Historian John Ferling has been called a national resource, and his latest book again demonstrates his unsurpassed insight into the Founding Fathers, giving us George Washington as we have never seen him before.
Our first president has long been viewed as a hero who rose above politics. The Ascent of George Washington peers behind that image-one carefully burnished by Washington himself-to reveal a leader who was not only not above politics, but a master manipulator adept in the arts of persuasion, leverage, and deniability. Washington deftly screened burning ambition behind an image of republican virtue-but that image made him just the leader that an overmatched army and a shaky young nation desperately needed.