Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Biography of George Washington with Alexis Coe

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

We have a tendency to regard many of our U.S. Presidents as heroes, illuminating the ways in which they shaped our nation for the good, that we often gloss over their missteps. Historians piece together facts and details to fill in the gaps of the bigger picture, but how often are our interpretations colored by our own lived experiences and perceptions? Sharon speaks with presidential historian Alexis Coe, who talks about her goal as a historian to tell the whole story. Listen in to learn some fun–and maybe not so fun–facts about our first president, George Washington. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson Go to https://ground.news/interesting for an objective, data-driven way to read the news. Save 50% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan with my link. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is presidential historian Alexis Koh. And one of the questions I am most curious about is how are we supposed to judge people from history like George Washington? Are we supposed to judge people like George Washington, who obviously was a tremendously consequential American, but who also has a very problematic history with enslavement?

There's more to that story and more about George Washington to learn. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting today with Alexis Ko. This is actually a meeting that I have been meaning to have for a very long time ever since your book was first released. You never forget your first. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. We were talking before we got started today about presidential biographies. They're interesting. Presidents are inherently interesting people, but they tend to be written by a certain type of author, right? Like they tend to be written by men. They tend to be written by white men. They tend to be written by men of a certain age and education level. And not that there's anything wrong with that perspective, but I really enjoyed hearing a fresh and different take

on a presidential biography. Why did you pick George Washington? Thank you. Well, I think you hit on a really important point, and since so many history lovers listen to your podcasts, they do want to make a really important point, which is that much was made about me being the first woman to write a biography on Washington in four decades, a really important point, which is that much was made about me being the first woman to write a biography on Washington in four decades and then the first woman historian in I don't

even know how long, it's at least a hundred years. There is no presidential historian of color, the dedicated presidential historian. And so the thing about presidents and studying them is I can't do it all, but I can get an idea of the conversation that's going on. Because if you think about history, you think about American history, and let's say, Luso-Brazilian studies or French history, you know, and then within presidential history, each president has its own little cottage industries. And in order to get to a president I might not spend a lot of time with, I usually read four to five biographies, and I can know what's going on because they mention each other, you get the tension, you understand where they disagree, and that works except in one occasion and that was for George Washington. It absolutely

did not work. I used to joke that the presidential scholars who write about Washington almost like they had to show up to take an oath and someone just forgot to call me. You take the oath and you say I'm going to write a book on George Washington and I promise to proceed in the exact same way as everyone who came before me. That includes saying, I'm going to break him out of his mold and he's too marveled to be real. Then they all proceed in almost the exact same manner. They use the same quotes. The structure is almost identical, give or take a few hundred pages. There's absolutely nothing new. Slavery is usually contained within a chapter. And we want a hero. And that struck me as off. I didn't see an evolution. And then I started checking some of the quotes in the stories

that some of them told, and they were just not true. Or there was just either the quote that they all use is actually the least interesting quote of all, or it's just completely misrepresented. And so I felt like this is the problem with being a public historian and independent historian. If I get this sort of bee in my bonnet and I don't go after it, I feel like I'm complicit. I'm a part of the problem. And that is how I came to write a book on George Washington. You wanted to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Was he always one of your favorite presidents? Has he been one of those figures for you for many decades where you're like, you know, I'm just fascinated by Washington? Or are you surprised by your interest in him? Well, absolutely surprised. I grew up in California, and we study a very different history there. But what is absent from our school trips are presidential libraries and historic sites. We of course have Richard Nixon, but no one's really trying to induct that into the calendar. It's not when I... I did not even visit Mount Vernon until I was in graduate school. It was almost amusing to me how reverent people were and how much

nostalgia and lore was invested in particularly the historic homes, less the presidential libraries, because of course I love them all. But the homes themselves were odd to me. And I did visit Mount Vernon when I was in grad school, and I thought it was really interesting and provocative, but I would not say, you know, I do not leave thinking, oh yes, this is what I'm going to do. Hmm. Okay. What was the moment for you? Can you pinpoint it? The moment where you're like, I have to write a book about George Washington? Yeah. I guess, as you just said, I remember just putting my forehead in my palm and thinking, how am I going to sell my agent on this?

