Dear John
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends for years – until they both entered politics on the new national stage. Joanne and historian Richard Bernstein explore their post-retirement reconciliation, and a new friendship conducted entirely via letter.
Music:
Collapsing Slo-Mo by Podington Bear
Cloudbank by Podington Bear
Clair De Lune (Pianet, Moog, and Brushes Arr.) by Podington Bear
View Transcript
JOANNE: Thanks for downloading this episode of BackStory on the lives of presidents after they leave office. If you enjoy this BackStory, check out BackStoryRadio.org. There’s plenty more about presidents where this comes from.
BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
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NATHAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.
BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines I’m Brian Balogh.
NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connelly.
JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman.
NATHAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. And each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.
JOANNE: Speaking of the news, this week, you may have seen two familiar faces in an unfamiliar style, as the National Portrait Gallery unveiled the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama. Portraits are just one of the honors likely to head your way if you are a former president of the United States. In fact, there’s now a whole landscape for the modern post-presidency, taking in memoirs, speaking tours, presidential libraries, and charitable foundations that often serve to cement a president’s legacy.
In today’s show, we’re going to be exploring the post presidency and asking, how did it take shape? To start, we’re going to turn back to two early presidents, one sitting in his study in Braintree, Massachusetts, and the other at home just down the road from our studios here in Charlottesville. I’m talking about presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of course. And perhaps I should be more correct and say ex-presidents, because we’re catching them in 1812, and both of these men have left office.
BRIAN: Well, that certainly gives them a lot more time to sit around their studies, Joanne.
JOANNE: It definitely does. And above all, it gives them a chance to write, to write letters to friends, to family, to each other.
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RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They have launched into an amazing intellectual adventure on paper.
JOANNE: That’s a good friend of mine, Richard Bernstein. And he has spent a lot of time reading their letters to each other, as have I.
RICHARD BERNSTEIN: These letters are just amazing. I mean, you read them and you get a sense of John Adams. He’s an old man, about 77 years old when he starts writing this retirement series of letters. And he writes up until after he turns 90. And he’s every bit as adventurous, and youthful, and playful as he was when he was a teenager writing in his diary. Jefferson, I think, is a little more conscious of what the Romans called gravitas and dignitas.
JOANNE: Adams and Jefferson had been friends all through the Revolutionary War and for years after. But beginning in the late 1790s, because of their politics, they became less and less friendly. You may remember that they actually ran against each other in the election of 1800. It was a really nasty election with a lot of mudslinging on both sides, and their friendship didn’t survive it.
RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They sit in a stew of funk and resentment for what really is nearly 12 years.
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JOANNE: These letters were their reconciliation after not speaking to each other for over a decade. You kind of get the sense that it opened up the floodgates of all the things they would have loved to discuss with each other. The two wrote to each other constantly pretty much for the rest of their lives. If you look at the dates of their letters, sometimes they’re writing nearly every day.
NATHAN: And I bet that kept the post office busy.
BRIAN: Hey, you’re not kidding, Nathan.
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RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They marveled, by the way– they love it only takes a week for a letter to get from Braintree to Monticello or from Monticello to Braintree. Now, I don’t know if you remember when we were first getting to know each other, and I wrote you letters, and it took about a week for a letter to get from New York to Charlottesville. So I was struck by how little progress we’ve made.
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JOANNE: And we were kind of talking about intellectual things, too.
RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Yes, we were.
JOANNE: Now these letters are about all sorts of things. They talk about philosophy, their families. Both complain about the indignities of old age. John Adams actually has a great sense of humor that he lets creep into these letters from time to time, and my favorite example of that is how he signs off one letter. He signs it, “In the 89th year of his age, still too fat to last much longer.”
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RICHARD BERNSTEIN: One of the things about that that I love is he has a sense of the ridiculous, and he’s delighted to play with it, even if it makes fun of himself.
BRIAN: It sounds like these letters ended up being kind of a self-portrait of the artists as ex-presidents, so to speak. Did they talk seriously about politics, or is it all jokes and philosophy?
RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They occasionally reference politics in their correspondence. They occasionally will kick around an issue together. And every now and then, the sitting president will write to all the ex-presidents to ask for their advice. But they’re very careful not to get too much involved. They think of themselves as retired. And I think at one point, John Adams even uses the metaphor, “We’re old men and we will look silly buckling on our political armor to go into battle again.”
JOANNE: They’re far more concerned about the future, about posterity generally, and about how posterity will think of them.
RICHARD BERNSTEIN: They are both obsessed with that question.
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I mean, one of the central themes of the correspondence is did we do right? Have we got a legacy that we are passing on to posterity? What will they think of what we did?
I mean, they’re like the Roman god Janus. They’re looking backward and forward at the same time. They really, really want to take the long view and to understand the significance of what they had done in the larger course of history. And I think learning that perspective and learning that balance is really important, and I think it’s a legacy that Adams and Jefferson both tried to leave us.
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