Word: franklin
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...house of his future wife Deborah Read and that "she, standing at the door, saw me and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous appearance." So here we have, in a brief paragraph, the multilayered character known so fondly to his author as Benjamin Franklin: as a young man, then seen through the eyes of his older self and then through the memories later recounted by his wife. It's all topped off with the old man's deft little affirmation--"as I certainly did"--in which his self-deprecation barely cloaks the pride he felt...
...Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington's colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that genial urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony...
When he went to Paris as an envoy during the Revolution, Franklin proved himself a master of the diplomatic doctrine of realism by playing an adroit balance-of-power game between France, Spain, the Netherlands and later Britain. In a memo he wrote to the wily French Foreign Minister Vergennes, whose realist outlook was summarized by his maxim that "the influence of every power is measured by the opinion one has of its intrinsic force," Franklin emphasized the cold calculation of national interests that he knew the minister would appreciate. If France and her ally Spain joined the American cause...
...Franklin realized that appealing to a calculus of power was only part of the equation. So even as he catered to France's calculation of her national interest, he also played the rousing chords of America's exceptionalism, the sense that America stands apart from the rest of the world because of its virtuous nature and ideals. Both the hard power that came from its strategic might and the soft power that flowed from the appeal of its liberty and democracy would, he realized, be equally important in assuring its influence...
...private press he built at his home near Paris, Franklin printed the inspiring documents coming out of America--the Declaration, the constitution he had written for Pennsylvania--as a way of winning hearts and minds in France and elsewhere. In a letter to Congress explaining his tactics, he gave a classic formulation of the lure of America's ideals: "Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind." He ended by echoing...