We decided to focus instead on character. We would not present every major problem Washington faced, but try to analyze the abilities and the disposition that enabled him to face them all so effectively. John Adams, who nominated Washington for Commander in Chief in 1775 and who served (sometimes unhappily) as his vice president, emphasized Washington’s character in a shrewd but admiring letter to Benjamin Rush. Time and again, Adams wrote, the people’s “love of the marvelous” tempts them to believe in leaders who claim to be selfless and public-spirited, even though they are often “deceived and abused” in their trust. “Washington, however, did not deceive them.” We wanted to explain how he inspired people and why he did not let them down.

This structural decision had technical consequences. The conventions of storytelling in historical documentaries are well established. Ken and Ric Burns have brought them to a sumptuous high gloss, but they animate almost everything in historical television, from World War II battle stories on the History Channel to celebrity biographies on A&E. Such shows employ three techniques: interviews with experts, historians if the subject is long dead, friends and hangers-on if he is recently departed; clips of TV and newsreel footage, or still shots of photographs, paintings, and prints, depending on the target era; modest re-enactments, to give a period flavor. Add a narrator and appropriate music, and you have a show. (The limiting factor—besides talent—is money. One to two hundred thousand dollars will get you lots of stock footage. The bigger the budget, the more stops can be pulled.) For a show on the Founding period, the musicians are fiddlers, the talking heads are professors, and the re-enactors are soldiers in Revolutionary gear, marching or firing their muskets. When we got to meet some Revolutionary War re-enactors during the filming of Rediscovering George Washington, they told us that their world is so compact—much smaller than the world of Civil War re-enactors—that they can often recognize individual uniforms from a shot of marching breeches.

Our film would make use of all these techniques, but a show on character would have to do more. Lacking a narrative framework, it would have to find other hooks for the viewer’s interest. Washington was a master of holding people’s attention, with his physique, his uniforms, his dramatic gestures, and his silences. How could we do the same? The technique we hit on was to bring the past into the present. This adds an element of surprise; one thing people don’t expect to see in a historical documentary is the present. It can also show the ongoing relevance of history—in our case, how character traits and leadership

Whenever we discussed a facet of Washington’s character directly, we tried to show a modern application. Manners were important to Washington all his life, easing his rise in the world and smoothing his adult interactions with hundreds of people not necessarily congenial to a Virginia planter. His youthful guide to good breeding was The Rules of Civility, a list of 110 rules of etiquette originally written in sixteenth-century Europe and copied by him into a notebook in the 1740s, when he was a teenager. What would teenagers in turn-of-the-millennium Virginia think of them? We went to a high school near Fredericksburg, where Washington lived when he transcribed them, and asked. They thought what any random group of Americans might think: Why go to such elaborate and artificial lengths to be polite? Washington would say, “Think again.” Or, if we were discussing some episode that illuminated a particular skill of Washington’s, we tried to get contemporary takes on it.

Washington was a resourceful politician, adept at building support for his actions and wrong-footing critics. The Whiskey Rebellion, a violent protest against the whiskey excise that shook the trans-Appalachian backcountry in 1794, two years into his second term, showed how a master politician untangled a cat’s cradle of passions and possible courses of action. How strong were those passions? We shot a discussion with descendants of Whiskey rebels in western Pennsylvania who were still angry more than two centuries after the fact. My wife called this part the “militia scene.” The rebels’ descendants weren’t shooting now, but their ancestors had, and their arguments would be familiar to a range of modern Americans, from ordinary tax protesters to Idaho Panhandle survivalists.

How savvy were the actions that Washington took? We filmed a seminar at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—just over the mountains from the main outbreak—at which colonels kibitzed his information campaign and the force levels he applied. The Army War College was interested in the Whiskey Rebellion because “homeland defense” had become, in the mid-nineties, a military priority. If we had shot the seminar after September 11, the discussion might have been even more intense.

What about slavery, to our eyes the great question mark over his character? On one hand, Washington fought for American liberty; on the other hand, he owned slaves all his adult life. On the other other hand, he freed all his slaves in his will, one of the few slaveholders of the Founding era and the only slaveholding President to do so. What to make of this record? Every year, the Quander family, an extended black clan concentrated in northern Virginia, Maryland, and eastern Pennsylvania, holds a reunion. Many of the Quanders are descendants of Nancy Quander, whom Washington named on a list of his slaves the year he died. We went to a Quander family reunion and asked them what they thought of Washington and his connection to their family. On the whole they were more charitable than

A theory of technique is fine, but making it real involved a lot of collaborative nuts-and-bolts work. Authors usually have nothing to do with anyone else’s work. They write their books and maybe do tours. Every other aspect of making a book is terra incognita to them. Writing and hosting a documentary plunges you into the whole process. It’s as if an author also had to work at the printing plant and the warehouse and meet with the sales force.

