June 13, 2010: By George, I'm Thirsty

I had to get out of the office for a few minutes today, so I took a short walk early in the afternoon.  This is a shot of part of a water feature in front of the IMF that seems to put a smile on the face of anybody who walks by. It has a small pool with fountains that squirt in laser-clean arcs and water that runs down the side of the building. I suppose great architecture is easy to afford when the entire developed world pays your bills and you charge everybody else interest.

The best book I've read on our first president is The Indispensable Man, by Thomas Flexner.  Washington was indispensable because he was the only man in America after the Revolution who had broad enough support from the people to unite the colonies as one country.  Mostly self-taught, he was not as educated as his peers, a fact about which he was insecure, yet he had the wisdom and leadership skills those more educated men lacked.  Those traits literally, according to Flexner, made America possible.  His tenure as our first president "was the triumph of a man who knows how to learn, not in the narrow sense of studying other people's conceptions, but in the transcendent sense of making a synthesis from the totality of experience."  In all history few men who possessed unassailable power have used that power so gently and self-effacingly for what their best instincts told them was the welfare of their neighbors and all mankind."  Rather than exploit his power and popularity to expand his role, he exercised restraint--a notion that has since become scarce.  The man could have been king, but he didn't want a crown.  He consistently said his first preference would be to simply retire to Mount Vernon.  I don't think I'm being partisan when I say we'd all be better off if today's presidents would do more to emulate Washington than to endlessly seek to expand the reach of their office.