Reading the Presidential Biographies: Washington and Adams
Last year, I decided to embark upon a slightly mad endeavor: to read a biography of every U.S. president in order, from Washington to Trump. I’ve taught and tutored AP US History for over a decade now, and so I’m pretty familiar with the broad contours of US history as well as the specific accomplishments of most of the presidents. But I was interested in more than just Wikipedia-page level accomplishments or a cursory summary. I wanted to understand the personalities behind these figures who ascended to this most hallowed position in American society and to see what insights I could glean about how such personalities influenced the decisions they made in office — to answer, I suppose, that great philosophical question about whether human beings are simply at the mercy of their historical contexts or whether they can actually shape that context. More than that, I had the sense that reading these biographies in order would give me a different view of the way America has transformed over the centuries, specially through the lens of the personalities who came to lead the country — a unique vision of history that can’t be accessed from reading just one book.
I began, of course, with George Washington, and in selecting a biography, I opted for Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life, from 2010, widely regarded as the most comprehensive account of our first president, clocking in at 904 pages and 42 hours on the audiobook. The book was exhaustively detailed, and Chernow admirably used all primary sources available to him to tell this story — but I was struck by how enigmatic a figure Washington remained despite so many pages of detail. Chernow begins with a description of Washington sitting for Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait and notes that Washington “ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.” (Chernow, Washington: A Life, 2010) Chernow asserts that his goal with his biography is to reveal the man behind the unknowable person in the portrait, but after reading the full book, I can’t say that Washington’s inner life really broke through the image. This is certainly not a fault of Chernow, whose biography is indeed one of the best and most thorough accounts of a historical figure I’ve ever read, but instead a feature of Washington himself — even as Chernow relates the complexities of the great man’s feelings, his shifting moods, his desires, Washington himself remains first and foremost a symbolic figure, forever tied to the country he helped create.
What does come through, however, is the strength of his will and his belief in a public duty. I was moved by certain aspects of Washington’s life that suggested a sense of sacrifice for the sake of a larger destiny. First, he never had children, and though this is likely more the result of infertility than any explicit kind of sacrifice, it is compatible with Washington’s image as a man who always chose public life over private life — as a father to the nation, it seems fitting that he never had biological children. Second, however, is the sense I got that to be the great man of history, Washington had to sacrifice certain aspects of his personal life, specifically his marriage, which Chernow depicts as something he had to bear rather than a true loving partnership, like that of, say, John and Abigail Adams. Perhaps this is unfair to Martha Washington, but in the book she comes across as a weak, timid figure, lurking in the background as a ghostly incarnation of the personal and family life that Washington could never fully embrace. The biography ends with a particularly depressing section describing Martha’s final years after Washington’s passing, living at their plantation in Mount Vernon, surrounded by her slaves, waiting to die. Washington got his apotheosis, but it seemed to come at the cost of his ability to live a “normal” life.
By contrast, John Adams comes across as a very human Founding Father. The book I chose to read was of course David McCullough’s John Adams, from 2001, the basis for the famous HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. Compared to Chernow’s book, this biography was a more manageable 750 pages. Moreover, McCullough’s writing style was more jaunty and jocular, moving at a faster clip. Much of this is attributable to Adams himself, who, in contrast to the often grim and unyielding Washington, has in his writings a lively and personable charm, self-deprecating at times, boastful at others, ultimately more of an actual person than just a symbol. Despite all he accomplished, Adams always remains a figure one can connect to and feel empathy for: in his love for his wife Abigail, we can read our own desire for love and fulfilling companionship, and in his sometimes jealous rivalries with other Founding Fathers such as Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson, we perhaps see a reflection of our own inner ambitions and resentments and the very human desire to be recognized for our accomplishments.
Ultimately, then, while Chernow’s Washington was grander and more illuminating with regard to the way the first president’s personality reflected his role in American history, I found McCullough’s John Adams a more entertaining read and Adams himself a more compelling figure. I was moved especially by the end of McCullough’s book, in which he summarizes in broad strokes Adam’s worldview:
Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost. He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.” His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.” His confidence in the future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever. Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was sure. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend Francis van den Kemp, he had written, “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.” It could have been his epitaph. (McCullough, John Adams, 2001)
Such a quote about our “gay, merry world” is quintessential Adams: both emotional and insightful, revealing so much about the man himself but also providing a way to live for future generations. I never thought I’d find such philosophical wisdom in a book about an American president, but that’s what makes Adams so fascinating: he was our most intellectual president, devouring books on politics and history, always questioning, always searching, always striving to understand his place in the world. In this way, he is like all of us, and thus ultimately perhaps our most human president.
