendous intensity under the surface that would periodically like a volcano boil over you said he was prone to tears he's tried to tear is there many times again the evidences everywhere in his story we all know the story about Frances tavern his farewell to the officers at the end of the war there were thirty 40 officers standing in the long room of France's tavern Washington said I can come to you would you mind coming to me they come and Washington hugs him and they're tears in his eyes I was struck the number of times in writing the book how many times contemporary observers noticed tears in his eyes of this tremendous emotion that he was fighting off he was a highly emotional man but he was somebody who was always very reluctant to show those emotions and I think that someone who was always afraid of becoming a captive to those emotions so that he became and I was overly controlled personality sort of emotionally muscle-bound in a certain way you say that he was a man of fierce irritable disposition yeah he also I don't want to overstate that side of it you know I am stressing that simply because I felt that that was the overlooked dimension this was also a man who in his dealings with political associates with military officers could and often was exquisitely sensitive and courteous I don't want to paint a portrait of him tyrannical but just rather somebody who was very very sensitive in dealing with people and he had a tremendous sense of tact and courtesy really an exemplary figure in that way so this is a very complicated man this is a very tough nut to crack sociologically and psychologically all right in this day and age what makes you think a 900-page book will sell well I think that at the moment people are very disenchanted with American politics and I think that they're looking for heroic figures from America's past and there's no figure who's more heroic were fearless were courageous than George Washington but what I tried to show in the book Bryan almost as in a novel this is something that very slowly and gradually happens in his life Washington as a young man although there's an amazing and perseverance and doggedness about him you could already see glimmers of the Future leader he's somebody who's pursuing money status and power he's not in particularly attractive character in certain ways when he's younger but he so transcends his past he's someone who's so ennoble by circumstance that under the pressure of the Revolutionary War and then the Constitutional Convention the creation of the federal government these monumental challenges bring out this greatness and this is a man who ends up so much greater than anyone would have predicted who had read about his adolescence or his early adulthood so I think that it's a tremendously inspirational story at a time god knows when we all need a little bit of inspiration I think the American public is pretty depressed at the moment I'm gonna just have you do a snapshot of several places where he was in his life and we'll come back to some of these what did he do around Boston well in Boston he goes up in July 1775 and he takes control of the Continental Army he's just been appointed commander-in-chief and his presence there was extraordinarily important for because the Continental Army was really composed exclusively of New England militia so one of many reasons that Washington was chosen having a Virginia planter as commander-in-chief suddenly gives a continental perspective to the Continental cause which it most certainly did not have before that and it's a moment where the the Redcoats the British are bottled up in Boston they're really under siege from the Continental Army and Washington manages to drive them at a bust and and he has his first great victory maybe a little bit of beginner's luck because then he has enormous amount of difficulty duplicating that feat New York okay he goes to New York and that's where he suffer as a string of disasters the Battle of Brooklyn the the British Expeditionary Force the largest of the 18th century is about pounce on the Continental Army not only wipe it out wiped the whole revolution out and Washington evacuates the entire army across the East River overnight fleas up to northern Manhattan unfortunately it's not the last disaster Washington loses twin forts on opposite sides of the Hudson toward Washington and Fort Lee and this begins this long bedraggled demoralized retreat across New Jersey and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania Philadelphia okay in Philadelphia well what happens is that because the there's always a fear that the British are going to take Philadelphia Washington and his troops first fight the British at Brandywine Creek hoping to to stop them it's one of the battles unfortunately at Washington blunders because of faulty strategy and intelligence he was far from a faultless military leader the British occupied Philadelphia and occupied until the spring of 1778 and Washington Washington DC washington DC genja mount vernon well let's start with Washington DC because under the residence Act of 1790 residence act specified is 65 miles along the Potomac where the capital might be it's actually George Washington who goes on horseback and rides along the Potomac River who actually picks the spot where Washington DC is going to be and of course there was a certain amount of grumbling at the time because coincidentally or not it was very close to Mount Vernon we're Washington owned 8,000 acres and it's not accidental that the White House stands where it is because it faces south towards