APPEARANCE

Abigail Adams was not easily impressed, but she was impressed the first time she met George Washington. Mrs. Adams had gone from the family home in Braintree to be presented to Washington when he took command of the American troops outside Boston in July 1775. She described their meeting in a letter to her congressman husband who was chained to his desk in Philadelphia.

I was struck with General Washington. You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him, but I thought the one half was not told me. . . . Those lines of Dryden instantly occurred to me:

Mark his majestic fabric! He’s a temple
Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.
His soul’s the deity that lodges there,
Nor is the pile unworthy of the God.

The features of this temple were straight, pulled-back hair, once chestnut colored, now graying and powdered; deep-set blue-gray eyes; a strong nose and jaw; height over six feet; long, powerful arms and legs; and, more than any one thing, the balance and command of the whole. Washington was in command of his body, and it commanded the space around him. Thomas Jefferson was also a six-foot-plus redhead, and, in his own way, an impressive man. But Senator William Maclay, in a description that historians have been citing for decades, because it is both vivid and unawed, wrote that “a laxity of manner seemed shed about” Jefferson. No one ever saw a laxity of manner in Washington.

There are two quotations in Abigail Adams’s letter. Those over-the-top lines of John Dryden, written out as verse, come from a 1690 play, Don Sebastian, King of Portugal; in quoting them, Adams gave them a sex-change operation, for they are spoken of the play’s heroine: “Mark her majestic fabric,” and so forth. (Why did Abigail turn a woman into Washington? No doubt, from her powerful identification with the mighty events she was living through.)

But the other quotation, unsignaled by punctuation, is even more over-the-top, for it is the Bible’s description of the Queen of Sheba meeting Solomon (Adams kept her sexes straight in this one). “And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and of thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it; and, behold, the half was not told me” (I Kings 10:6-7). It’s pretty good, on a first meeting, to make Abigail Adams think of King Solomon.

Solomon impressed Sheba with his mind, his judgment, and his surround: “And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built, And the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers . . . there was no more spirit in her” (I Kings 10:4-5). George impressed Abigail by his looks and manner alone. It should be no surprise that such qualities, by themselves, could have such powerful effects. Malcolm Gladwell’s book on the importance of first impressions is called Blink, not Sniff, or Hi! Every sense tells us vital information, but sight rules. The eyes have it. That is why all of us, from children who have first learned the tyranny of fashion to Missionaries of Charity in their blue-striped veils, are concerned with personal appearance. That includes leaders.

We all know what Washington looked like, but it is hard to know, in the twenty-first century, what looking at him was like. He was painted many times, yet the best painter to do his portrait, Gilbert Stuart, caught him when he was already in his midsixties, the beginning of the end. Stuart’s full-length image, which hangs in the Smithsonian, gives us a powerful, and powerfully guarded, face, but the body is stiff and static, missing in inaction. Stuart’s so-called Athenaeum portrait, which hangs on every dollar bill, is a head shot, with no body at all. How did Washington move? This was a man who rode a horse every day of his life, and who danced with Caty Greene for three hours. A relatively crude production like Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware captures some of this energy by displacing it onto other elements in the painting—the floating ice, the straining flag, the rowing men. We are left with written descriptions, as entranced, and inadequate, as Abigail Adams’s. Norman Mailer wrote a whole book about Marilyn Monroe, but what explains more—his words, or a few frames of The Seven-Year Itch? Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt still roll off the presses, but you can learn as much from photos of his million-dollar smile and his jaunty cigarette holder.

When did Washington become conscious of his own appearance? Certainly by the time he began ordering his own clothes. When he was eighteen or nineteen he wrote a “memorandum to have my coat made by the following directions,” describing in some detail the lapels (“six button holes”) and the length (“very long waisted . . . down to or below the bent of the knee, the [distance] from the armpit to the fold to be exactly as long or longer than from thence to the bottom”). All Virginia gentlemen wrote such directions; they had to be particular because their tailors lived across the ocean in England, and their orders often came back wrong. Washington kept up a keen interest in dress all his life, designing every uniform he wore from the French and Indian War to the possible war with France that called him out of retirement in 1798. One benefit of uniforms for him was that epaulettes compensated for his narrow shoulders, one of the few limitations of his physique.

American military style began to change forty years after Washington died. The two great generals of the Mexican War were Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor. Scott, a tall, stout peacock, was nicknamed Fuss and Feathers; Taylor was a slob (no tailor he). Ulysses Grant, who served under both men, imitated Taylor’s relaxed style during the Civil War, and the cult of simplicity marches on in the American military. Washington, who preceded it, knew he looked good, and he wanted to make sure he looked as good as possible.

