October 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 5 As America goes into its
fifty-fifth presidential election, we should remember that there
might have been only one—if we hadn’t had the only candidate on
earth who could do the job Looking back over two hundred years
of the American Presidency, it seems safe to say that no one
entered the office with more personal prestige than Washington,
and only two Presidents—Abraham Lincoln and Franklin
Roosevelt—faced comparable crises. The Civil War and the Great
Depression, though now distant in time, remain more recent and
raw in our collective memory than the American founding, so we
find it easier to appreciate the achievements of Lincoln and
Roosevelt. Washington’s achievement must be recovered before it
can be appreciated, which means that we must recognize that
there was no such thing as a viable American nation when he took
office as President, that the opening words of the Constitution
(“We the people of the United States”) expressed a fervent but
fragile hope rather than a so