“But Washington, as Franklin well knew, wanted no scepter. He had given his entire life, not for personal glory, but for the American nation. As Marcus Cunliffe writes in his widely respected book George Washington: Man and Monument, in the end he had no private life left at all. He bore the burden that was required of him as General and then as President, to disappear as a private individual into an ideal. “His very strength resided in a sobriety some took for fatal dullness…[but] in his own person [he] proved the soundness of America.””