The Washington Post National Weekly. February 23, 2020

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2020

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly Amid gang peril, a Mexican village is arming its children.

Is it for self-defense, or to get attention?

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Politics Sanders tops national poll 6

Nation Utilities resist rollback 8

5 Myths George Washington 23

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Politics

Trump’s legal power moves Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

Post-impeachment, he declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America

BY T OLUSE O LORUNNIPA AND B ETH R EINHARD

D

uring his Senate impeachment trial, Democrats repeatedly asserted that President Trump is “not above the law.” But since his acquittal, analysts say, the president has taken steps aimed at showing that, essentially, he is the law.

On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to a clutch of political allies, circumventing the usual Justice Department process. The

pardons and commutations followed Trump’s moves to punish witnesses in his impeachment trial, publicly intervene in a pending legal case to urge leniency for a friend, attack a federal judge, accuse a juror of bias and threaten to sue his own government for investigating him.

Trump defended his actions, saying he has the right to shape the country’s legal systems as he sees fit.

“I’m allowed to be totally involved,” he told reporters as he left

Washington on Tuesday for a trip to California, Nevada and Arizona.

“I’m actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country.

But I’ve chosen not to be involved.”

The president’s post-impeachment behavior has alarmed Attorney General William P. Barr, who has told people close to the president that he is willing to quit unless Trump stops publicly commenting on ongoing criminal matters, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss

President Trump backstage before addressing National Border Patrol Council members at the White House on Feb. 14. His comments on the justice system have led to concern from legal experts and former federal officials.

internal deliberations. It also has appalled several legal experts and former officials, who have said his direct intervention in legal matters risks further politicizing law enforcement at a time of fraying confidence in the Justice Department.

More than 2,000 former Justice Department employees signed a public letter last week objecting to Trump’s public intervention in the case of his longtime friend Roger Stone, and urging Barr to resign.

The head of the Federal Judges

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Politics

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Amanda Rivkin/Agence france-presse/Getty Images; Jae C. Hong/Associated Press; Manuel Balce Ceneta/associated press

Association has called an emergency meeting to address growing concerns about political interference in the Stone case. And four prosecutors resigned from the case after Trump decried their recommended prison sentence of seven to nine years for Stone and the Justice Department reversed course to lobby for a lower sentence. The new prosecutors sentenced Stone to three years and four months in prison Thursday.

A jury convicted Stone last year of lying to Congress and obstruction in a case that Trump has repeatedly condemned as unfair while leaving open the prospect of issuing a pardon for his friend and political ally.

Carmen Ortiz, the former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts under President Barack Obama, was among the signatories on the letter condemning Trump’s political interference in legal matters.

“I’ve worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations,” she said, “and I’ve just never seen behavior like what we’re seeing right now.”

Trump added to the sense of legal disarray Tuesday by granting executive clemency to a group of 11 people that included several political allies and others convicted of corruption, lying and fraud.

Among the recipients of Trump’s largesse was Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who was convicted on corruption charges in 2011 related to trying to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

His sentence was commuted. Financier Michael Milken, who was

charged with insider trading in the 1980s, and Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner jailed on eight felony charges, including tax fraud, were pardoned.

Trump said the pardons and commutations were based on “the recommendations of people that know them,” including Blagojevich’s wife, Patricia, who made a direct appeal to the president on Fox News.

Legal experts said that by relying on his personal connections rather than the Justice Department’s established review process for finding convicts deserving of clemency, Trump risked politicizing his pardon power.

“It’s a clemency process for the well-connected, and that’s it,” said Rachel Barkow, a professor and clemency expert at the New York University School of Law. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s comments about the Stone case have caused the most concern. Trump has singled out the judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, for personal attacks, accusing her of bias and spreading a falsehood about her record. He has amplified Stone’s request for a new trial, accusing a member of the jury of being politically biased against him.

Though Barr has warned that the president’s unbridled commentary about ongoing criminal cases was making it “impossible for me to do my job,” Trump continued to express his views about

legal matters Tuesday.

Trump told reporters that he partially agreed with Barr, acknowledging that his tweets do make the attorney general’s job more difficult. But he said he would continue tweeting nonetheless.

“Social media, for me, has been very important because it gives me a voice,” Trump said.

And he has made a direct connection between his own legal travails and those of Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress about his attempts to get details from Hillary Clinton’s private emails from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

Trump’s increasingly provocative comments raised the prospect that he might issue pardons for Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Since his impeachment acquittal, Trump has tried to portray the prosecutions of his allies as the illegitimate product of an illegitimate investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 race.

Prosecutions stemming from the Mueller investigation are “badly tainted,” Trump tweeted Tuesday, and “should be thrown out.”

“If I wasn’t President, I’d be suing everyone all over the place,” Trump wrote. “BUT MAYBE I STILL WILL. WITCH HUNT!” After learning that federal judges would be holding an emergency discussion about his intervention

President Trump on Tuesday granted executive clemency to 11 people, including, from left, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, financier Michael Milken and former New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik. Trump said the pardons and commutations were based on “the recommendations of people that know them.”

in legal cases, Trump tweeted that they should instead discuss the alleged shortcomings of the Mueller probe.

Trump’s constant commentary and increasing willingness to flout traditional legal processes signal that the president feels emboldened and unrestrained after Republicans voted almost unanimously to acquit him on impeachment charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” a history of White House chiefs of staff.

While some Republicans spoke out against Trump’s commutation for Blagojevich, the reaction from GOP lawmakers Tuesday was mostly muted. And there’s little to indicate that pardons for Stone or Flynn would lead to a significant Republican backlash.

Whipple said the president’s decision to pardon several of his political allies just before Stone is scheduled to be sentenced set the stage for an increasingly “dangerous” phase of Trump’s presidency.

“This is a president who thinks the law exists to be circumvented,” he said.

The next test of Trump’s willingness to intervene in the legal process could come as soon as Thursday, when Stone is set to be sentenced by Jackson. Asked Tuesday if he would issue a pardon for Stone, Trump demurred.

“I haven’t given it any thought.

In the meantime, he’s going through a process,” Trump said.

“But I think he’s been treated very unfairly.” n

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NATION

Utilities balk at mercury rollback

BY J ULIET E ILPERIN AND B RADY D ENNIS

F

or more than three years, the Trump administration has prided itself on working with industry to unshackle companies from burdensome environmental regulations.

