Books: Shaper of Victory

GEORGE WASHINGTON (Vol. V, 570 pp.) —Douglas Soufhall Freeman—Scribner ($7.50).

George Washington has had his ups & downs since the days of his idolatrous early biographer, Parson Weems. The debunking period set in long ago—at least as early as 1880, when a character in Henry Adams' novel, Democracy, ticked him off as "a rawboned country farmer, very hard-featured, very awkward, very illiterate and very dull." Since then, two generations of "liberal" debunkers have gleefully whittled away at his reputation, trying to leave the impression that Washington was little more than a stodgy figurehead....