Founding Father

...undoubted literary talent, and his capacity for clothing bloodthirsty ideas in the fancy dress of the French revolutionary tradition...

...and he read Seneca to perfect that bane of tell-all biographers, control of his emotions...

...It was one thing to rebel against a foreign tax collector...

...He shared none of the conventional loyalties, neither to places nor to people...

...The last sighting of the Plutarchian form was reported by Victorian schoolboys, but it is here brilliantly revived and simulated by Richard Brookhiser, who blends classical concision with engaging modern touches in this lessis-more examination of the Washington we ought to know...

...The roiling hatred between these two was not lost on Washington, who signed the imperfect treaty with the pointed comment: "Men are very apt to run into extremes...

...By welfare, moreover, Rohwer is keen to point out that he means more than public assistance to the poor and indigent: he means a whole raft of government transfers of How the East Was Won & What About Democracy...

...Like Plutarch, Brookhiser uses personal details only as they relate to public career...

...Interested less in historical narrative than in the portrayal of character for instructive Great Character, Nice Quads 62 March 1996 • The American Spectator purposes, Plutarch took biography into the realm of ethics, setting forth his aims thus: "The virtues of these great men serve me as a sort of looking glass in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life...

...Late in life, when told that his pleasurable anticipation of retirement showed in his face, Washington replied: "You are wrong, my countenance never yet betrayed my feelings...

...Likewise, 1794's Whiskey Rebellion "struck him as an attack on the legacy of the Revolution, all the more serious because it mimicked its arguments...

...It contained, among others, his mother Caridad, an ardent Stalinist who ended her days as the doorkeeper of Castro's embassy in Paris...

...He rode so well, says Brookhiser, that his soldiers imagined that man and horse were one...

...Constitutions of our own choice and making...

...There is not a king in Europe," said Benjamin Rush, "that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side...

...He never earned a living in the conventional sense...

...Clearly Asia has done something right these past few decades...

...the epoch of rapidly growing export markets," he thought, "has ended...

...Survival was foremost, and Asian governments discovered that the only way out was fast economic growth created by "small pro-business governments"—which in turn benefited from a balance of power maintained by the U.S...

...so Brookhiser showed a portrait of Washington on horseback to a lady body builder, who took one look at the bulging saddle muscles in his thighs and reverently breathed, "Nice quads...

...What made Trotsky different from Lenin, Stalin, and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership was his intellectual bent, his Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington Richard Brookhiser Free Press / 230 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Florence King If George Washington is no longer first in the hearts of his countrymen, it is due in part to his major biographies...

...Richard Brookhiser's wise analysis of it is a timely lesson for a contemporary America that worships shallow image and shrinks from the sternness of maturity...

...He had no feeling whatever for Russia or Russians...

...64 March 199 6 The American Spectator...

...but when men make their own tax laws they must abide by them...

...For Rohwer the reasons these nations succeeded was even simpler: they had no choice...

...The way men behave in polite society is related to how they order society," Brookhiser writes...

...The delegate from South Carolina, Pierce Butler, thought that the powers of the presidency had been made too great because they were adopted with Washington's character in mind, thereby making the savior of his country "the Innocent means of its being, when He is lay'd low, oppress'd...

...Trotsky was dispatched with an alpine axe—an unusual weapon which the assassin concealed under his raincoat...

...Then he bowed and left, "with a dignity so severe that every Person seemed alarmed," recalled one delegate,who rushed back to his room to make sure he still had his copy...

...His affection for his son Lev Sedov was largely based on politics rather than paternal feelings...

...the different nations have met the social and political problems thus created in different ways...

...But Plutarch placed high value on the psychological benefits of manly form...

...When the duties of the president were opened to discussion, silence reigned...

...Rohwer does not pretend that this will be easy...

...Volkogonov obtained much of the new information about Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940 from talks with Pavel Sudoplatov, the NKVD project officer on the case whose own memoirs were published two years ago...

...in the process an entire industry of experts has sprung up eager to explain just how the East was won...

...Asia has come a long way in the past few decades, and it has come quickly...

...Between the hush of veneration and the drone of land surveying, we lose access, and then interest...

...right up to the 1917 revolution he was surviving on handouts from his family in Russia...

...Neurotics make better theater, but Washington's gift to his country was a temperament rooted in undemonstrative steadiness...

...Polite, yes —but his mere presence at the day-care center would have ruined Ted Kennedy's rendition of the spider song...

