Raised to a New Stature
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Raised to a New Stature John Adams By David McCullough Simon and Schuster. 752 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of history, Columbia; editor, "The Presidents: A...
...He danced and he joked...
...Vain, he was, but a Pollyanna or a fool he was not...
...The short, chubby statesman (when he was President, some people gigglingly called him "His Rotundity") appears to have required constant assurance that he was right about all matters he passed judgment on—in other words, almost everything...
...Over time, the Founding Fathers simply lost their luster in the public imagination...
...His central role in making independence possible included working to obtain for Washington the command of the Continental Army—to help bind Virginia to the cause...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" John Adams, the second President of the United States, was known as the Atlas of Independence—at a time when all educated people knew who Atlas was...
...From his perch of impotence in the Senate he lectured on the issues—to the indescribable vexation of all within earshot...
...One of his other characteristics that stood him in good stead was his not forgetting old intimates...
...Adams came in, he took my hand in both of his, and with a hearty squeeze accosted me in the words, 'How do you do, my dear old friend?'" The beautifully shaped career Adams played out in his long years is matched by few, if any, other Americans...
...Yet Vice President Adams served as a kind of balance wheel between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians already beginning to emerge as progenitors of opposing parties...
...Althoughhe reaches no conclusion that his predecessors have not also drawn (the Adamses have never been neglected by historians), his treatment will nevertheless appeal to a wide audience...
...Especially in the era of e-mail and cell phones, it may safely be said that such exchanges no longer take place among the Solons of the land...
...The President seemed to be, he wrote, "a bad edition of a Polish king...
...The mundane matter of making ends meet was a constant concern for the couple...
...You are apprehensive of monarchy...
...That was Adams in top form, offering praise where praise was due, but making sure of a little pat on his own back for turning down that prime writing assignment...
...No contemporary national politician is capable of writing with the prosaic elegance and articulateness of the Fathers...
...The new Adams is not lovable, but he is believable and, above all, admirable...
...The results of their immense literary output in laying the foundation of this nation show that this coterie of men was, against all competition, "the greatest generation...
...What McCullough has accomplished would have pleased John Adams immensely and perhaps satisfied his unquenchable vanity...
...They were supplanted by Presidents who were turned into golden boys of the media...
...On his Inauguration Day, he wrote to Abigail of what it was like to succeed Washington: "The sight of the sun setting...
...I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate...
...Still, McCullough has limned Adams and his relationship with his beloved Abigail so well that our second President has been elevated to new stature...
...The unfortunate marriage of his daughter Nabby and her slow death from cancer took a heavy toll on him and on Abigail...
...In Paris with Abigail on the momentous mission of helping to write a treaty of peace with the Mother Country, Adams knew they had to keep up appearances, despite his meager salary from Congress...
...Years after 1776, Adams recalled how he had explained to Jefferson, the immortal Author, why he and not Adams should prepare the document: "Reason first: You are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business...
...The kingship of Poland was an elective office...
...It is a treat to encounter words that stick...
...As Vice President under George Washington, Adams again was a frustrated man, for he quickly recognized what all of his successors have discovered, that he had no power...
...You are very much otherwise...
...For instance, he has highlighted a wonderful exchange that the present generation ought to take to heart as a sample of mature discourse between politicians who disagree...
...Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory...
...Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular...
...Reason third: You can write 10 times better than I can...
...McCullough, whose gimlet eye for a telling anecdote or choice phrase has been the hallmark of his resplendent works on Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and those glories of engineering and construction, the Panama Canal and Brooklyn Bridge, provides us with an incomparable up-to-date look at Adams andhis family...
...Languishing in the wings, he told himself, "I am nothing, but I may be everything...
...Other students of the period, including Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer recipient this year for his Founding Brothers, and the late Richard B. Morris, author of the earlier Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny, have contributed to the refurbishing of the men of Independence...
...She was prepared to make the necessary sacrifices with him...
...David McCullough's John Adams revivifies a figure who, for all his shortcomings, including particularly a bredin-the-bones biliousness, had a dogged spiritual and mental autonomy plus an appealing sense of self that the present generation deserves to become reacquainted with...
