It was the presidential kibitzing that was lip-read throughout the world. At Jimmy Carter’s funeral, observers could not get over a short, jovial exchange between Barack Obama and Donald Trump as all living presidents gathered to pay their respects—with George W. Bush giving Obama a friendly shot to the midsection as he passed by.
Lindsay M. Chervinsky’s graceful and elegant Making the Presidency offers a window into how inter-presidential dynamics began. Following George Washington, who had achieved mythical status while still living and had run for the presidency twice unopposed, John Adams was faced with the difficulties of being the first to be second.
Take the initial handoff. Washington was done with being “Mr. President.” (In the spring of 1789, Adams, who had spent significant time in the courts of Europe, had suggested the title be “His Highness, the President of the United States and the Protector of their Liberties.”) Adams “never escaped rumors that he preferred the trapping of monarchy,” Chervinsky writes. Washington excluded him from every cabinet meeting and “shared little information with him about state affairs.”
Having defeated Thomas Jefferson for the presidency in 1796, Adams found himself in the unenviable position of following a legend and leading a public he was bound to disappoint.
When Adams delivered his inaugural address in Philadelphia, neither his wife Abigail nor Martha Washington was in attendance. George was. As Adams mused, “The sight of the sun setting full-orbed, and another rising (though less splendid), was a novelty.”
Adams was also the first to navigate betrayal within his own administration. At the time, the vice president came from the opposing party, which led to both public and private undermining of the presidency by Jefferson—who, like Adams, never attended a cabinet meeting and “watched the administration from the outside.” Jefferson’s constant undercutting of Adams’s agenda led Abigail Adams to muse, “It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds.”
As president, Adams demonstrated enough humility to defer to his predecessor. He even asked Washington to return in his role as America’s lead general should fighting with France reach a boiling point. But he was confident enough to mark his own path. Adams fired his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, without the Senate’s involvement, thereby setting a precedent for independence and separation of powers: “Because of Washington’s unparalleled stature, that precedent was theoretical and untested. Adams made it a tangible governing power.”
When Washington died on December 14, 1799, no one had mourned a dead president before. By February, after months of elaborate ceremonies, Adams was ready to move and take the nation with him. “An eminent character and example of public virtue has now been sufficiently celebrated,” he wrote to a friend. “I hope we shall now let him enjoy his heaven in tranquility and no longer disturb his ghost with fulsome adulation.”
Chervinsky, director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, concludes her study by defending Adam’s legacy. Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson, she writes, “shaped the historical narrative” that left Adams—often “described as unpredictable, jealous, unreliable, mad with power, and vindictive”—resentful that his service hadn’t been granted the same high standing as Washington’s. But, she points out, Adams’s painful avoidance of a war with France led to an alliance that has held since 1800. And his graceful exit after the bitterly fought campaign against Jefferson that year, which included threats of violence and the specter of foreign interference, helped pave the way for future transitions. “The peaceful transfer of power,” the author reminds us, was not the result of a “clearly articulated process in the Constitution or a specific statute.” Rather, “this defining characteristic of American democracy emerged because the first two administrations established precedents that crystallized into norms and customs,” becoming “a cherished feature of the political system.”
Jefferson, in his inaugural address in March 1801, sought to heal the wounds rendered by the harsh campaigning. Months earlier, one of his aides had said Adams “had the hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams’s supporters had countered that Jefferson was “a mean-spirited low-lived fellow.” With him as president, they warned, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.” But with the winner having emerged, it was a time to bridge partisan divides. “We are all Republicans. We are all Federalists,” then–President Jefferson declared.
Adams was not there to hear those words, having taken a stagecoach back to Massachusetts at 4 a.m. It wouldn’t be until 1845, when John Tyler attended James K. Polk’s inauguration, that a defeated president attended the inauguration of the opponent to whom he had lost.
Adams and Jefferson maintained a lengthy friendship despite their prior acrimony, until they both died on July 4, 1826. Before the inauguration, Adams had written to his victorious opponent, “I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous Administration, which I heartily wish you.” The two men had put aside their grievances and recommitted themselves to “basic civic virtue. It was not comfortable,” Chervinsky emphasizes, “but they did it.”
Faith in the transfer of power through peaceful means remains treasured today, despite January 6, 2021. Perhaps that’s why the jovial exchange between Obama and Trump on January 9, 2025, was so striking. For a fleeting second, we were allowed to remember that we are all Democrats, we are all Republicans.
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