We the People: THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AFTER 200 YEARS : Mr. President : The sheer force of George Washington’s presence shaped the powers of the office.

On Aug. 18, 1787, the people of Philadelphia awoke to a most unusual article in the Pennsylvania Herald--a leaked report from the Constitutional Convention. In three months of deliberations, it was the first word on the convention’s proceedings that directly quoted a delegate.

From its opening in late May, the convention’s business had been shrouded in careful secrecy. Inevitably, the secrecy had bred rumors, and the statement published in the Herald was directed at the most pernicious of those rumors: “We are well informed,” it began, of “reports idly circulating, that it is intended to establish a monarchical government. . . . Tho’ we cannot, affirmatively, tell you what we are doing, we can, negatively, tell you what we are not doing--we never once thought of a king.”

The extraordinary disclaimer reflected the fact that an extraordinarily difficult topic for debate in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787--as it chanced to be in Washington during the summer of 1987, and many summers in between--was the power of the President.

‘Most Difficult’ Issue

How much control should the chief executive wield? Who should elect him? What should be his role in foreign affairs? What about the appointment of judges? On the method of election alone, the delegates in Philadelphia voted 60 times.

In delegate James Wilson’s view the presidency was “the most difficult (issue) of all on which we have had to decide.”

And the resolution of that issue, while it would affect almost everyone in the original 13 states and cast as long a shadow down through succeeding generations as any decision the Founding Fathers made, was decided on surprisingly personal grounds. The powers of the presidency set down in the final draft of the Constitution were significantly influenced by the delegates’ feelings about one individual--George Washington.

As the convention’s presiding officer, Washington sat in almost total silence from beginning to end, but it was universally assumed--both by the delegates in Philadelphia and, later by Americans in all walks of life as they deliberated over ratification--that he would become the first President.

What swung the convention toward a powerful chief executive was the delegates’ extraordinary regard for Washington’s personal character.

Shapes Idea of Power

In fact, delegate Pierce Butler of South Carolina complained afterwards, the powers granted to the President by the Constitution were “full great, greater than I was disposed to make them. The members cast their eyes towards General Washington as President; and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a President, by their opinions of his virtue.”

James Monroe, the future fifth President, wrote of Washington: “His influence carried this Government. For my part, I have a boundless confidence in him nor have I any reason to believe he will ever furnish occasion for withdrawing it.”

The confidence that Washington could be trusted not to abuse great power was based on more than mere conjecture. In February of 1783, the commander in chief of the Continental Army was encamped with his troops near Newburgh, N.Y. The soldiers had accomplished miracles, having by then defeated the British at Yorktown, but they were near the point of mutiny over Congress’ failure to pay them. As tensions mounted, his officers presented Washington with what amounted to a plan for a coup. Washington refused to participate. The officers decided to go ahead without him and called a meeting for March 15.

Pleads With Officers

Shortly after the meeting began, Washington unexpectedly strode in. “Do not open the flood gates of civil discord,” he pleaded with his men. Hoping to assuage their concerns further, he announced that he would read to them a letter from a member of Congress on the question of pay for the troops. And then, this man of great reserve and considerable vanity took his glasses from his pocket. “I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country,” he explained. The assembled officers wept.

As the delegates in Philadelphia well knew, history contains more Caesars than generals who said no to absolute power. Two decades later, for example, Napoleon, faced with a similar entreaty, had himself crowned emperor. Washington’s refusal to go along with his officers was crucial to the establishment of a republic in America, and reports of his courage and his dedication to civilian rule spread rapidly through the new nation.

Even in Washington’s own time, his life was becoming the stuff of legend. Today, the layers of myth lie thicker still. “No American is more completely misunderstood than George Washington,” wrote his biographer James Thomas Flexner.

Image Seems Detached

Americans have named boulevards, villages, towns, states and even children after Washington. His birthday is celebrated as a holiday, and tourists flock to monuments that bear his name. But if the man himself is thought of at all, the image that comes to mind is commonly that of a stiffly formal figure in a powdered wig who could not tell a lie and wore ill-fitting dentures, a figure who seems largely irrelevant to the complexities and pressures of the 20th-Century White House.

In his eight years in office, however, Washington was forced to set precedents on virtually every fundamental issue of presidential authority.

Consider, for example, the vice president: The convention made no decisions--in fact barely considered--what that officeholder was to do. In theory, nearly every possibility was open. But the election of Washington, a Virginian, needed to be balanced with the election to the vice presidency of a figure from New England. Massachusetts’ John Adams was the logical choice. Unfortunately for all vice presidents since, Washington disliked Adams and set the pattern for the future by giving him little to do.