But as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to finalize the latest in a long line of rollbacks, the nation’s power sector has sent a different message: Thanks, but no thanks.

Exelon, one of the nation’s largest utilities, told the EPA that its effort to change a rule that has cut emissions of mercury and other toxins is “an action that is entirely unnecessary, unreasonable, and universally opposed by the power generation sector.”

Kathy Robertson, a senior manager for environmental policy at the company, said the industry long ago complied with the rule.

“And it works,” she said. “The sector has gotten so much cleaner as a result of this rule.”

Despite a chorus of opposition from unions, business groups and electric utilities, the EPA is on the verge of finalizing its proposal as part of a broader effort to overhaul how the government calculates the health benefits of cleaner air. Coal executives have lobbied for it, arguing it represented one of the worst excesses of what President Trump calls “the war on coal.”

The agency plans to declare that it is not “appropriate and necessary” for the government to limit harmful pollutants from power plants, even though every utility in America has complied with standards put in place in 2011 under President Barack Obama. While it will technically keep existing restrictions on mercury in place, it means the government would not be able to count collateral benefits — such as reducing soot and smog — when it sets limits on toxic air pollutants.

It is a rollback that industry officials say could open the door to new legal fights, prompt some plants to turn off their pollution controls and ultimately sicken

Stacy Kranitz For The Washington Post

Power sector says there is no need for change as EPA plans to remove Obama-era regulation more Americans — all so that the administration can rewire how the government weighs the costs of regulation.

The changes could give a boost to struggling coal companies, while hamstringing future efforts to limit mercury emissions from the nation’s power plants.

The rule in question, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), targets a powerful neurotoxin that can affect the IQ and motor skills of children. Between 2006, when states began to curb mercury from coal plants, and 2016, when the Obama-era rule took full effect, emissions have declined 85 percent.

The Obama administration initially projected that the industry would spend between $7.4 billion and $9.6 billion each year to comply with the regulation, while society as a whole would save between $37 billion to $90 billion from the prevention of thousands of premature deaths and lost work days.

Those estimates included not just lower mercury emissions but col-

lateral benefits from reductions in soot and other smog-forming pollutants that contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems.

The power industry ultimately paid far less to comply. It spent about $18 billion between 2012 and 2018, or $3 billion annually.

The Trump administration has said that it is inappropriate to count such “co-benefits” when considering the economic impact of regulation, saying Obama used creative math to justify burdensome new requirements.

“When you do a cost-benefit analysis, you should address the pollutant that’s the subject of the regulation,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a recent interview.

The 2011 requirements did more to hasten the closure of coal-fired power plants than any other regulation adopted under Obama. Facing the first-ever limits on these pollutants, companies across the country chose to switch to natural gas or renewable energy rather than invest in

The John E. Amos coal-fired power plant in Winfield, W. Va., was retrofitted to comply with a rule on mercury enacted under President Barack Obama.

costly new pollution controls.

Less than a decade ago, utilities were fighting the rule in court, along with coal producers and Republican attorneys general.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the EPA had failed to adequately justify the economic impact of the standards. The next year, the Obama administration published an analysis saying the combined benefits of curbing mercury and other pollutants, like soot, outweighed the costs even when taking industry expenditures into account.

The revamped rule is stuck at the White House, according to two senior administration officials, where staffers continue to deliberate which cost estimates to use.

Administration officials insist their mercury rollback is merely a response to the Supreme Court ruling — not an effort to once again allow emissions of a harmful set of toxins.

But the electric industry is skeptical.

American Electric Power, for instance, has spent more than $1 billion to comply with the standards since 2011, along with other rules limiting sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. It shut down nearly 7,300 megawatts of coalfired generation at 11 different plant sites in 2015 and 2016 alone.

The company and its competitors, represented by the Edison Electric Institute, have urged the administration to preserve a rule they once opposed. Utility executives warn that if the EPA says the rule was unjustified, the decision could allow outside groups to sue over passing on the cost of pollution upgrades to customers.

What’s more, many experts expect a coal company or conservative group to quickly petition a federal judge to scrap the rule on the grounds that it was never warranted in the first place.

“We’ve already made these investments,” Scott Weaver, American Electric Power’s director of air quality, said in an interview.

“We’re happy to comply with this rule. Let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak.” n

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A tale of two infected cruise ships B Y L ENA H . S UN, L ENNY B ERNSTEIN, S HIBANI M AHTANI AND J OEL A CHENBACH

I

n the wee hours of a rainy Monday, more than a dozen buses sat on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Inside, 328 weary Americans wearing surgical masks and gloves waited anxiously to fly home after weeks in quarantine aboard the Diamond Princess, the luxury liner where the novel coronavirus had exploded into a ship-wide epidemic.

But as the buses idled, U.S. officials wrestled with troubling news. New test results showed that 14 passengers were infected with the virus. The U.S. State Department had promised that no one with the infection would be allowed to board the planes.

A decision had to be made. Let them all fly? Or leave them behind in Japanese hospitals?

In Washington, where it was still Sunday afternoon, a fierce debate broke out: The State Department and a top Trump administration health official wanted to forge ahead. The infected passengers had no symptoms and could be segregated on the plane in a plastic-lined enclosure. But officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagreed, contending they could still spread the virus.

“It was like the worst nightmare,” said a senior U.S. official involved in the decision, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

“Quite frankly, the alternative could have been pulling grandma out in the pouring rain, and that would have been bad, too.”

The State Department won the argument. But unhappy CDC officials demanded to be left out of the news release that explained that infected people were being flown back to the United States — a move that would nearly double the number of known coronavirus cases in this country.

The tarmac decision was a pivotal moment for U.S. officials improvising their response to a

Spencer Fehrenbacher

Officials are trying to navigate a medical crisis with few precedents and extremely high stakes crisis with few precedents and extraordinarily high stakes. Efforts to prevent the new pathogen from spreading have revealed the limits of the world’s readiness for an unprecedented public health emergency. In the worst-case scenario, covid-19, a flulike respiratory infection, could become a full-blown global pandemic.

Navigating the crisis has required delicate medical and political judgments. The decision to evacuate the Americans from the Diamond Princess came only after infections on the cruise ship spiked and passengers revealed their grim living conditions.

One lesson from that debacle is that cruise ships are like Petri dishes. Thousands live in close quarters on a vessel never designed as a medical quarantine facility. The crew continued to deliver food, and health workers moved throughout the ship.

