each of these people is a human being mm hm mm hmm
and the
it seems to me there are two mistakes you can make they're the exact opposite
in trying to understand washington and the founders
the one is to canonize them
to mystify and mythologize them
and there's a natural tendency to do that
uh...
or at least there was within the academy as you say the op the exact opposite
trend obtains now
uh... if you were a doctoral student at harvard or yale and said you wanted
to write your dissertation on washington's presidency you'd be
committing professional suicide
mm hm mm hm uh
washington and the founders were often perceived as the
you know instigators of racism and classism and imperialism and patriarchy and all the
evils of the world
i think these are mirror images of each other these two interpretive postures
uh... and both of them are cartoons
and i think the distinguishing feature of much of the best work done on the
founders of the last fifteen years and there's been this surge of interest and in
readers to especially some of these books have done very well thank god
your child's education would benefit from that my child education depends on this
uh is that flawed greatness
flawed greatness
in which it's almost like
when we're young and we look at our fathers or our parents
we first of all regard them as all
uh... all-powerful and omniscient
and then we go through a phase a least my children went through a phase
where we could do no right
yeah your sui generis
nobody else ever went through that
and uh...
but then you should be able to reach a more balanced perspective and understand
your parents
uh as fellow human beings whose flaws aren't uh...
uh... these uh... the only way to define them and yet who are not
uh... who are not saints and uh
i think we've reached that point now with regard to the founders
uh... so in the case of washington he was avaricious about land he had a huge
ego
uh...
he he he's not the kind of person you'd want to work for
uh...
he was demanding beyond any any uh sensible level uh...
uh...
and uh... and all that
beside the point
because
he's the greatest leader in american history
his judgment proved impeccable in all the big ways
and we wouldn't be sitting here today
he's the only person that was indispensable in the revolutionary
generation mm hm mm hmm you can imagine replacing all the others with what it but it's
difficult to imagine yeah the revolution succeeding and the united states
becoming a viable nation
without washington there yeah
joe uh being a lawyer and trained in specifics you know
an obnoxious characteristic to be sure
let me go through some of the
things that you said that would be considered
less desirable
in our today
you talked about his avarice for land being uh... one one such thing
uh... his uh... great demandingness of his staff being another thing
although that that
you know a lot of people are very demanding today
uh well another thing like his
commander in chief even in his early days
uh…as a military officer in the french and indian war
if you deserted or fell asleep on sentry duty he had no compunctions about stringing
you up right in other words people would beg for mercy and he'd say tough
yeah you know he's a he's a tough task master and there's a kind of line in his mind if you cross
that line there's no mercy for you and when john when major andre the
british spy who
uh... who
with uh... was implicated with the benedict arnold attempt to take west
point
all these people said please let andre off because he's a good british
gentleman and he
said no and then they said well let's shoot him rather than hang him he wants to be
shot
no he's a spy he hangs and he hung yeah so there's this
you know there is a
and while he does reach uh...
shooting was the way uh…an honorable military an honorable man wanted to be firing squad
be killed by a firing squad rather than at the gallows uh...
uh...
hamilton pleaded with him at that moment to do that
and even though he gets to the right place in the end on slavery
he's going to disappoint you if you come to him with a twenty-first century
expectation of
uh... racial justice uh... and he dies and at the time of his death he owns
three hundred and nineteen slaves
uh... so
there's a lot of things about 'em that aren't going to fit neatly in some sort
of modern sensibility right right
this excerpt is brought to you by the massachusetts
school of law