America in Washington’s lifetime was a republic of words. Americans read everything, from Thomas Paine to the Bible (no American would have needed an explanation of Abigail Adams’s allusion to the Queen of Sheba). Washington lived in the midst of that literary ferment. But he was also an intensely visual person, trained as a surveyor, the designer of his own house, a lover of performances and plays. Having the raw materials of an impressive appearance, he improved them and then broadcast them. The dissemination took a lot of effort in a world that did not even have the technology for cheap reproductions of prints until shortly after he died, but he had unusual opportunities to get his image out, and he made use of them. No magazines or newspapers? He visited all thirteen states. No TV or YouTube? He was seen, in person, by tens of thousands of people. He was the biggest, and longest-running, show in America.

Now, when kids mug for each other via cell phone and every Web site links to a podcast, leaders have more chances, and more need, to make use of their appearance. No one looks like George Washington (though an Italian stylist did try to bring his long-behind haircut back in the nineties: “It can be a very white-trash look. But for me, there’s a rebel in that hairstyle, something hard-edged”). Every leader has to know what he does look like, what that can mean for him, and how to present himself to his audience.

STRENGTH

If strength only mattered in the NFL, why do so many corporate headquarters have gyms?

For most of Washington’s life, it was obvious to him, and to everybody else, that he was strong, and that this was noteworthy; tales of his physical prowess go back to his boyhood. We owe the story that he threw a rock across a river to his first biographer, Parson Weems. “The trouble with Weems,” one historian told me, “is that he isn’t lying all the time.” Weems actually scratched around and interviewed people who had known Washington when he was a boy. He attributed the rock-throwing story to Colonel Lewis Willis, a cousin of Washington’s who “often [saw] him throw a stone across Rappahannock, at the lower ferry of Fredericksburg. It would be no easy matter to find a man, nowadays, who could do it.” I made an experiment, for a PBS documentary, with a half-dozen young men on the baseball team of Stafford High School, near Fredericksburg, taking them to the former ferry site with a bucket of rocks, and seeing what they could do. Two of the guys managed, twice each, to hurl their stones to the other side: not a superhuman feat, but hard enough. It would have been even harder in the mid-eighteenth century when the Rappahannock, not yet dredged, was broader.

Washington’s strength was an aspect of his compelling appearance; the temple built by hands divine drew much of its attraction from being a powerhouse. The array of tools produced by human culture—handheld rocks, Blackberries, paintbrushes, rosaries—have modified the premium we place on sheer physical force. But strength lingers in our hard wiring as an object of respect. An old-fashioned phrase for going to war is “making an appeal to arms.” Our first arms are the two at our sides. One delegate to the Continental Congress, Dr. Solomon Drowne of Rhode Island, fantasized that the issues dividing England and the colonies might be settled by a single combat between Washington and George III.

But sometimes—usually in the military, though not only there—the millennia of culture peel off, and Dr. Drowne’s primal fantasy becomes reality. When James Monroe was president, his treasury secretary, William Crawford, called him a “damned infernal old scoundrel” and threatened to beat him with a cane. Monroe, by then an old, small man, but a brave one—he had been shot at the Battle of Trenton—grabbed a pair of fireplace tongs to defend himself. The two calmed down before they came to blows. Nobody was calm in Cambridge, in the winter of 1775, when the Virginians and the Marble-head men began their rumble in the snow (see Chapter 8, “Unusual People”). Washington went to the center of the fight and pulled two combatants apart and held them by their necks, like dogs, until they settled down, and the other brawlers ran away or settled down themselves. Luckily for the discipline of the army, this was not a daily occurrence. But if the lid blew off, Washington could deal with it, with his bare hands if necessary, and everyone knew it.

A very practical manifestation of his strength was his skill on horseback. Almost everyone, even urbanites, rode horses in those days; Boston-bred Sam Adams was taught how to ride by his cousin John on their way to the Continental Congress. Washington was peerless. He honed his skills with frequent fox hunts, which his step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, remembered rapturously: “He rode, as he did every thing, with ease, elegance, and with power. . . . [A] horse might as soon disencumber itself of the saddle, as of such a rider.” Young Custis saw Washington’s riding with the hero worship of a boy, but no adult ever contradicted his estimate. A remarkable instance of horsemanship in action was recorded by a lieutenant in a Connecticut regiment, who saw it on the predawn march to Trenton in December 1776, after the crossing of the Delaware. The road the Americans took, slick with snow and sleet, crossed a pair of steep ravines. “While passing a slanting, slippery bank,” the lieutenant wrote, Washington’s “horse’s hind feet both slipped from under him, and he seized his horse’s mane and the horse recovered.” It is hard enough to catch your own balance in midfall; how much harder to catch a half-ton creature?

