Richard Brookhiser
George Washington on Leadership.
Basic Books, 272 pages, $26
George Washington on Leadership seeks to answer the question of what a contemporary business executive, entrepreneur, or politico can learn from the career of a man deprived of his father at age eleven and possessed of little formal education who grew up in a rural portion of a colony far from its motherland as the third of six sons. How did someone who started out with so many disadvantages in life come to be so rich, so singularly admired, and so accomplished? And how did he do it even though he was by most accounts far from gifted as a public speaker and not witty or brilliant?
Washington acquired two advantages early on: fame and money. Fame from his role in fighting against the French during the Seven Years’ War (what we usually call the French and Indian War) and money partly through marrying well. But, as Brookhiser makes clear, the standard explanation that Washington’s riches were derived from his marriage to the wealthy young widow Martha Custis is both right and wrong. While it’s true that the future first First Lady had substantially more wealth than he did when they wed, Washington had already acquired much property from his labors as an industrious surveyor and a somewhat wily land speculator as well as from special dispensations given to him as a reward for his service to the crown during the Seven Years’ War. Washington then