Mount Vernon something that used meant not a lot of time on but enough time that I wanted to ask you more about it because I had never thought about this you know we always talk about the teeth and that the the teeth are there at Mount Vernon to see but what I never thought about explaining this is it because of this contraption and he wore in his mouth he had a hard time speaking yeah this is not again a trivial aspect of Washington's life and not only because of the pain that it caused him by the time that he was inaugurated as the first president he had only one tooth left it was a very lonely lower left bicuspid hanging on he had a complete set of dentures made and there was like a little hole drilled where that tooth was and so the dentures were held in place by that one tooth the way that the upper and lower dentures were connected was through a curved metal spring at the back the only way that they stayed in the mouth was that the person had to keep the mouth and the lips closed because what happened as you opened your mouth to speak the pressure was released on that curved metal spring in the back and there was always the possibility that the dentures would come flying out of your mouth and I think that one reason among other is why Washington is president that tended to keep his speeches very short he must have been very very self-conscious about he was also very laconic person who was not given to long-winded speeches anyway but you can imagine how distressing it was for a man of Washington's pride to always have to worry in any social occasion that these dentures would slip out of his mouth any history of when he started losing his teeth started losing his teeth actually when he was a twenties even during the French and Indian War it's very funny at the very end of the Revolution he has a French dentist named Pierre la mayor comes to the Continental Army headquarters to work with Washington and Washington was so self-conscious about his bed Keith Brian I think that he thought the people would mock it in some ways that he doesn't even enter that this dentist has come as if he's meeting with some master spy and it's so delicate that he can't even you know recorded in the in the roles and then he had a dentist in New York named John Greenwood who was his dentist when he was president and when Washington corresponds with the Greenwood he never uses such telltale words as teeth wear dentures or anything like that if Greenwood sends him dentures Washington will write back I received the items that he said you know lest some prying party would see this and realize that Washington was corresponding about his teeth that's kind of funny to think of such a great man who was so self-conscious about this defect of course for us it creates an enormous sense of compassion particularly I examined up at the New York Library of Medicine Academy of Medicine of one set of his dentures they're very ungainly contraptions and when you see them and you picture them rubbing along the gums day after day you realized how agonizing it must have been to have those in your mouth was gruesome you talk a lot about health for instance I wrote down Washington suffered cruelly from hemorrhoids what impact did that have on well you know by the time the George Washington is thirty years old he's had smallpox he's had malaria he's had dysentery you know in the 18th century if you live to 50 or 60 you probably would live to see to 70 or 80 because there were so many epidemics all of the time and I think that Washington was a very Hardy specimen who was able to survive all of these different illnesses it probably also gave him the feeling he came from a very short-lived family his father died 49 is older brother Lawrence dies at 34 it probably gave from some sense that he was going to defy the odds in his family and actually have the long life and he dies at 67 which is actually much younger than the next five or six presidents but by the standards of Washington males of Washington is unusually long-lived but on the hammering question the reason I bring it up is because you say he travel lying down during these times I guess even though he had dysentery in the French and Indian War during the famous defeat of General Edward Braddock on the Monongahela River and it caused diarrhea and magnitude dales it was very painful for him to just sit on his horse and so it was an extraordinary example of Washington's bravery riding in this battle he was tall he was a very conspicuous target on the horse and he actually took four bullets in his clothing I think one in his hat and three in his coat he had two horses shot out from under him and a Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies said afterwards that it looked like the heroic youth George Washington was being preserved by Providence for some important future service for his country which was certainly one of the the great calls in any sermon in history you said nobody touched Washington Washington didn't like to be touched there's a story perhaps apocryphal but it makes the point that at the Constitutional Convention that Hamilton governor Morris were talking about whether or not this was true that Washington didn't like to be touched and Hamilton dared Mars the Tatra made him a bet that he would not go over and actually touch Washington Morris went over and gave Washington a slap on the shoulder and said how are you today general and Washington apparently turned and gave him a withering glare that he never forgot again we don't know that this story's is authentic but certainly people were shocked