John Adams. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, May, 2001 by Michael Waldman

JOHN ADAMS

by David McCullough

Simon & Schuster, $35.00

HISTORIANS WHO WRITE ABOUT John Adams often fall in love with him. In part, that's because he is such good copy. In his private letters, he is opinionated, grouchy, neurotic, and scathing about himself and others. (Think George Costanza in a powdered wig.) He is also the overlooked hero of the American Revolution. There are no marble monuments to John Adams on the Mall. But it was Adams who picked George Washington to head the Continental Army, and who chose Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence.

Adams himself endlessly fretted that he might be ignored by posterity. "The essence of the whole," he once wrote, "will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war" (Franklin, for his part, wrote of Adams, "He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.")

Now Adams gets the full Big Book treatment in a wonderful new biography by David McCullough, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman. This is not a tome for scholars, or for those who want a detailed rendering of political differences between Federalists and Republicans. At times the reader wonders if the prickly Boston lawyer is being subtly reworked into Give-'Em-Hell John. But this book brings to life a vital and turbulent character at the center of our history, one whose clear-eyed vision has worn well.

At its best, this book captures the sheer improbable adventure of the Revolution. In a few years Adams went from a small-town lawyer, best known for successfully defending the Redcoat soldiers accused of killing colonists in a riot organized by his cousin Samuel Adams, to the floor leader of pro-independence legislators at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was soon bound for France to serve as an envoy for the new nation, accompanied by his young son, John Quincy. The description of that trip is thrilling, with the sailing ship slipping away in stealth, battered by storms and pursued by, and occasionally exchanging fire with, the fearsome British Navy. Before they were icons, these were revolutionaries, fugitives who would be hanged if the war were lost. Adams spent years abroad as a diplomat, wandering through the decadent capitals of pre-revolutionary Europe. Some have portrayed. Adams as an easily scandalized prude, but McCullough persuasively shows him to be another American archetype--an early workaholic striver, dismayed by the old world's tolerance of sloth and inequality.

Adams returned to the United States and, as the first Vice President, was the first to discover that his fellow Founders had created "the most insignificant office ever known to man" Succeeding the irreplaceable Washington, President Adams fell victim to the political fratricide of the time. The French Revolution sharply divided Americans; the Terror thrilled Jefferson's Republicans but horrified Hamilton's Federalists. U.S. envoys were ejected from Paris, and the French navy set upon our ships. Not for the last time, war fever consumed the country. But Adams authorized peace talks, demobilized an army that Alexander Hamilton had hoped to lead, and lost reelection. McCullough persuades that Adams was a war hero president--one who triumphed by pulling the country back from war.

The book is not flawless. McCullough sandpapers Adams' rough edges, and works too hard to explain away his uglier moments. The reader wonders just why so many who knew him well thought he was off balance. He failed to attend Jefferson's inaugural? Blame stagecoach schedules. The Mien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized criticism of the government, are nearly ignored. That Adams was encouraged to sign them by his wife Abigail is a fascinating fact, but you'd have to read Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers to learn it. And it is hard to believe that Thomas Jefferson could be quite as self-deluding and shallow as he is portrayed here. The book could have taken more seriously the substance of Jefferson and Adams' long disagreements, rather than just the emotional story of friendship, breach, and reconciliation.

Still, in all, the John Adams is not only gripping but also highly useful. There was a time when any educated American could easily summon the spirit, words, and events of the nation's founding. Plainly, that's no longer true. And it's a huge loss. Our moral leaders have long used the ideals of the revolution as a goad, and a goal. They forced their contemporaries to recognize the gap between our aspirations and present-day realities. But it's hard to do that if we don't 'share those common references. Lincoln's audience at Gettysburg in 1863 was entirely aware of what happened "four score and seven" years before, and King's audience at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 understood well "the full meaning of our creed." Today s mass audiences assuredly would not. Let's hope this book rides the best-seller lists long enough to reconnect today's public with our own surprisingly heroic past.