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CNN Crossfire

Jefferson Versus Adams

Aired July 04, 2001 - 19:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL PRESS, CO-HOST: Tonight, America's buzzing over John Adams.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID MCCULLOUGH, AUTHOR, "JOHN ADAMS": Adams never failed to answer the call of his country to serve, never once, and traveled farther in the service of the country and at greater risk than anybody of his time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRESS: But is the Adams' popularity coming at the expense of Thomas Jefferson? On this Independence Day, which one should be celebrated as the greater founding father?

ANNOUNCER: From Washington, CROSSFIRE. On the left, Bill Press; on the right, Robert Novak. In the CROSSFIRE, in New Orleans, historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at the University of New Orleans, and in Seattle, historian Richard Shenkman, editor of historynewsnetwork.com.

PRESS: Good evening. Happy birthday, USA. And welcome to CROSSFIRE.

Tonight, on this 4th of July, there will be a magnificent fireworks display at the Washington Monument. It will even cascade over the Jefferson Memorial, but not over the Adams monument because there isn't one. But 225 years later, that could well change. Congress is considering a memorial honoring our second president, and his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth: a move endorsed by two leading historians, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough, who have spurred an Adams' revival with their recent books.

But Ellis and McCullough also suggest that if John Adams doesn't get enough credit, Thomas Jefferson gets too much and not enough blame for owning slaves and maybe even sleeping with one of them.

So Adams and Jefferson, who sparred often in real life, are sparring still today 175 years after they both died on the same day: July 4, 1826.

Is John Adams our most underrated president? Is Thomas Jefferson our most overrated?

Sitting in again on the right tonight, one of our top-rated congressmen, Joe Scarborough of Florida.

Joe, take it away.

REP. JOE SCARBOROUGH (R-FL), GUEST HOST: Amen, top-rated. All right...

(LAUGHTER)

Hey, Rick Shenkman, welcome to CROSSFIRE. Let me ask you a question, you know, over the past five years, Thomas Jefferson has been slandered by pop historians in books, in movie, articles, even in a Nick Nolte Hollywood movie.

Now, I've got a question for you. You -- obviously, you and a lot of other people have heard about the "Nature" magazine article that came out a few years ago, and now the editors are admitting that it may have been misleading and one-sided, suggesting that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemmings. That was obviously on the front page of "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times" when it came out.

Now, we have a group of imminent historians that have produced a 500-page report that say that wasn't the truth at all. And as I've said, this "Nature" magazine, their editors have backtracked a little bit.

Don't you think that Thomas Jefferson after being slandered for five years is owed an apology on the 175th passing of he and Adams?

RICHARD SHENKMAN, EDITOR, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK: Well, I think what you're really asking is, do we want a hero or do we want a real man. And as a historian I want a real man, and a real man could father illegitimate children, he could sleep with his own slave. And the facts are always going to be ambiguous, and that's what historians deal with.

If you're looking for a hero and you want that true-blue Thomas Jefferson the way you had him in your schoolbooks when you were in the 3rd grade, that's not history.

SCARBOROUGH: Well, but at the same time, though, do you have any evidence that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings had a child? Is there any evidence out there? Again, we have a report by historians that have studied this exhaustively and they've come up with that there really is no DNA evidence at all to suggest that.

SHENKMAN: Well, the DNA evidence is ambiguous, and that leaves room for historians to disagree about the matter. This isn't a case where we've got Watergate tape recordings, and we can say, ah-hah, we've got him now. It's always going to be a matter of massaging the evidence that's there and trying to create a coherent story.

What story really explains Thomas Jefferson's life better? Is it the one that says, yes, he was an adulterer, he slept with a slave? Or is it this other one, this more true-blue one? That's something that is never going to be settled absolutely.

PRESS: We don't even have a blue dress in this case.

(LAUGHTER)

How are you going to figure it out?

Doug Brinkley, good evening. Welcome to CROSSFIRE.

DOUG BRINKLEY, UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS Thanks.

PRESS: Now, you have -- I've told you this to your face, I'll say it again -- you are one of my favorite American historians, down there working with Stephen Ambrose, maybe my all-time favorite. So I want to go easy on you.

My mission tonight is not so much to tear Thomas Jefferson down as to build John Adams up. So I simply want to ask you this question: If we can all agree that Thomas Jefferson has had more than his share of glory, from the Tidal Basin to Mount Rushmore, wouldn't you have to agree that John Adams had a lot -- has had a lot less of the glory that he deserves?

BRINKLEY: Put that way, the answer is yes, and I think it's very, very healthy that David McCullough has written a No. 1 best- settler and people are talking about Adams. And there's a -- I think I'm very positive about this idea of an Adams Memorial.

