George Washington on Leadership

YOU ARE the tool that is never put back in the box—until you stop working. There comes a time when every leader steps down or is struck down. How can a leader preserve his legacy after that? Succession crises are the bane of businesses, when innovators lose control of their companies, or unfortunately keep it, handing them off to unsuitable acolytes. An innovator may become unsuitable himself, locked into his first discoveries, like Henry Ford churning out Model Ts long after Americans stopped wanting them. Transfers of power in a democracy are controlled by the laws, not the will of the outgoing leader, yet these are always supplemented by the laws of politics, in which the soon-to-be ex-leader’s choice may in fact count for a great deal—for good or ill.

Washington had his favorite and unfavorite generals during the Revolution, and he made sure he praised the former to Congress. His most important recommendation came in October 1780, when Congress let him choose the man who should take over from the disgraced Horatio Gates in the southern theater. Washington tapped his able loyalist Nathanael Greene. “I think I am giving you a general,” he wrote a southern congressman laconically, meaning, I am sure I am giving you a good one. So he was. But Washington usually had no power to choose American commanders; he had to live with whomever Congress selected, as well as the possibility (which occasionally hovered over the horizon of reality) that Congress might supersede him.

Washington was succeeded in the presidency by his vice president, John Adams, but he took no direct role in picking him for either the number-two or number-one slot. It was clear, in late 1788, that the first vice president should be a New Englander, for regional balance; Washington told James Madison that he could work with either Adams or Massachusetts governor John Hancock. Adams prevailed in that election, and the next one, thanks to his own prominence as a patriot and the maneuvers of lesser political figures on his behalf. In the presidential election of 1796, Washington preferred Adams to his rival Thomas Jefferson, because Washington’s relations with his fellow Virginian, personal and ideological, had soured, and because of national pride: the French ambassador publicly threatened economic warfare unless Jefferson was elected, a gross interference in American politics. Adams won narrowly, though without Washington’s active support. At the new president’s inauguration, the outgoing president seemed to feel relief more than anything else; Adams thought Washington gave him a look that said, “See which of us will be happiest!”

Washington’s aloofness had several sources. The whole system was newborn. Party lines did not emerge until the end of his first term, and party organizations took a few years more to coalesce. Thanks to his fame, Washington won two elections essentially by acclamation, and felt that he should maintain his nonpartisan stance. Although Adams had nominated him for the commander in chief’s job in 1775, the two men did not know each other that well, Adams having spent a decade abroad during and after the war; the vice presidency was not an office calculated to bring them closer together (Adams was the first in a long line of vice presidents to complain that he had nothing to do). As a result Washington was followed by a man who broadly agreed with his policies, without being particularly similar to him in experience or temperament.

The best service Washington performed for his successor was to stay out of his way, with one glaring exception: in 1798, when Congress, fearing a war with France, tapped Washington to lead the army once more, he insisted that his second in command be Adams’s bête noire, Alexander Hamilton. Adams never forgave Washington for this, though he realized that Congress, packed with Hamilton’s allies, would have forced Hamilton on him even if Washington had not. Once Washington was sure of his former aide’s assistance, he supported Adams’s efforts to tone the war fever down, and rejected all entreaties that he, not Adams, run for president a third time in 1800. (Washington died in December 1799, but even the memory of third-term talk would have made the endgame of Adams’s administration more bitter than it was.)

The era of parties and partisanship arrived, but it has not made arranging presidential successions any easier. Even if the handoff is successful, the new runner may stumble. Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan, two-term presidents who gave their names to movements (Jacksonian Democracy, the Reagan Revolution), were succeeded by vice presidents—Martin Van Buren and George H. W. Bush—who were closer to their chiefs than Adams and Washington had been. Both successors, however, proved to be unpopular one-termers.

Some presidents undermine their successors. Theodore Roosevelt groomed his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, to follow him in the White House in 1908. Roosevelt, however, wearying of retirement, claimed that Taft had betrayed his legacy, and challenged him in the 1912 election cycle, splitting their party and guaranteeing that both men went down to defeat. Dwight Eisenhower had a shade of contempt for his vice president, Richard Nixon; in August 1960, as Nixon was running to succeed him, Eisenhower was asked by a reporter what ideas Nixon had contributed to the administration. “If you give me a week,” Ike said, “I might think of one.” Lyndon Johnson subjected his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to exquisite tortures of domination and fickleness that he had perfected during the years they served together in the Senate. Humphrey managed to win the nomination in 1968 after Johnson announced he would not run again, but lost the election to Nixon, making his second (Eisenhower-free) run.

The only successful string of successors in American political history was the Virginia dynasty (1800-1824): two terms of Jefferson, followed by two terms of his secretary of state, Madison, followed (after a rebellious moment of wanting to jump ahead in line) by two terms of Madison’s secretary of state, James Monroe. The three men remained friendly enough after their twenty-four years in the White House that they all served on the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia—more important positions, in Jefferson’s view, than the presidency. Franklin Roosevelt solved the succession problem by making himself into a dynasty, winning four elections in a row. The strength of this strategy was that, since FDR never retired, he was never a lame duck. The weakness of it was that he won his last election in 1944 as a dying man (see Chapter 18, “Identify Your Strengths”). When he did die, three months after his inauguration, he was succeeded by a vice president, Harry Truman, who had been so badly briefed he was unaware of the atomic bomb. The Twenty-second Amendment made this strategy unconstitutional.

