Eric's Reviews > His Excellency: George Washington

“He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary.” (A brilliant politician with a moral compass and the ability to imagine the judgements of posterity.) Like Lincoln, like Grant - and the three are companions on an old Cuban cigar box lid, “Los Inmortales.” To me Washington seems a heroic template for Lincoln and Grant, showing how one disciplines “a truly monumental personal ego” and “a massive personal agenda” - and, in Grant’s case, a primal ease in violence - to larger national interests, to themes of the common good. All three saw their opportunity in failing systems and were quick to pounce; they used their opportunity to establish and restore the United States; none established dynasties - Washington very purposefully so, sterile, he minced his estate among many heirs and freed his slaves.

“Washington’s powers of judgement derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions”; cue, for contrast, Jefferson and his fatuous self-deception, his agile intellectual masturbation; “the self Washington made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental,” the education of “an adventurer and soldier.” “Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal.”