Inventing the presidency
The show’s fullest treatment of Washington is the interview with historian Harlow Giles Unger about Mr. President: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013). Unger’s thesis is that the Constitutional Convention, having lived under George III, deliberately created a figurehead: “The Constitution says ‘the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States,’ but it fails to define executive power.” He read Madison’s summary into the record — “in our government, the executive department is not the stronger branch of the system, but the weaker” — and concluded that “the President was to do nothing. … that’s exactly what the framers intended.”
Zadek’s contribution to that segment was the observation that the office had no precedent anywhere: “the founders had no model to work after. There was no elected chief executive ever in the history of our planet Earth. So they were building something that never, ever existed before, and they knew much more what they didn’t want than what they did want.”
Unger then described Washington establishing what he called “seven pillars of executive power not granted to him by the Constitution.” With Congress out of session and no appropriation, Washington sent his Treasury Secretary to borrow money in New York on his own word; the following year he drafted 2,000 troops and sent them against Indian nations without a declaration of war. Unger’s defense was the oath: Washington acted “even if it meant violating the letter of the Constitution to preserve the spirit of that document.” The show drew the modern consequence directly — the United States has been at war more than a dozen times and Congress has declared war five How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013).
The same episode supplied Zadek’s argument that the founders distrusted direct election: “the President was not elected by the people; he was elected indirectly through the Electoral College. … The only direct election that existed at the time of our founding was the House of Representatives. So one-half of one-third of our federal government was governed by pure democracy” How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013).
Money and politics
In the episode with historian Thomas Fleming, Washington was used against modern campaign-finance law George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Zadek set up the question with McCain-Feingold and Citizens United; Fleming replied that the founders “were no more united than we are about this topic” but that Washington “would be appalled by our current finance laws and would be very much inclined to agree with you that there shouldn’t be any restraints on free speech.” Fleming’s summary of Washington’s political maxim — “We must take men as they are, not as we wish them to be” — recurs later in the episode as the justification for accepting Hamilton’s debt-assumption plan despite its windfalls.
Providence
The episode with Ray Lorber, author of George Washington’s Providence, examined Washington’s own belief that he had been preserved by a divine force for a purpose George Washington’s Providence (2013). Zadek’s interest in the book was documentary rather than devotional: it prints the letters in full, which he said made him feel “closer on a personal basis to President, to General Washington,” whom he called “one of my second favorite founders, but maybe he’ll move to number one after I finish reading this book.” The episode opens with his account of Colonial Williamsburg, where reenactors portraying Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and Washington take questions from the audience.
As rhetorical touchstone
Outside the founder episodes, Washington appears mainly as a measure of what the country was supposed to be for. Arguing against the government’s promotion of home ownership, Zadek said: “Men didn’t die at Valley Forge so somebody in Levittown, Long Island, could mow their lawn” The Credit Crunch (2010). In the ratification episode Fleming used Washington’s starving army of 1783 to explain why the Articles of Confederation had to be replaced Was The Ratification of the Constitution A Mistake? (2012).