The federal government as the subject
In the show’s usage, “Washington” most often denotes the federal government rather than the man or the city. Bob Zadek opens an October 2017 episode by saying he has “often despaired about the amount of power concentrated in the federal government at the expense of the states and localities,” and states that this “is not the system the founders had given us” — the founders, he says, gave “a robust system of federalism where the states were co-equal branches of government with Washington.” He attributes the change to “a lot of Supreme Court decisions and a lot of ill-advised legislation and constitutional amendment.” Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017)
Zadek’s guest that day, Robert Alt, chief executive officer of the Buckeye Institute since 2012, agrees from experience: he “worked in Washington for a number of years” and found that “you just could not get meaningful reforms done in Washington, but you can in the states.” Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017) Zadek’s own formulation is blunter — Washington “has shown itself to be ungovernable,” is “dysfunctional and will remain that way perhaps forever, if not longer,” and “does not have the ability to focus on more than one issue at a time.” He cites the criminal justice reform effort of Senator Rand Paul and Senator Cory Booker as an example of national hopes that “simply disappeared,” while the states continued to act. Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017)
The same equation of Washington with stakes and power appears in a February 2016 episode on the passing of Justice Scalia. Gail Heriot argues that “the reason we have such contentious Supreme Court confirmation processes these days is that government is so very big,” contrasting the framers’ time, when “the federal government was a very, very small part of anybody’s life,” with the present. Zadek restates the point: “To the extent that there isn’t so much power in Washington, then the stakes go way, way down.” Gail Heriot on the Significance of Justice Scalia’s Passing (2016)
George Washington and the strong presidency
The 2011 episode with historian Thomas Fleming treats Washington the man, with Fleming speaking partly in the voice of George Washington. Fleming describes the year before the Constitutional Convention, when James Madison — “little Jemmy Madison,” in Fleming’s telling, five-foot-six and about 110 pounds, “a very sick man all his life” — came repeatedly to Mount Vernon to discuss “what kind of a government the country needed” with the six-foot-two-and-a-half Washington. What Washington “hammered into Madison’s head” was that they had to have a strong president and could not let Congress run the country, because he had seen the Continental Congress govern from 1774 to 1787 with no check on it. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Fleming reports that during the Convention, when the meeting dissolved into a committee of the whole and Washington descended from the chair to sit with the Virginia delegation, he “insisted they had to have a strong presidency,” repeating “One man.” Fleming adds that a lot of people favored a three-man presidency, that Washington wanted the president elected by the people rather than by Congress, and that Washington held that the president should have the right to veto acts of Congress without an override. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Fleming also describes Washington’s determination that the president be “a figure that was known to all the people,” which is why he visited every state while president, traveling through the South and then to New England. The anecdote Fleming supplies is the exchange with Governor John Hancock of Massachusetts, who had been one of the first presidents of the Continental Congress and sent word that he “would be happy to see President Washington when he calls on him”; Washington replied that he “will be even more pleased to see Governor Hancock when he calls on him first.” Fleming notes that Jefferson and his followers called these trips “royal progresses.” George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Money, expenses and Valley Forge
The 2011 episode was framed around money and politics, and a caller from Mill Valley, Carl, raised George Washington’s wartime budgeting. Fleming corrects the framing: Washington “kept track of his expenses throughout the war” and handed in an expense account at the end of it “which took into account inflation and so forth,” but Congress paid for what the army bought, so it should not be called Washington’s budget. Fleming adds that Congress printed paper money without taxes behind it, so that within about three years people were saying “It’s not worth a Continental.” George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Fleming’s account of the commissary overhaul is the episode’s most detailed set piece. Congress appointed the commissaries and other purchasers, and “appointed so many total disasters” that during the Valley Forge period Washington and his aide Alexander Hamilton wrote what Fleming calls the first state paper — a 20,000-word document, dictated in large part by Washington and rewritten by Hamilton, presented to five congressmen who visited the camp. Its basic idea was that the army would choose the commissaries and quartermaster personnel and hire “responsible and reliable men.” Fleming quotes a congressman who hated Washington saying the delegation was going “to Valley Forge to rap a demigod over the knuckles,” and describes the visitors as “absolutely speechless” before the paper. He then recounts Washington inviting the committee head to dinner and, walking in the snow afterward, telling him that Congress did not trust him and that he could not go on that way — at which the congressman, alarmed at the thought of a resignation, promised that Congress would trust him and returned to become Washington’s biggest advocate. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Providence and the reenactors
A December 2013 episode returns to Colonial Williamsburg, which Zadek describes as “an entire functioning pre-revolutionary war village” where Jefferson and others walked the streets, and where a theater offers Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and George Washington speaking in period dress and then taking questions from the audience. Zadek stresses that these are not actors who prepared for a couple of months but people who “have spent their lives understanding the men they impersonate,” making it “as close as we can ever come to asking Thomas Jefferson a question.” He recalls hearing Patrick Henry — “the voice of thunder,” and one who “vehemently opposed the Constitution” — and George Washington, and regrets asking his two prepared questions in the wrong order, since he was called on only once. The question he wished he had asked was how Washington felt the moment he learned that Benedict Arnold had betrayed him. George Washington’s Providence (2013)
That episode’s guest is Ray Lorber, author of George Washington’s Providence, who says he began the book after retiring and reading about the founding fathers, including a book on John Adams by McCullough, and noticing “a lot of conversation about Providence.” Lorber’s premise is that Washington “had his own personal Providence,” believed he was being saved by Providence to do something great, and knew he was destined for something great in this world, with Providence protecting him so he could accomplish it. Asked whether Providence means God, Lorber answers: “By God. His version of God.” George Washington’s Providence (2013) Zadek notes that Lorber spent 10 years on the book and that it reproduces the full text of letters written by and to Washington, which he says made him feel closer to Washington on a personal basis. George Washington’s Providence (2013)
Across episodes: the same question in two treatments
The question of where power should sit is argued in more than one episode, and the treatment shifts with the guest. In 2011, Fleming supplies the founding-era case for concentrating authority in a single executive: Washington at the Convention insisting on “one man,” election by the people, and a veto Congress could not override, with the Continental Congress’s committee-ridden record as the negative example. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011) In 2017, Zadek and Alt make the opposite-direction argument about the same concentration — that power has accumulated in Washington at the states’ expense, that Washington is ungovernable, and that the states are now the site of sound experimentation. Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017) The 2016 Heriot episode supplies the connecting mechanism rather than a position: contentious confirmation fights follow from the size of government, and the stakes fall as power in Washington falls. Gail Heriot on the Significance of Justice Scalia’s Passing (2016)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state where Washington the city is located, nor do they name any bill, statute or case underlying the shift of power to the federal government beyond Zadek’s general reference to Supreme Court decisions, legislation and constitutional amendment. They do not give the name of the Williamsburg theater, the title of the book on John Adams beyond its author, or the founding date of the Buckeye Institute. Several sections break off mid-thought — Zadek’s introduction to the money-and-politics segment, the Hamilton financial plan segment, and the foreign policy and neutrality segment — and nothing after those breaks is reported here.