THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Washington towers above the other Founding Fathers, but you almost never hear a quote from him.

If you do hear a quote from him, it was probably written for him by Hamilton or somebody. If you read biographies of GW you simply cannot conclude that his IQ would have tested above average.

I have studied and worked with testing a LOT. I worked with my doctor brother and we came up with testing methods he was especially invited to Walter Reed to talk about.

PLEASE don't get bogged down into what IQ tests test. Analogy tests are better, becasue IQ tests were developed to tell the difference between the LEGAL, not medical, categories of idiot, imbecile, moron, subnormal and normal.

Mensa be damned, IQ tests are admissible in court, but they are NOT admissible to talk about how BRIGHT someone is. The analogy test is better for that.

The point is that even the best "intelligence" test, the PERFECT intelligence test, would have classified GW as about average.

But Washington was a genius.

There is a CORRELATION between intelligence and genius. There is a CORRELATION between I and height.

But Napolean was still highly intelligent.

Genius is CORRELATED to tested intelligence. But GW was a genius.

You see, intelligence is largely a matter of how fast your mind works, among other things. So while a highly intelligent person will LEARN to read fast, a genius like GW will never read fast.

Charlemagne tried hard, but he never learned to read at all.

So while a high-IQ person could leap from mountaintop to mountaintop in an hour, old George could ponder and ponder and ponder and finally come up with something said high-IQ type would NEVER come to.

That is what GENIUS is: Thinking of something no one else would EVER think of.

When the fighting in Boston got under way, a lot of people tried to jockey their way into being the Commander in Chief of the inevitable new American Army. They spoke, they made conncetions, they did the whole thing.

There is no record that Washington ever said a thing as a member of hte House of Burgesses. He figured he couldn't compete that way.

So he just showed up at each session with his uniform on, six feet two inches of Silent Dignity. That was genius.

No big speeches, those were for politicians. No jockeying. That just made the other jockeys hostile.

He just showed up in his uniform saying, "When you stop babbling and want to get serious, I'm here."

Actually GW wasn't much of a general.

I will now do a separate piece on how he won the Revolution.