2/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick3
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 19 June 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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2/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-George-Search-Washington-Legacy/dp/0525562176/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.
In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I In The World. I'm Tom Batser with Nathaniel Filbrick. His new book travels |
| 0:10.2 | with George in search of Washington and his legacy. A reenactment of the inauguration, Nathaniel |
| 0:17.5 | attended in New York one April afternoon. And there are revelations here. For example, |
| 0:24.0 | Genesis 49 to 50 after Washington said fetch me a Bible. What's there? |
| 0:29.9 | That yes, there is, you know, the 12 tribes of Israel. You know, this is this is America |
| 0:38.8 | as a biblical imperative. And you know, here is George Washington saying, wait a minute, |
| 0:44.3 | I need a Bible to be sworn in. They find the Bible and it's turned to this passage. |
| 0:50.5 | And you know, this is America of biblical proportions. And you know, but and yet Washington |
| 0:57.6 | is so overcome at the moment of his inauguration. He's up on the second floor balcony with |
| 1:04.4 | crowds all surrounding the building with people on the roofs, the buildings across the |
| 1:10.1 | road. And he's he's he looks out and he's dressed not in his military uniform, but in |
| 1:16.7 | a a drab brown suit. He's making the point that, you know, this he is not a military leader |
| 1:23.4 | by any means. He is, you know, one of the people, but he's about to be sworn in when it's |
| 1:29.7 | clear the scene overcomes him. And he collapses into a chair, an unscripted move. And the crowd |
| 1:36.9 | grows hush. For me, this is and this for me, this is the moment. This is the moment where |
| 1:43.4 | we see Washington on the cusp of becoming the first president and just being completely overcome |
| 1:50.9 | by the moment. And you know, I think there's a tendency to think of Washington as that marble man, |
| 1:57.2 | as the guy who stares at you from the $1 bill who knew where he was going all along and and |
| 2:03.4 | bent the country to his will. But in reality, he didn't know why the country was going. |
| 2:09.0 | It was his while the ride as he could imagine. And he was scared to death as he as he prepared to |
| 2:15.7 | to take the oath of office. Overcome that scene. Washington has bad health moments, but I want to |
| 2:21.7 | I want to connect the author, Nathaniel Filbrick to the painter and see why it's because both of you |
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