John and Abigail Adams: Love and Liberty

While the District of Columbia has monuments to our first and third Presidents--Washington and Jefferson--our second commander-in-chief is conspicuously absent: President John Adams, the recent recipient of renewed and well-deserved attention thanks to David McCullough's excellent best-selling biography John Adams. As it is impossible to understand the man apart from the central figure in his life, his wife Abigail Smith Adams, they are both discussed here by several knowledgeable historians and biographers, including McCullough, Joseph Ellis, Phyllis Lee Levin, and Edith Gelles. Unfortunately, the program wastes time with superficial comments from Adams' descendants (who are too many generations removed from the subjects to matter) and politicos with no scholarly credentials such as Indiana congressman Tim Roemer and the elder George Bush--time which could have been better spent discussing Adams' passionate desire to provide for the abolition for slavery in the Declaration of Independence, and his alleged famous last words (“Thomas Jefferson survives”) which were technically inaccurate but metaphorically prophetic. Although not the excellent documentary this extraordinary couple warrants, this entry in A&E's popular Biography series is serviceable, and therefore recommended for large history collections. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Reagan)