When George Washington became the first president of the United States 235 years ago, he understood that his conduct in office could determine whether the infant nation survived as a self-governing republic. There was no precedent in human history for the experiment in government that he would lead with virtue, dignity, and humility.
For generations, Americans have honored Washington’s memory and the lessons he demonstrated throughout his life, but human memory can wither. Last week’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump revealed a desperate need to remind ourselves and our public characters of those lessons of virtue, dignity, and humility.
A bedrock of public virtue is truth-telling. Democracy does not function as it should when leaders lie. Corruption and public abuse will fester in a system of secrecy and deception. In his much-celebrated farewell address, issued as he was retiring from public life, Washington stated this proposition simply: “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”
Washington was always careful in his public statements, unwilling to express an opinion he had not thought through, and he was fiercely jealous of his public reputation for probity. His dedication to truth-telling spawned one of the most persistent fabrications in American history: that as a young boy, he confessed to his father that he had chopped down a favorite cherry tree. Ironically, the story about honesty was imagined and promulgated, based on no evidence, after Washington’s death.
Political leaders will ever strain to divert public discussion away from uncomfortable subjects and toward matters they would prefer to address—and last week’s debate was no different. Biden shared incorrect or misleading economic statistics and incorrectly claimed that no U.S. troops had died during his presidency. Trump unleashed his typical tsunami of lies about inflation, immigration, trade, and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. At one point, he even claimed—falsely—that there was “no terror at all” during his time in office; in another moment, he claimed that some states have approved abortion “after birth.” Trump’s lies cannot be shrugged off as overstatements blurted out in the heat of the moment—they have been persistent for years, and they are unlikely to stop.
When Washington’s army lost a battle—and they lost several—he did not pretend that they had won. When the Senate rejected his nominee, John Rutledge, as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Washington did not claim they had violated the Constitution or his executive prerogatives; instead, he nominated Oliver Ellsworth to the post. When the Senate in 1795 ratified the Jay Treaty with Britain except for a provision relating to trade, Washington signed the treaty subject to that Senate-dictated reservation.
Another central element of George Washington’s legacy was his willingness to relinquish power to others and retire from the honors of public life. Washington first performed this rare feat at the end of the Revolutionary War, when he resigned his commission in the Continental Army. King George III of Britain said that Washington’s resignation made the American George “the greatest character of the age.”
More than a decade later, as the 64-year-old Washington neared the end of his second four-year term as president, friends urged him to stand for election again, arguing that his continuation in office was essential to preserve the American republic. No one else, they insisted, could hold querulous Americans together.
A vigorous, athletic man in his younger days, Washington had endured 11 years of military service, much of it spent on horseback and in soldiers’ camps, occasionally in mortal danger. He led the nation through a bloody war for independence, stood firm watch over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, then assembled and led the first American government. But by 1796, he was not the same man.
A political adversary, Thomas Jefferson, left a withering portrait of the older Washington:
The firm tone of mind, for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; its energy was abated; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquility had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.
Despite the entreaties of friends, our first president resolved not to seek a third term in office, thereby setting a precedent that endured for many decades and was eventually enshrined in the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. In his farewell address announcing that decision, Washington quietly acknowledged the toll that time had taken on him.
“The increasing weight of years,” he told his countrymen, “admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.” It was time, he recognized, to deliver into other hands the American experiment in democracy.
The recent presidential debate framed the increasing weight of years on both candidates, but more pitilessly on Biden, whose performance was halting and sometimes unfocused. Especially troubling were moments when he lost his way so thoroughly that he simply trailed off.
I have spent my adult years in courtrooms high and low, sometimes at political events, and on speakers’ daises and panel platforms. I have seen people stumble over sentences, grope unsuccessfully for facts or names, reverse words to express something other than what they plainly intended, or simply fail to address the subject under discussion. I have certainly committed such errors myself, though I prefer not to remember them.
But I have never seen anyone in such distress as Biden was during last week’s debate. I hope never to watch that performance again. And I defy anyone—including the president—to watch it and conclude that he should continue as a candidate for another four years in office.
Biden is not more indispensable, more essential to the survival of our republic and democracy, than George Washington was. George Washington set the example of knowing when it was time to go. We need Biden to know that, too.
Washington was not a perfect man. He could have a high temper, though he strained to control it. He did not forgive those he thought had played him falsely. But he always recognized that his duty to his office and to the American people came first, well before what his self-interest or personal preferences might be. That’s why his face is on the money and his name is on the national capital.
