Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein by Isaacson Walter

Author:Isaacson, Walter [Isaacson, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Bon Vivant

Paris, 1778–1785

JOHN ADAMS

In April 1778, shortly after the American treaties with France had been signed, John Adams arrived in Paris to replace the recalled Silas Deane as one of the three American commissioners. The French were not thrilled by the switch. “Mr. Deane,” reported Edward Bancroft to his spymasters in London, “is highly esteemed here and his successor J. Adams is much distrusted.” Bancroft reported that Adams was also unhappy. “Adams is heartily disappointed to find everything done and talks of returning.”

When they served together in the Congress, Adams had initially distrusted Franklin, then gone through a blender of emotions: bemusement, resentment, admiration, and jealousy. On their trip to negotiate with Lord Howe on Staten Island (when they shared a bed and open window), he had found Franklin both amusing and annoying. So, when he arrived in Paris, it was probably inevitable that he and Franklin would, as they did, enjoy and suffer a complex mix of disdain and grudging admiration for one another.

Some have found the relationship baffling: Did Adams resent or respect Franklin? Did Franklin find Adams maddening or solid? Did they like or dislike each other? The answer, which is not all that baffling because it is often true of the relationship between two great and strong people, is that they felt all of these conflicting emotions about each other, and more.

They were both very smart, but otherwise they had quite different personalities. Adams was unbending and outspoken and argumentative, Franklin charming and taciturn and flirtatious. Adams was rigid in his personal morality and lifestyle, Franklin famously playful. Adams learned French by poring over grammar books and memorizing a collection of funeral orations; Franklin (who cared little about the grammar) learned the language by lounging on the pillows of his female friends and writing them amusing little tales. Adams felt comfortable confronting people, whereas Franklin preferred to seduce them, and the same was true of the way they dealt with nations.

Adams, who was 42 when he arrived, was thirty years younger than Franklin and about five years younger than Franklin’s son, William. More sensitive to insults, real and imagined, Adams came to feel more strongly about Franklin than vice versa. At times, he was driven almost to distraction by Franklin’s insouciance and self-indulgence. “He envied—and suspected—people with no rough edges, people who moved easily in the finer circles,” Berkeley historian Robert Middlekauff writes of Adams in his textured study Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. He was “incapable of the easy gesture, and incapable too of the small hypocrisies that carry other men through life.” David McCullough, in his masterly biography of Adams, is more sympathetic and balanced about him, but he too conveys the rich complexity of his attitudes toward Franklin.1

Most of Adams’s resentments were occasioned by ill-disguised jealousy at being overshadowed. Franklin had “a monopoly of reputation here and an indecency in displaying it,” Adams complained to a friend after a few months in Paris. But in reading some of the unkind things he

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