...The details of the murder are grisly, though on balance it is difficult to feel sorry for Trotsky: he got no worse than he gave, or was prepared to give...

...Though the Whites (and ultimately Stalin) liked to taunt him for his Jewish origins, for Russia's large Jewish community he felt nothing but contempt and hatred...

...He put down both rebellions like an impatient father knocking heads...

...Within the academy there is debate between those who see Asia's success as a textbook example of Capitalism ioi and those who attribute it to key interventions...

...and Chinese and Indian incomes were not even a third of Taiwan's...

...No doubt these were characteristics worthy of emphasis for the period after 1934...

...But the nature of these interventions explains why they were not the disaster they have been in other parts of the world...

...Even less successful are those biographies that dispense with veneration and FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...

...Never one to read for pleasure, Washington read for information...

...He did not help matters when he found a copy of some proposed resolutions on the floor...

...Placing it on the table, he warned the members to be careful lest the business of the Convention get into the hands of the press and "disturb the public repose by premature speculations...

...In Burr, Gore Vidal paints Washington as a provincial Eisenhower, but Brookhiser offers the interesting speculation that in the matter of Jay's Treaty, Washington may have benefited from being less cosmopolitan than Jefferson, who had spent five years in Paris, and Hamilton, who was born in the West Indies...

...Trotsky died as he lived—a victim of force and violence at the service of an idea...

...More fundamental is a question even fewer American critics are willing to ask: whether American-style democracy is even desirable...

...Taiwan was at the level of Zaire...

...In Japan in 196o, he points out, each Japanese had only one-eighth the dollar income of Americans...

...But Trotsky—with his literary flair, his genuine fascination with ideas, and his charisma as a public speaker—was someone they could fantasize being...

...He had the ease and composure of the big man (six-foot-three-and-a-half), though his large-framed physique had a disconcerting flaw: wide hips...

...If so, it was the only one...

...Seventh Fleet and access to the vast American market for their manufactures...

...The thing is so unaccountable, that I hardly know how to realize it...

...No French, German, or Spanish intellectual worth his salt could identify with Lenin, who was something of a philistine, or Stalin, who was all too obviously a gangster...

...He would sit a short time and then retire, quite provoked and disappointed...

...A minor, indeed arcane, point to us, but a godlike asset in a century saturated in classical antiquity...

...his country was merely a theater, and its population merely guinea pigs for so many revolutionary experiments...

...Never having left America except for a trip to Barbados with his half-brother, Washington could focus on the welfare of the United States as Jefferson the Francophile and Hamilton the Anglophile could not...

...The American Spectator • March 1996 63 Hatred to England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in France...

...Shay's Rebellion of 1786, the tax revolt by Massachusetts farmers during the Confederation period, moved Washington close to petulance: "It is but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the Constitutions under which we now live...

...all the delegates were loath to discuss in Washington's presence what everyone knew would be his next job...

...Both involved taxes, but the first were levied on Americans without their consent...

...Our age, which travels by auto and harbors political fears of the "man on horseback," is left cold by an aspect of Washington that enchanted his contemporaries: the image of the centaur...

...It is this, in fact, which explains much of his enduring fascination for many Western leftists...

...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...

...During the best years of his life—the revolution and civil war—he had presided over some of the most barbarous treatment ever meted out to political enemies, or even to those who were insufficiently suffused with his own ideological ideals...

...Rohwer calls Asia's stunning economic success "the greatest, and most thrilling, event of the last half of this century...

...Clinton has facilitators and Newt has Tofflers, but Washington had only Seneca, the Roman stoic who advised, "Scorn pain...

...Intervention that provides a spur is very different from the sort that acts as a cushion...

...In 1971 Ross Terrill marveled in the Atlantic Monthly how Chairman Mao's new China "has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man"—this at a time when the country was still reeling from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution...

...the latter was the representative of the Fourth International in Europe until his murder...

...The getaway car was forced to depart for the United States without him...

...If the sufferings of Russia over the past seven or eight decades have gained it nothing else, they have at least purchased immunity from this sort of nonsense...

...Nor does any of this trump Milton Friedman, who would undoubtedly note that non-intervention seems to have had the better record: not only is Hong Kong's per capita GDP more than twice that of Korea's, its economy is far better positioned to meet the new competition coming from an increasingly global economy...

...Nor, in the long run, did his pen: the only personal remarks he ever committed to paper were cut up by a worshipful nineteenth-century historian for handwriting samples...

