NONFICTION - March 24, 1996

FOUNDING FATHER: Rediscovering George Washington by Richard Brookhiser (Free Press: $25; 230 pp.). Although the prevailing trend in history, emanating generally from left-leaning academics, is rewriting the past from the bottom up, more conservative writers have countered in recent years by reconsidering the accomplishments of Great Men. The master of the form is Garry Wills--think of “Lincoln at Gettysburg”--but one of his able students (literally) is Richard Brookhiser, here writing “a moral biography” of George Washington. One might expect Brookhiser, an editor of the “National Review,” to take easy potshots at modern commentators--those who downplay Washington’s military and political intelligence or emphasize his ownership of slaves--but wisely he returns to original sources and finds a man of impressive substance. Brookhiser has written an intriguing sketch, but it’s so skeletal one wishes the book were a full-scale biography--though a deeper wish, on closing it, is that today’s political leaders showed this founding father’s strength of character.