More than 600 of the 3,700 passengers and crew members have now tested positive for the virus and two older Japanese

passengers have died.

The coronavirus (officially, SARS-CoV-2) is extremely contagious. Experts estimate that without protective measures, every infected person will spread it to an average of slightly more than two additional people. The disease, covid-19, has been fatal in roughly two out of 100 confirmed cases.

Travelers have already spread it to more than two dozen countries, where it has infected more than 75,000 people and killed more than 2,000.

With Japanese authorities quarantining the passengers for weeks off the coast, the ship quickly developed the secondlargest number of coronavirus cases on the planet outside of China — more than in Japan, Singapore, Thailand, the United States or all of Europe. Avoiding “another China” has been the goal of the World Health Organization for weeks, and then it happened anyway, in Yokohama harbor.

The treatment of the Diamond

Spencer Fehrenbacher, 29, takes a photo on a State Departmentchartered airplane about to depart from Japan on Monday. He and hundreds of other American passengers were quarantined for weeks aboard the Diamond Princess, a luxury liner, after a passenger tested positive for the coronavirus.

Princess passengers stands in stark contrast to what happened to those on another cruise ship, the Westerdam, who were greeted by the Cambodian prime minister with handshakes and flowers, and who later traveled widely.

Only later did news come that one of the Westerdam passengers had tested positive for the virus.

That situation spurred fears that Westerdam passengers would spread the virus around the world. But no additional passengers have tested positive, and so far, no evidence has emerged they have widely seeded the virus.

Now, health experts say, there is little to do but wait and see whether the Westerdam passengers spread the virus around the world. Some are skeptical they will see that, suggesting the single positive test result may have been erroneous.

“You would assume if one person got infected on any cruise, you would have a mini-outbreak,” said one U.S. official involved in the response. “Maybe she wasn’t positive.”

Based on what is known so far, Cambodia’s approach is preferable to quarantining people aboard a ship where the virus is spreading, said Saskia V. Popescu, senior infection prevention epidemiologist for HonorHealth, a hospital system in Phoenix.

But that requires educating passengers about reporting symptoms and self-isolating if necessary, and having public health authorities in home countries closely monitor those who have returned. It includes quickly tracing the contacts of anyone who develops the infection.

“I think we can say if you’re going to quarantine people, doing it on a cruise ship is not the best place,” Popescu said.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Phay Siphan, the Cambodian government spokesman, expressed no regrets on the handling of the Westerdam and its passengers.

“The ship was abandoned by the Earth,” he said. “We understood their predicament, and we knew we had to help them.” n

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History

At Iwo Jima, a warrior is forged In a hellish WWII fight, a farm boy with a blazing weapon earned the Medal of Honor

Hershel Williams, 96, is in his home in Ona, W.Va. In 1945, he was in the fight of his life 8,000 miles away on the volcanic island Iwo Jima.

M ICHAEL E . R UANE in Ona, W.Va.

rock and mechanical and human wreckage.

At night the scene was illuminated by star shells.

War correspondent Robert Sherrod said he had never seen so many dismembered soldiers.

“Nowhere in the Pacific war have I seen such mangled bodies,” he wrote in LIFE magazine. “Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay 50 feet away from any body.”

In one case a Marine’s severed foot was recovered still in its boot. The serial number on the boot was noted and the foot was buried in a formal grave, according to author Richard F. Newcomb’s classic account of the battle. Later, the owner of the foot was found alive in a hospital in Saipan.

BY

T

he Japanese soldiers came out of their concrete “pill box” with bayonets fixed, determined to get the Marine who had been killing them all afternoon with a flamethrower.

Their target was Hershel Williams. He was 5-foot-6, the youngest of the 11 children of a dairy farmer from Quiet Dell, W.Va. He had a nice smile, and a girl back home named Ruby whom he planned to marry when the war was over.

He was 21, and known as “Woody.”

But 75 years ago this month, on a volcanic island in the Pacific called Iwo Jima, he was a terrifying destroyer of the Japanese, incinerating men in their hideouts with jets of blazing diesel fuel and high octane gasoline.

They had to stop him.

But he saw them coming, and pulled the two triggers on his fearsome weapon.

He still remembers how they slowed down and fell, their clothes ablaze.

He had no remorse at the time.

The Japanese were killing Marines. They would soon kill his best friend. The battle, the war, had to be won. “I had no qualms,” he said.

He moved on to the next enemy fortification. By the end of the day he had destroyed seven pill boxes, acts for which, months later, he was given the Medal of Honor for valor.

The anniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima was Wednesday. The battle is probably best remembered for the Feb. 23 flag raising atop Mount Suribachi, immortalized in a news photograph and a famous statue in Arlington, Va. But for those like him who fought there — and a few are still alive — remembering Iwo can be frightful.

After the war he had nightmares in which he was not shooting fire, but fighting it. “I put out a lot of fires,” he said.

Photos by Rich-Joseph Facun For The Washington Post

Once, while dreaming, he terrified his wife when he jumped up, pushed their bed out of the way and began pounding on the wall at an imaginary wave of fire.

“I’m fighting this wall of fire,” he said. “Trying to put [it] out.”

The battle of Iwo Jima came as World War II had turned decisively against the Japanese, who had suffered several major defeats, and whose homeland was being pounded by U.S. bombers.

Fought for 36 days over an apocalyptic landscape of blasted volcanic sand and rubble, the combatants used swords, pistols, rocks, rifle butts, and bamboo lances as the Marines tried to dislodge Japanese soldiers from warrens of bunkers and caves.

A massive U.S. bombardment from land, sea and air had done little to roust the enemy, so that much of the fighting was done at close quarters. Some was at arms length.

One Japanese soldier attacked a Marine with a Samurai sword, slicing his arm from his hand to his elbow.

At one point, a Marine said, he

was so close to the enemy that he couldn’t lower his rifle to aim.

A Japanese soldier clutching an explosive charge ran up against a U.S. tank and blew himself up.

Hand grenades were thrown back and forth like baseballs before they blew up. One Marine threw back seven.

Pfc. Jacklyn Lucas, 17, of Plymouth, N.C., was surprised when he suddenly saw two enemy grenades at his feet. He forced them into the sand with his rifle butt and his hands, and covered them with his body. He didn’t even have the chance to shut his eyes, he wrote later.

Only one grenade went off. It blew him sky high. But he lived to be 80 and was also given the Medal of Honor.

The battle went on long after the flag was raised on Suribachi.

