Introducing George Washington on TV (June/July 2002 | Volume: 53, Issue: 3)

Introducing George Washington on TV

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Authors: Richard Brookhiser

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

Historic Theme:

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June/July 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 3

 

Bismarck supposedly said that it was better not to know how governments and sausages are made. I spent almost four years helping make Rediscovering George Washington, a film by Michael Pack that I wrote and hosted and that PBS will air this July Fourth. That’s the length of a college education, and that’s what it felt like, a crash course in moviemaking, a refresher course in storytelling, and a series of continuing education credits in the subject I thought I knew going in: George Washington’s life and times. I did some construction work, developed a strange new respect for Parson Weems, and learned that most Americans, however little they might know of the details of history, have a tough and unsinkable respect for the father of his country.

 

I had known Michael Pack since the early 80s, though we had not worked together until we began collaborating on this project. Historical documentaries were new to both of us. I was a political journalist who had turned his attention to dead politicians, writing Founding Father, a book on George Washington; and, in 1991, I started focusing on Alexander Hamilton. My biography of him entitled American, was published in 1999. Though I had appeared as a talking head in several documentaries and as an occasional pundit on some talk shows, I had never worked behind the camera. Michael and his company, Manifold Productions, had been doing documentaries for 15 years, generally on political subjects. The project he was in the midst of when we began was the study of a normal year in the life of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, though, when the year he chose to document proved to be anything but normal, the show became The Fall of Newt Gingrich. He had never done a show on early American history.

The first decision we made, before a camera rolled, even before the money was raised, was that we could not present George Washington’s achievements as a straight narrative. There was too much to cover. From the moment when the Continental Congress picked him to lead the Revolutionary armies in June 1775 until his death in December 1799 was more than 24 years, 16 of which were spent as Commander in Chief or President. During the eight years of “retirement,” he was still the most famous man on the continent, and he interrupted his leisure to perform such services as chairing the Constitutional Convention in 1787. If you add to that near quarter century of national pre-eminence Washington’s colonial career in the French and Indian War and the Virginia House of Burgesses, you have a public life of 45 years.

We did not have the money for a series, and we could not fit this panorama of activity into the hour we originally planned, or even the 90 minutes the show became. The welter of events in Washington’s life became evident when we viewed earlier documentaries on him that used