It's like how is it going to drop me? It was a Mary Washington quote. It was a Mary Washington quote that was used by Ron Chernow. Quote was representative of the situation that he was describing that was in a letter. I remember given Mary Washington a really hard time, Washington's mother. And early on, I thought that was really odd because what they didn't describe him as,

which we described Barack Obama, and sometimes Gerald Ford, as people raised by single mothers. So I thought it was weird that she was being sidelined in this way. Then I kept looking at her and she was being interesting. But there's a scene that Turnam describes in Washington, where Mary Washington comes to visit and she comes in like,

a bad-ass hell and she uses those words and that she takes him to task, all these things and demands to know his plans and is so angry at him. And that is not at all how Washington describes it. And I went straight to the archives, I said, oh my goodness, did Ron Chernow somehow get access to some letter that no one else, no other historian has seen?

My God, what privilege. He runs in certain circles, maybe an archivist is handing him something. No, it's the same letter that's referenced by everyone. It says, you know, his mother stopped with other names are listed in there. And you know, he's delayed Washington is delayed getting to the headquarters because he's supposed to meet with Governor Dinwiddie, the last royal governor. And so he uses this

visit as an excuse, but he's not saying anything to suggest that she's a bad out of hell and she's like coming to ruin his day and ruin his trip and ruin his life. And so I just thought, all right, what else is going on here? And of course, once you start poking. Take one step into the rabbit hole. You don't know how far down you will tumble. And you just have to stop at one thing. That's the unfortunate part. I have documents that are like 40, 50 pages, no narrative, just pointing out faults and misnomers that have just been

perpetuated over time. And I want to, I definitely want to talk about that in one second. I just wanted to point out something that you said that I, that was very interesting, that different biographers, different historians interpret the same set of words in wildly disparate ways. And what your perception as a woman, your perception as a younger woman about Mary Washington's words was perhaps quite different than historians prior to you. When they read those same words, they felt that they meant something different. Right. Or you just, I mean, it's unfortunate. I don't think there was much thinking going on. Women are treated like accessories or eyewitnesses.

And that is their only real use. They're either helping a man or they're supporting him. They're like these caricatures. And so what is really vexing to me, not just about women, but about people of color, about anyone who is not a famous person we can name. There's not a lot of interest. There's simply a lack of curiosity about these people. Mary Washington, even Martha Washington, who's painted as a saint when she's really not. There is this need to place women and enslaved people in these categories. And I really felt as though it was a matter of being curious about the world and in a way that

I just don't think that these biographers who came before me are. And when I say the world, I mean the greater world, not just the man and immediate power. And so I think it's a blend of an attraction to power and a sort of unhealthy relationship with nostalgia. Hmm. Yeah, that means I do think some of it is probably wanting to romanticize the past. Like you're saying, an unhealthy relationship with nostalgia. This idea that things used to be better. People used to be heroic. People used to fight valiantly in battle. They used to sail across the Delaware. People used to be different and better than

we are today. I think that's probably a dangerous assumption. Do you agree? Having read their diaries, yes. They are not better. They are better at certain things as we all are. I'm not culpable for the actions of George Washington, but I am responsible for understanding them. And if I'm going to claim to be an American who is interested in our country's history, and I do think that the act of being a historian and being interested in American history in general is a very patriotic one, then you have to look at these people quite honestly. I don't know any other way to do it. I don't know what the point would be. Yeah, we don't do ourselves any favors by not being honest about who somebody was and what they

accomplished and where their faults were. We are not made better by just holding up a figure from the past on a pedestal and glorifying them like a deity. That actually does not benefit us in the long run. We don't learn from any of the mistakes that they made. We're not looking at history with open eyes. And it's those kinds of viewpoints that lead people, I think, to overly romanticize the past in which chances are quite good they would have had few rights

and would have died from a very painful illness. We have to talk about some of the enduring myths about George Washington, and he is in many ways a mythical figure. And a lot of people know about things like, you know, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree. He had wooden teeth. There's a huge variety of myths. As you mentioned, you have like a massive document just of like things that are not true about George Washington that people commonly believe. Do you know about how Steve McQueen escaped murder at the hands of the Manson family? Or about Dwayne the Rock Johnson snatch and grab gang and the Rocks nearly 10 arrests? What about Danny Trejo running a drug protection racket while in lockup? The obsessive killing of

Dorothy Stratton, the real-life murder that inspired David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the three conspiracies surrounding Marilyn Monroe's death? These stories and more are told in the new podcast Hollywoodland, where true crime and Tinseltown collide. Hollywoodland is hosted by me, Jake Brennan, creator of the award-winning music and true crime podcast, Disgraceland. Follow and listen to Hollywoodland wherever you get your podcasts. So, Bert, can we start first of all with the teeth?