All the pitfalls of presidential succession—the incompetence of the incomers, the malice, envy, and ego of the outgoers—afflict transfers of power in the business world, for the same reason that they affect them in politics: leaders do not want to know that they are dispensable, or mortal. Some CEOs, like some presidents, make an honest effort to find competent replacements, but often enough they fail, wittingly or unwittingly, or they tear down the replacements they have found, or they hang on, without term limits, smiling from the covers of business magazines or group portraits at Sun Valley, with their wrinkles and their trophy wives.

Washington knew that he was mortal, and replaceable. One prominent twentieth-century biography of him is called The Indispensable Man, yet he dispensed with himself twice, at the end of the Revolution, and after his second term as president. The ceremony for his retirement from military life in December 1783 was prescribed by Congress. A committee headed by Thomas Jefferson directed Washington to appear in the statehouse in Annapolis, Maryland, where Congress was meeting, on the twenty-third. When Washington rose to make his remarks, Congress would remain seated. When the president of Congress rose to respond, Washington would remain standing. At the end of their exchange, Washington would bow; members of Congress would not bow, but would take off their hats.

This protocol, designed to demonstrate the subservience of the military to the civilian power, was not intended by Jefferson, in any demeaning spirit, to put Washington in his place. That may well have been the intention, however, of the president of Congress, Thomas Mifflin, Washington’s old enemy from the Conway Cabal (see Chapter 9, “Troublemakers”). If Mifflin had malice in mind, however, he had not calculated on one thing: Washington’s complete acceptance of the principles that the ceremony was meant to express. “It was a solemn and affecting spectacle,” wrote a young congressman. “When [Washington] commended the interests of his dearest country to almighty God, and those who had the superintendence of them to His holy keeping, his voice faltered and sunk, and the whole house felt his agitations. After the pause which was necessary for him to recover himself, he proceeded to say in the most penetrating manner, ‘Having now finished the work assigned me I retire from the great theater of action.’” He performed the part that had been written for him with conviction—because it was the part he would have written for himself.

Toward the end of Washington’s second presidential term, Jefferson, who was by then Washington’s political enemy, knew enough not to try to run him down. Philip Freneau and other journalistic warriors in Jefferson’s party had been trying that, for almost four years, without effect. Washington had emerged from every controversy, foreign or domestic, with his reputation and his popularity intact. In June 1796 Jefferson wrote Monroe resignedly that “one man outweighs [Congress] in influence over the people. . . . Republicanism must lie on its oars, [and] resign the vessel to its pilot.”Three months later Washington told the country, in his Farewell Address, that he was resigning the pilot’s chair. At the inauguration of President Adams and Vice President Jefferson the following spring, Washington, by his own little ceremony of giving way to Jefferson (see Chapter 15, “Courtesy”), showed once again where he stood, once his job was done.

Washington retired to private life, twice. But private life, after his second retirement, confronted him with another decision. He had kept his estate going in the 1760s by moving from planting to farming: from being a tobacco crop master to a multipurpose agricultural entrepreneur. But now farming no longer paid. Slave labor was not productive enough, and he had too many nonlaboring mouths to feed. Thanks to his investments in land, he was still a very rich man, but the heart of his self-made empire had become hollow.

In his will he freed his slaves (see Chapter 18, “Identify Your Strengths”). But he also addressed the troubled condition of WashCorp by breaking it up. Martha was given the use of his estate while she lived, and he gave blocks of stock to various schools. After his wife’s death, more than 9,000 acres, including Mount Vernon, would go to three nephews and two step-grandchildren. The rest, 60,000 acres plus miscellaneous stocks, bonds, and livestock, he valued at $530,000. He directed that it be sold and divided into twenty-three equal shares, to be distributed to his many nieces and nephews. The careful itemizing in his will still shows the eye of a surveyor (he said he was “but little acquainted” with one tract in southern Maryland, though he knew that it was “very level”) and the instincts of a bargainer (he urged his executors “not to be precipitate” in selling off land, since prices “have been progressively rising”). He still plugged canals: “I particularly recommend it to [my] legatees” to hold shares in Potomac canal stock, rather than cash them in, “being thoroughly convinced myself, that no uses to which the money can be applied will be so productive as the tolls arising from this navigation.”

So the engine of his energy and ambition still spun, but it was momentum merely, and Washington knew it. None of his heirs would become rich as a result of his legacy. The occupants of his glorious estate house found themselves saddled with a white elephant, increasingly chipped and sagging as the decades passed, until the 1850s when a patriotic woman from South Carolina, appalled by its condition, raised the money to buy it for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns it still.

Washington gave no one a windfall. He left each of his relatives somewhat better off than he had been left when his father died a half century before. Two of them would have notable careers—his nephew Bushrod Washington was already an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and his step-grandson George Custis would be a successful memoirist, evoking his youth at Mount Vernon. But their lives, as he planned, would be up to them.