...Though there is an undeniable link between rising affluence and the escalating demands of a growing middle class for more representative (and less patronizing) forms of government, whether this process moves in a straight line towards U.S.-style democracy is another question altogether...

...The handpicked assassin—a handsome, urbane Spaniard by the name of Ramon Mercader, who seduced Trotsky's homely American secretary Sylvia Ageloff to gain entry into his circle—was originally assured that the Stalinist apparatus would arrange for his escape and safe conduct out of the country...

...the second were levied by them through their elected representatives...

...One consists of seven volumes, another contains four...

...In the early 1960's, economist Gunnar Myrdal cast his eye over the region and predicted a sour future...

...South Korea was about as rich as the Sudan...

...ed to Paris, where his oldest son (and political collaborator) died under mysterious circumstances after a perfectly ordinary appendectomy...

...Instead, he was apprehended and beaten by Trotsky's guards, and turned over to Mexican officials to face a twenty-year jail sentence...

...still another begins with Columbus's discovery of America...

...Politeness is the first form of politics...

...Our age worries about authenticity but the eighteenth century worried about reputation, defining character as "a role one played until one became it"—what we call hypocrisy...

...No one has done it better than Jim Rohwer, former Asia correspondent for the EconWILLIAM MCGURN is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review...

...The aim of intervention was not to protect the beneficiary firms from competition, from foreign influences, or from change itself but to accelerate the impact of all these things as a way of upgrading the firms' abilities...

...Not least of these, he argues, will be persuading an increasingly ambivalent America that its own interests will best be served in a world committed to a multilateral trading system, and an Asia in which it remains the dominant military power...

...Nobody ever claimed the lost one...

...By taking a cold-blooded approach to welfare, Asian nations kept government spending small, which today has left them lean and mean at a time when others (witness the bitter protests in France) are finding themselves caught in a bitter clash between the demands of world markets and their lavish social spending...

...The portrait that emerges in this book is not altogether attractive, and perhaps this is the one way in which it breaks new interpretive ground...

...problem: he was surrounded by so many complex intellectuals that he comes off as boring...

...omist and now a director for CS First Boston in Hong Kong...

...According to Martha Washington's granddaughter Nelly Custis: "His own near relatives feared to speak or laugh before him, not from severity, but out of awe and respect....When he entered a room where we were all mirth and in high conversation, all were instantly mute...

...when the programs failed (whether in South Korea, Indonesia or Malaysia), policy was smartly turned around...

...Brookhiser's deft brushstroke portraits of Jefferson the radical-chic liberal and Hamilton the overwrought Burkean elitist point up Washington's biographical Asia Rising Jim Rohwer Simon & Schuster /382 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY William McGurn Modern history has not been kind to the Asia hand...

...either it will go away or you will...

...And though the World Bank in 1993 produced a remarkable volume called The East Asian Miracle charting the region's economic takeoff, when the miracle was beginning in the late 1950's, the Bank had its money on Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines...

...The aloof and majestic Washington lends himself to only one type of biography: the moral essay in the tradition of Plutarch, the first-century student of exalted human nature who wrote Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans...

...Although Washington was, in Brookhiser's description, "a conspicuous example of moderation and disinterestedness," he had no patience with unhappy freedmen...

...And in sharp contrast to the cut-and-paste books that have characterized the genre, Asia Rising is a substantive analysis of the reasons behind that success, and the social, cultural, and political challenges created in its wake...

...He had the same effect on the Constitutional Convention...

...Martin's...

...look for vulnerability...

...and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them...

...Some of the details are worth noting...

...Nor could royalty top his manners...

...Even today, a visit to any university campus in the United States or Great Britain will turn up vest-pocket editions of the original, complete with hair running in all directions, a goatee, and granny glasses...

...Was this an outward clue of his "undoubted sterility...

...But it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests...

...at i6 he copied out advice from etiquette books, playing the role of gentleman until, as president, he thought of the nation as an expanded Mount Vernon guest list whom he must treat properly...

...When the beneficiaries floundered," Rohwer writes, they were cut off...

...Washington cultivated his reputation assiduously...

...It's true that governments here intervened in their economies in a variety of ways—most commonly by controlling credit and encouraging exports...

...Most of Trotsky's biographers, particularly Deutscher, have emphasized his revolutionary honor and his sturdy anti-Stalinism...

...But Volkogonov points out that, from the very beginning, Trotsky was a man with virtually no friends, no interests, and no purpose in life but revolutionaryupheaval to be followed by revolutionary dictatorship...