But the problem is don't build up John Adams by ripping down Thomas Jefferson and pitting them against each other. And that's what's happened both slightly in McCullough's book, but definitely in Ellis' book. And due to the Sally Hemming DNA thing -- let me just say it does not matter whether he had an affair with Sally Hemmings. The evil was owning slaves, and that's the big dark, you know, spot on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson.

What I don't like is that people don't realize that Jefferson during the civil rights moment was being quoted over and over again by people like James Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. Jefferson's relevant to the freedom movement all over the world today and John Adams is now.

PRESS: Well, I...

(LAUGHTER)

I was with you until that very last statement. I mean, let's -- and maybe some people don't recognize the contribution that John Adams made. Not to take the entire half hour here, but let me just -- let me just list a couple of things, right. As you know, this is a man who first wrote the outlines of the new federal government, this is a guy who named George Washington the head of the Continental Army. Then he took on the job of providing the soldiers with food and clothing and housing during that entire -- entire battle.

He was the strongest voice for independence, as you know, in the Congress. He asked Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. He went to Europe and helped persuade France to come in on our side. He went to the Netherlands and got us the money to fight the war. I mean, it goes on and on.

He came -- he was the first ambassador to the court of Saint James. He negotiated the treaty with Britain. He came back and served as vice president and then as president.

Wouldn't you have to say that nobody, nobody did more to bring about our independence than John Adams personally?

BRINKLEY: I agree with that, and -- but there's a difference between understanding what democracy really was. Adams in the Revolutionary War period was all those things. Adams as president, you get things like the Alien Sedition Act, which means you would not be able to criticize President Bush, you would be imprisoned for it. That was the mindset of John Adams in 1798. He signed the Alien Sedition Act and wanted to muzzle any press opposition.

Jefferson, on the other hand, understood that what made democracy work was open press, freedom of the press. Without it, we could never have worked.

And also, Bill, Adams didn't have a vision for America. Jefferson did. When Jefferson worked for a year to finally acquire New Orleans, control the Mississippi River with the Louisiana Purchase, buying it for $15 million from Napoleon, it was Jefferson that understood the Mississippi didn't divide America, that the Mississippi River pulled America together. And it's the visionary side of Jefferson that we need to celebrate on the 4th.

In addition, we need to celebrate the gritty determination for liberty that John Adams was the proponent of. And both need to be honored, but I don't think we need to be debunking Jefferson.

PRESS: Now, just a quick point, you're absolutely right about the Alien and Sedition Acts: It was a total disgrace. And if it were here today, yes, I would be in jail.

(LAUGHTER)

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, and let me just say this, Professor Brinkley, there are a lot of people that still think Bill Press should be in jail because of what he says about George Bush.

(LAUGHTER)

PRESS: With or without.

SCARBOROUGH: Amen.

Now, let's go to slavery, because I think...

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: Yes, go ahead, Rick. I'm sorry.

SHENKMAN: Yes, I just want to make the record about Jefferson a little more complicated. Floyd Abrams in "The New York Times" the other day made the argument that John Adams was bad on Alien and Sedition and Thomas Jefferson was good on Alien and Sedition. Well, the problem with that is that when Jefferson actually became president he turned out not to like criticism any more than John Adams did. And he goaded the people in his own party who were prosecutors in the states, particularly, for instance, in Pennsylvania, to go after their enemies.

BRINKLEY: Yeah, but you know...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Goading is different than imprisonment...

SHENKMAN: Now, they prosecuted them. They prosecuted them.

SCARBOROUGH: Let me point you to, Rick, let me point you to something, though, that Abrams wrote at the end. He said: "When Jefferson became president in 1801, he pardoned those convicted under the law. When Federalist newspapers made him subject of fierce attacks, he took no legal action. A visiting Prussian minister" saw outside of Jefferson's office a slanderous article on him, and this is what Jefferson said to him. He said -- he said: 'Should you ever here the reality of our liberty, our freedom of the press questioned, show them this paper and tell them where you found it."

Isn't this a man that understood the greatness of America rested in the ability of people, like Bill Press unfortunately 225 years later, to viciously attack presidents if that's what their political view was?

SHENKMAN: He changed his mind. By 1806, he was asking prosecutors in the states to use state sedition laws to go after his political enemies. He only backed off in one very famous case in Pennsylvania because he was going to be blackmailed. They were going to produce a letter in court that he had written confessing to how when he was young man he went after the wife of his best friend and wanted to make love to her.

BRINKLEY: We're dealing with libel issues, which Jefferson sort of...

(LAUGHTER)

PRESS: I think Doug wanted to make a point, here.

SHENKMAN: All right, Doug. Go ahead.

