September 29, 1999
LAWRENCE -- The first man in the job as president of the United States was a man of vanity, disappointment and longing, according to Richard Norton Smith, historian and biographer. Smith will speak on "The Surprising George Washington," at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 11, at the University of Kansas Visitor Center auditorium, 15th and Iowa. His speech is sponsored by the Robert J. Dole Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at KU.
As author of "Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation," Smith will talk about "a historical figure vastly more interesting ... than the marbled icon who reappears out of the historical mists each February to sell us used cars and appliances."
Smith is director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids, Mich., and author of numerous books including a biography of Chicago Tribune magnate Robert R. McCormick and 1948 Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey.
The Nation magazine editor said of Smith's biography of Washington: "We think of the Washington administration as a golden age of patriotism, which it was. But it also had negative campaigning, leaks to the press, confrontations with Congress, and scandal. Richard Norton Smith lays it all out like an 18th century C-SPAN."
A 1975 graduate of Harvard with a degree in government, Smith was a White House intern and a free-lance writer after his graduation. In 1977, he worked as a speech writer for former Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and later for former Sen. Bob Dole. He has served as an editorial consultant with the Doles for their joint autobiography and with Sen. Dole on his book, "Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House."
Smith has also directed the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.