John Quincy Adams -- if only he were running

Surfing television and the Internet can be an exercise in serendipity.

Bored with the incessant rerun of "A Christmas Story" on Christmas day, I discovered C-Span's presentation of an October 2007 State Department Forum on "U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente 1969-1976." The commentators were two men who were central figures in that period, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.

What caught my attention was not the discussion of U.S.-Soviet relations but a comment by Kissinger about another key figure of the time: President Gerald Ford, the only occupant of the Oval Office who was never elected to the presidency or vice presidency. President Nixon "nominated" and the Senate approved Ford as vice-president after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973, a scenario repeated in 1974 when Nixon resigned and Ford became president. In the context of the Nixon-Ford "transition's" effect on détente, Kissinger said: "Ford had never run for the presidency. He was as close to a normal human being as we'll ever get in that office." Surfing the Internet Dec. 26, I found the Web page of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The first item noted that the embassy had accepted a statue of John Quincy Adams to mark the anniversary of the start of formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia in December 1807. Adams was the first U.S. diplomatic representative (1809-1814) to the court of Tsar Alexander I in St. Petersburg.

Adam's public service stretched 51 years beginning in 1797 as U.S. envoy to Berlin and ending with his death in 1848 while in the U.S. House of Representatives -- 100 years before Gerald Ford's first election to the House In between, Adamsserved six years (1803-1809) in the U.S. Senate; was Secretary of State under James Monroe (1817-1825), where he crafted the Monroe Doctrine; ran for president in 1824 against Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Monroe's Treasury Secretary William Crawford, and Secretary of War John Calhoun. Jackson won both the popular and the Electoral College polls, but failed to gain a majority in either count. The decision moved to the House of Representatives, where Clay threw his support to Adams, who was selected as the sixth U.S. president on the first ballot over Jackson. Jackson supporters cried foul when the new president then appointed Clay as Secretary of State; was elected to the House of Representatives in 1831, serving until his death 17 years later.

Again, like Gerald Ford, Adams owns a distinction no other occupant of the Oval Office can claim: he is the only president to serve in Congress both before and after his election as president.

Despite his Federalist pedigree, Adams was not a prisoner of partisan politics but a man of principle -- what I take to be the meaning of Kissinger's description of Ford as a "normal human being." Throughout his 17 years in the House, Adams stood as a genuine "people's representative," opposing slavery and the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War -- the first war of America's "Manifest Destiny." And although Adams is remembered most of all by diplomatic historians for crafting, as Secretary of State, what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, it seems most appropriate that his post-presidential service was in the "people's chamber," both because of his stand on war and on slavery and because his election in 1830 was, according to historians, unexpected.

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica said of Adams: "Few men in American public life have possessed more intrinsic worth, more independence, more public spirit and more ability than Adams." History judges John Quincy Adams' presidency as a failure, but not the man.

It may well be too soon to judge objectively the efficacy of Ford's presidency, but there is no doubt that Ford, like Adams, was a success as a human being.

Would that the same can be said of the person elected our next president.

More to the point, may the same be said of each of us in 2008 and beyond.

Colonel Daniel M. Smith (Ret.), a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran is the Senior Fellow for Military Affairs at the Friend Committee on National Legislation.