when Washington was embraced for instance Lafayette who was like surrogate son many stories of Lafayette embracing Washington with both arms in one case actually giving Washington a kiss across the face from ear to ear which no one did but the fact that people recorded this was an expression of their shot that someone was behaving with this kind of familiarity in Washington had a way of sending out signals that you did not act familiarly and he always told his subordinates where there was a military political subordinates that one of the secrets of leadership was not to be overly familiar with your subordinates this sound like the same question but you also said he didn't shake hands yeah again when he had the reception as president who can go around the room and he would just nod nod to people whether this was borrowed from royal practice because royalty didn't touch people we don't now it certainly was alleged by his political enemies that this was an aping of royal ways which was a common criticism of the opposition party while he was president but he had this sense of personal dignity there was very much part of his power and very much part of his mystique I mean Washington would never make it as a politician today because he didn't press the flesh he was not this glad-handing back-slapping character that you have to be in in politics today but I think that there's something very attractive about the the formality and the innate dignity of the man you mentioned pay tribute to James Flexner who wrote lots about George Washington and Douglas Freeman south Oh Freeman what do you have in your book that they don't have in their book well number one my book is based on the the new edition of the papers so I have probably somewhere between 5 to 10 times as much material to to work with they were both great writers Freeman was a demon of researchers you know he was a Virginia newspaper editor flexin had a lovely flowing style but I think also Bryan the conception of biographies change quite radically over the last century at the time that Freeman is writing in the 40s or the time that Flexner is writing in the 60s early 70s biography is still the public record of a public man so now when we read a biography we expect it to be a rounded portrait of the private person as well as the public person so that for instance I have a very detailed portrait of Georgia's marriage to Martha which you wouldn't get in those books not that those writers were incapable of doing it it was just kind of considerate of lesser importance have a very very detailed portrait of Washington as a slaveholder that again was seen as kind of more incidental to the life of a great man so that there are various dimensions of the private man to be sure that you wouldn't find in those biographies speaking of the Slade question there's a note that you make back to the teeth issue where if I understood it right George Washington bought teeth of Negro slaves for his own right one of the wonderful curators down at Mount Vernon Mary Thompson discovered that Washington bought eight or nine teeth he just marked in his book from Negroes so we don't know if that meant from his own slaves and I should explain that his dentures the dentures were not made of wood let's retire that people thought it was wood because as it was made of ivory either walrus ivory elephant ivory as that ivory aged and stained it took on a granular look that when you look at it now might be wood but the ivory was actually the frame and they were actually real teeth inserted into the the dentures and so we don't know this for the fact but now that this has been discovered that he bought teeth from Negroes which presumably meant slaves he may have had in his mouth teeth from his own slaves and I have to say this may sound slightly ghoulish but in the 18th century this was considered acceptable that dentists advertised as Washington's dentist did dentist advertised in the newspapers and bought teeth from people so if you lost a tooth you would sell it so it's not quite as macabre as it might sound but of course it's quite startling to think that Washington may have been walking around with teeth from one or several slaves the book any idea what the first run is I mean they're going to put out in the market I think large I don't actually know this we talk the exact would it be I mean fifty sixty a hundred thousand men the past you've sold a lot of books would yeah it would be more than a hundred thousand from my god therefore my publisher and you've done a book on JP Morgan the Warburg's you also did a book on Alexander Hamilton right which of those books were the most successful actually the the graph keeps rising fortunately each one has been more successful at least in a commercial standpoint than the than the one before you know and what I've tried as an author is to keep broadening my focus to stay fresh a number of people have commented the George Washington book is actually the first one that doesn't have a large financial or economic dimension and that's true I found what was happening after I did Morgan and the Warburg's and the Rockefeller that I was being stereotyped and I would go to give a speech and that people would start yelling out in the audience do Vanderbilt next to Carnegie next as if I would spend the rest of my life just knocking off Gilded Age moguls and Hamilton was actually something of an exit strategy because I knew that there would be very large financial dimension obviously with Hamilton but it would lead me into constitutional law but lead me to find policy and I think