James Thomas Flexner, 95, a polymathic American historian whose subjects included doctors, painters, traitors and heroes, most notable among them George Washington, died Feb. 13 at his home in New York. The cause of death was not reported.
Of his more than 25 works, Mr. Flexner received the most acclaim for his prize-winning four-volume account of the first president, whom he demystified through depictions of human frailty without sacrificing his historical grandeur.
His Washington never chopped down a cherry tree but did carry on an intense flirtation with his best friend's wife. He also was given to exaggeration for purposes of military propaganda during the Revolutionary War and was a brilliant political strategist who knew how to get a recalcitrant Congress to act.
Mr. Flexner started writing the Washington series in the mid-1960s and, with its final installment, "Anguish and Farewell" (1972), won the National Book Award for biography and a special Pulitzer Prize citation. The first two volumes became a popular CBS miniseries in 1984.
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His later book about the first president, "Washington: The Indispensable Man" (1974), was nominated for the American Book Award.
"My continuing effort has been to disentangle the Washington who actually lived from all the symbolic Washingtons, to rescue the man and his deeds from the layers and layers of obscuring legend," he wrote. "I found a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spirit -- not a statue of marble and wood."
Mr. Flexner, a New York native, was born into vibrant intellectual and scientific circles about which he wrote many times. He first won acclaim for "Doctors on Horseback: Pioneers of American Medicine" (1937), which received wide distribution by the U.S. armed forces during World War II.
The book included a section about his father, Simon Flexner, a sixth-grade dropout of German Jewish stock who became a self-taught microbiologist and pathologist, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and discoverer of a cure for spinal meningitis.
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His mother was Helen Thomas, the well-educated feminist daughter of Maryland Quakers whose sister was president of Bryn Mawr College. She also was related, through various cousins' marriages, to eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson, the art critic, who triggered young Mr. Flexner's interest in art history.
Mr. Flexner chronicled his parents' relationship in "A Philadelphia Love Story: An American Saga" (1984), which received a rave review in The Washington Post:
"A history of one's own family is always open to criticism: Motives are suspect, judgment can be clouded. But Flexner is never self-serving, and he is remarkably candid about his parents without ever being disloyal."
He wrote about his mother's initially hesitant attitude toward physical love, his father's feelings about his Jewishness and how the couple overcame their self-doubts and insecurities to find mutual devotion.
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Mr. Flexner was well traveled in his youth and stimulated by his parents' rich social lives. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1929, he spent his earliest professional years working as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and executive secretary of the New York City health department's noise abatement commission.
His early attempts at fiction writing floundered, but he found an immediate market for "Doctors on Horseback."
He followed that with "America's Old Masters," "Steamboats Come True," the three-volume "History of American Painting," "The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre" and "The Young Hamilton," about Alexander Hamilton.
He said he always wrote for a mass audience. "That doesn't mean that I'm trying to get bestsellers, but I do wish to communicate," he said. "That separates me from most scholars."
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In his 1996 autobiography, "Maverick's Progress," he recounted his suspicions that many in academia never accepted him because he lacked a doctorate.
Still, he was undeniably a favorite of reviewers, and never so much as for the Washington books. He said he took on the Washington project because he "kept meeting" the man through his other research and "he never fitted the picture of Washington that was in everybody's mind."
He came to admire Washington for his historic refusal to accept absolute power. Using original sources, he slogged through decades of mythic stories that tended to make Washington seem beyond human grasp or, conversely, denigrate the man for failing to live up to the mythology.
"I think there has always been a Freudian image of Washington as a father figure that you want to get rid of," he said. "There was a great deal of satisfaction on many people's parts in putting him down, and there are always iconoclasts. Also, so much of [what was] held against him was stuff that had been manufactured for him."
Mr. Flexner's wife, Beatrice Hudson Flexner, whom he married in 1950, died in 1998.
Survivors include a daughter.
JAMES THOMAS FLEXNER
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