Apr. 12, 1801—
George Washington Adams, who, though
gifted with good looks and a flair for poetry, would stagger under the weight
of expectations as the son and grandson of Presidents, was born in Berlin,
where his father was serving at the time as U.S. Ambassador to Prussia.
I have to chuckle every time someone brings up the
misbehavior of Hunter Biden and the alleged influence exerted on his behalf by
his father. Leave aside the convenient amnesia of these critics when it comes
to the prior President and the personal and financial misdeeds of his
three older children. The fact is that, going back to the founding of the
republic, Presidential children (particularly, far more often than not, Presidential
sons) have given their parents fits.
Or, as Doug Wead recalled about a 1988 study he did
for George W. Bush in his history of this group, All the Presidents'
Children: “Research showed that being related to a president brought
more problems than opportunities. There seemed to be higher than average rates
of divorce and alcoholism and even premature death. Some presidential children
seemed bent on self-destruction.”
The biggest case in point: the Adams family. The
trouble started with the alcoholic male in-laws of patriarch John Adams.
That tendency towards substance abuse, along with a predisposition towards
depression, carried over to the following three generations of this American
political dynasty.
Say what you want about Hunter Biden, but the grandson
of John Adams, George Washington Adams, got there first. Traumatized by parental separation early in
life? Check. A fling with the female darling of one’s brother? Check.
Overshadowed not just by a powerful father but a brother of great promise? Check.
A major substance abuser for much of his adult life? Check. A headache
who gave his father’s political foes plenty of ammunition? Check.
Young Adams’ father, John Quincy Adams,
became America’s greatest Secretary of State, then its sixth President. In his post-Presidential career, he became the most relentless congressional foe of slavery and advocate for the constitutional right of petition. But in private life, his personality—anxious, taciturn, dour, and demanding—often darkened the lives of his wife and children.
Paul Nagel’s superb collective biography of the family
was called Descent From Glory. At times, however, I thought it might
be better called Descent Into Despair. George epitomized the
latter title.
His birth was greeted with joy, relief—but also with trepidation.
It came one month after John Adams, the first President to lose a reelection
bid, left the White House peevishly rather than witness the inauguration of rival
and former friend Thomas Jefferson. A child to continue the family line was
seen as balm for the old man’s spirits.
The successful delivery of the baby also soothed, at
least for awhile, the anxiety of John Quincy and wife Louisa Johnson Adams, who
had already suffered a couple of miscarriages. The new mother and her son were
each “fat and rosy,” the diplomat assured concerned relatives and friends.
That jocular tone was uncharacteristic of the ambassador.
His wishes for his son were best expressed through the pillar of integrity and restraint he was named for:
President Washington, who in his second term had been so impressed by his Vice President's son that he predicted John Quincy would head America’s
diplomatic corps in time. “I implore the favour of Almighty God that he [George] might
live and never prove unworthy of [his name],” John Quincy wrote after the birth.
It was not to be.
When John Quincy Adams was appointed America’s first envoy
to Russia in 1809, he decided to take two-year-old son Charles Francis
Adams with him and Louisa to St. Petersburg but to leave eight-year-old George
and six-year-old John Adams II in the care of relatives in Massachusetts. The
parents were gone for so long—six years—that, upon their return, they did not
recognize the now teenage George.
The reports they received in the interim about George—that
he was, as Nagel put it in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, “hyperactive, erratic, brilliant but undisciplined, effeminate,
and lazy”—were not reassuring.
The diplomat father—brilliant but ultra-disciplined—had
already been peppering his son with letters advising him about Bible study,
good companions, and the necessity to rise before 6 am to learn Greek and
Latin. Now he decided to take an even stronger hand in directing his George’s
future.
Grandfather John, maybe regretting his own hectoring
for driving John Quincy’s brothers Charles and Thomas towards insolvency,
alcoholism and despair, delicately tried to warn his son against also exerting
too tight a control over his children, writing of the grandson he wished had
been named for him, “George is a treasure of diamonds. He has a genius equal to
anything, but like all other genius, requires the most delicate management.”
That “genius” was manifested in an area that John Quincy
wished he could have indulged more—poetry. George was so good at writing
verses that when he attended Harvard, he won the prestigious Boylston Prize
over a formidable competitor: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But whatever pride John Quincy might have felt in his
son’s accomplishment was lessened by his otherwise lackluster performance at a
school that his father had trained, pushed, and pulled strings for him to
enter. With no American until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow more than two decades
later making his living solely through poetry, it was necessary that George work
at another profession: the law.
Even with excellent mentors—John Quincy and Senator
Daniel Webster—George showed little interest in this career, and also
underperformed when he followed father and grandfather into politics. Successful
races for the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston City
Council preceded service in these bodies, where he evinced little interest
in his work.
What really interested George were ladies and liquor.
Like his literary hero, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, he drew women to him with
his good looks. He would be deeply sorry for one of those conquests: the
beautiful niece of his mother, Mary Hellen, who took up with him after playing with
the affections of the youngest son, Charles Francis Adams—and who, after
breaking off her engagement with George, married instead middle brother John
Adams II.
From this point onward, George’s downward spiral
accelerated. Mounting gambling debts increased the problems caused by lack of
career success. Looking at Charles Francis, he saw a paler but unmistakable image of his father: introspective, self-critical, but high-minded and responsible enough to carve out a public niche.
Worse, love-on-the-rebound led George to impregnate the maid
of the family’s Boston doctor. The threat of scandal deepened his depression.
With John Quincy having repeated his father’s
Presidential electoral loss, he turned his attention again in the spring of
1829 to his oldest child, summoning George to DC to help with the family transition
back to Massachusetts.
Being under the thumb of his relentlessly demanding
father was more than George could bear. Before leaving for the nation’s
capital, he was already confiding in associates his intention to commit suicide.
Before dawn on April 30, he either jumped or fell overboard from a passenger
liner in New York Harbor. It would be a month before his remains washed ashore.
In pondering in his diary the news that his son was
lost, the former President momentarily deluded himself into thinking that the
death had been precipitated by “the motion of the Stage and Steamboat in
twenty-four hours [which] had produced a fever, with a rushing of the blood to
the brain,” but what followed sounded more like soul-crushing guilt over this probable suicide:
“Blessed God! Forgive the repining of mortal flesh, at
this dispensation of thy will! Forgive the wanderings of my own mind under its
excruciating torture!”
Agony caused by George continued to plague the family for a few years. Charles disposed of his brother's papers, but refused to be blackmailed concerning George's illegitimate child. Two years later, the family had to suffer through the publication of a 44-page pamphlet that divulged all the secrets of the affair.
Over a century later,
a more successful President, Franklin Roosevelt, surely thinking of his own children’s
struggle in the public eye, observed, “One of the worst things in the world is
being the child of a President. It’s a terrible life they lead.” Though a more
playful and warm-hearted father than John and John Quincy Adams, even FDR could
only pray that his children could survive a life disrupted by parental ambition as best as they could.