that with each book you have to try to expand your range as a writer otherwise you go stale so I'm hoping that people who read the previous books won't mind that with Washington there's not a you know very big financial or economic dimension when did you actually start this book I started this book six six years ago so this is a record in terms of the amount of time that I spent on the light I have to say even though you were saying it is a very long book I felt that I was writing it on the back of a postage stamp because the books that I had in mind the standard references on Washington the Freeman's the flexed the freeman book is approximately about seven volumes about 4,000 pages Flexner is four volumes around 2,000 pages I was trying to do the same thing in a single volume and what I noticed because they've been a lot of wonderful books on Washington in recent years but what I noticed was that people were either doing a year like David McCullough's wonderful 1776 were David Hackett Fisher's terrific Washington's crossing they would do a specific event or Joe Ellis did a terrific book called his Excellency there was a thematic study of the life but the gap that I saw in the literature was the single volume cradle to grave biography that was authoritative and that would be all encompassing and would really try to prove it I present a fresh portrait but to be a synthesis of all of the new documents and all of the new scholarship about Washington so I don't know whether I've succeeded but that's what I set out to do where did you spend your time along the way most of the time I just spent in my home office because you know usually what I do is a story and I travel to archives and I sit there wiping the dust off city records and straining my eyes to decipher handwriting's whereas in this case I was just able to buy these 60 volumes of the Washington papers I supplemented that with 17 volumes from the old edition I did go to almost all of the major Revolutionary War battlefields how much of that did you really read of the old osbahr yeah I can honestly say Brian I scanned every page I can't say that I read every word of every page but I did scan you know you'd develop sort of instinct as a historian in terms of seeing what is significant or what might be useful you know what I couldn't do there have been since George Washington died 900 biographies I couldn't read every page of every biography and I decided that I would focus more of my time and attention I'm going through original material you know rather than traipsing through every single biography that had ever been written about Washington in your book and near the end you also pay tribute to your deceased wife who died in the middle of all this in 2006 yeah I mean question asked but what what did that do to this whole process oh well this was yeah this this was the darkest period in my life my wife and I worked together for almost 28 years and in addition to being the most wonderful wife a man could have she played a very important part in my career she was she was my muse she was my confidante she was my in-house editor every night over dinner we would discuss the book and invariably she would ask me a question that would send me scurrying back to the books I used to read the books aloud to her and she was a perfect proxy for my ideal reader because she was she wasn't afraid to suddenly interrupt me and say honey I didn't understand that word or honey that line isn't clear or even sometimes to my dismay honey the book is dragging a little bit you know in this section says she was absolutely invaluable I was very grateful to this book Brian because I was working on it during the the final year of her life and then after I lost her the book gave structure to my day I was lucky every morning I opened the door and I stepped through it and I was in the 18th century which was a nice escape and remembered George Washington is a great story of someone coping with adversity what fortitude means willpower patience forgiveness acceptance all of these different qualities that you see in Washington's life so he was actually a pretty good role model for me to have before my eyes but it was tough so how long was she sick by the way well she had a grand cancer off and on over four and a half year period so what did you do after you lost her how did you fill in that space with your you know that editing help every night it was hard I guess you know particularly my life is so solitary but of course I would have Valerie there at breakfast I would have Valerie there at dinner so it was a solitude surrounded by this extraordinary marriage the solitude became quite harrowing and suddenly she wasn't there and I just was very very fortunate in having terrific friends and family members I think that by the time I lost her you know when you've been with someone for so many years you've internalized that person and so I found it as I was writing Washington I began to say to myself you know we hear her in my mind saying honey that sentence isn't very quick and in fact what I did sometimes I would carry on imaginary dialogues with her and I would imagine her kind of saying things and asking me different questions but it was very hard and I was actively worried about this throughout the writing that there was a very significant dimension here my writing career had been lost and could I produce something that was worthy of the earlier books you mentioned earlier that he spent a lot of time on Washington's marriage yes because where did that relationship start well it started back in 1758 Washington