It devoured Marines and Japanese soldiers alike. They fought over places on the island called the “Meat Grinder,” “Death Valley,” and “Bloody Gorge.” The terrain was littered with smashed banyan trees, blasted

Into the inferno For the Marine Corps, Iwo Jima was one of its most epic battles.

It was front-page news across the country. A Marine general likened it to the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, and said it assured that there would be a Marine Corps forever. (The famous flag raising photograph, by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, reinsured it.)

The battle saw one of the largest Marine Corps forces ever fielded — 70,000 men — and the largest casualty toll in its history.

Roughly 6,800 Marines, sailors, and one Coast Guardsman were killed, according to “Investigating Iwo,” a Marine Corps study published last year.

For the Japanese, Iwo Jima was home territory, about 700 miles from Japan and part of the prefecture of Tokyo. No foreigner had ever set foot on it, Newcomb wrote.

It had two airfields, which is why the Americans wanted it, and why the Japanese were determined to hold it, or exact a deadly price on the Marines trying to take it.

Each Japanese soldier was instructed to kill 10 Americans.

Back in Japan, people sang the rousing “Song of Iwo Defense,”

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History and it was broadcast to the island’s defenders. But the Japanese general in command, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, wrote to his wife: “No one here expects to return alive.”

Of the roughly 20,000 Japanese defenders, only 1,083 survived, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Two of those survivors remained in hiding until 1949.

Iwo Jima was an old volcano, shaped like a pork chop, about five miles long and 2½ miles wide. Viewed from the air on the first day, United Press war correspondent William F. Tyree said it looked like it was sizzling.

And into the inferno, on Feb. 21, 1945, “scared half to death,” stepped Hershel Williams.

Now 96, Williams sat on the edge of his easy chair in this rural community outside Charleston one day last month and told of his part in the battle. A dignified man, he wore glasses, a black leather vest, gray slacks and black “Medal of Honor” cowboy boots.

Of the 27 Marines and sailors who earned the medal at Iwo Jima, he said he is the last one still living.

In the kitchen, vials of Iwo Jima sand sat on a shelf, near an old photo of President Harry S. Truman giving him the medal. A duplicate medal hung from its powder blue ribbon on a coat stand in his bedroom. (The original is in the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.)

A picture of Jesus hangs on a wall, a symbol of the profound religious awakening 58 years ago in the Pea Ridge Methodist Church that Williams said ended his nightmares and transformed his life. He went on to have a career with Department of Veterans Affairs and established a successful horse farm.

He said as a Christian he now regrets having killed people.

“It’s one of those things that you put in the recess of your mind,” he said. “You were fulfilling an obligation that you swore to do, to defend your country.

Any time you take a life … there’s always some aftermath to that if you’ve got any heart at all.”

A mysterious weapon Williams weighed 3½ pounds at birth and was not expected to live. His mother, Lurenna, named him Hershel for the local

Thayer Soule Collection (COLL/2266) at the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division

Top: A pair of Marines aim their flamethrowers at defenses blocking the way to Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi in 1945.

Above: Williams, seen in 2020 and 1945, is the sole surviving recipient of the Medal of Honor at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

doctor who reached the farm three days later.

By the time he was born in 1923 several of his siblings had already died in the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. His father, Lloyd, died of a heart attack when he was 11.

As World War II neared, he said he was impressed by the snappy “dress blues” uniform of local men who were in the Marine Corps. The Army’s “old brown wool uniform … was the ugliest thing in town,” he said. “l decided, ‘I do not want to be in that thing. I want to be in those dress blues.”

Aside from that, he said, “I

knew nothing about the Marine Corps.”

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he tried to join, but the Marines said he was too short.

Later, the requirements were eased, he said, and he got in. He thought he would never have to leave the country, just defend it against invaders.

He wound up 8,000 miles from home on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

There, in early 1944, he and some other Marines received crates of flamethrowers, which they had to figure out how to operate. The weapon was mysterious. It had two tanks to hold the flammable liquid to be fired, and a third tank of compressed air to push the liquid out.

The nozzle contained a barrel with phosphorous matches that ignited the liquid as it spurted out. He said the Marines experimented with what type of flammable liquid to use and settled on a mix of diesel fuel and high-octane aviation gas. The weapon weighed 70 pounds and the tanks were virtually bullet proof, he said.

There was no guidance on how the weapon was to be used. “We had to learn that ourselves,” he said.

Coming ashore on Iwo Jima a

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year later, Williams said, he supervised six other flame thrower/ demolition men in his “special weapons unit,” he said. But as the hours of fighting passed they vanished one by one. Dead or wounded, he didn’t know.

About midday on Feb. 23, he and his comrades had been stopped cold by a cluster of impenetrable Japanese fortifications called “pill boxes.” Enemy gunners fired from small slits in the concrete walls and were almost impossible to hit as they mowed down Marines.

Williams said his company commander, Capt. Donald Beck, held a meeting in a shell hole to figure out what to do. He asked Williams if he thought he might make progress with his flamethrower.

Williams said he would try.

He was assigned several Marines to cover him, and a “pole charge man,” armed with a long piece of wood that had an explosive taped to the end. His job was to stick the charge into the fortification and set it off after Williams had fired, “to make sure that everybody in there is dead,” he said.

But the pole charge man was struck in the helmet by a bullet and knocked silly. The covering Marines were killed. And Williams was on his own. He doesn’t remember a lot of what happened, but a few scenes have stayed with him.

He remembers crawling toward one pill box where he could see the barrel of a Japanese machine gun protruding from a slit. Bullets ricocheted off his flamethrower tanks. He got within 20 to 25 yards and “rolled a big ball of flame” at the enemy gunner, silencing him.

He recalls crawling toward another pill box when he noticed a wisp of smoke escaping from a ventilation hole in the top. He crept up, stuck the nozzle of the flame thrower into the vent and fired. “Got ‘em all,” he said.

He remembers killing the Japanese soldiers who tried to get him with bayonets.

He does not remember that over the course of four hours one afternoon on Iwo Jima he went back to his lines five times for fresh weapons, and five times returned to the battle.

But that’s what he did. n

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Mexico’s child vigilantes The indigenous people of Ayahualtempa formed a militia to defend themselves from a gang.