Distrust of Executives

The vice presidency was only one of many topics that the convention treated with vaguely worded compromises, a result of the mixed emotions with which the delegates faced all executive power. The long struggle for independence from an English king and his royal governors had alerted the delegates to the public’s deep distrust of powerful executives. Yet internal unrest and a series of increasingly ominous disputes among the states had convinced many that strong central leadership was necessary if the new nation were to survive.

Some delegates had supported a strong President from the beginning. Alexander Hamilton, for one, had delivered a long speech to the convention in mid-June arguing for a chief executive to be given broad powers and elected for life.

Virginia’s Gov. Edmund J. Randolph, who represented the opposite pole, came closer to the majority sentiment as the convention opened. Executive power should not be put into the hands of any single person, let alone one with life tenure, Randolph told the convention. A single executive, he said, would be “the fetus of monarchy”; better divide the post among three.

Delegates Get Full Draft

Supporters of a weak executive held the majority for most of the summer. In early August, for example, only six weeks before the convention completed its work, the Committee of Detail presented each delegate with a large, seven-page folio containing the full draft of a new constitution, the crystallization of all the work the delegates had done up until then.

Even at that late date, the draft provided that the President would be elected by Congress to a seven-year term and would be ineligible for reelection. He would be the commander in chief of the armed forces, but not only would Congress have the sole power to declare war, the Senate would have the sole power to make treaties. The President could veto legislation and appoint some officials, but the Senate alone would name ambassadors and justices of the Supreme Court.

Over the next month, the supporters of a strong executive gained steady ground. The President would be elected by an electoral college, not the Congress, giving him an independent base of authority, what presidents today refer to as a “mandate.” And the Senate was forced to share its power over treaties and nominations with the President: he would make proposals, they would have the power of “advice and consent.”

Intentions Become Blurred

Unfortunately for the historical record, by the time these compromises were struck, the convention was into its last hectic weeks and James Madison--whose notes remain the primary account of the debates--had grown too exhausted to keep detailed notes. Little is known, therefore, about what the delegates said in those final debates or precisely what their intentions were. And what is known has served to fuel more arguments about the Founders’ intent than it has settled.

One thing is clear, however: many of the delegates were content to let Washington fill in the gaps they had left.

“I think I knew General Washington intimately and thoroughly,” wrote Jefferson, who was not at the convention, to a friend in 1814. “His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a (Sir Isaac) Newton, (Francis) Bacon or (John) Locke. . . . He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed . . . “

“His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man.”

18th-Century Figure

Paradoxically, the man on whom the dominant office of the 20th Century was modeled was a character out of the past, even in his day. He embodied civic responsibility tinged with an aristocratic sense that rank and privilege carried with them strict obligations--ideas handed down from republican Rome. Such views were already being pushed off the stage by notions of equality--notions fostered in the Revolution he had helped to lead.

Like all great men, Washington was a complex, sometimes contradictory, personality. A tremendous athlete who took pride in his strength, appearance and unparalleled ability as a horseman, he was at the same time childless and haunted by fears of dying without an heir. A tremendously successful politician--the only person ever elected President unanimously--he had an outstanding intuition for his countrymen’s deepest wishes but proved, after becoming President, almost blind to the rising partisanship that wracked his last years in office.

Although he appears in modern eyes as a bewigged and powdered member of Virginia’s planter aristocracy, Washington was preeminently a frontiersman. Unlike Adams, Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, he never visited Europe and had little contact with cities. Until he took command of the revolutionary army besieging British troops in Boston, he had never traveled north to New England, and until he became President, he had never gone south to the Carolinas or Georgia.

Gains Wilderness Reputation

Instead, Washington spent his youth and made his reputation in the wilderness that lay across the Appalachian Mountains. There, while in his 20s, he learned his first lessons about warfare, as a British Colonial officer leading troops against the French and their Indian allies in what is now western Pennsylvania.

Rapidly, he learned the limitations of untrained troops. During one campaign in the fall of 1758, two groups of Virginia militia stumbling through the woods mistook each other for enemy soldiers. As they began to shoot, Washington on horseback dashed between the lines, knocking firing guns aside with his sword. The dead and wounded numbered 40, but Washington emerged unscathed.

Such incidents not only provided Washington with valuable military lessons, they helped add a myth of invulnerability to his already formidable reputation for strength, endurance and bravery.