was going to Williamsburg to consult a doctor he had a friend Richard Chamberlain who knew this young widow Martha Dandridge Custis who was living ironically enough in the house on the Pamunkey River called the White House I could do not and she was this wealthy widow it was a sort of whirlwind courtship they met only two or three times before they decided to to Mary and her argue in the book I don't think that it was the the lustiest their most romantic marriage in history but I think that it was one of those marriages that ripened into a very deep friendship and I think that Martha Washington it is absolutely invaluable to George Washington she gives some financial security she was extraordinarily wealthy as a widow she gave him emotional support and you really needed a confidant he was a he was a reserved character she was a real social asset she was a great I was this very good conversationalist and you have a sense with Washington it's also often happens with signalman that once they marry they go from having a kind of ruthless like to suddenly being settled in God knows Washington who is going to achieve these monumental things I think really needed a very settled home life in order to do that and Martha gave that to him so we might as well throw Sally Fairfax into it at this point and that I mean you wrote a lot about that yeah this is one of the great mysteries of Washington's life because right on the eve of his marriage he is infatuated with one of his best friend's wives Sally Sarah Sally Carrie Fairfax who was the wife of George William Fairfax who not only was a very close friend of Washington they occupied Belvoir which was this beautiful mansion on the Potomac just south of Mount Vernon but the Fairfax family which controlled the Northern Neck proprietary five million acres between the Potomac and the Rappahannock River the Fairfax family they were Washington sponsors his Metra so he's doing something really quite rash and he writes a letter to Sally it's pretty much a declaration of love which she rebuffs you know I concluded that this had to have been an infatuation rather than what I would call love and I argue it this way that infatuations can cool rather quickly when circumstances change but when real love it would have endured the fact that it didn't endure we know because George and Martha Washington become very close friends with George William and Sally Fairfax since I point out after the marriage their periods where the Fairfax's and the Washington's actually traveled together they vacationed together I think that if George Washington had really been in love with Sally Fairfax and that had been an enduring form of love the idea of traveling for a couple weeks with your wife under one and the woman you love on the other hand just would not have worked out so there's no question that he was smitten and there's no question that he writes and what is a declaration of love but I think that it fairly quickly cooled into something else what documents survived though that the letters exchanged and all that from that period well unfortunately we have more of the letters that George wrote to Sally rather than we have very few that Sally wrote to George which might supply some of the the gaps in it and it's really just based on us a small handful of letters that were discovered only I think they came to light maybe in the 1950s and of course people were very shocked by this but again as I argue in the book George Washington was a very passionate figure and as I also try to show in the book he was very attentive to two women the the aphrodisiac of power already existed in the 18th century and I have many many quotes in the book of you know beautiful young women swooning around Washington at various assemblies and and balls and of Washington taking very careful note of those swooning young women some of the things you you wrote about his person who's never able to express these forbidden feelings of rage he learned to equate silence and a certain man least elyda T with strength yeah I prayed about this in the context of his relationship with his mother Washington had one of the more difficult mothers of all time she was a very crusty domineering very self-centered woman who you would think that the mother of the father of our country would have all sorts of quotes from her taking pride or pleasure in her son we really don't have any and in fact she was constantly critical of George for neglecting her and Washington we have quite a number of his letters to her he always writes to her and it's very correct but rather frosty tone and you could just tell that he is suppressing this rage against his mother and I argue it's a kind of us you know psychological speculation that he first learned to you know govern these powerful emotions in dealing with his mother because he was really never able to openly express the hostility that I think he felt order how long was she in his life she was there a long time in fact she is still alive when he becomes the first president and she dies even though she had never gone to New York to visit him in fact she didn't seem to have attended George and Martha's wedding we have no evidence that even though she was living in Fredericksburg we have no evidence that she ever went to visit George and Martha at Mount Vernon which is very peculiar because George Washington was the most dutiful son and family man imaginable and everyone loved Martha Washington it's really hard to imagine somebody having a bad relationship with Martha Washington and I think could get on anyone's good side