Because you do talk about the teeth situation in your book. So what first of all, why are Americans obsessed with George Washington's teeth? And then secondly, give us like the real the real tea on his teeth. Yes. Well, they're sort of all connected. I'll get the positive miss that I'm going to dispel and then the less positive. To say that George Washington never told a lie, I'm surprised that that is not what he's turning in his grave about, because he loved spying. He was a spymaster during the revolution.

He loved spying and he got so into it. Some of the moments in which you see him reveal himself is either when he's angry or excited and very rarely does he get excited about something other people are excited about. You know, he's very into making tools for his farm and I do however, I'm with him with mules. His passion for mules was great. But so I feel like by saying he never told a lie, you are really denying him this important part of his story as general. And then that leads into other stories about how we won the revolution, how he set us up for success because we set off this age of revolutions. And now we were so stable. How? Read the book and sit in there in that section on the revolution. But going back to the teeth, now this is sort of related because

okay, tell I, this goes back to the cherry tree story, right, that Washington cut down a cherry tree. And then his dad why, you know, did you do that? He said no. And then I cannot tell why I did. I don't know if you cut down the cherry tree, you cut down trees. But honestly, he enslaved, you know, as many people as his age when his father died. His first title was master. And so he probably ordered someone to cut down a tree, even at that age.

But the point is it has something to do with wood. Let's just consider wood for a second. What happens when you put wood in water? It doesn't work. Splinters. No, it doesn't work. It's not a good material for that. So it doesn't belong in your mouth. And also it would really mess up the inside of your mouth while you were, I don't know, breaking the denture. But this points to something we don't want to know. And we're so committed to not knowing that we have invented this insane story That his dentures were full of wooden teeth

It is true that by the time Washington was inaugurated. He only had one choose left Was there something about Washington in particular that made his teeth bad for any reason that we know of? Like why did he have only one left? I mean reason that we know of? Like, why did he have only one left? I mean, possibly Martha lectures their grandchildren and nieces and nephews about oral hygiene, I think as a result, it's definitely a fixation for all of them. I think part of it was oral hygiene when he was in the wilds of the Ohio as a young man, you know, fighting on behalf of the British against the French. Some of it, his dentist accused him of drinking too much court, which shows that they were not close because his drink was Madeira. But I don't think he drank that much. There's one letter from Lafayette, which he, they got drunk at Mount Vernon, but that was when Lafayette was visiting after the war and they

were feeling very warm and tender towards each other. Otherwise, he didn't drink a ton, though he did like a nice Madeira. I think it was just bad teens, bad hygiene, bad luck. But dentures were not uncommon among the elite, but what filled them was walruses and other sorts of iris, tusks of elephants. So we have to say, he was a bit of a poacher,

of course they were all hunterous. And then you also have to imagine the wiring that it goes into for the dentures is not good. So if you look at portraits of Washington, there aren't that many, you can see his smile, if you want to call it that, his sort of straight-lined mouth and his jaw, it changes over time. And that's because he's wearing different sets of dentures.

But here's where it gets bad. And this is why I led with the spying. It was not uncommon in early America, and I know this from an ad that Washington's dentists took out to solicit the teeth of enslaved people to be put in the mouths of elite white people in their dentures. Washington did that. He also would hang on to teeth that had fallen out, not really understanding that they fell out for a reason, and he would try to have his dentist put those in as well in addition to the ivory. But he did then realize that he could

turn to his own enslaved community, because between him and Martha, there were, you know, at times 400 enslaved people at Mount Vernon, and simply pay them. And he paid them under market value. And so when we think about his teeth, you know, not only were they winning, but they sort of, I mean, they're emblematic of America in a lot of ways, and certainly of the founding era. Mm. So he would go to his own enslaved people and say, I'll give you X amount of dollars

if you let me take that tooth out of your mouth? Is that what you're saying? We don't know how he procured the teeth. We don't know. I hope he wasn't going and pulling them. But I think what, you know, it would probably be the overseer slash doctor, and somehow the teeth would come to him. The thing about Washington that I'm very thankful of because he cared about his every cent, and so his financial records, his ledgers are really revealing once you understand how to read

them and the language and what his intentions were. And so this is written down just as any other transaction. He finds a better deal. He always finds a better deal. How would he procure the ivory? I mean, it's not like we have walruses and elephants in Tidewater, Virginia. Like all of his things came from abroad. He bought a special suit for the inauguration. It was homespun in brown, but his shoes were fancy. They had diamonds because he was all flash.

