If Brookhiser avoids the sentimentalism of past encomiums, he nonetheless produces a new sentimentalism borne of today's cultural conservative fixation with fatherhood and family values. "The contemporary failure of fatherhood is perhaps the subtlest barrier to our understanding of Washington, the greatest source of the distance between us and him," Brookhiser writes in the introduction. Hence the chapter on Washington and fatherhood is written too much as a mirror to our own time rather than Washington's. "We are not sure what the fathers of families do," Brookhiser laments, "much less fathers of countries." The childless Washington, Brookhiser concludes, settled on his countrymen as his substitute children. This is taking the metaphor of fatherhood--which alludes to the most fundamental act of politics (founding)--too far. It is doubtless true that in the age of liberal democracy (the "end of history"), the idea of political founding seems remote, but it is a stretch to lump the pathologies of the contemporary family together with the desuetude of the idea of founding. Not to mention that Brookhiser seems to assume that no one in modern America has a decent father--quite a stretch. Conservatives at times get so wrapped up in their rhetoric that they forget that most Americans, and certainly most Americans likely to read this book, do in fact have perfectly decent fathers. And that we may have strong fathers without having 18th-century ones.
This chapter is the only part of the book that seems incongruous, though even here one must assent to Brookhiser's summary judgment that "Washington was the most important man in America, whether he was onstage or off, for twenty-four years; for seventeen of those years, he was front and center. It is a record unmatched in our history, scarcely matched in the histories of modern democracies."
Finally, Brookhiser provides a nice account of the blend of Washington's character, showing us his moral, dramatic, religious, and intellectual influences. He also ably brings out Washington's nasty temper, which sounds as though it could have matched the oft-described "volcanic" temper of the current occupant of the White House. In this passage the reader is again reminded of Churchill's description of the various aspects of Marlborough's character and aims, of which Churchill wrote that "No one of these purposes could be removed without impairing the others, and part of his genius lay in their almost constant harmony." Likewise, Brookhiser notes of Washington's many traits that "Each aspect was necessary, however. Without his physique and the threat of his temper, he would have been inconsiderable; without his ideas, he might have been directionless. If he had lacked any of the three or possessed any to a lesser degree, he could not have been the father of his country."
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