BRINKLEY: No, I mean, I think that's just dealing with a libel issue that Jefferson was concerned about. I think the thing we don't want to lose sight of here is that Jefferson, like Ben Franklin, was one of the first great Americans. Jefferson had many sides to him. He studied nature. He was an agronomist, a farmer. He loved the indigenous aspects of our culture. He became the -- we can't forget that politics is appearance, and Jefferson has lived on all these years because of his persona and because of his vision in a way that Adams hasn't for a reason, because Adams was always about the law.

You know, when he was in Boston, Adams was against the Boston Tea Party, Adams was against hanging King George in effigy. He never liked democracy because he saw it was a mob rule. He was an aristocrat. Jefferson was an aristocrat who had an understanding of the common man and his great tribute to the University of Virginia, one of the great state schools which he built, letting poor students get educated as well as the elite.

SHENKMAN: Well, John Adams wasn't an actor, which was Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the two men around him on either side of him of the presidency was. That's absolutely true. John Adams was a fellow who just shot his mouth off. He told people exactly what he thought. He wasn't reticent. He was too candid for his own good.

SCARBOROUGH: Not only, though, was he too candid, Isn't it true that he had such a bad temper that people like Benjamin Franklin actually accused him of being mentally ill? I mean, is this the type of person that you to put on the same level with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

SHENKMAN: Well, nobody's on the level in my book with George Washington. I think he is above them all. But certainly, people thought that Thomas Jefferson behaved very, very badly, in ways that John Adams never approached. Thomas Jefferson, after he leaves the presidency, bankrupts his family by pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into improvements into Monticello, and all because he wanted to have this glorious monument to his own ego.

John Adams, he just lived in a small little house. He wasn't an aristocrat, he was a farmer. He has many of these virtues that we like to see in Americans.

BRINKLEY: Jefferson was loved by everybody all over Europe much more than Adams, and all over the United States by people and intellectuals. And you know the famous quip of John Kennedy when he dined in the White House and had all the Nobel Prize winners there, President Kennedy made a toast and said, "We've never had this much genius in this room except when Jefferson dined alone."

And I think that comment from President Kennedy reverberates and is repeated a lot because there was nobody with the mind and scope and Renaissance feel of Thomas Jefferson, and we owe him a great, great deal.

PRESS: All right, folks, fellow historians, hold there just a second. We'll get back to our debate about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, which one deserves more credit?

As we go to break, however, here's a little clip from a recent movie, "1776," where Benjamin Franklin is trying to teach John Adams some manners. Maybe an impossible task.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "1776")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: John, why don't you give it up? Nobody listens to you. You're obnoxious and disliked.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: I'm not promoting John Adams. I'm promoting independence.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Inevitably, they can't help connecting the two Even your own cousin. And if Sam Adams can't put up with you, nobody can.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCARBOROUGH: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. I'm Congressman Joe Scarborough sitting in on the right.

You know, for over 200 years, Thomas Jefferson was hailed as the sage of Monticello, the conceiving spirit of the American Revolution and the author of "American Scripture." But over the past five years, he's been slandered by pop historians as a racist, a radical and a rapist.

Now defenders of John Adams are stepping into the fray and saying that Jefferson's reputation has been overblown at the expense of Adams, and they suggest that the second president was really the guiding spirit of the American Revolution.

Who's right? Well, joining us tonight to debate who was the better founding father, historian Richard Shenkman in Seattle and historian Douglas Brinkley in New Orleans.

PRESS: Doug, I want to go back where Joe started out tonight. But I don't think the issue is Sally Hemmings. I mean, Jefferson, if true, is hardly the first Washington politician to have a sex scandal, nor the last. But I think the issue is more slavery. The fact is, we know John Adams never owned a slave, out of principle. Jefferson owned hundreds until the day he died. Unlike George Washington, he didn't free all of his slaves. He only freed five of them. He supported slavery in the state of Missouri. He wrote that slaves were intellectually inferior and also that they had bad body odor.

And yet, this is the man who said, "All men are created equal." So doesn't that just make him a colossal hypocrite, his life and his writings?

BRINKLEY: I don't think it's a colossal hypocrite. There's -- the low marks, the horrible side of Jefferson is his views on race, although he was quite intelligent dealing with Native Americans, and if anybody reads his book, "Notes of Virginia," it's an abomination on race.

But you know, Walt Whitman once said -- and it's the great American statement -- "So I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." Jefferson contained multitudes, and to pick just on the one side of him over and over again and not look at all of his incredible accomplishments -- including the original Declaration of Independence in which he had, in the first draft of it, wanted to abolish slavery, and it was the Continental Congress and debate that said that's impossible. Jefferson carries a burden because he's from the slave-owning South. And the Southerners carry a burden of history, and that's the legacy of slavery.

