A Third Term

A Speculation for 2028

Cover illustration by Barry Blitt

Excerpted from Paul Greenberg’s new novella A Third Term

A few days before his first death, George Washington allowed himself one last mistake.

The new whiskey still at a far corner of his Potomac lands had broken down and he’d set out before dawn in snow and sleet to oversee its repair. The storm grew stronger the farther he ventured, but he paid it little mind. He shooed away a boy who, on Martha’s insistence, had come from the manor house bearing a heavier cloak.

As with all his previous mistakes, Washington later retraced the sequence of errors when their consequence was finally perceived. He should have waited for the storm to pass, he thought riding home that December day, his hair a frozen skull cap pasted to his brow. He should have changed from his wet field clothes immediately on return, but he had not wished to keep his luncheon guests delayed from their repast even if the boiled beef and peach preserves burned his throat as he washed them back with three tall glasses of claret.

Later, after the physicians had bled him a dozen times, there was little improvement to his inflamed throat and his clotted lungs. As he watched the doctors fumble with errors of their own, he realized that his ill-timed visit to the whiskey still had fatally cut short that retreat from public…