The Presidency
Each year George Washington gains more luster in our reveries on how we got where we are. Our sophisticated scholarship and painstaking restoration, which so often dismantle heroes, have revealed the human dimensions of the father of the country but have failed to dim the aura of greatness that clings to Washington, whose 251st birthday we mark next week.
His contemporaries felt the same awe and wonder. In Washington's last years, Mount Vernon became a mecca for the great and the grateful, for the curious and the ambitious. So many people arrived at the doorstep that Washington, who would turn none...
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