The government was fine with it — until they started arming children.

by Kevin Sieff in Ayahualtempa, Mexico

photos by Luis Antonio Rojas For The Washington Post

A boy in Ayahualtempa’s self-defense force plays with a yo-yo among others with rifles — some toy, some real. Those over 12 have working firearms as a drug cartel threatens from a neighboring town.

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cover story

B

efore he picked up a rifle and joined a squad of armed children, Alex wanted to become a schoolteacher. He would teach anything — “whatever the principal asks” — because spending his days in a classroom sounded pretty good.

He was 13, a B student with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bicycle who got nervous around the girls in his middle school.

Then, in November, as violence surged in the mountains of Guerrero state, the men of Ayahualtempa decided it was time for their sons to take up arms.

Alex was handed a hunting rifle and told to show up for daily training on the village basketball court. He and his young comrades, some as young as 6, marched and crawled with loaded guns almost as tall as they were. Their uniforms said “Community Police” in yellow letters.

When the photographers started coming, the boys were told to cover their faces with handkerchiefs. Arming children to defend the town against a violent gang was not a media stunt, Alex’s commanders insisted. Yet if the images drew the government’s attention to a place Mexico’s security forces had forgotten, it would be a triumph of its own.

But were the boys training to defend their village, or were they being paraded in front of visiting photographers to send a message to the government, a plea for more resources?

Sometimes even Alex wasn’t sure. What he knew was that the gun was heavy and loaded, and the training felt real enough to him.

Alex’s father, Santos Martínez, looked at his son’s face, trying to gauge whether Alex was mature enough to join the force.

“There was no fear in his eyes,” Martínez said. “That’s how I knew he was ready.”

Alex repeated the words of his commander: “I’m preparing to defend my village.”

Bernardino Sánchez Luna, the 48-year-old founder of the autodefensa CRAC-PF, watches his daughter sleep in their home in Ayahualtempa.

Mexico suffered 35,588 homicides in 2019, a record. It was another data point in a trend borne out across Ayahualtempa and thousands of towns like it: Every year, no matter who is in power, this country becomes more violent.

But violence takes dramatically different forms across Mexico, a nation splintered by turf wars. In the northwestern capital of Culiacán, the Sinaloa cartel battles the country’s security forces with military-grade weapons. In Ayahualtempa, a village of 600 indigenous people, the community police carry aging hunting rifles in their own war against a powerful drug cartel called Los Ardillos, which controls the neighboring town.

For years, Ayahualtempa had maintained its own defense force, dozens of armed men who patrolled the village and manned checkpoints and held overwatch positions on the roofs of unfinished homes. Autodefensas, or self-defense forces, are legal in Guerrero state and recognized by the federal government.

But over the past year, the local autodefensa, known as the ­CRAC-PF, has been overwhelmed. Twenty-six people have been killed since the start of 2019 in the force’s territory, which includes Ayahualtempa and 15 other towns. Last month, 10 musicians from those towns traveling to a concert were shot and burned beyond recognition. One of them was 15 years old.

Alex’s middle school was in what was considered to be enemy territory. He stopped attending.

Bernardino Sánchez Luna, the 48-year-old founder of CRACPF, said its leaders spoke among themselves and decided to allow the boys into the force. In recent months, the group of armed children grew more formal. Now there are 17 boys in matching T-shirts. Those under 12 get handmade toy guns.

Those over 12 get working rifles.

“If the government can’t protect them, they need to be trained to defend themselves,” Sánchez Luna said.

Alex had seen the pictures of himself, rifle in hand, published in newspapers across Mexico. It was a strange kind of fame. He

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Cover Story

had never left the state of Guerrero, and now his face was on newsstands in the capital. His commander insisted it was part of the strategy.

He noticed that CRAC-PF’s leaders began welcoming local journalists, who took photos of the boys during their training sessions. He heard Sánchez Luna talk about how the media could be used as a tool to convey the village’s problems — its demands for the state and federal governments. The village had been ignored for decades, but it would be hard to ignore a force of armed children.

By the time a Washington Post correspondent arrived in Ayahualtempa this month, Alex’s suspicion had sharpened.

“These journalists like you come, but I don’t know where they’re from,” he said. “How can I trust them?”

He was sitting on the curb outside his family’s small convenience store, where he staffs the register now that he is no longer in school. He kept his uniform and rifle behind a stack of plastic Pepsi bottles. Training starts at 5 p.m.

Sánchez Luna insisted the boys were not being used as a tool

Above: Santos Martínez has breakfast with his wife, Justina.

Top: Their son, Alex, has been in training to defend the village.

He stopped attending middle school because of the danger from a drug cartel. He now works at the family store.

KLMNO Weekly

to attract the attention of the media or the government. But he did admit that when journalists were in town, he held training sessions earlier, because photographers and videographers had complained that the nighttime drills were too dark to record. He also called the media “an important weapon for us.”

After a flurry of stories in Mexican news outlets, CRAC-PF printed out a list of 29 demands for Mexico’s president. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had taken an interest in Ayahualtempa after seeing images of the armed children in the media.

“Giving children weapons and taking videos is an act of cruelty,” he said earlier this month.

But despite López Obrador’s comments and a condemnation from UNICEF, the children remain armed, and the government has not tried to intervene. The Guerrero state governor agreed to send a routine police patrol through the area. But that meant little to the people of Ayahualtempa, including Alex, who now watched, rifle in hand, as the heavily armed officers drove by.

“We can’t trust them, either,” he said.

One morning, Alex and his father left their house for the village’s main checkpoint, a chain barrier that marked the division between Ayahualtempa and Hueycantenango, which they considered enemy territory.

They walked shoulder to shoulder, each holding a rifle.

“Man the bunker,” Martínez said.

Alex moved behind a barrier of tires and concrete, his right hand near the gun’s trigger. He wore a pair of broken sandals, his feet sometimes slipping out as he walked.

It was a moment that blurred the mission of the armed children. The force’s leaders said Alex and the other boys were merely “in training,” but here he was providing close protection for his father. Or was this, too, an elaborate attempt to attract news coverage that might draw the government’s attention to a place it had mostly abandoned? It was hard to tell.

“I don’t know how they can get the government’s attention aside by doing these sorts of things — or by dying, and even that will only get the authorities’ attention for a few days,” said Chris Kyle, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who focuses on Guerrero.

In Mexico, stories emerge of self-defense groups recruiting children every few years. Accounts of drug cartels enlisting kids are even more common. But rarely has any group been this open about its effort. Another Guerrero autodefensa leader, Gonzalo Molina González, likened the children to Mexico’s Niños Héroes, the teenage folk heroes who died trying to repel the American invasion of Mexico City in 1847.