Such feats can save lives—Washington’s, for instance, who might have tumbled down the bank—or battles. While Ulysses Grant was besieging Fort Donelson in February 1862, he was away from his main force when the enemy made a breakout. “The roads,” he noted drily in his memoirs, “. . . were unfit for making fast time, but I got to my command as soon as possible.” The roads were rutted mud, suddenly frozen solid, as dangerous a surface as the slippery bank outside Trenton; only Grant’s uncanny affinity for horses allowed him to gallop back in time to bottle the enemy up. In July 1898 Theodore Roosevelt’s regiment lay below the San Juan heights outside Santiago, Cuba, being peppered by bullets that the Spaniards poured down on them from state-of-the-art Mauser rifles. Time to charge, though who would want to in such a situation? “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” Roosevelt shouted to a hesitating man. That man was shot and killed where he lay, but Roosevelt’s other men stood up, despite the fusillade, and followed him up to the heights.

Though war is now mechanized, and computerized, the physical remains a factor. The capabilities of a Ranger put televised strongman competitors, hauling trucks around, into perspective. Horses even were used in attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, along with Predator drones. But the arts of peace call for their own stamina. Sitting in a negotiation or at a desk on a deadline, or making a presentation after a transcontinental flight, is not heroic, but it is hard in its own way, and if you flag, you lose—not least the confidence of those working with you.

In January 1992, George H. W. Bush vomited at a state dinner in Japan. This moment of feebleness (he was suffering a twenty-four-hour bug) symbolized both physical and political weakness—this despite his having been a war hero and a college athlete. Gerald Ford was possibly the most athletic man ever to reach the White House—he was recruited by the Green Bay Packers after college, though he chose instead to go to law school—yet a few well-publicized stumbles as president and the mockery of Chevy Chase, the TV comic, fixed an image of him as a klutz. By contrast, Franklin D. Roosevelt, crippled but relentlessly upbeat, conveyed personal force, which translated to political power. In October 1944, during his fourth presidential campaign, he made a daylong swing through four of New York City’s five boroughs in an open car in the pouring rain, relieved only by two changes of clothes and some fortifying bourbon. He was in fact dying at the time, of an enlarged heart and other ailments, but he seemed lively, and he won his election.

Until that Rapture of geeks, the Singularity, we are stuck with our bodies. A leader should pull his weight at least, and if he has got something more, flaunt it.

AMIABILITY

Not every leader is likable, but Washington was. His heroic qualities came to overshadow his amiability as his career progressed, and they have obliterated it since his death. The face on Mount Rushmore wears no trace of a smile, and why should it? He had wars to fight, and a country to found. But his contemporaries attested to his amiability—what biographer James Thomas Flexner called his “sweetness”—and he made use of it in his grand roles.

When Abigail Adams described her first impressions of Washington as commander in chief to her husband, she spent most of her letter on his physique. But she also wrote some sentences about his manner. “Dignity with ease and complacency . . . look agreeably blended in him.” Complacency now means smugness: the complacency of the Academy Awards ceremony. In the eighteenth century it also meant, and clearly means here, a pleasant manner, or a disposition to please: a manner that puts people at ease.

It’s not that Abigail Adams was a soft touch. Everybody likes Benjamin Franklin, from Walter Isaacson to Walt Disney. But Abigail Adams was immune to his charms. In 1784, nine years after meeting Washington, she described an evening with Franklin and a French lady friend. “After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor she wiped it up with her chemise. This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.” Franklin’s ménage did not put her at ease. But Washington did.

Abigail Adams noted a quality of Washington’s that was related to his complacency: “Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” Eliphalet Dyer, one of the congressmen who voted him into the commander in chief ’s job, praised the same quality: he was “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow.” Harum-scarum fellows can do just fine in the military; Baron von Steuben ranted and swore to good effect, Charles Lee ranted and swore, and George Patton’s pep talks to the Third Army before D-day are classics of profanity. “The quicker we clean up this goddamn mess, the quicker we can take a jaunt against the purple pissing Japs . . . before the Marines get all the goddamn credit.” Washington had a different approach.