SCARBOROUGH: Rick Shenkman, let me ask you this: Is it possible for Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, you said was elevated above all others, to have great characters? To be architects of freedom, not only for Americans, but for people all over the world, and still have slaves? And let me -- bouncing off of what the good doctor said about Jefferson, let's put up a quote of something that Jefferson wrote near the time of his death.

It says: "Nothing is certainly written in the book of faith more than that these people (slaves) will be free. Indeed, i tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Now, here's Jefferson near the end of his life, saying that he knows that slaves are going to be freed and that Americans are going to pay a price for slavery. Isn't it possible for us to look at the greatness of Jefferson and Washington and others, while recognizing that they were flawed people?

SHENKMAN: Well, I think you have hit the nail on the proverbial head here. I happen to love hypocrites, I have no problem...

(LAUGHTER)

That's OK. Hypocrisy is an American tradition.

And Thomas Jefferson is the symbol of American hypocrisy, wonderful. You know, we couldn't have a better symbol of that.

The fact of the matter is that the way we really ought to look at Washington and Jefferson, these famous Virginian slave holders, is that the remarkable thing is not that, oh, they were slaveholders and how could they be slaveholders! Given their pro-liberty philosophy.

The question really is: How did these people who grew up in a slaveholding community come to the conclusion that slavery was bad? That's what is really remarkable, how many of us, growing up in our own society with all of our own prejudices and assumptions about how the world works and should work, would be willing to come really come outside ourselves and say, you know, that view that you have about this, that or the other thing, that's not right.

And the fact that these guys could reach the conclusion in the 1790s, for instance, when slavery was huge in a huge part of the economy in Virginia and throughout the South, that slavery quote was "a necessary evil." And that's what they all agreed on, slavery was "a necessary evil" at the time. That's remarkable. That's something we ought to reflect on.

PRESS: Doug Brinkley, I want to ask you something else that bothers me about Thomas Jefferson. He preached sort of that he was above -- not above, party politics because party politics didn't exist -- but he deplored the idea that of the political parties in other kind of stuff.

And yet, in 1800, he actually paid James Callender to write vicious attacks. He was vice president, paid him to write vicious attacks against President John Adams, calling him insane and a monarchist, and a hermaphrodite.

And then when he was found out, he wrote to Abigail Adams, and said, you know, I wasn't paying them to do that. I was just giving him charitable contributions, because the poor man was broke. I mean, he was a coward, he was a liar. Is he your kind of model politician, Doug?

BRINKLEY: I think he's like Franklin Roosevelt was. Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a chameleon on plaid who changed his mind and tacked with the wind, just like FDR. But that makes a good politician at times.

Ben Franklin taught Jefferson something. Franklin loved Jefferson, and he said you don't need to be like John Adams and go in there with your view and shout at everybody and tell them what you think and lay it all on the line -- absorb the environment, change at the moment when you need to change. Politics is like sailing and you tack with the wind. But Tom, Franklin told him, deliver the memo. Deliver the piece of writing that will dominate the debate.

And throughout his career, Jefferson did that, and he pulled off the Louisiana Purchase when these Adams-like Federalists denounced it. And we would not have the United States without Thomas Jefferson.

PRESS: Gentlemen, great fireworks on the Fourth of July. I'm sorry the show is over. Thanks very much for being here and helping us celebrate America's birthday. Doug Brinkley in New Orleans. Rich Shenkman in Seattle.

And Yankee Doodle Joe Scarborough and I will be back with our closing comments about Adams and Jefferson.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCARBOROUGH: You know, I hate to admit with that big-time journalist Adam Climber that historians are liberal, but they really are. And these attacks on Jefferson over the past five years have proved it. They hate the fact that he believed in small government. And they even doctored up this Sally Hemmings story to help Bill Clinton during impeachment. I think it's a disgrace,and they owe him an apology. And so do you, Yankee Doodle.

PRESS: I can't believe you are quoting Adam Climber, that major league AH. But at any rate, look, here's the story. Thomas Jefferson had a better spin doctor than John Adams. That's all. They're both flawed men. But we think Jefferson was all great and Adams was not. They're both great Americans.

And Joe, I tell you what, I would personally like to tear down the Jefferson Memorial and build one to Adams, but I will compromise with you: let's build an Adams monument right next to the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin. Would that make you happy?

SCARBOROUGH: Maybe. We'll see.

PRESS: You are too easy, I love it. Happy Fourth of July.

SCARBOROUGH: Happy Fourth of July.

PRESS: From the left, I'm Bill Press, good night from CROSSFIRE.

SCARBOROUGH: From the right I'm Joe Scarborough, make sure to tune in tomorrow night for another edition of CROSSFIRE.

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