At the checkpoint, Martínez refused to lower the chain for a truck driver. “They could work for Los Ardillos,” he muttered under his breath.

Alex stood behind the bunker, watching as his former teachers walked to his old primary school. He didn’t wave. His middle school, Escuela Secundaria Tecnologica Cuauhtémoc 121, was only 200 yards away, but on the other side of the chain.

A few months ago, he had watched as a CRAC-PF member carrying firewood was shot and killed a few feet from the school.

Not long after, the family decided it was too dangerous for him to continue going to class. They worried that anyone from Ayahualtempa could be targeted.

Alex’s older sister, Erica, refused to stop going to school. She ran away to an aunt’s house.

Their mother is torn.

“I want my children to attend school, but not if that means their lives are at risk,” Justina said. “Every day I worry about my daughter.”

Alex returned home from the bunker and set his rifle down on the floor. There was another training session that evening. More journalists had arrived. Alex repeated that he was training to defend his village, to prepare for a possible incursion. He could feel himself getting stronger and more capable.

That’s what he was told, and that’s what he believed. n

12 sunday, february 23, 2020

SUNDAY, Month, Day, Year 7

Politics

KLMNO Weekly

Who shined in the Nevada debate?

BY

A ARON B LAKE

shouldn’t be billionaires. “I can’t think of a way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation,” Bloomberg said, before comparing Sanders’s position to “communism.” That may have gone too far, but it’s the contrast he wants to draw.

Bloomberg has run millions of dollars’ worth of ads largely uncontested in states where the other candidates aren’t yet focused.

So Wednesday was a baptism by fire. It is tough to argue he did not get burned.

T

he Democratic presidential candidates took part in a debate in Nevada on Wednesday, just days before the Democratic caucuses there.

Below, some winners and losers.

Winners Bernie Sanders: You wouldn’t have thought from watching the debate that Sanders was the one threatening to open up a potentially insurmountable delegate lead in the weeks ahead. Instead, the candidates mostly focused on Mike Bloomberg and arguably landed tougher attacks on one another than on Sanders.

Sanders did have to defend himself on some sticky subjects, from his refusal to disclose more about his health to a powerful Nevada union’s criticism of his Medicare-for-all plan. But there wasn’t much to suggest his momentum would change. He’s the favorite in Nevada, and thanks to the other infighting we saw Wednesday night, that seems likely to continue.

Elizabeth Warren’s takedowns of Bloomberg: After clash-

ing with Sanders in the last debate, Warren did him a massive favor by taking a chain saw to Bloomberg. She jumped in early, throwing out some derogatory quotes about women — “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians” — and then pointing out they were not said by President Trump but instead reportedly by Bloomberg. Later, she attacked Bloomberg’s apology for his stopand-frisk policy, which disproportionately targeted minorities.

“This isn’t about how it turned out; this is about what it was designed to do to begin with,” Warren said. And then she went after him for not sufficiently addressing the treatment of women at his companies. “And I hope you heard what his defense was: ‘I’ve been nice to some women,’ ” Warren said, before pressing him to release women from nondisclo-

John Locher/Associated Press

Sanders stays steady, Warren goes on the attack, and Bloomberg fails to impress in first showing sure agreements. Others piled on, and Bloomberg didn’t have much of an answer for any of it.

Warren reserved some attacks for another of Sanders’s leading opponents, Pete Buttigieg. The camera was not on Sanders during these exchanges, but he must have been smiling at what his formerand-apparently-current-again ally was doing for him.

The moderators: At the start, “NBC Nightly News” host Lester Holt encouraged the candidates “to directly engage with each other on the issues.” The candidates heeded that. The result was the most substantive debate with by far the most contrasts to date. And that’s what debates should be about: competing visions and arguments.

Losers Bloomberg: The mayor doesn’t have much experience debating.

His last one was back in 2009 — a one-on-one matchup in a race

where he was a heavy favorite.

This one was a different animal, and it got ugly in a hurry for Bloomberg. He was the big target from the get-go. He came off as very technocratic, and he often did not jump in to defend himself, apparently hoping the bad moments would pass. But they persisted.

Maybe the most brutal attacks were on stop-and-frisk.

Bloomberg said he had simply been wrong about the policy but that he eventually came around.

That skirted the fact that he defended it well into this decade, and that it stopped not because of his personal evolution, but because of a court order. At one point, Bloomberg even seemed to be tempted to defend the motivation for stop-and-frisk, before thinking better of it. “The bottom line is that we stopped too many people,” Bloomberg said. “But the policy — we stopped too many people.”

A rare punch that seemed to land for Bloomberg was when he took on Sanders for saying there

Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, left, listens as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) speaks during the Democratic primary debate Wednesday in Las Vegas. Warren went after Bloomberg for his treament of women and his stopand-frisk policy, which disproportionately targeted minorities.

Joe Biden: If there was a bystander on the debate stage Tuesday night, it was Biden. There was nothing there to suggest he might rescue his struggling campaign.

That said, he still seems well-positioned in the South Carolina primary. He had better hope so.

Amy Klobuchar: She has regularly been named a winner in these debates, but she seemed desperate and less prepared at times Wednesday. She had a particularly rough exchange on how she had not been able to tell a reporter the name of Mexico’s president. Then she tried to recite other trivia about foreign leaders but stumbled, appeared to check her notes, and mustered only a last name for another Latin American president. “Who is the president of Honduras?” she said, glancing down. “Hernandez.” It was just one moment, but it wasn’t good.

She also repeatedly got caught in personal back-and-forths with Buttigieg, despite neither of them being in a great position in national polls.

Sanders’s claim about his supporters: An early line of attack on

Sanders was the nastiness of his supporters, especially online.

“Why is it especially the case among your supporters?” Pete Buttigieg asked Sanders, who said he did not think it was the case.

Sanders backers may not have a monopoly on such tactics, but it is certainly more of an issue with them. Denying that it’s unusual skirts the issue. n

13 sunday, february 23, 2020

SUNDAY, Month, Day, Year 20

KLMNO Weekly

Opinions

The Astros scandal has somehow gotten worse John Feinstein is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

Given the severity of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal, it would be almost impossible for the cover-up to do any more damage to the game of baseball. But the Astros and Commissioner Rob Manfred are giving it their best shot. ¶ As a group, the Astros have been unrepentant and sorry only that they got caught, if that. Oh sure, owner Jim Crane fired general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, but that now appears to be a move made to deflect any blame away from him.

