And it’s a shame. He’s the only one that isn’t represented. I would be all for it, but I wouldn’t want it to be tucked off someplace where it was not part of the experience of people coming to see our capital and to appreciate it.
I love what he said about this subject in my notebook here, and it was a tribute he wrote to the capital, his benediction. Some of you may know it. It’s a simply marvelous message that I hope will be remembered for generations: “Here may the youth of this extensive country forever look up without disappointment, not only to the monuments and memorials of the dead, but to the examples of the living.”
Adams was a great optimist, and I think that’s part of why he’s so American. We are by nature optimists, and we know that the hard times and troubles and periods where nothing seems to be happening very effectively come and go. And that we can do it if we work together.
America is a joint effort in everything. If you read history, you know that nothing of any real consequence, or very rarely, has ever been accomplished alone. And he knew that.
I think he’s one of the most remarkable human beings in our story as a nation. I also think his wife, Abigail Adams, was one of the greatest of Americans. They led extraordinary lives. Theirs is an amazing story.
There’s an old adage about writing novels: keep your hero in trouble. Both John Adams and Harry Truman were constantly in trouble, so I didn’t have to worry about that.
DR: Now, when you started to write your book on John Adams, you were actually going to write a different book. You were going to write a book about Revolutionary heroes, including Jefferson. Why did you decide to just write a book on Adams?
DM: I had the idea of doing a dual biography. It was going to be Jefferson and Adams. I thought that having both onstage, as it were, I could see them in a different way from how they have been seen before, or even how they were seen in their own time.
I was a little worried how I could keep the glamorous, famous, handsome Thomas Jefferson from upstaging this short, cranky Yankee. Once I got into reading what Adams wrote—the way he poured out his heart and soul in his letters and diaries—I realized what a human being he was.
History is human. That’s what it’s about—“When in the course of human events…” History is about people, and it’s the people of history that we need to know and understand. Why they did what they did, why they were the way they were. What were they up against, what were their advantages, and so forth? Who were their friends? To whom were they married? All of that.
Jefferson tells you nothing about his wife. We don’t even know what she looked like. He called in every letter that she may have written to friends of theirs and destroyed them. Destroyed every letter that he wrote to her and she wrote to him. How can you portray this man very effectively? He built a wall around his personal life. He didn’t want people intruding on that. And you go where the material is.
If I may just sidestep a little bit, I was giving a talk at a university in California, and during the question-and-answer period one of the questions was, “Aside from Harry Truman and John Adams, how many other presidents have you interviewed?” And I said, “Appearances notwithstanding, I did not know President Truman or President Adams.”
But if you get to read their letters, if you’re surrounding yourself with what they said privately, publicly, what they said to someone they love, what they said to their children, what they said to themselves in their diaries, you get to know them, in many ways, better than you know people in real life. In real life you don’t get to read other people’s mail.
The unfortunate thing about all of us is that none of us write letters anymore, and no one in public life dares to keep a diary anymore. It can be subpoenaed against you in court. And here were these people pouring their selves out on paper because of the old sense of working your thoughts out on paper.
Adams writes about this. He says, “It’s only when I sit down at the desk with a piece of paper and my pen that I can really start to think.” And again and again in his diary you’ll read, “At home thinking.” Imagine. Taking time to think! And what a mind. What an incredible brain.
So I thought, “No, I’m going to write about Adams. And that’s more than enough, right there. That’s one of the greatest American lives I know about.”
DR: Maybe we can convince people that there should be a great memorial. Let’s go through his life a bit. John Adams was from a not wealthy family but a family that had been around Massachusetts for a while. His father was a farmer and a preacher. John Adams went to Harvard and then became a lawyer. He was well respected, and ultimately he was elected to the First Continental Congress. When he got there, it turned out that he was more articulate and a stronger believer in independence than other people. How did he become such a leader from the beginning?
DM: I’d like to recast what you said a little bit. John Adams came from very humble origins. His mother was illiterate. They had maybe one book in the house, which was the Bible. And they had no money.
The father did something he’d never done, to help pay for him to go to Harvard. He sold some land. The father was a farmer, as you say. And John went to Harvard on a scholarship, and when he got there, he said, “I discovered books and I read forever.”
You have to keep in mind this is not the Harvard that we know today. This is a small school with a small faculty, six or seven professors, several hundred students. And he did get a law degree. He taught school for a while. And he stood for practicing what you preach.
One of the bravest and most important acts of his life took place when no one would defend the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. No one would dare do that because it would have been so infinitely unpopular. He said, “Well, if we believe in what we say, somebody’s got to represent them. If you all won’t, I will”—knowing in his heart at least that it would probably destroy any ambitions he had for a leadership life in Boston or Massachusetts or national politics.
