They don't make American presidents like George Washington anymore, and they never will. As Richard Brookhiser points out in his book "George Washington on Leadership," he did it all and he did it well:

"He ran two start-ups, the army and the presidency, and chaired the most important committee meeting in history, the Constitutional Convention. His agribusiness and real estate portfolio made him America's richest man. ... Men followed him into battle; women longed to dance with him; famous men, almost as great as he was, some of them smarter, did what he told them to do. He was the Founding CEO."

Brookhiser, a Time magazine columnist and senior editor at National Review who has specialized on the American Revolution, has also written a highly praised biography of Washington, "Founding Father," as well as "Alexander Hamilton, American," and "America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918." I talked to him Tuesday by telephone from his home in New York City:

Q: Is there evidence you’ve found that George Washington was either an alien or an angel sent down to Earth to make sure we won the Revolution?

A: (laughs) No. No such evidence.

Q: Can you quickly remind us what great things Washington did -- before he even became president?

A: Well, the greatest thing was he was the first commander in chief of the brand new Continental Army. America had never had an army before. There had been 150 years of fighting in British North America, but that was always done by the militias of individual colonies or by the British army against various enemies -- French, Indians, combinations of both. In the spring of 1775, fighting has broken out around Boston. The battles of Lexington and Concord are fought. Congress picks one of its own, George Washington, to be commander in chief. He is sent up to Boston to take charge of the militias that are already there and of troops from other states that are to come. His job is to create an army out of these materials. And he does this and about a million other things over the next eight and half years until the war ends in 1783. It’s the longest war we’d fight until Vietnam. It’s longer than the Civil War and our share in World War II put together. It’s longer than Iraq. There are many, many defeats and screw-ups in the course of this war, but Washington sticks with it and ends up victorious.

Q: Was there ever a time when Congress thought about replacing him?

A: Yes, there was a thing called “The Conway Cabal.” It’s still not clear who all was involved or exactly what the game plan was. Thomas Conway, despite his Irish ancestry and name, was a French officer. France came in on our side in 1777 and Conway was one of the officers who came over. Washington took an almost instant dislike to him. Part of the reason seems to be Conway’s high opinion of himself. Conway certainly made himself available to congressional critics of Washington, of which there were some. There seems to have been schemes afoot to give Conway an important job, to make him sort of parallel to Washington in the command structure.

Who knows where this might have gone. But it blows up, partly because Conway is just tactless and clumsy about it, and also because people realize that, “No. We’re not going to do any better than the man we have. In fact, we could do a lot worse.”

Q: He was already a hero.

A: He had already been a hero in the French-American War, which was almost 20 years earlier.

Q: He was also very wealthy.

A: Yes. There was a rumor in Congress that he had promised to outfit 1,000 men at his own expense. He could not have done that. Prosperous though he was, it was all tied up in land and he just could not have mustered that kind of cash. But what he did do at the second Continental Congress -- he was a delegate to both the first and second; the first was in 1774, the second meets in 1775 -- was come in his old French and Indian War uniform. That’s partly to show his availability for any command posts that may be available. But it’s also a statement to his fellow delegates that things may come to this -- You know, “Things are not getting better. They’ve gotten worse since we met last year, and we may have to fight to assert our rights. And that if it comes to that, I’m ready and I hope everyone else will be too.”

Q: What qualities made him such a great leader and where did they spring from?

A: The book is full of examples and I could have stuffed even more instances in. But I think there are two broad ones. One is his determination and consistency in pursuit of his goals. When he gets a goal in sight or in mind, he’s going to achieve that goal in almost every case. There is a singleness of purpose. Jefferson said years after he died that Washington took a long time to decide, but once he decided, he acted and he could not be swerved. This is something I learned only in writing this book.

I wrote a biography 12 years ago called “Founding Father.” I’ve written other books about the Founding in which he appears. But only when I really bore down on leadership in this book did I realize how flexible Washington could be in the choice of his means.

If things went wrong, if there were failures -- which there often were -- he would not only say, “Well, the luck was bad.” Or “The enemy happened to be stronger.” He was also able to say, “What were we doing wrong?” Or “What did I do wrong?” He didn’t always say that immediately. Those are very hard things to ask. But he would grapple with them. He was able to modify his game plan. Sometimes he was able to chuck it and take up a new one. So what struck me after finishing this book was the persistence in pursuit of his goals but the flexibility as to the means.

Q: Did Washington have any character faults or flaws? Continued...