Curtis Compton/Atlanta journal-Constitution/Associated press

In the Astros’ embarrassing news conference on the first day of spring training, Crane insisted he bore no responsibility for the scandal and at one point actually said, “Our opinion is that it didn’t affect the outcome of the game.”

Fifty-five seconds later, he said he did not say those words.

Then, asked directly whether he thought stealing signs and knowing what pitches were coming made a difference in results, Crane said, “It could possibly do that; it could possibly not.”

Of course, Crane never uttered the word “cheating”; none of the Astros used that word. It’s as if they think that if they don’t say it, the world will somehow decide it didn’t happen.

As shameful as the Astros’ behavior has been, Manfred’s has been worse. He is supposed to be the leader when a crisis hits his sport; that’s why he’s paid a reported $11 million per year.

Right from the beginning, MLB has botched this investigation, from the blanket immunity it gave players to Manfred’s refusal to so much as make a symbolic gesture by taking the 2017 World Series title and trophy away from the Astros.

Some will argue that stripping the Astros of their title does little.

But that’s wrong. Taking away the trophy means the team can’t

display it in perpetuity and forces it to remove banners that proclaim them “World Champions.” Remove the Astros’ name from the record book, leaving a blank for the 2017 World Series winner, as there is for 1994, when the World Series was called off after the owners forced the players to strike by violating the rules of collective bargaining.

That’s not nothing. The NCAA, which does little right, has vacated Final Four appearances and, most recently, Louisville’s 2013 national title. The banner that hung at Yum Center had to be taken down, and Louisville fans are angry about all of it.

Good. Astros fans should be angry, too — at their team.

Manfred claims he thought about taking away the championship then decided it wouldn’t really have any meaning, that it was enough for the public to know what happened. Now there’s a guy you would want as the judge when you’re accused of a crime: “Yes, your honor, I did it, but the public knowing about it is enough punishment.”

Seriously?

Manfred’s biggest mistake was not punishing any players. The offer of immunity should have been to a limited number of witnesses. Start with players and then managers no longer with the

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred answers questions about the Houston Astros and the cheating scandal during a news conference at the Atlanta Braves’ spring-training facility this past Sunday.

Astros (Alex Cora, Carlos Beltrán). Then, after discovering who the instigators were, tell them: “We gotcha. You better talk if you ever want to play/work in baseball again.”

Instead, Manfred and his band of not-so-merry men took the easy way out: They gave everyone immunity and then took bows for exposing the plot. Except they didn’t expose the plot; former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers did. He had the guts to go on the record to the Athletic, giving MLB enough that it was almost impossible not to get something done.

But perhaps the most ludicrous thing Manfred did during his mini-media tour this past Sunday was claim that one of the reasons for his decision not to punish any players was fear of the players’ union.

Baseball’s players’ union is the most powerful in sports and has, in the past, whipped the commissioner and the owners repeatedly during work stoppages. This, however, is different. This isn’t about money.

It is difficult to believe that players on the other 29 teams would be eager to raise a ruckus about players on a team that cheated its way to a World Series championship being punished.

And if union leader Tony Clark did protest because he was obligated to, chances are the suspensions might be reduced but wouldn’t be overturned.

As it is, four men have been penalized for the scandal: Luhnow and Hinch along with Cora and Beltrán, who were forced to resign from managerial jobs with the Boston Red Sox and New York Mets. That’s it.

Meanwhile, most Astros are sitting in their posh spring training clubhouse in West Palm Beach, Fla., smirking at everyone, most notably the gutless commissioner.

The latest line coming from the baseball apologists is “It’s time to put this behind us.”

That’s not going to happen anytime soon. Almost no one has been punished (the Astros’ $5 million fine and loss of draft picks is almost meaningless), the Astros won’t even say the word “cheat,” and the commissioner wants to be done with it.

What the Astros did is a disgrace that will stain baseball for years. The actions of the team, the players and the hapless commissioner have only made it worse.

That didn’t seem possible when this began. And yet . . . n

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SUNDAY, Month,23, Day,2020 Year sunday, february

KLMNO Weekly

books

Teamwork to make America work N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

W ALTER I SAACSON

W

Franklin & Washington The Founding Partnership

By Edward J. Larson Morrow. 335 pp. $29.99

George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are “the two indispensable authors of American independence,” says historian Edward J. Larson.

hen George Washington arrived in Philadelphia in 1787 to attend the Constitutional Convention, his first ceremonial visit was to the newly expanded home of Benjamin Franklin. In his joint biography of the men he calls “the two most celebrated heroes” and “the two indispensable authors of American independence,” historian Edward J. Larson speculates that Washington walked rather than rode in his carriage from the house where he was staying, because riding would have entailed bringing his enslaved coachman and groom into the courtyard of the man who had months earlier become president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

As America’s founding shows, leadership requires collaboration. Franklin and Washington were the two founders best at forging teams. Franklin wrote an autobiography around the theme of how to win friends and influence people, and Washington won a revolution by doing so.

In “Franklin & Washington,” Larson’s approach is to create not a buddy narrative but instead a leadership study showing how two different personalities can forge a partnership. “To explore their historic collaboration, this book traces their shared history in a dual biography that looks for overlaps and stresses connections,” he writes.

One problem that Larson faces is that Franklin and the 25-yearsyounger Washington had a lot of mutual respect, but they rarely spent time together. Although they used words like “respect” and “esteem” and even “veneration” when they signed their letters to each other, the contents were usually businesslike rather than intimate or personal. So try as he may, Larson has produced a book that is not as much a tale of teamwork and friendship but instead two well-written and in-

Getty Images/iStock

teresting biographical narratives that occasionally intertwine.

There were three great projects that Franklin and Washington worked on together, or at least in parallel. The first was in forging a unified army out of a ragtag collection of state militias.

The Continental Congress sent Franklin in 1775 to Cambridge, Mass., where he stayed with Washington and “produced the framework for a new Continental Army.” They had one area of disagreement: Washington insisted that his army not include any enslaved people or free blacks.

Their second great dual endeavor was one they worked on from afar, with little coordination. As envoy in France, Franklin wrote letters of recommendation for European officers seeking commissions, secured loans and other military funding, and enlisted the French navy and army in helping the colonial cause. After a while, Washington felt inundated and annoyed by all the letters of recommendation, but they did produce for him Count Pulaski, Baron von Steuben and the Marquis de Lafayette.

