Washington.......................

 

     "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," Churchill's fine formulation for the complexity of the old Soviet Union applies nicely to Washington, except you might take the entire package—riddle, mystery, enigma—and double wrap it inside a conundrum.  Less talented than other generals, less intelligent than other politicians, not at all well-educated to begin with, parochial in both his background and interests, a man with a strong sense of amour-propre but no complex vision, either political, religious, or economic, here was this man, George Washington, without whom, everyone who has thought at all about it agrees, the experiment in government known as the United States would, as like as not, almost certainly have failed.

-Joseph Epstein, from his Essays in Biography