The Dangerous Book of Heroes (4 page)

Washington actually made few contributions in the debating chamber, reputedly breaking silence only once. Yet by the time the Constitution was ratified by each state assembly in 1788, he had become the automatic choice for first president. Of his popularity, he said: “I feel very much like a man who is condemned to death does, when the time of his execution draws near.”

Ratification itself was not easy: in Washington's state of Virginia it passed by just ten votes. It's argued that the seeds for the next civil war of 1861 were actually sown in the Constitution, in its contradictions between ideals and application. Despite every person being a “freeman,” slavery was accepted, although the words
slave
and
slavery
were carefully not used. Further, although no slave had a vote, each slave counted as three-fifths toward another vote for their freeman “owner.”

It was Washington who summed up the realities facing the states. He wrote that the Constitution “or dis-union, is before us to chuse from.” Without its unifying force, the thirteen states would have parted company and France, for one, would have stepped in and snapped up some of them. As it is, there was a threatened French invasion in 1798.

Although there were other choices for the first president, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, once again it seemed inevitable that Washington would be chosen. In the first presidential election—by an electoral college, not the people—Washington received every primary vote. He took office on April 30, 1789, his wife joining him in New York.

That first presidency concentrated on internal affairs. Washington was determined to bind the states together, to create a stable mechanism of government and establish future presidential and congressional practices. He set the precedents for the presidency and government that exist today. Washington also visited every state, traveling in a white coach-and-four, with footmen in attendance and his stallion trotting behind.

During the first presidency there were no political parties at all, only men with different opinions. Of no political faction himself, Washington attempted to keep it that way. He selected a balanced,
nonpartisan cabinet: Alexander Hamilton was appointed secretary of the treasury, Thomas Jefferson secretary of state, Henry Knox secretary of war, and Edmund Randolph attorney general.

Hamilton, a pragmatist from the West Indian colonies, introduced several controversial monetary policies. In particular, the federal assumption of state debts, the creation of the Bank of the United States, and, ironically, excise taxes, the spark that had set off the revolution. There were demonstrations and riots against the new taxes, too, and Washington was forced to call on the state militias to calm parts of the country. Hamilton and Jefferson were often in opposition, with the president smoothing the crises.

Washington's second presidential term was dominated by foreign affairs. Despite his publicly stated intention to retire to Mount Vernon, he was unanimously reelected in 1792.

The bloody excesses of the French Revolution, begun in 1789, had horrified Washington. Only days after his second inauguration, without provocation, revolutionary France had declared war on Britain and a host of European countries. The treaty made between monarchist France and America during the Revolutionary War still existed, but Washington had no intention of aligning the United States with this new France and its horrors. The Federalist Hamilton supported the president, but Jefferson was strongly pro-France—or rather, anti-British—and his democrats wanted the United States to support France militarily.

Meanwhile, the French revolutionary ambassador, Edmond Genet, traveled the country to establish French fund-raising societies. He whipped up support for the United States to declare war on Britain, recruited American volunteers to fight for France, and issued French letters of marque for armed American ships to attack other countries' cargo vessels. He received no support from the neutral George Washington and so threatened to “appeal from the president to the people.” This amounted to foreign interference in American domestic politics.

When Genet overruled the president's order that a French-financed private warship remain in Philadelphia, Washington demanded his
recall. In reality, the president kicked the French ambassador out of America. Suddenly, Genet changed his tune and begged to be allowed to stay. Yet another revolutionary mob had assumed power in France, and Genet himself was now in danger of the guillotine. He sought, and was given, the first political asylum in the United States.

Washington wrote: “I want an
American
character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced that we act for
ourselves,
and not for others.” He adopted a policy of strict neutrality in regard to the new French wars, alienating Jefferson in the process. Jefferson resigned at the end of 1793 and formed the Democratic-Republican Party.

The first invasion and war with Native American nations also began in Washington's second presidency. The 1785 and 1786 treaties forced on the northwest Native Americans by the federation of states had caused huge resentment; three thousand people died in the subsequent fighting. After a major U.S. defeat in present-day Ohio, the decisive 1794 battle at Fallen Timbers (near Toledo) imposed temporary peace along the border.