He really liked sumptuous fabrics and he married well, he married rich and he ordered up. So he got to order from the most expensive exclusive London purveyors. And that's where he would get sort of everything. And I think also the dentist would procure things as well. But everything was on special order, as we would call it today. Okay.

Can you give us a couple of other commonly believed things about Washington that are just not true? This comes up a lot just because it's something that people will say quickly in a sentence when they're talking to me and they're interviewing me or they're just talking about Washington and they'll say, you know, the wig and the thing, no wig, no wig, credit where it's due, that is his hair. And not only that, he was a bit of a ginger when he was younger. He had reddish hair, which is like very shocking to people sewing the Jefferson, but that was an elaborate hairstyle

that that man had another man do all the time. So an enslaved person would work on that with, you know, curlers and then they would put it in a little queue, like a cute little jacket, it was called like like a sleeping bag. And that was all him. That was all in his hair. That was not a wig. That's fascinating. That seems like a lot of work to maintain that hairstyle. Except, you know, they didn't wash very much. So not as much work as we would hope, but just enough. We've talked about him as the father of our country, George Washington, Martha

Washington, we imagine her in the bonnet. I always say don't get fooled by the bonnet. I always say that, don't get fooled by the bonnet. But Washington had no biological children. And this was not a big deal in early America and for a long time in America, if you met a woman who had young children, you thought it was great because you could raise them, you know, two, three years old.

If they lost their father, you could just sort of swoop in and be their father. And you just wanted an heir. There was paternity, it wasn't really noble, and people just didn't care as much at that level. And the other thing is it almost guaranteed that the woman you were marrying could have more children. And when Washington saw Martha, I think that's what he saw. And he loved her children and raised them as his own and then their grandchildren he raised as well. And he raised nieces and nephews

and other people's children. I mean, this man was fathering all the time but he was not actually a father. And when I talk about fathering all the time, I mean, let's take his stepson and his step-grandson. Washington was constantly communicating with their schools, their teachers, their principals, whoever. Basically, they say, don't tell Martha,

but I'd like him to be inoculated or lecturing these boys about things like losing umbrellas. That's the level of almost helicopter parenting he was doing. He was doing it because he loved them. He was also doing it because he was so excited. He was the eldest son from the second family and his father died young. He didn't get any of the rights and privileges

that his two half brothers got. And they got them. They got to go to London for schooling, things that really made a big difference in early America between your general potential, the opportunity structure that you were presented with as a colonist. And so he thought, oh, my God, I can give them everything.

They can go to the best schools. They will never want for anything. They will come out in society and everyone will want to marry them because Washington at 15, 16, 17, he's basically he's almost shameless. You know, he will write to any man who's rich, who has a young eligible daughter and try to talk his way in. It doesn't often work out. He's been this like, I'm sick, but I wanna try again. Are you sure she's not interested?

Like, are you sure? And it's not until his heroics and he has to meet Martha. She's the only one who's set up for this. So I think those are things that I find really, really interesting about Washington as well. And that we, again, we think of all these founders as being so well educated, he had to drop out of school when he was 14. They will all at some point give him a lot of backhanded compliments about his deficient education, as he called it. And something I also really love about

Washington is that he was an autoddiadact to a certain extent, and he loved to research, but he would pick up books about how to do things. So when he was made the general of the Continental Army, he had really just led the Virginia militia like over a decade earlier. And so he had no experience with a major army against the greatest superpower in the known world. And certainly as he's growing out of Philadelphia, he stops by a bookstore and he picks up books about basically how to general, how to live in wars. And so I think that those things are really interesting about Washington and sort of they fall into the myth area.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I love that fact about him that he was like, and it's okay, I will be the general. But first, I need to find out how to be a general. I'll read the books on the way, and I will figure it out. I'll be ready by the time I get to Boston, I swear. The big thing that Washington had that the other men who showed up in Philadelphia did not have, besides like a little bit of experience,

there were people there who had more experience than him, but they tried to cut deals with the Continental Congress. They tried to say things like, all right, what if I leave your army, but if we lose, you pay me a bunch of money. But Washington was like, all right, let's do this. I don't have a choice anymore. And it's not because he was reckless. He was anything but. He was anything but. Washington's biggest complaint about the Boston Tea Party, he thought that their reasoning was correct and sound, but he really disliked that they destroyed property, which of course

was the whole point. And to make that point without dumping all the tea, and it's one of our best stories, he would have denied us that because it wasn't profitable. It wasn't a good idea for entrepreneurs, for capitalists. Right. The patriots were like, we already tried writing letters. Yes. What do we have?

