Yet there was one thing that made him the unquestioned leader of the new nation. He had what the dramatic critics call "presence", but it was nothing acquired or rehearsed. It was the presence of nothing but character.

The war was only 18-month-old when it seemed that all was lost in the foothills of Pennsylvania. The British had captured Philadelphia and the Congress took to the mountains. They were frightened and divided body of men. Word got to a delirious London that Washington was trapped in a frigid valley and the war was over. The first part was correct, but not the second.

In that awful winter of 1777, Washington camped in Valley Forge. It surveyed the main supply routes and was a tactical place to take a stand. And in the beginning life was bearable, even pleasant for the commander in chief. He even had time for a fellow officer to paint his portrait. His wife came to stay with him. There was friendly company and no lack of food and drink. But soon his army began to thin out from disease, desertion, treachery and in the end, actual starvation.

By then only about half of his men had arms, and fewer of them had shoes or shirts. To this implacable man, the ordeal was grim but quite simple. The word was "duty". He had given his word to hold together an army that was bedraggled, ill trained and close to defeat, and he made it plain that he would stay with the last of them.

While they stayed here into the spring when the sickness was at its fiercest, and then the French who'd had a good many brave volunteers over here signed a treaty of alliance with the Americans, and they lined up with this ragged army, and put it simply, the revolution held. It was not won for another four years and third year was the darkest of all, and Washington stuck it out. And when he died, he was not yet a legend, far from it. Many of his countrymen might think he was indomitable in war, but because of many real and fancied indignities, he was considered insufferable in peace.

But by now he towers over the generations of notable Americans as Shakespeare towers over the literature of England. But Americans love to challenge the unchallengeable, to create a hero and then deflate him. And about every 30 years some debunker starts to chip away at this monolith. However, as KK said once, glancing up at the Washington Monument, "he's still there". So he is.

When the war was won there must have been a deal of guilt in the respect that important men, congressmen in particular, showed towards him in public. They had quit and he had stayed. Perhaps only another soldier, and that the greatest, could truly value the fortitude that he took to weather the winter at Valley Forge and the darkest year of 1780. At any rate, when Washington died, and the nation gave him a stately funeral, Napoleon was seen to bow his head. And in the English Channel the British fleet fired a salute of 20 guns.

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