Their third endeavor together was serving as the two lions at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. There the main traits that they shared proved invaluable.

Both believed that the fledgling nation needed to become a strong national union rather than a mere confederation of states. They were also brave enough to believe in compromise. “The business of the Convention should be conducted with moderation, candor & fairness,” Washington said, and Franklin capped the contribution with a speech in favor of the compromises made.

Great leadership teams generally are not composed of people with matching personalities. Instead, they are forged by people who bring different strengths and traits to the table.

Washington was aloof and revered. He embodied the noble virtues of duty, courage, honor, fidelity and discipline. And while he was the beneficiary of inherited and married wealth, Franklin was a self-made tradesman who proudly portrayed himself as a “middling” man of humble origin. His virtues were not the noble ones but the practical ones

he listed in his autobiography, such as industry, frugality, humility and moderation.

Their greatest difference was on slavery, and Larson confronts that issue with unflinching directness. As a young man, Franklin owned two or three household slaves, and he had allowed the advertising of slave sales in his newspaper. But as he reached middle age he saw his error, let his slaves wander off, became a supporter of black education, wrote essays decrying the effect of slavery on society and eventually became president of Pennsylvania’s abolition society.

Washington not only retained 300 enslaved people, he was known for his harshness. He clothed and housed them poorly, had them whipped regularly, and pursued them vigorously when any tried to escape. He would eventually sign the nation’s first fugitive slave law.

Because of the slavery issue, Franklin’s relationship with Washington ended on a chilly note. When Franklin died, Jefferson proposed that administration members should wear black badges for a month. President Washington quashed the proposal.

“No one can know what might have happened had the two icons of the revolution, Franklin and Washington, stood together against slavery at the nation’s founding,” Larson writes. “As it happened, they split over the issue and with them the nation.”

Partly their differences were regional, the merchant and shopkeeping economy of Philadelphia vs. the plantation economy of Virginia. But they were also based, as Larson shows, on personality and values. n Isaacson, a professor at Tulane University, is the author of biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

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KLMNO Weekly

Five Myths

George Washington BY

A LEXIS C OE

During a 2019 visit to Mount Vernon, the historic home of George Washington, President Trump reportedly said: “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it. You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.” Such self-importance would have pained the first president, who didn’t need ostentatious preening to become the namesake of the nation’s capital, a state, a university and countless other things. Nobody has forgotten him. We have, however, misremembered him — and the myths about him are as illuminating as they are false.

Myth No. 1 Washington was a great military leader.

Henry Lee eulogized Washington as “first in war,” and today, he continues to be remembered for his martial feats.

“My inclinations are strongly bent to arms,” Washington himself wrote in 1754 — before quitting the army four years later.

But while Lee said “first,” we shouldn’t take it to mean “best.”

Decades after leaving the military, Washington showed up to the Continental Congress not in a gentleman’s suit but in uniform.

His comrades, getting the message, named him commander in chief of the Continental Army.

He never claimed to be a military genius, or even the best man for the job, but played catch-up as fast as he could, reading as many books as possible. In the end, he lost more battles than he won. To be fair, Washington was more than just a general: He was a spymaster, overseeing the Culper Ring out of Long Island, among others; he also understood the power of propaganda and sought out stories about British atrocities to publicize. In the end, though, his greatest military gift was sticking with it: The British kept changing generals, while Washington saw the war through.

Myth No. 2 Washington wore a wig.

With few exceptions, Washington appears in portraits with a neat white plait, and

viewers often assume that his coiffure was as false as his teeth.

In fact, Washington’s long, full hair was entirely natural. A wig, which he could have just plopped on his head in the morning and taken off at night, would have been much easier to maintain than his labor-intensive hairdo — not that he did it himself.

Washington had enslaved workers who tended to his personal needs, including the task of gathering, fluffing, curling and powdering his hair white. What was his natural hair color? Later in life, he went gray, but the portraits painted in his youth are quite clear: Washington was a redhead.

Myth No. 3 Washington emancipated his slaves in his will.

Washington is often depicted as a man who, over decades, had a change of heart when it came to slavery.

While he did reluctantly allow a small number of black soldiers to fight for his army, but it was the white men he met during the revolution who influenced his final act. The Marquis de Lafayette, for example, often wrote him letters proposing different ways he could free his slaves. As far as Washington’s will, one thing is clear: The only enslaved person freed outright was Billy Lee, his valet. The rest of the people he enslaved — 123 men, women and children — had to wait for his wife, Martha, to die

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

Dean Malissa portrays George Washington as he greets Harper Wright, 9, during a celebration of the first U.S. president’s birthday at Mount Vernon on Monday. Washington was born on Feb. 22, 1732.

or for her to set them free.

According to Abigail Adams, Martha was moved to do so a year later, because she feared they would try to kill her. When she died soon after, the slaves she owned in her own right, who had married her late husband’s and started their own families, were cruelly ripped apart; her grandchildren inherited them.

Myth No. 4 He felled his father’s cherry tree.

The tale of Washington’s arborcide is not only made up; we also know who conjured it. Mason Locke Weems, a broke itinerant parson and bookseller, concocted it for his 19th-century book “The Life of Washington.” It appears alongside many other apocryphal stories that Weems promised his publisher would “sell like flax seed.” They did. With each new edition, the story spread, transforming Washington from a man into the embodiment of the country. America, then an infant nation eager to establish its own morals and values, embraced it, and today it remains the only story most people know about Washington’s childhood.

Myth No. 5 Washington’s mother was illiterate and unloving.

Like her son, Mary Washington has often been rendered as a usefully one-dimensional caricature. In the early 19th century, the young nation made her a kind of saint: Andrew Jackson laid the cornerstone of a monument dedicated to her. After the Civil War, however, historians turned on Mary. Shelby Little, in 1929, claimed that she was “illiterate,” a description echoed

by Chernow, despite the fact that her letters and books survive. In “Washington: A Life,” he further accuses her of having “little that savored of maternal warmth” and calls her “crude.”

That’s strange, considering how devastated she was to miss a surprise visit by her son during the revolution — and that she said so in a letter to him. “I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure again,” she wrote, before signing, “Loveing & affectionat Mother.” n Coe is the author of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.” She hosts the podcasts “Presidents Are People Too!” and “No Man’s Land.”

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