but there's an episode I described in the book where late in the Revolutionary War Washington gets a letter from the Speaker of the Virginia assembly saying dear general there's something going on here I think you should know your mother has been in the State Capitol Patino lobbying for an emergency pension claiming that she's oppressed by taxes and also implying that she'd been abandoned by her son and Washington of course feels completely humiliated immediately sits down and writes to his brother please go talk to mother you know how much money I've given her how much I've loaned her please get her to stop saying these things well that was really quite a public rebuke that to have the commander-in-chief's mother seeking poverty relief from the Virginia legislature quite a story did he have any close friends that's an excellent question because he had many friends but I don't think that he really had friends maybe in the sense that we think of it today we think of a friend is someone can we have a confessional relationship where we really bare our souls and Washington was a very wary person and took a long time to win his trust he would only very slowly let down his guard so their figures that he knows throughout his life I mean for instance his friend dr. James Craig who was not only his friend with the family physician Craig is there starting in the French and Indian War is there with Washington the moment that he had died so wasn't that Washington you know was a solitary figure at all but it's a very different kind of figure from the other founders in that way who did he you know you take us through the different relationships he has with everybody from Madison to Jefferson yeah Monroe all the rest but who did he have the most difficult relationship with of all the founders I would have to say John Adams because even though John Adams was the first vice president of Washington was the first president John Adams is rather conspicuously excluded from the inner council occasionally you will see letters passed between them on different issues but Adam starts out at the Second Continental Congress it's really Adams who's in many ways the most influential advocate I'm George Washington to be commander-in-chief but then there's a lot of sniping as the years go by and Adams who was always worried about his place in history it is petrified that he's going to be upstaged by two people Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and he makes a very funny statement later on and he said when this story of the Revolutionary War is written it will be Benjamin Franklin striking the ground with his lightning rod and an out sprang General George Washington and there you have the whole thing in a nutshell and he was not wrong but of course that Washington and Franklin would receive this tremendous adulation I think that one important thing in terms of Washington's relations with the other founders he has much better relations with the founders of the previous generation like Franklin who must have been by 25 years older than Washington has much better relations but there was at the younger generation Madison and Hamilton who were about 20-25 years younger were difficult relations with his age peers Adams is I think three years younger Jefferson is about 12 years younger than Washington and this is true during the Revolutionary War two that Washington feels competitive with his age peers and on some conscious or subconscious level feels threat whereas he has much better relations with both older and younger men I didn't listen from so my own calculations and thinking the year 1775 I found almost no one that was over 50 and some of these folks were in their late 20s early 30s and taking on this whole revolution it's amazing Alexander Hamilton becomes aide-de-camp to George Washington and very quickly chief of staff he's only 22 years old by some people's calculation even 20 years old when Hamilton becomes the first Treasury secretary and de facto prime minister of Washington's first term Hamilton is 34 years old again this was a unique moment in history of crisp population was younger than the would be now so you wouldn't have a political system dominated by people in their 50s and and six days this was also Brian it was a unique period of history where there was a tremendous need for youth and vitality and creativity we had a war to fight and we had a constitution to write that we had a government to create these were things that required an enormous amount of energy and imagination and people had that kind of creativity and you see this in the careers of both Madison and Hamilton they're very quickly drawn into politics and they rise very rapidly because the need was there all right what was he was he a humble man or was he a man that liked the big white horses leading him into the community I remember I'm reading here his request of the personal guards I had to be a certain height and all I explained that story now this is a rather bizarre story Washington decides that to create a personal guard early in the Revolutionary War to guard him also to guard his papers which he always lovingly tended okay he tells his officers that the man he wants for this guard can be taller than 510 is shorter than 5/8 this seems like rather strange precision in the middle of the Revolutionary War he's always complaining about his shortage of manpower then the following year not satisfied with that he issues a new set of orders that they can't be taller than 510 or shorter than five nine so he's looking for almost a kind of Hollywood uniformity the