Today is George Washington’s 280th birthday. Before the odd mash-up known as Presidents’ Day was created by federal statute and pressure from advertisers, the Father of Our Country rated his own observance each February 22nd, as did Abraham Lincoln on his birthday, February 12th.
Historian Ron Chernow, whose biography of Washington won the Pulitzer Prize last year, recently sat down with Brian Bolduc, editorial associate for National Review, to discuss Washington’s leadership style for a column in The Wall Street Journal.
Washington “realized that a leader should be neither too remote nor too familiar,” Chernow said, and that people “don’t need to like you, much less love you, but they do need to respect you.”
Our first president was a complicated man – emotional and highly sensitive to criticism on the inside, with a volatile temper that he worked hard to control, while remaining calm and impassive on the outside, according to Chernow. Washington “had an old-fashioned belief that silence was strength, and that you only very gradually let people enter your private thoughts and emotions.”
Chernow and other historians report Washington had a great sense of stagecraft, usually to enhance the dignity of his office but sometimes, during the Revolutionary War, to conceal from the British the dire situation of the Continental Army. He was meticulous in dress and polite and cordial in conversation.
Because he rarely acted on his emotions, Chernow told the Journal, Washington exercised presidential power wisely. His method was to canvass his Cabinet for opinions, weigh his options carefully, then make a decision. Once he made it, he stuck with it. “There was nothing wishy-washy about Washington,” Chernow said.
As a president and as a military officer, Washington was a hands-on executive who led from the front. Like many great leaders, he also was lucky. In 1755, during the French and Indian War, Washington had two horses shot out from under him during a battle near present-day Pittsburgh, and four musket balls pierced his uniform coat, but he escaped without a scratch.
When the Continental Army was forced to make a perilous retreat across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan in 1776, with the British Army in hot pursuit, a dense fog settled on New York Harbor and enabled Washington to get all of his men across safely in one night. Later that year, when his army crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Eve for a surprise attack on Trenton, snow and sleet at daybreak helped conceal the Continentals from the garrison of Hessian mercenaries fighting on the British side, leading to their defeat.
What leadership lessons can be drawn from the man whose stoic portrait graces the one-dollar bill? “What Washington’s life shows,” Chernow told the Journal’s Bolduc, “is the importance of clarity of vision, of tenacity of purpose and character, and how much can be accomplished in life if you keep your sights set on your ultimate goals.”