...When Washington retired after his second term to go back to Mount Vernon, Adams' turn at the helm came...
...Similarly, George Washington was everywhere celebrated as the Father of His Country before his doppelgängers started to run used-car sales on Presidents' Day...
...Consequently, one finds here a riches of description and evaluation that make the 18th- and early 19th-century locales of Revolutionary-era politics—Philadelphia, New York and Boston—vibrant and comprehensible...
...Adams wrote her in his limpid phrases: "I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend the States...
...Adams' labors as a diplomat were notably unsuccessful and frustrating...
...Reported Sewall, "When Mr...
...As for Adams' relationship with Thomas Jefferson, his famous report on how Jefferson became the author of the Great Declaration has never been parsed more interestingly than in this volume—not even by Carl Becker in his classic work on the subject...
...readers will be deep in McCullough's debt for embedding them in an expert narrative...
...Self-possessed as he was, Adams could be as intimidated as a schoolboy on his first date...
...Adams, however, was no Johnny onenote, tendering to the world only lofty thoughts clothed in phrases aimed at posterity...
...During his assignment in London he visited Jonathan Sewall, a Loyalist who had fled to England...
...Readers will note that McCullough has conducted a painstaking mining of the Adams Papers so scrupulously edited by the late Lyman H. Butterfield and his associates and successors at the Massachusetts Historical Society...
...McCullough explains deftly that Adams "was apprehensive because he saw clearly how much there was to be apprehensive about...
...Abigail had assured her husband: "The gentleman and the soldier look agreeably blended in him...
...It is not merely that the sources are impeccable...
...After pondering hisjustarrived copy of the new Constitution, Jefferson wrote to Adams from Paris expressing deep concern about the kind of Chief Executive that had been created...
...We observe this when the 15-yearold goes off to Harvard, again when he prepares to travel to Philadelphia in 1774 for the Continental Congress, and yet again while he is on his way to France and the Revolution back home is coming to an end...
...So did their son Charles' long, losing battle with alcohol...
...He was a faithful husband and father who filled both roles fervently...
...But he must be remembered for obtaining the loans from the Dutch that helped make possible the ultimate victory...
...The verbal sparring between Jefferson and Adams has been written about to a farethee-well.Butin McCullough s hands it seems fresh and instrucfive...
...But his feeling of inferiority never left him...
...That was apparent in 1785 when, having been named Minister to Great Britain, he tremulously presented his credentials to George III—whom Tom Paine, in an assessment Adams shared, had labeled "the Royal Brute...
...He sometimes chewed tobacco, and each morning drank "his usual gill of hard cider...
...That sum, he confided to a friend at the French Court, was but "a sprat in a whale's belly"—a metaphor likely brought from home in Massachusetts...
...Adams' rejoinder was, as McCullough observes, prophetic: "You are afraid of the one, I, the few...
...In addition, despite the bravado he often displayed, he was filled with selfdoubt...
...and another rising (though less splendid), was a novelty...
...It has been easy to be intimate with the recent Oval Office occupants: They could come into the living room at will, bearing names like Ike, Jimmy, Bill, and now W. Today, though, when personal integrity, intellectual sureness and principled performance are qualities worth discovering in action again, those 18th-century icons clad in perukes and smallclothes are back in affectionate regard...
...Two hundred years later, he is getting his due in this bountiful biography...
...The founder of the line of outstanding Adamses was always somehow overshadowed in the public mind by his son, John Quincy, whose antislavery stand made him "Old Man Eloquent," and his great-grandson, the historian whose magisterial The Education of Henry Adams may well be the best autobiography written on this side of the Atlantic...
...I, of aristocracy...
...Abigail unfailingly validated his positions, and never more devotedly than when, as a member of the Continental Congress, he spoke out in favor of breaking with the Mother Country and declaring independence...
...When official business kept him away from his cherished house in Braintree for extended periods of time, which was very often, he knew without a jot of doubt that in spite of the family burdens Abigail was forced to bear alone, he was the brightest star in her firmament...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