sort of bandbox precision to his personal guard and I point out repeatedly in the book that the Washington said tremendous store by personal appearance he thought that you know your personal appearance was markup your kind of inner water and so but again he had grown up he's spent remember more than five years in the French and Indian War had been exposed to a lot of British generals whom I guess had their you know their followers and their staff but it is their the stranger that he did that so what you said that he went to every state after he became president but that when he would go into a community he had I mean what was the the group that would precede him and that way he wanted to come into it was very interesting cuz during his first term as president he decided that first he would visit all of the northern states and then he would visit all the southern states he travels from town to town by carriage but what would happen was he would always bring along a white parade horse and when he was mildly to outside of town he would dismount from the carriage he would get on the white parade horse in Undertown why did he do that he he had a great sense of showmanship he knew that he looked great on horseback it's not coincidental that we have all these equestrian statues of George Washington he had a theatrical sense but you know he's a contradiction because on the other hand he feels so burdened by his own celebrity you know this same man who rides into town on a white horse will then inform us in his Diaries that let's say the following morning in leaving he learned that a procession of dignitaries would accompany him out of town at 7:00 a.m. in Washington will write in his Diaries I got up at 5:00 a.m. and left but before this escort could accompany me because he tired of all of these adulation and the receptions and he constantly had to make speeches and make nice with people and he was not Washington had many virtues but one virtue that he did not have response in a day you know nowadays we think of a politician there's somebody who can on the spur of the moment come up with a funny anecdote a few well-chosen words George Washington was not like that and it was a torment to him wherever he went not only do people want to see him but that they wanted to to lionize him and he got very very tired of it so you know whatever ambitions he had as a young man and his ambitions were quite enormous as a young man he had more than his fill as time went on and then he began to feel oppressed by the whole when did you how do I back into this question when did you know almost nothing about Washington in other words when did your process of learning about him start and when did you begin to change your perception it was really the Hamilton biography was the first eighteenth-century book that I did and I could remember saying to people as I was writing the book that Hamilton is the protagonist of the book but Washington is the hero of the book I was very impressed by the way that all of the other founders became partisans for a particular cause all of them get sidetracked into very petty sometimes very vicious personal disputes with each other George Washington is the one person who keeps his eye fixed on the goal and that Jim impressed me tremendously when I was writing the Hamilton book because Hamilton and Jefferson become consumed by this almost pathological hatred of each other and that leads to the formation of these two parties and here's George Washington who's always trying to rise above the fray not unlike President Obama he gets into office hoping to be nonpartisan president hoping that will be kind of very reasonable and civilized discourse and learns exactly what President Obama learned that wasn't going to happen money taxes I point out that his taxes were in arrears from 85 86 and 87 yeah he actually was a scofflaw I was quite shocked by that one of the paradoxes of Washington it's commonly said he was one of the richest men maybe the richest man in the colonies whether he was that he wasn't the one thing that of a certain is that he was land rich and he was certainly slave rich but he was cash poor I discovered that he had to borrow money to go to his own inauguration in New York in 1789 at the end of his second term as president he has to borrow money again to take his family and slaves back to Philadelphia so that this is a man who is constantly weighed down by concern over money it runs throughout his entire life you know and unfortunately like a lot of the Virginia planters he was not only constantly in debt but he was a he was a real spendthrift he was a compulsive shopper George Washington I said time he had the most land how many acres DiDio Washington by the end had at least 40 or 50,000 acres Mount Vernon which actually consisted of five separate farms was 8,000 acres and I think that on top of that he had about 40 or 50,000 acres out west which he was constantly trying to sell to pay off his his debt this sounds like a lot but at the time there were a lot of people who were amassing large amounts of land and in fact one of Washington's grievances against the British Empire is that at the end of the French and Indian War they banned settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains and there were a lot of Virginians like Washington who were snapping up all of this land in western Virginia and they felt that the British Empire was suddenly awarding their ambitions and there was no ambition that burn more brightly in the breasts of a true Virginian than land everything revolved around land at that