In order to promote trade, finalize borders, and conclude various outstanding matters, the president sent Chief Justice John Jay to Britain to negotiate a treaty of commerce. It was the first major U.S. international trade negotiation. The Jay Treaty was signed in 1794 but provoked bitter criticism from pro-French congressmen. Washington was accused of negotiating an abject surrender, and Congress demanded the details. In fact, the treaty was a major success.

Through the Jay Treaty, Britain withdrew its trading posts from the Ohio country, the U.S.-British northern borders were confirmed mostly in U.S. favor, prewar debts were written off, trade was established between the United States and British West Indian colonies, the United States was given a “most favored nation” status in British trade, and the exports of both countries increased. What Britain would not agree to was a demand for compensation for freeing the slaves of its former colonies, withdrawing the right to impose a military trade embargo against its enemies (at that time France, in two later world wars Germany), and stopping impressment of seamen into the Royal Navy.

Britain was leading a twenty-two-year world war against militarist France and refused to have its hands tied in such a way. By 1796, it was the French who harassed U.S. ships and threatened sanctions. Eventually gunfire was exchanged, and in 1798 there was almost war. As a result, Washington realized that the United States needed her own warships and commissioned the first. One of them, USS
Constitution,
was built from captured British frigate plans.

Following the success of the Jay Treaty, Washington sent his ambassadors to Spain to negotiate another treaty. The Treaty of San Lorenzo gained U.S. access to Spanish Mississippi and to the Spanish port of New Orleans. Yet the political maneuverings of Congress, the virulent attacks by Jefferson's supporters, and the public criticism of the excise tax had exhausted Washington. His sight and hearing had deteriorated further, and he refused to run for a third presidential term.

The farewell address he gave on September 19, 1796, is reread every year in the Senate. In three specifics Washington spoke against “the baneful effects of the Spirit of [political] Party,” endorsed a foreign policy of independence but not isolation, and proposed that “the very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government pre-supposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

Once more, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon and
farming. Apart from a brief period in 1798, when he was commissioned commander in chief of a new army raised to resist the potential French invasion, he remained at home until his death.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

In the winter of 1799, he came down with a fever and throat infection after riding. He died on the evening of December 14, in some pain. He said, “I die hard but I am not afraid to go.” He is buried at Mount Vernon.

George Washington was born to an era of great and visionary men—Cook, Franklin, Burke, Nelson, Wilberforce, Jefferson, Wellington—but he stands with them equally. When the news of his death reached Britain, his former protagonist, the Royal Navy, fired a salute to him of twenty guns—just one less than for the monarch.

At the time of his death, Americans considered George Washington cold and indomitable, a steadfast man of war rather than of peace. Yet the modern republic he helped found, in those first precarious and unstable years of peace, has lasted longer than any other republic in the world. The shadow of his spirit crosses the centuries to the present day.

In the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge once swung around in his chair and looked through the windows of the Oval Office at the Washington Monument. “He's still there,” that president commented. So he is, another hundred years later.

Recommended

Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation
by Richard Smith

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
by Fred Anderson

The Life of George Washington
by Jared Sparks et al.

USS
Constitution,
Naval Shipyard, Boston, Massachusetts

Mount Vernon Estate, Virginia

Sulgrave Manor, Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, U.K.

T
hrough obsession, daring and sheer talent, the men and women in this book often achieved extraordinary things. They saved India, escaped from Colditz, climbed Everest, and even defeated Napoléon. There is a reason for including such lives that goes beyond a collection of “ripping yarns from history.” In this day and age, it is all too easy to become mired in paying the mortgage, getting promoted, filling the hours with hobbies and anything else we can find. There is a place for such things, of course—we cannot all climb Everest.

When disaster strikes, each of us is capable of courage and quiet dignity. Yet somehow, it is harder without these stories and others like them. Men and women alike take strength from the courage of Edith Cavell or the insane recklessness of Teddy Roosevelt or, indeed, Ranulph Fiennes. Put simply, their lives help us to endure the hard times. As Prince Charles once said: “My admiration for Ranulph Fiennes is unbounded and thank God he exists. The world would be a far duller place without him.”

