George Washington

Tim Reid, writing in the (London) Times, says "most Americans agree on three things about George Washington, their first President: he was a great man, but a stiff-jawed dullard with revolting wooden false teeth". He may be right about the great man and the wooden teeth, but I'm not so sure most Americans consider Washington a "dullard" because I doubt that most Americans know enough about him to have an opinion at all.

From the transcript of this 2002 PBS discussion on Washington:

It’s shocking how little information is in history textbooks about George Washington. And what we’re noticing is that there are parents who are in their twenties who know so little about Washington that they cannot tell anything to their children who are in third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade. It used to be that any child who would come to Mount Vernon, I could at least mention the cherry tree fable to, and I’d get some kind of reaction. Now many of them will look at me like, ’What is this guy talking about?’ They don’t even know the myths anymore.

To me, he's just the Indispensable Man.