But instead, it made him more popular. Because they saw what backbone this man had. That he wasn’t just doing this to follow the crowd. He was doing what he felt was right. And he did that again and again and again in offices he held right up to and including the presidency.
DR: After he defended the British soldiers who took part in the Boston Massacre, he was elected to the legislature in Massachusetts, and then they sent him to the First Continental Congress. And there he became a leader from the beginning?
DM: Yes. Because he was a man who was willing to get into the arena. He would stand up on the floor of the Congress and battle articulately, and never with personal invective, for what he stood for. He’s the one that really put the Declaration of Independence over, on the floor of the Congress. If he’d only done that, he would be someone of infinite importance in the story of our country.
Remember, everybody that signed that document was signing his death warrant. All the odds were against us. Only about a third of the country was for independence. A third of the country was against it. And the remaining third, in the good old human way, was waiting to see how it came out. We had no military strength, we had no money, we had very little in the way of military experience, and we were up against the most powerful nation in the world, with the most powerful navy, most powerful army, and we thought we could do it.
The other thing people don’t realize, or unfortunately don’t know enough about, particularly students, is that the Revolutionary War wasn’t a quick little thing. It was eight and a half years. It was the longest war in our history except for Vietnam. And very bloody, proportionate to the size of the population.
DR: In addition to being the most ardent advocate for independence, Adams made two decisions. He recommended somebody to be the general of the army for the American colonies and somebody to write the Declaration of Independence. Why did he pick George Washington and why did he pick Thomas Jefferson?
DM: He picked Jefferson because he felt he was the best writer. And he liked him very much
and admired him very much.
Washington was a clear choice. There wasn’t really much mystery about that. There were so very few to choose from, and they were all young, in their thirties or early forties, with no experience. They’d never done this before; none of them had. And it’s just miraculous, out of this tiny population—2,500,000 people, and 500,000 of them were slaves held in bondage. Couldn’t vote, had no say.
One of the most important virtues or admirable qualities that we all should know and understand about John Adams is he’s the only Founding Father to become president who never owned a slave. As a matter of principle. And Abigail was staunchly of that same point of view. The slaves weren’t all in the South. They were sort of a status symbol in Boston, and you had servants who were slaves. That was the thing to have.
DR: He was not an abolitionist, though?
DM: No, he wasn’t. Nobody was making an issue of that at the time because they had determined that “we can’t solve this one now—we’ve got to sidestep that.” They were really putting in the closet an issue they knew eventually had to be solved.
DR: The Continental Congress vote to separate from England takes place on July 2, 1776. John Adams then writes to Abigail, “This will be the most important day in the history of our country, July the 2nd.” Why do we celebrate Independence Day on July 4 instead of July 2?
DM: This is something that he wrote on July 2, 1776. That was the day they voted. Your wonderful Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol has the painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, and almost everything about it is wrong.
Nothing happened on July 4. That’s the date on the document. And all those people weren’t assembled to sign it. They signed it when they were in town, as it were. Some of them signed in the fall, some were signing all the way up to Christmas. And the furniture in the painting is wrong. The room, the decorations of the room are wrong.
The only thing that’s right, and it’s what’s most important, are the faces. They were all representative of individual Americans—free, independent Americans—who are stating their political faith and who are accountable. In other words, they can’t hide anymore. There they are. Proudly, but not without courage to do that.
Adams wrote that day or the next day: “The 2nd day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as a day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”
“Just the thing for a Child to have!” Commemorative 1850s broadside of Adams’s passionate letter, July 5, 1776, about the importance of the Declaration of Independence.
Think about it for a minute. He’s saying, “From one end of the continent to the other.” The country at that point didn’t even reach the Allegheny Mountains. And he’s seeing this dream, this ambition. Like John F. Kennedy saying, “We will go to the moon.” This is an American moment, and it is more than just legally interesting or legally important, profound, and unprecedented, which it was. And Adams had that capacity.
Adams was short, and he was not very handsome, and he comes right after the presidency of the tallest, most glamorous, important figure in the world then, George Washington, and before the glamorous Thomas Jefferson. And to me, it’s very interesting that it’s the same situation with Harry Truman. He comes after Franklin Roosevelt and is succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower, two of the most luminous figures of that day. But you have to wait for the dust to settle, and you begin to see who really did matter.
Right here, across the way here, over at the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, there’s a piece of sculpture commemorating the goddess of history, Clio. She’s riding in her chariot, and there’s a clock on the side of the chariot, and she’s writing in her book.