 

Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes was born in Windsor on March 7, 1944. His father commanded the Royal Scots Greys Regiment in World War II and died without seeing his son. In fact, Ranulph Fiennes's first claim to fame was being the youngest posthumous baronet in existence.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

His first years were spent in South Africa, in idyllic surroundings. He ran around with a gang of local lads, sometimes carrying bamboo spears. They took turns throwing them at one another, protected by a trash-can lid.

In 1952, Ranulph was sent as a boarder to Western Province Preparatory School. When he won the divinity prize, he was so pleased he decided briefly to become a priest. That dream fell to pieces when he was taken to see a film on the ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. Given the man he became, it is not fanciful to suggest that the film shaped his life.

The following year his mother took the family home to England, drab and gray to a boy who had known the sun of South Africa. She rented a small cottage, and he was sent to board at Sandroyd School near Salisbury. After a miserable start, he grew to love his time there, though mathematics was always a particular challenge. He found that his classmates would listen to stories based in South Africa, and he charged them squares of chocolate to hear them. He formed a gang named the Acnuleps (Latin for
cave
spelled backward), who signed their rules in blood, as boys tend to do. They went on to fight another gang, which led to the leaders being caned and the gangs disbanded.

After prep school, Ranulph went to Eton, where he was bullied and made thoroughly miserable. It is interesting to consider the old myth that the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. The implication is of fair play and teamwork, but there may be another truth underlying the idea. Boys' private schools can be hellish places, but those who survive them are rarely worried by any other difficulty in later life.

At Eton, he made the boxing team and learned to love history. He was thrilled at news of Edmund Hillary's expedition to the South Pole. At sixteen, he was diagnosed with rheumatic fever and told to rest for six months. He spent part of that golden spring and summer learning to make explosives in a gardener's shed at home.

Back at school, he moved up to light-heavyweight boxing and he and a friend began to climb the school buildings at night, despite the
threat of expulsion for anyone caught. One night they successfully left a toilet seat and a trash-can lid on the summit of the school hall, but on another occasion they were discovered sitting on a roof. Ranulph got away without being caught, but his friend was found and questioned by the headmaster. As it turned out, the head had been a keen climber in his youth and was more interested in their methods than in punishment.

After Eton, Ranulph joined the Royal Scots Greys tank regiment in 1963. He trained in Germany on seventy-ton Centurions. At six feet two, he had grown to the point where he could box in the heavyweight division. He also joined the cross-country running team and the ski team and formed a canoe club. Under his supervision, the men would regularly paddle a hundred miles a day. To Scots, his name was pronounced “Feens,” and they described it as “Mr. Feens's Concentration Camp.”

From the Scots Greys, he applied to join the Special Air Service. To prepare, he trained alone in the Brecon Beacons and took a parachuting course. The highest peak in the Brecons is Pen-y-Fan, and one part of the training was to run up and down it three times in eight hours. Another unusual part of SAS training was planning and carrying out a bank raid in Hereford. To his great embarrassment, he managed to leave the plans in an Italian restaurant. They were handed to the police and the plans reported in newspapers around the country. Despite that incident, Fiennes passed the famously harsh training and specialized in demolitions.

His career with the SAS came to an abrupt end in 1966. A friend of his told him about a film set in Castle Combe, Wiltshire. Twentieth Century-Fox was about to begin shooting
Doctor Dolittle
and had built sets and a twenty-foot-high concrete dam in the area, ruining the peace of an ancient English village. Fiennes agreed to help destroy the dam and also to tip off an ex-SAS man named Gareth Jones, who had become a journalist. Instead, Gareth Jones told the
Daily Mirror,
and they called the police. With explosives and detonators, Fiennes went in darkness to Castle Combe, unaware that police
cars were waiting for him. His own car was an ancient and unreliable Jaguar, which he parked nearby and then walked in across the fields.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

Unseen, he and two friends laid explosive charges as well as gasoline flares on timers to lure away the film company's security men. As they lit the fuses, the night was shattered by police with dogs. The dam was destroyed in the explosion that followed, but the trap had been sprung.

Interestingly, Fiennes had been trained to avoid exactly this sort of capture. He submerged himself in the river and made his way in darkness back to his waiting car. However, it wouldn't start so he was stuck. Things were not looking good for the escape when a police car came up and parked next to it. Trying to brazen it out, Fiennes asked the policemen if they would help him start his car. He was arrested.

