American Age:
Book Review
by Mike Mahn

IPS Features

Return to Current IPS Features

Return to Catalogue

IPS Features Staff

International Press Service

Title: John Adams

 Author: David McCullough

Simon & Schuster

Notes from first reading: ‘Wonderful book! Writing is excellent. What a man, this John Adams--- brave, stout, and brilliant!’

Author David McCullough won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Truman. He should’ve gained another for this piece of work on John Adams, who was cast in the twin shadows of the looming George Washington and the towering Thomas Jefferson. But it is a fitting placement for this diminutive Yankee from Massachusetts, every bit the counterweight to his Virginian contemporaries, and, regarding Jefferson, often the counterpoint, but most always, the complement to both, and each to the others in matters affecting the destiny of America. Their lives were woven together in a manner that only a fiction writer could imagine.

Adams had the great pivot of spouse Abigail as a prod (“You cannot be… an inactive spectator…. We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them,” she would write to her husband), and a pillar of support throughout the tumultuous Revolutionary and Federalist era. Adams would be Washington’s vice-President and succeed to the Presidency in 1797 after the General’s two terms. But Jefferson’s ambitions would not be longer subdued. The two would engage in a bitter struggle for the Presidency in 1800, which some claim as the most rancid in American history. Judging by contemporary standards, that is saying something!   

Jefferson would defeat his former co-revolutionary as the nation divided into political factions. Washington died on December 14, 1799, and did not witness the dissolution of his dream of non-partisan national leadership, and, what surely would have been heart-breaking to him, the bitterness between these two stalwarts of the independence movement.

Yet, Adams and Jefferson would resume their friendship in later years, following Jefferson’s two terms in office, and be frequent correspondents. In one of the greatest coincidences in political history, the two men would die on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after they signed the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed to the world a new era for liberty.

HBO has ‘discovered’ Adams and is currently running a series on his life and times, based on the McCullough book. But by all means, read the book. Like John Adams, it is an essential part of American history.