You've been there, but you don't pick up arms, hopefully. But he writes about how there's a quote in which he's, I'm done writing polite letters. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay two nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western.

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Should modern Americans judge figures from the past who do things like enslave other human beings, things that violate our collective conscience. How should we treat or judge figures? I think that's constantly a source of debate and, you know, it's difficult to parse out. How do we judge people like George Washington who enslaved many hundreds of people? The word judge, I think, is a part of the issue, because it sounds like we've got to gavel and we're ruling on this. I don't think we should judge

them. You know, a place like Mount Vernon, who profits off the life of George Washington, says really explicitly, we are here to celebrate the life of George Washington. We are here to learn about George Washington. This is not a choice, actually. He's in our textbooks. We have to. If we're judging him, we're also celebrating him. So my issue with both of these perspectives is that they're mutually exclusive. And so I don't think I've come up with a potent word to offer you in exchange for that one. But I think what we need to do is we need to understand. We're not really here to judge.

And for me, it's a professional relationship. Are there moments where I go, oh, yes, of course, all the time. At one point, Washington is, I mentioned having an enslaved person cut down a tree. It's because when he's older, he has an older enslaved man named Tom move a log, and he can't do it on his own.

Logs are huge and heavy, and Washington slaps him himself. and Washington slaps him himself. And of course, at that moment, I thought, like, Washington, like, one, you're enslaving this man, yes, but there are 90 things to think about, because he's a human on this date. Both of them are humans. And Washington is not treating him

on a human on every single level. And I have to think of all the levels. I can't just think, I think, yes, he's enslaved. This is true. He's also expecting Herculean efforts by this man, something that Washington would have never been able to do on his own at any point in his life. Why is he so demanding and impractical with a lot of things? And what is going on with him that day? I also think it's, I don't think of it as good about it. I think if it is instructive, if you want him to be your role model, if you want him to be your example, the worst person who was ever a president,

that is a personal choice. And you're very welcome to. But that is not why we know his name. We know his name because he is the most historically significant person in our country. I want to get to Washington's farewell address. And many of his words in that farewell address, first of all, as you mentioned, he voluntarily gives up power. And people were like, you can do that? Or like, why? Why would you do that? That's a thing people could do? Yeah.

I love power. ... give up power. So that, of course, as you mentioned, was precedent setting. And it set up the peaceful transfer of power, which is an incredibly important aspect of a democracy, not just in the United States, but around the world. The outgoing person assists the incoming person, and we don't have a bloody revolution or a violent overthrow or one political rival killing their opponent in order to seize power. It was a very, very revolutionary idea. He gives this very eloquent address to Americans as he's leaving power. And one of the things he does is caution people about excess factionalism and cautions them about,

evil men will usurp the reins of power for themselves. And they will take it away from the people where it belongs. And it's in many ways, when you read his words today, you're like, it is almost prosthetic about what he was trying to caution people against because we are there. We are literally there. And we've been there probably for a little while,

but we are, it is glaringly obvious that we have achieved everything that Washington did not want for America. And I would love to hear more about your perspective on his farewell address and about factionalism in that time period. It was an explicit warning. If you were to have told me, and I don't know, 2017, 2018, 2019, all these years that I was working on it, that the farewell address would smack up modernity and would feel like he had transported himself

to the future. I would not have taken that bet. I would not have taken that bet. And yet it was just ringing in my ears for a while. Partisanship has always been bad, but it was terrifying to watch it happen. Washington in some ways was responsible for it. He's the only president who didn't declare a political party, and as a result, he sort of forced it on people, and they did it.

He hated to be criticized. You know what's funny is, that is an edited version. Alexander Hamilton edited it down because he thought that Washington's version wouldn't eat well because he was so angry. And if you might, that is not the dynamic you imagine between Washington and Hamilton. If anyone who's seen Hamilton knows, Washington is the one who can keep this cool. Hamilton is the one who's saying, you know, everything he feels and thinks without any filter. Washington is, you know, he was estranged,

he was frenemies with everyone. He publishes this carefully written farewell address in all the newspapers and then goes about his business. He still has to work for quite a long time. He says, you know, be careful because men who are only interested in power are not going to represent their regions well. They're only going to represent the people

who vote for them. They're gonna work actively against the interests of other people and they will absolutely be exposed and vulnerable to foreign interests because foreign interests will come in with money and they'll buy their way in. And then America is pretty much over because of course these were all the complaints about Parliament. When he says, okay, this is direct quote from his farewell address, however, political parties

may now and then answer popular ends. They are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government. And I've always been curious, was he talking about anybody in particular? Sure. He was talking about Jefferson, all those guys. And Jefferson, famously a Francophile, the French Revolution was happening, the ambassador came over and tried to get an audience with Washington, kept trying to drag us into the war. He definitely was talking about the men he knew, the men he came up with, as we would say.