time we talked about health earlier but the one thing that also popped up periodically or the health was the tumor that kept reoccurring what was the tumor yeah Washington during his first two years in office twice almost died the first time a tumor appeared on his left thigh and he began running a high fever at the time it was thought it might be the cutaneous form of anthrax it probably was an infection that turned into a carbuncle but they feared for his life that he founded very painful to said they actually reconfigured his couch so that he could lie down and they cordoned off the street outside the Executive Mansion they sprinkled it with straw so that there would not be any noise that bothered Washington and it did flare up again a couple of years later and then there was an episode that the following year where Washington had either flu or pleurisy but then develops into pneumonia again he's sick for several weeks everyone has written him off and then miraculously he survived so that was quite something in the first year or two of this the new government how much in those days at the public know about all these illnesses of yet well the the press kept a very discreet silence on both occasions and did not immediately say anything of course they knew that the Executive Mansion was cordoned off I'm sure that there was a lot of gossip going around but the press didn't reveal that until relatively late in the in the process so at that point the press was still protective of a politician's privacy but that would change very rapidly not only changing that wrong time change very rapidly during Washington's presidency and the second hour of this two-part series we're having we're going to talk more about things that are in the book we've been talking about things a book but I'm talking about the different eras but leading up to that I went through and found the number of pages you devoted to each section he started out with the frontiersmen and yeah I thought it a t eight pages to that what was the purpose of calling that section the frontiersmen well there's so much of Washington's life to spend on the frontier not only fighting in the French and Indian War but from the time he was 15 or 16 he's acting as a surveyor in the in the frontier area and Washington who also has this vision from the time he's a young man of America but became America expanding to the to the West and so I wanted to then draw the contrast to the second section when he becomes a planter and he's living a much more genteel kind of life at least inside the mansion that at Mount Vernon and point out that this was somebody who shuttled very easily between the world of the backwoods in the world of the drawing room he was quite a versatile character the biggest section is 267 pages devoted to the general right yeah well obviously we in half years as commander in chief hat you know have to be the center of it but I really tried to to do the whole life sometimes you read a life of Washington and it's all the Revolutionary War and I wanted to give a full attention to both terms as a president and the period is fascinating between the Revolutionary War and the time he becomes a president there's really not a dull period and his in his life why 83 pages to the Statesmen I guess because it was relatively brief again you have to pity me here Brian I have five and a half years of the French and Indian War to cover I have eight and a half years whose name I think that he meant to have four months of the Constitutional Convention and then I have eight years of the two-term presidency so I'm kind of very aware but I have to do justice to those big chunks of the the story and you really can't stint when it comes to those because those are the the monumental achievements of his life so I may have written the others somewhat more succinctly presidency gets 205 pages the most and we'll continue this discussion but the most interesting thing you learned about his presidency thing I learned about his presidency well sometimes it's portrayed that George Washington somehow you know floated above the fray that he was a figurehead and that Hamilton was running it not at all I mean Washington was absolutely on top of everything that was going on even Jefferson marveled it the way not only that everyone was reporting to Washington but Washington wanted to review all outgoing letters and Jefferson marveled at the way that Washington was aware of absolutely everything that was happening in the administration so he was a much more much stronger president than I think people realize and very creative remember he's forging the office of the presidency he establishes a benchmark in terms of pointing people in brilliance and integrity he's really the one who's defining the system of separation of powers and checks and balances and then most importantly we're still living with George Washington's presidency and what I mean by that is that Washington unlike the framers of the Constitution Washington decides that the engine of foreign and domestic policy is going to be the presidency it's not going to be the Congress on turnout author of the new book Washington a life will pick up from where we left off in our next hour thank you for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at QA or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

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Keywords: Q&A, C-SPAN, cspan, chernow, lamb, george, washington, founding, fathers, history

Id: _y4PpfeVbqk

Length: 58min 12sec (3492 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2010