Each job in a documentary attracts characteristic personalities. The cameraman, the soundman, and the editors are Artists. They have the perfectionism and attention to detail that only bohemians bring to their work. If every business were run with the care that these craftsmen lavish on making their work look or sound just right, Enron would still be in business. If, before making this film, I had to walk into a room in an art gallery, to talk about the paintings of George Washington that hung there, I would have walked a straight line. Under the direction of Gary Griffin, our cameraman, I walked an S curve—because that route took me around the naked marble backside of a Greek slave girl who happened to be sharing the room with the general. What does she add to the story? Logically, nothing. But she looks good; she creates a split second of shock; she makes the shot more interesting. Dozens of such decisions, over 90 minutes, make the difference between a real movie and video wallpaper.

Michael Pack was both the director and the producer. The director oversees everyone else involved in the project, and the producer oversees the director. In Neo-Platonic terms, the director is the Creator, while the producer is the Almighty. These responsibilities call for a personality that is wily and tyrannical, a cross between Max Bialystock and Mussolini. Michael is in fact a thoughtful and considerate man—not an obvious candidate for such jobs. But there were many times when the recalcitrance of the world required him to show his inner guile and steel. The world did his bidding.

As the host, I was the talent. I learned this when after months of planning, I arrived for our first shoot—an annual re-enactment of the Battle of Monmouth, which was fought in June 1778—at Monmouth State Park in Manalapan, New Jersey. We built an episode around Monmouth, rather than desperate Trenton or heroic Princeton, because Monmouth was the first battle in which Washington’s troops fought as professionally as the British (the British never willingly went head to head with him again). Michael picked me up at the nearest train station early on the evening before the re-enactment so we could get a last-minute look at the site. On the way over, he gave me a lecture. This, he told me, would be my first shoot. People in the crew would be doing all manner of things tomorrow, and my natural impulse would be to help, or at least

When we arrived at the state park, we walked with the ranger in charge of the scene of tomorrow’s “battle”: a wide field, sloping down a hill from the visitors’ center. Michael wondered how he could get Gary elevated for bird’s-eye camera angles. The roof of the visitors’ center was out of bounds. Gary could not be in a tree on the field, since he would spoil the illusion for the spectators and the re-enactors. “Could I put up a scaffold on the sidelines?,” Michael asked, the Duce in him stirring. “Fine with me,” the ranger said. Michael’s assistant then found two companies in the phone book that rented scaffolding. One would put up a 20-foot four-level scaffold, for $1500. The other would give us the pieces of a 20-foot scaffold, for $150. Michael chose the second. A truck duly appeared with a load of metal stems and joints. The supplier showed us how they fitted together and drove off, leaving Michael, his assistant, his assistant’s assistant, and the Talent to assemble the 20-foot scaffold in the gloaming, while the ranger helpfully observed that in 20 minutes the sun would set, and we would lose our light. The first level was child’s play, and the second was easy. The third and fourth were alarming, which is why I didn’t go up to them; but the scaffold, thanks in part to the talent, got built. And could I shower in Evian water, please?

I was also the writer of the show, but I had been prepared for the manipulations my prose would undergo by my career in journalism. Years ago a wise colleague at National Review said that the world did not hang on every “goddamn golden syllable” that we might write. Articles are always being cut and stretched, not only to make them better but to make way for new pieces, to fill holes left by the sudden disappearance of old pieces, and to accommodate artwork or ads. My voice-over running commentary in Rediscovering George Washington would be similarly tortured, for reasons of time (the film equivalent of space). I would also have to rewrite myself to match the flow of a shot. If I had written, of the Whiskey Rebellion, that “the house of the inspector for excise was attacked and burned by the rebels,” but the print illustrating the deed had been shot so that the camera panned from the rebels to the burning house, then the voice-over would have to become “the rebels attacked the inspector’s house and burned it.” In documentaries the picture is worth a thousand words.