So he viewed people like Jefferson as cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled, is what you're saying. He thought he was a liar. Jefferson with Madison and Monroe to a certain extent were authoring essays under pseudonyms. And the pseudonyms were like my favorite. My favorite is porcupine. It was indeed very prickly. And they would write these essays. And Washington, of course, knew who was writing them. And Hamilton was word for word obsessively arguing the case. But by the end, it was just completely clear that it was Jefferson. And Washington, he says, you know, I believe you, I believe you. And then he finally says, I don't believe

you. And they never spoke again. They never spoke again. And so he absolutely was worried immediately what happened. When the government actually started, when we won the war, Washington gives us power for the first time. And everyone thinks, oh my God, this is the greatest man in the world, his first retirement. And he goes home to Mount Vernon. And the North and the South are already fighting about who's going to pay all these war debts. And this, this house is, well, we don't know any money. And of course, we know why they don't know any money. And, you know and it goes on and on and on. So everyone's already fighting and he's already like, oh my God, we're going to lose this.

So I fought for eight years, I risked everything and he suffered for it and gained quite a lot. And so he's worried they're going to ruin it from the very beginning. And it just took a while to see we are so vulnerable and we don't realize it. And we got a little glimpse of it. We're dancing around it, but we got a little glimpse on January 6th. And imagine being George Washington, fighting for eight-ish years, and coming out of retirement again,

your wife being totally unhappy with you that you have to spend more years out of Virginia. You lose all your children. You are known as the greatest man in the world, and then you're hated by half of your country. You have everything to lose. And at the same time, all these other revolutions that we set off,

there's so much bloodshed, guillotines galore in France. We didn't have that. And so she was always managing, managing, managing. And that he did learn, we have to say, as an enslaver, he's managing his plantation as forced labor camp. He's making sure there are no rebellions. He's maximizing labor.

He's making sure that he's profiting off everything. And so I think that's what's going on is he's managing this country. And so he sees the weaknesses and he sees the peril and the greatest danger were his best friends. The other men lauded for this heroic, incredible feat. What would you love for people listening to this, the average American, to know about George Washington? You're the founders. They expected us to change quite a bit all the time. And if we didn't, then we would fall into decay. This is again from the farewell dress.

The corrupt men decay. That's why we had to rebel in the first place, you know, as the British called it. We called it a revolution. And so I think he would, he would be surprised we haven't had another. They knew slavery was going to end. They knew they were on borrowed time.

They would have been surprised at the role that women played. They would have been surprised at purportedly equal citizenship and things like that. But I think he would have been most disappointed and shocked by how little we progressed and how much we put on them, on the founders. How much faith and how we have. I mean, he would want to be remembered. Certainly, he knew his legacy would matter. He wanted to be at the center of his country's story,

I would say. It just didn't really matter which country it was at first. But he would be also disappointed in that country. It is always very, I think, instructive and important to humanize characters from the past and to know that Washington had to buy books on how to be a general. And he was not well educated and so consequently did not know how to be president. There was, there's no president of America 101 book to buy. Like you could buy a book for generals. There was no concept of like how to be the president. He was making it up. He made it up. As many things as he got right, as many things as

the founders got right, as much foresight as they had, as much wisdom and intelligence as they had. I think it behoves us to remember that they literally invented it. It exists because they invented it. And we have the power to do the same. Things can change because we invent the change that could become so important to future historians. Absolutely. I love that. Yes. Thank you so much for being here today. One of the things I think people will enjoy about your book, You Never Forget Your First, is first of all, it's entertaining to read. It is not one of those 1,000 page biographies where it recounts every boring quote in old language. It is compact. It is like just over 200 pages. It is witty. It really creates a different portrait of Washington and it humanizes him in ways that many biographies have not been able to achieve.

So congrats on your incredible amount of research and work. I think a lot of people will enjoy reading your book. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening. You can check out You Never Forget Your First. It's a New York Times bestseller. It is written by presidential historian Alexis Ko. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you

enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show? That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.