John Quincy Adams

The son of American icons John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams transcended his parents’ high expectations, serving his country as a 15-year-old diplomat (as secretary to the American minister to Russia), U.S. president, and later, congressman. Unger (The Last Founding Father) asserts that Adams’s positions on abolition and the promotion of science showed him to be prescient, while his outwardly reserved ambition revealed him as a Revolutionary relic whose earnest legal mind garnered him the respect of the fiercely partisan congressmen who surrounded him on his Capitol deathbed. Though Unger oversimplifies the initial American support for the revolutionary French during the elder Adams’s tenure as president, he eloquently details the diplomatic headaches caused by both the infamous XYZ Affair and ever-changing Gallic governments. Spare prose clarifies the overview of political complications and intricate family dynamics, revealing Adams as a historically overlooked yet key transitional figure who witnessed the birth of the nation and endured its nearly irreparable geographic squabbles of the 1840s. Always serving the public with style and conviction, this “towering figure in the formative years” of the nation earned both his parents’ respect and a place in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. 43 illus., 4 maps. (Sept.)