When he retired from the frontier wars in 1759 at the age of 26, Washington was a hero whose name was known throughout the colonies--a name that Colonial leaders would quickly call on when a new war, this time for independence, broke out in 1775.

Washington’s ‘Kingly’ Reserve

Washington could be a garrulous and friendly man. Mount Vernon, his home, was never without guests when he was there, and visitors from throughout the nation and the world found him a gracious and generous host. About him, however, was a dignity and reserve that his contemporaries invariably labeled “kingly.”

A story from the convention--some historians repeat it as fact, others as legend--attests to Washington’s reputation. Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris, the story goes, bragged to Alexander Hamilton that he feared no man, whereupon Hamilton bet him dinner for 12 that he would not dare slap Washington on the back.

A few nights later, Morris and Hamilton encountered Washington at a dinner. Morris walked up, bowed, laid his left hand on Washington’s shoulder and said, “My Dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well.” Washington said nothing, but stood back and stared until Morris slunk away into the suddenly silent crowd.

“I have won the bet,” Morris reportedly said at dinner, but “nothing could induce me to repeat it.”

Adams Proposes Title

After the first presidential election, Vice President Adams proposed that Washington should be given a title to fit the dignity of the office: “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” But, historian Dumas Malone wrote, “Washington needed no title that he did not already have.” In this, too, he set a precedent for his successors.

At every step Washington created his powers as he exercised them. Foreign policy provides the chief example. What did the Constitution mean in giving the Senate the right to “advise and consent” on treaties? Facing his first treaty, an agreement with the Creek Indians, Washington personally went to the Senate chamber to seek the Senators’ advice. So annoyed did he grow with the bickering debate that on leaving he was heard to declare that he would “be damned if he ever went there again.” Neither he nor any other President did so again.

Later, when foreign policy crises arose while Congress was out of session, Washington did not hesitate to act, brushing aside worries by some in his Cabinet that he was overstepping the executive’s constitutional role.

Power to Confirm Cabinet

Similarly, he established the President’s primacy over the rest of the executive branch. When Congress established the major executive departments, members of the Senate argued that as they had the power to confirm department heads, they should also have a veto if the President chose to fire one. Madison, then Washington’s closest associate, led the opposition to the move in the House, and only Washington’s great prestige led to the defeat of the measure on a tie vote in the Senate.

Washington made clear that he was accountable for his secretaries’ acts, and that they, in turn, were responsible to him alone. Washington directed that his cabinet members--Jefferson, his secretary of state; Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury; Henry Knox, the secretary of war, and Edmund Randolph, the attorney general--act only in his name and by his authority. Each day, Jefferson, for example, bundled all his official correspondence into a packet, which he sent to the President for approval. Only after Washington’s review would the letters be sent.

There was another less happy precedent as well. As his first, triumphant, term drew to a close, Washington all but begged to be allowed to leave office and retire to Mount Vernon. Leaders of all the government’s factions, however, united to urge him to stay on.

Second-Term Erosion

In the first term, both of the two parties emerging in the nation had treated Washington as largely immune from attack. In the second term, this immunity eroded. Monroe, for example, who had expressed his “boundless confidence” in 1788, by the mid-point of the second term was Washington’s ambassador to France and was secretly sending information to the opposition.

As the second term wore on, the Washington Administration deteriorated. Jefferson and Hamilton each resigned to build the parties they helped lead and were replaced with far less competent advisers. Age began to sap Washington’s tremendous strength as it debilitated his memory.

He was less and less able to thread a path between the two contesting camps, more and more vulnerable to what he termed “all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehood could invent, to misrepresent my politics and affections--to wound my reputation and feelings--and to weaken, if not entirely destroy, the confidence (the people) have been pleased to repose in me.”

In this too, Washington was traveling a road nearly all his two-term successors would find painfully familiar.

Stays True to Message

As the end of the second term drew near, Washington made his decision to retire firm and irrevocable. Perhaps others had thought of a monarchy, but Washington would stay true to the message the Constitutional Convention sent out in 1787: He “never once thought of a king,” and was determined that the world would see the new nation handle its first succession as the result of an election, not his death.

Washington left office in the spring of 1797 with a mixture of bitterness and relief, and in that, too, no doubt set a precedent for many later incumbents. Adams, describing the ceremony at which Washington handed the office over to him, wrote to his wife of the expression in Washington’s eyes:

“Me thought I heard him say, ‘Ay, I’m fairly out and you’re fairly in. See which of us will be happiest.’ ”