"It must take a lot of balls to walk away from power that way; hardly anyone ever does it."

Damn right! One other who did it was Emiliano Zapata, the famous Mexican revolutionary leader from Morelos, Mexico. He walked away from being president of Mexico, because he discovered that the government apparatus around him was so corrupt that he could not get them to do much of anything for the general public as he wished them to. He was killed not too long after that by a trap set by Federal soldiers.

Another was Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. He peacefully submitted to the results of a democratic election, left office, and was still campaigning for the Sandinistas, last I heard.

Another was Mikhail Gorbachev, who peacefully dismantled and walked away from the Soviet power structure.

Tremendous guts and honesty in the case of all three of them, I'd say, just like in the case of George Washington.