The idea behind putting the statue there was that the members of Congress would look up to see what time it is. That clock still keeps perfect time. That’s a Simon Willard clock, made in Massachusetts about 1850. They would look up to see what time it is, and they would be reminded that there was another time—history—and that what you’re saying today, what you’re doing today, here on the floor of this legislative assembly, is going to be judged in time to come, in the long run.
There’s present-day time and then there’s the time of history. And the best and most effective people in public life, without exception, have been the people who had a profound and very often lifelong interest in history. You have to understand history in order to understand who we were, how we got to where we are, why we are the way we are, and where we might be going. And that you are going to be judged by history, not just by tomorrow morning’s headlines. And they were worried about this back at the very beginning.
DR: Was Adams upset that later on we didn’t celebrate July 2, we celebrated July 4? And why do we celebrate the Fourth?
DM: Because that’s the date that’s on the document. “When, in the course of human events…” July 4, 1776. But no, he didn’t mind.
So often in history, what really happens, you couldn’t put it in a novel. Nobody would believe it. The truth is stranger and more wondrous, very often, than fiction.
The idea that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the two men who put the Declaration of Independence over and changed history, changed the world, then died fifty years later on the same day, July 4, 1826—unbelievable. And yet it really happened.
They came to Adams right before he died. It was about two or three days before. The newspaper reporters came to him and they said, “Mr. Adams”—he was sitting up in a chair that’s still there in the Adams house in Quincy, Massachusetts—“we’re going to be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Do you have anything to say?”
He said, “Yes. Independence forever.”
“Would you like to say a little more, Mr. Adams?”
“Not a word.”
DR: After the Declaration of Independence is signed, the Revolutionary War goes forward; Adams is asked to go to France and see if he can get the French in as allies to help America in the Revolutionary War. How did he get to France? He couldn’t fly over, so describe the boat ride and how he went and whom he took with him.
DM: He went over by sailing ship, which was the only way you could go anywhere. And he took his little boy with him, John Quincy Adams. So you had two future presidents riding in the same ship.
It was dangerous just to go to sea in those days, but very dangerous to be going to sea when the sea happened to be controlled by the British navy. And if they were captured, he would be taken and hanged.
And he didn’t speak a word of French. He began scurrying around and buying all the books he could get on France and managed to teach himself French pretty effectively on the voyage over. It was a very difficult voyage, and he did it several more times before he was finished. Going, coming back, and going back to Europe a second time. He was a very brave man.
It was a very courageous time. You have to understand what they were reading at the time. For example, they had no rules of punctuation. Never used quotation marks—nobody did. When you’re reading their letters, you’ll come across a wonderful line or two. You think, “Oh, isn’t that great?” And then you find out that, no, they’re quoting a line from some poet or Shakespeare. It happens all the time.
They all did it, because they knew that the person they were writing to knew the line. It would be as if in a letter you would say, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to follow the Yellow Brick Road.” You probably wouldn’t put quotation marks around that.
One of the lines that appears again and again in the Founding Fathers’ writings is a line from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man”: “Act well your part, there all the honor lies.” In other
words, history has cast you in these roles and you better damn well play that role to the best of your ability. And why? “There all the honor lies.”
Nobody talks about honor anymore. Not money, not fame, not power—honor. And they really believed that. Of course, they didn’t always live up to it, but they believed it.
So there’s a certain creed, a certain faith that we need to know more about, because it was the fuel of their courage and their persistence in the cause of equality and freedom and the freedom to use our minds to think for ourselves. This great institution [the Library of Congress] was signed into existence by John Adams, a man who never stopped reading.
When he was in his eighties, he embarked on a sixteen-volume history of France in French, which he taught himself. And he told his son, little John Quincy—one of my favorite of all lines—“You’ll never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” Take a book, carry a book. Don’t go anywhere without a book. And he would urge poetry.
There’s so much about this man that needs greater appreciation, but I feel immensely gratified that my book has reached such an audience as it has. The book is now in its forty-eighth edition.
Nothing can please me more than that the story of that amazing American is out there for people to know him and be enlarged by him. Adams et al. set such an example, and that’s why it’s so imperative that we teach history—the example of those who preceded us.
DR: When Adams finally gets over to France, he finds out he’s got two colleagues he’s got to negotiate alongside: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They’re in France as well. What was it like for the three of them representing the United States? Was it easy for the three of them to get along?
DM: Well, I say this not to put Jefferson down, but Jefferson didn’t arrive until the war was over. So all the tough stuff was over. He came in when it was easy. Franklin was there before Adams.
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