Ken Burns

It's the Battle of Long Island.

George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder.

He leaves his left flank exposed and the British –

See it?

And they completely surround him.

And then a year later at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank exposed and they go around.

He's not the greatest tactician, but he is the man of the time.

This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence.

I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person, without whom we don't have a country.

We just literally don't have a country.

We have a historian.

The only time really in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall – we don't have first-person voices.

I mean we don't have witnesses.

We have hundreds of first-person voices.

But we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing and there's one, Christopher Brown, who just shakes his head and he goes like –

I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put it this way.

I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership.

And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that.

More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve.

He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said.