For his efforts that night, Fiennes was expelled from the SAS and demoted from captain to second lieutenant. He rejoined the Scots Greys and became engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Virginia “Ginny” Pepper, before traveling with his regiment to Oman in Arabia. He took part in active fighting there and won the Sultan's Medal for bravery. At the same time, he was looking ahead to a life after the army, hoping to make his later career with exploration and record breaking. On leave, he made preparations for an expedition to follow the Nile from the mouth, near Alexandria, to the source, two thousand miles south. He assembled a group of like-minded adventurers and used Land Rovers and hovercrafts to reach the source successfully, following in the footsteps of earlier adventurers such as Richard Francis Burton. The Nile trip would be the first of many such expeditions.

After his tour in the army ended, he needed to earn money, and a chance came with an advance to write a book on the Nile expedition. Fiennes wrote it in six weeks, while his fiancée researched the history. It was his first experience of publishing. His plan was to make a living
through expeditions and writing about them. However, his drive to travel and explore meant that he and Ginny separated for a time, as he did not seem ready to marry.

Alone again, Fiennes joined the R Squadron of the Territorial Army, who acted as reinforcements for the SAS in time of war. The physical tests were the same as for the SAS, and he passed the grueling ordeal. At the same time, he set about assembling a team for an expedition to Norway. The plan was to free-fall and parachute from a small Cessna plane onto Europe's highest glacier. The
Sunday Times
referred to it as “the World's Toughest Jump” and paid to cover the event.

Fiennes was first out of the plane and quickly reached terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour before pulling his rip cord and making a safe landing in the drop zone. The rest of the team came down in two runs, and from a safe base they began to climb and survey the area. A storm came in and almost killed them, but they survived to get down. His career as a renowned explorer had begun in earnest. Ten days after his return to England, he married Ginny.

In the early 1970s he was asked to audition for the part of James Bond. Producer Cubby Broccoli said Fiennes had a face and hands like a farmer and chose Roger Moore instead. It's interesting to speculate how different the films would have been with Fiennes as the hero. Instead, he took part in unmapped river expeditions across British Columbia, where he survived rapids and moose stew. The BBC accompanied him to make a documentary, and although this meant he didn't have to find sponsors, he was unhappy with the final programs, as they por
trayed him as both cruel and incompetent. Yet the audiences were eight million for each episode, and he actually found sponsors easier to find afterward.

To supplement his income, Fiennes began to give lectures. He wrote about the Canadian experience and for years planned what would become one of his most famous exploits, the attempt to circumnavigate the world around both poles. The Transglobe Expedition of 52,000 miles would last from 1979 to 1982 and lead to Fiennes and Charlie Burton being the first men to reach both poles overland.

In most lives, that single achievement would have been enough to make him what
Guinness World Records
once called “the greatest living explorer.” Yet other, more astonishing events were still to come. Fiennes continued to write, uniquely qualified to produce a book about Robert Falcon Scott's tragic race to the South Pole. His life had brought him fame, and he traveled around the world to give lectures. He took a job for a time with Occidental Petroleum, but it was always with an eye to planning the next great expedition.

In 1992 he discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman, previously
believed to be a myth. He went on to make the first unsupported crossing of the Antarctic continent on foot. He endured heat and cold and continued to demonstrate what a human being can do in extreme conditions.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

In 2000 he was involved in a solo, unsupported attempt to walk to the North Pole. Disaster struck when his sledge fell through the ice and he suffered frostbite in his fingers trying to pull it out. He had known this danger before and found that windmilling his arms restored circulation, but on that occasion it didn't work. His fingertips had frozen solid. The attempt had to be abandoned, and by the time he came home, the first joints of all the fingers on his left hand had died. Amputation was the only answer, but his surgeon wanted to wait for five months to allow as much skin as possible to recover. Fiennes found the pain of jarring the fingertips excruciating and decided to cut them off in his toolshed. His first attempt, with a hacksaw, was too slow and agonizing, so he used a Black & Decker fretsaw. Strangely enough, Black & Decker have yet to use this in their advertising. He also lost a toe to frostbite; it came off in the bath and he put it on the side and forgot about it until his wife found it lying there.