The Story of John Adams (Told by David McCullough)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And up next, a story about one of our founding fathers, a star of all stars, and that is John Adams. To tell the story is David McCullough, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, which turned into an HBO series. That John Adams story you are about to hear was given by McCullough at the John Adams Institute in the Netherlands. We’d like to give a heartfelt thank you to the John Adams Institute and their podcast, Bright Minds, for allowing us to share this story with our listeners. Here’s David McCullough with the story of John Adams.

I’ve often stopped in recent years to try to figure out what it is I’ve been writing about in my writing life. For a long time, I thought maybe I must have a water obsession. The first book was about the Johnstown Flood, the second was about a bridge over the East River, the third was about the Panama Canal.
But I think, at root, everything that I have been trying to do in my work is about courage, and principally, chiefly the courage of one’s convictions. And the story of John Adams, again and again and again, is a story of courage. I thought I would begin my remarks with the painting that hangs in our national capital. It’s the most famous painting ever done by an American. It is seen by more people than any other painting ever painted by an American as it hangs there where millions go through as visitors every year. It’s John Trumbull’s signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is seventeen seventy-six, and almost everything about it is inaccurate. The room didn’t look like the room is portrayed. The curtains at the windows are not the same, the furniture is wrong, the doors are in the wrong place. The Declaration of Independence was not signed on the Fourth of July, seventeen seventy-six. They didn’t begin signing it until August of seventeen seventy-six, and not everyone was present for the signing because many of them hadn’t returned to Congress yet. Some of them didn’t show up until fall, and one man didn’t get back until seventeen seventy-seven. But there is one thing about it that it’s entirely accurate, and those are the faces of the people portrayed: the signers of the Declaration, a declaration that set out to really…
…change the world. And it wasn’t something handed down by a king or a potentate or a czar, but the decision of a group of citizens acting on their own, acting very bravely on their own, because by signing that document, they were signing their death warrants. They were committing treason. If captured, they would be hanged. So when it says at the end, “we pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor,” that’s not just rhetoric, that’s not just talk. That’s the literal truth. If you study the painting, you’ll notice that all the lines of perspective all come down to three characters in the foreground: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who were the three responsible for the document itself. Jefferson did the draft, Adams and Franklin were sort of his collaborators.
But if you… study it further, you’ll see that the figure that stands in the exact center of the painting, and clearly the intention of the artist is to draw your eye to him, is John Adams. John Adams was not the author of the Declaration of Independence. He chose the author of the Declaration of Independence. He said it must be written by Jefferson. What he did was make it happen. He got the Congress to vote for it. He was the driving spirit. If Jefferson was the pen, Adams was the voice. He was, in that sense, one of the most important Americans who ever lived, and had he done nothing else with his career, he would be a figure that we would know about from that time. We know very little about what he said in his great speech. We know very little about what he said in any of his speeches, because all the sessions of Congress were conducted behind closed doors in secrecy. Philadelphia was full of spies. There was every chance that the word would get out. Adams went on then to have one of the most astonishing careers in all of American history. He became our emissary to France with Franklin; he became his own emissary to the Netherlands, spent two years here, and succeeded on his own against all kinds of odds—without authorization, to begin with, not knowing the language, not knowing anybody here, bringing two of his little boys with him. He succeeded in negotiating a loan from the Netherlands, from the Dutch bankers, of five million guilders or two million dollars. At a point where we were in desperate need of money to fight the war in seventeen eighty-two, there was by no means any guarantee that we would win the war. In fact, every sign suggested that we had a chance. But there were some people who would not give up, and Adams was one of them. He then, after the war, became our first ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, and at the same time he was still the ambassador to the Netherlands. And as a consequence, he came back and forth many times from London to Amsterdam and The Hague to negotiate further loans. After he left the Court of Saint James’s, he returned to the United States to become our first Vice President and then succeeded George Washington as President. He served one term, after which he was defeated by Thomas Jefferson in one of the most rancorous, difficult, closest elections in our history, with vicious charges being made on both sides, and a contest that wound up in the House of Representatives and was only settled after thirty-six votes when one man changed his vote. So when we read about presidents of the United States becoming President by a very slim margin or by a controversial contest, it all is a very old story. Adams then returned to his home in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he lived for another twenty-five years. Now, here was a man who traveled farther in the service of his country, at greater risk, at greater discomfort, and greater chance of his losing his life, not to say his livelihood support his family, than any of the major figures of that time.

And you’ve been listening to David McCullough tell one heck of a story about the great John Adams, and it’s so interesting to hear how McCullough even shows Adams. It was not his intention. He’d started by wanting to cover Jefferson and tell Jefferson’s story. But the more he prodded, the more he poked, the more he realized that Adams was more interesting. In the end, let’s face it, Adams chose Jefferson, as he said, to write the Declaration. Jefferson was the pen, but Adams the voice. And if you go to Monticello—and I went to the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville—everything was Jefferson all the time. What I learned in three years there, reading almost everything. You can’t know Jefferson; he hid himself. And by the way, we have friends like this and people like this in our lives. You don’t know them; they don’t tell you anything about themselves. The story of John Adams continues, and boy, do we know a lot about John Adams. You’re about to hear so much more, so much more. We all need to know and learn. And we’d like to give a heartfelt thank you to the John Adams Institute and their podcast, Bright Minds, for allowing us to share this story with our listeners. The institute’s name commemorates the man who was the first American emissary to the Netherlands in seventeen eighty. The story of John Adams continues with David McCullough here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and with David McCullough telling the story of one of our Founders—and perhaps the Founder—John Adams. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

He finally decides that he is not going to be a schoolteacher, and he’s not going to be a minister, as his father had hoped—as most parents of students who went to Harvard hoped, as most of the faculty expected the students to become preachers, ministers, Protestant ministers.
Instead, he decides he will… become a lawyer; he will enter public life. And this was a great struggle because he knew he was going against his father’s wishes.
And he adored his father. And one Sunday after church—he was a very devout Christian, I should emphasize—inspired by the sermon he had heard, he went out under the night sky to behold the glorious spectacle of a starry night. And beholding the night sky, he wrote, “the amazing concave of heaven sprinkled and glittered with stars. I am thrown into a kind of transport.” He knew that such wonders were the gifts of God. And then he writes, “But the greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind.” “But of all the provisions that he has made for the gratification of our senses,” this same twenty-year-old wrote, “are much inferior to the provision—the wonderful provision—that he has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason.” He has given us reason to find out the truth and the real design and true end of our existence. He then says, “It will be hard work to become an attorney, to learn the law, to qualify for the bar. But the more difficult and dangerous the enterprise, the higher the crown of laurel is bestowed on the conqueror. But the point is now determined: I shall have the liberty to think for myself.” Now, what did the Founders of our country believe? What did they think when they talked about “the pursuit of happiness”? They didn’t mean long vacations. They didn’t mean travel to foreign, exotic places. They didn’t mean a nice, comfortable afternoon in a hammock, or a lot of expensive possessions.
What they meant… what they were talking about was an extension and enlargement of the experience of life through the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. And they all…