Reinventing the first president

In these pages Mr. Lengel seems to have set out to entertain the lay reader by creating what is essentially a compendium of amusing folk legends that have come to adhere around poor George. There is the story about a spiritualist in the 1940s who claimed to have spent 110 days conversing with Washington, who supposedly confessed that he liked to swig hard cider and struggled with alcoholism as a result. There is “a popular advocate of past-life regression” who contended that Washington had been reincarnated as Gen. Tommy Franks (“although Franks apparently remains unaware of his true identity”). And there’s the story that circulated on the Internet involving an “independent Scots historian” who claimed that Washington had received valuable intelligence at Valley Forge from creatures from another planet.