He had made use of his amiability in his first long-term military command, as colonel of the Virginia Regiment, formed in 1755 to guard the frontier during the French and Indian War. “Our colonel,” wrote one of his men, “is an example of fortitude in either danger or hardships, and by his easy, polite behavior, has gained not only the regard but affection of both officers and soldiers.” Fortitude won him the regard of officers and men, but easy, polite behavior won their affection. When Washington resigned his commission in 1758, twenty-seven officers signed a testimonial, hailing him not only as an “excellent commander” but also as a “sincere friend” and an “affable . . . companion.” “How rare it is,” they went on, “to find those amiable qualifications blended together in one man.” For good measure, they called him “the man we know and love.” Serving in the Virginia Regiment was not lovers’ duty. It struggled with inadequate supplies and murderous raids, and Washington hanged his share of deserters. Yet at the end of it all, his officers wrote him a tribute that seems better suited to the retirement of a popular high school teacher than a commander in a war zone. They asked him to stay on another year, but he was not intending to, and in fact went straight to married life, so they had nothing to gain by their warmth. They offered it anyway: sign that they had been warmed by their commander.

Washington was still amiable when he stepped into the presidency. Once again he was described by Abigail Adams. “He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity.” Other qualities—distance, gravity—have joined the mix of his public personality, appropriate to his political station and his age; Washington was twenty-three when he took on the Virginia Regiment, forty-three when Abigail Adams first met him, fifty-seven when he was first inaugurated. But affability is still there. “[He] has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that, if he was not really one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.” There is the Adams sharpness; she knows full well that not every smiling face is friendly. But Washington’s good intentions had been ringing true for years.

One reason we have forgotten Washington’s amiability is that it did not come in the most memorable form that amiability can wear, a sense of humor. He enjoyed other people’s jokes, but told few himself. So Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, still cracking wise into the twenty-first century, have come down to us as the all-time great guys of American history. We need to remind ourselves—perhaps Abigail Adams could help us—that humor isn’t always what it seems. Lincoln (not Franklin) had a vein of deep sympathy, alloyed with depression, but both men used their humor to keep other people at a distance, and in the dark. Washington’s distance and gravity were more forthright.

Men who kill and risk death must feel bound to the men who command them. Politics and business lack the pressure of danger, but each has its own pressures, and its own occasions for bonding. Overbearing harum-scarum fellows rise to the top in both worlds, as they do in the military. Former press lord Conrad Black (no shrinking violet himself) tells a story about a French Canadian politician of his youth. The boss was sitting on a podium, as a flunky praised him, calling the roll of his many virtues. “Broadminded!” he interjected. The flunky dutifully added this trait to the list. But amiable leaders are equally capable of taking men into battle, and keeping big men, petty men, and men who are a combination of both in harness. A leader should not force himself to rant and swear if it does not come naturally, and he should cultivate any geniality that he has. It can see him through much dullness, wrangling, and bloodshed.

BRAVERY

People look for bravery wherever they can, even in metaphors: so we speak of political campaigns and hostile takeovers. Pacifists are proud of their courage in maintaining that fighting is wicked and senseless.

Accounts of Washington’s bravery in battle fill his wars. After his first battle in 1754, he wrote a brother, “I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.” At Yorktown in 1781, his last battle, he was inspecting the field when one of his aides, Lieutenant Colonel David Cobb, worried that he was too exposed. “Had you not better step a little back?” “Colonel Cobb,” Washington replied, “if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”

That answer was a little hard on Cobb, who was only trying to make sure the commander in chief was not blown away. But Washington’s rebuke, like his letter about the bullets’ whistle, makes him seem indifferent to the danger around them. Two days after the Inchon landing in September 1950, Douglas MacArthur went ashore to inspect the beachhead. At one point a Marine lieutenant tried to block his way. “We just knocked out six Red tanks over the top of this hill.” “That was the proper thing to do,” MacArthur said, and went to the crest to see for himself.

Such bravery is not necessarily the product of insensibility. (God help the man for whom it is—and the men under him even more.) In 1786, Washington’s secretary, David Humphreys, was working on a biography of his boss, which he offered to Washington for comments and corrections. The longest comment Washington wrote, and the most vivid writing of his life, concerns Edward Braddock’s defeat in 1755, and the subsequent retreat, which Washington had to lead, all the other senior officers having been killed or wounded.

The shocking scenes which presented themselves in this night’s march are not to be described. The dead, the dying, the groans, lamentations, and cries along the road of the wounded for help . . . were enough to pierce a heart of adamant—the gloom and horror of which was not a little increased by the impervious darkness . . . of thick woods, which in places rendered it impossible for the two guides which attended to know when they were in or out of the track, but by groping on the ground with their hands.

Bullets were not so charming when they found so many marks. Washington learned fast that every battlefield is a charnel house. In the moment of action, however, he was too engaged to worry, or to fear.

