Name: Washington: The First President | Exclusive | History
Uploaded: 2020-03-23T06:11:44.000Z
Duration: 4 min 52 s
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One of the greatest myths about Washington that needs to be dispelled is that he was somehow superhuman.

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Wait, have chosen to see George Washington through the lens of a mythic person, and we've done that because he was our first president.

Adverbs of degree

But for historians who know his life, we know that he was a man like anybody else, a man with doubt, a man who was uncertain that this nation would ever really form and work a man who did not know if he was really ready to be president of the United States.

When he is assuming the presidency, he's saying, I don't know if I could do this.

This was a tiny country and a fledgling country, and nobody knew that this was gonna work.

Hey, more than any other single person had created the United States.

And so he had a big investment in seeing that the United States would succeed.

Washington understood that if he failed, the country would fail.

It was that simple, but exactly what this presidency consisted of was quite unclear.

At the time Washington took his oath of office.

If you read article two of the Constitution on the powers of the presidency, You would not be able to tell what in heaven's name the president can and cannot do.

Nobody knew how to define the presidency.

Did you want to be called Your Excellency?

If a king entered a room, people knew that they should stand.

What do you do when a president enters the room?

It seems like he probably has some degree of power on foreign policy.

But over domestic policy is not clear at all.

Washington was part of important balancing act.

Should the Legislature be dominant, what would be the role of the judiciary will be the roll of the states.

I think a dramatic example of the fact that this was a new government and there was no precedent is Washington's copy of the Constitution.

He's given this book, and it's a beautifully bound book.

It also has in it a copy of the Constitution in the beginning of and when George Washington eyes preparing for the first State of the Union address in January 17 90 he sits down and he re raids the Constitution in that book and he marks it up in the markets.

Basically, what he does is he reads through and every time the presidency is involved he writes in the margin President.

So Article One, which is all about the legislative branch in the powers of Congress, where they're mixed with the executive branch of the veto power.

George Washington makes these little brackets in his fine surveyors hand and writes President, This is his job.

He doesn't know and he's marking it down on a piece of paper.

You can see him wrestling with the job on paper.

In a sense, he's using this pencil just like we would use a highlighter article to all about the executive branch.

It starts out, the executive power shall be vested in the President of United States.

Constitution wasn't a detailed blueprint and it was going to take shape.

As Congress developed its powers as the executive, the president developed his powers.

He's already been president for 10 months.

He knows what's in the Constitution, but he's so careful that is binding himself to the rule of law, to the Constitution, to the limits and responsibilities of that office.

Constitution sets up broad Structures Washington has the responsibility to fill it.

He's so conscious of the power of being a president without precedent and that he's setting a model that others will follow.

Washington's not thinking about the next year or the next decade.

He's thinking about what the United States could become over the next century.

Washington's presidency shapes the office.

 The precedents set during his presidency are more important than any language in the Constitution itself. 

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Washington: The First President | Exclusive | History

assume

conscious

executive

doubt