Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 7
John Adams said Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S. Grant said James Garfield did not have “the backbone of an angleworm.” Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson “a Byzantine logothete.” Wilson called Chester Arthur “a nonentity with sidewhiskers.” Harry Truman summed up Lyndon Johnson with a curt “No guts!”
It is hardly surprising that Presidents would have strong opinions about their predecessors and successors. Not all of them have expressed their views in public. Some have concealed critical thoughts as a matter of policy: they felt Presidents and former Presidents should avoid public brawls. Others have been awesomely, even recklessly confrontational. But few Presidents have gone quietly into the night without some interesting remarks on the record.
George Washington was an exemplar of presidential reticence. When his successor, John Adams, decided to send an envoy to France to try to resolve the quasi-war raging between the two countries, Washington was appalled. Leading Federalists urged him to speak out against the move, but despite his admission that he found Adams’s decision “incomprehensible,” Washington told Secretary of War James McHenry, “I believe it is better that I should remain mute.” (Had Washington intervened, he would have found himself in the embarrassing position of opposing what turned out to be one of the most brilliant coups in the history of American diplomacy. The envoy astonished everyone by bringing home peace with France.)
This example of reticence was soon honored in the breach. John Adams vented his spleen on Thomas Jefferson for years, combining palpable jealousy with acute criticism. In 1803, seeing disaster in Jefferson’s decision to dismantle the Navy he had created to fight the French, Adams wrote William Cunningham, the son of an old friend, “I shudder at the calamities which I fear his conduct is preparing for his country: from a mean thirst of popularity, an inordinate ambition and a want of sincerity.” Jefferson, for his part, complained that his predecessor was “distrustful, obstinate, excessively vain, and takes no counsel from anyone.”
Nine years later Adams wrote to Jefferson directly to blame him for the impending War of 1812. Jefferson’s lack of a navy had encouraged both the English and the French to treat America with contempt. Jefferson, proving himself a philosopher, ignored these shafts and replied with an essay on the theology of the American Indian.
This long-running postpresidential feud had a touching denouement. In 1823, when both men were very old, the letters Adams had written Cunningham in “sacred confidence” were published in the newspapers by Cunningham’s son. The son, a passionate supporter of Andrew Jackson, was trying to derail John Quincy Adams’s candidacy for President by showing that John Adams had slandered Thomas Jefferson. A horrified John Adams rushed a frantic apology to Jefferson, vowing that the quoted excerpts, were “destitute of [the] truth.”
Jefferson replied that he had paid no attention to the letters. “It would be strange indeed,”