Presidential Rehab

Do you recognize this man?



Why, it's Pope Linus, of course, the second pontiff, who ruled what must have been a pretty small group of Christians for about nine years (67-76). You'd be forgiven for not recognizing him; I mean, I went to Catholic school and took Mr. Mulvaney's Church History course, and I couldn't pick St. Linus out of a lineup.

John Adams, the Linus of America, suffered the same fate for a long time. I remember visiting the Denver Mint as a kid and buying souvenir coins in the gift shop. They sold coins with each president's portrait, and I decided to buy three. I bought Washington, because he was number one, and Jefferson, because he was my favorite president. Then, because he filled the gap in between, I bought Adams, the guy between numbers one and three.

So it went with Adams in popular culture. George Washington was the first president; Adams was the first vice-president (and the first to complain about how powerless the VP is). GW got elected twice, unanimously; JA is the first guy to lose a presidential election. Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase; JA signs the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. For a long time, he's a name on a list, a brief stop on the way between the important founding fathers.

This changes in 2001, when David McCullough publishes John Adams, his 751-page bio of America's first forgotten president. What's interesting about this isn't the fact that it's a success--as a New York Times points out, the book is "rebelling against the rebellion against the history of Great White Men"--but rather that it's taken so long for someone to do a really comprehensive reworking of Adams's reputation. Maybe the problem is too much information--after all, part of the mystery of Washington is Martha's destruction of their correspondence (Jefferson does the same when his wife dies, too), whereas John and Abagail Adams write each other (and everyone else) constantly. McCullough's got a lot of reading ahead of him (as he notes, the microfilm runs over five miles in length).

The result, though, of all this primary material and McCullough's willingness to wade through it all, is lively, engaging reading; I felt like I knew Washington a little bit better as a person at the end of June, but finishing John Adams felt like saying goodbye to a good friend. Ellis fleshed out Washington, but McCullough animates the Adamses--a remarkable family who we'll obviously return to later this year--with a vivacity that makes for a wonderful read.

But there's a dark side to this presidential rehab. We know that George W. Bush likes McCullough a lot--he gives him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006--and that Bush frequently invoked Harry S. Truman (another McCullough subject) in discussing how history would vindicate his presidency. Is is possible that, in reading about Adams, Bush thought some future biographer would explain away his failings and restore him to his believed rightful place in American history?