A leader’s bravery in combat inspires his men. It can also prepare a leader for other less obvious exercises of courage. Though Washington was ambitious, for his country and himself, he always hesitated to take on his great assignments, not only because he wanted to show that he was a modest man and no harum-scarum fellow but also because he sensed how difficult they would be—so difficult that they might be beyond his powers. When the Continental Congress tapped him to be commander in chief, he warned them that his “abilities and military experience may not be equal” to the trust they were laying on him. There were times it looked that way, and in fact he had never held a command so complex. As he cruised to his unchallenged election as first president, he was full of foreboding. He told his old comrade Henry Knox that he felt like “a culprit . . . going to the place of his execution.” He told his diary, in a rare expression of feeling, that he had “the best dispositions,” but “less hope.” And what good would hope have done him? The world was full of generals before he came along, but not of presidents; he was walking into a job that was not only new to him but new in history. History had some precedents, though—all the nations that had smashed up through mistakes at the top. Most culprits bring only themselves to grief; Washington might damage his country.

He might also damage something of little consequence to the world, but important to him—his reputation. After the victory of the Revolution, he was the greatest man in America, one of the greatest on the planet. Now he was sliding his pile of chips onto the table one more time. Knox understood exactly what was at stake. “Secure as he was in his fame,” he wrote Lafayette, “he has again committed it to the mercy of events.” At the end of his first term of office he yearned for retirement, in part, no doubt, out of a desire to protect his fame, still (amazingly) secure. Yet he put the fame on the table one more time. It is never hard to do less; only the brave take risks.

One of Washington’s last executive decisions was so long in coming that we see little courage in it, though it may have looked different to him. Despite careful management, Mount Vernon was clearly losing money by the 1780s. Only rents from his large landholdings kept him flush (the landholdings themselves were quite valuable, but he sold parcels only out of necessity). The war, and his absence, had been a drag on Mount Vernon’s balance sheet. So were the many slaves he had to support, more and more as time passed. In 1799 he made an inventory of the slaves at Mount Vernon, 277 people in all. Their labor was free, but more than half of them were too old or too young to work. Workers and nonworkers alike had to be clothed and fed.

This was a common dilemma of slaveholders who were reluctant to maximize their labor force by selling off the unproductive. “I am . . . against selling negroes, as you would do cattle in the market,” Washington wrote in 1794, and other slaveholders shared this view, not wanting to break up families, nor to think of themselves as slave traders rather than patriarchs. In 1799 Washington took a step beyond his peers by writing a will that freed all his slaves after his wife’s death.

This was no simple matter. Many slaves, after a lifetime of bondage, were unable or unwilling to fend for themselves; Washington stipulated that they could continue to be supported at Mount Vernon. (The estate made payments until 1839, totaling $10,000.) Washington’s will covered only the 124 slaves he owned; the other 153 belonged to the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Custis, and so to his heirs (in 1799, her grandchildren). Neither George—nor Martha, had she wished—could free them.

At least some of Washington’s legatees—he divided his estate among Martha’s descendants, and the many descendants of his brothers and sisters—must have been unhappy about the disposal of so much real property. The emphatic language of Washington’s will suggests as much: “I do . . . most pointedly and most solemnly enjoin it upon my executors . . . to see that this clause respecting slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the epoch at which it is directed to take place, without evasion, neglect or delay.” A will is already a pointed and solemn document; why be doubly so unless there is a need for it? Martha Washington, at least, had good reason to be concerned by what George was planning; since his slaves were to be freed after her death, might not some of them take steps to hasten it, if she survived him (as she did)? “She did not feel as though her life was safe in their hands,” Abigail Adams wrote after visiting the old lady after her husband passed. Martha freed George’s slaves a year after he died, a year and a half before she followed him.

Washington’s will did not show the bravery of the battlefield, or of the high-stakes political player. It shows the courage it takes, akin to determination, to grasp a gnarled fact of life. Slavery is gone, but other problems remain. Do you dislike illegal immigration? Who cleans your offices? Do you think the earth is out of balance? Is buying carbon offsets enough of a contribution to the solution? Every leader has (or should have) a moral code—a spur that gets him up in the morning, and a matrix that tells him what he may, what he must, and what he must not do. He has to decide if his moral beliefs are sensible, and if his line of work suits them, and he should know that those decisions may cost him time and money, perhaps popularity and power.

The varieties of bravery are not necessarily connected. Benedict Arnold was as brave a warrior as George Washington, and had a shattered leg to prove it, but he did not have the courage of his convictions, because he had no convictions. Bravery is a quality a leader must show whenever it is needed. If he does not have it naturally, then he must acquire it. Life supplies many opportunities for training.