Along with Washington’s Farewell Address, Adams’ Independence Day oration is often cited as evidence of an American tradition of non-entanglement with a corrupt and corrupting world. But according to Robert Kagan, a former State Department official and influential neoconservative, Americans’ image of themselves as inward-looking and restrained—except in response to attacks—isn’t necessarily shared by others, who see the United States as an ambitious, violent nation, always ready to encroach upon its neighbors. The less flattering version was, in a sense, true, Mr. Kagan asserts in Dangerous Nation, a sweeping, essentially superficial reinterpretation of American foreign policy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Americans did exhibit an appetite for territory as they raced across the continent, trampling on Indians and Mexicans, the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana. But Mr. Kagan claims that the nation’s expansionist behavior was motivated less by acquisitiveness or a lust for power than by a commitment to spread democracy, freedom and prosperity throughout its hemisphere and around the world.

From the outset, Mr. Kagan emphasizes, neither a “restive and energetic American people” nor the politicians who represented them sought isolation. Washington’s Farewell Address was a temporary expedient for a fledgling nation, a pose struck to prevent an alliance with France. Andrew Jackson had routed the Seminoles in 1818 in an attempt to wrest control of Florida. And Americans supported independence movements in Latin America and Greece in the 1820’s. Convinced that a liberal ideology gave American nationalism an international component, Mr. Kagan declares that John Quincy Adams’ audience “barely noticed” his “comparatively brief appeal for American restraint.”

Mr. Kagan contends that slavery had a profound impact on American foreign policy. Convinced that slavery must spread to survive, Southerners pushed for the annexation of Texas, Cuba and Mexico. In response, anti-slavery politicians in the North, including Adams and Daniel Webster, who had been expansionists early in their careers, opposed empire-building. After the Civil War, Southerners, scarred by memories of military occupation and the forced enfranchisement of blacks, made sure that the Democratic Party renounced territorial ambitions. Republicans, however, were even more determined to apply the Civil War model of a “‘selfless’ war on behalf of ‘humanity’ and ‘civilization’” to would-be or could-be “sister republics.” At the end of the century, Mr. Kagan concludes, two earthquakes—economic depression and populism— broke the political logjam and brought these Republicans to power. The “new departure” in foreign policy that ensued was actually a continuation and culmination of historical forces “reaching back to before the founding of the nation.”

Dangerous Nation is provocative; it is not persuasive. Relying on the work of other scholars rather than immersion in original sources, Mr. Kagan seems to cherry-pick the intelligence, omitting information that’s not congenial to his thesis. Although politicians often have two reasons for their actions—a good reason and the real reason—he takes at face value the pronouncements that moral and humanitarian concerns shaped American foreign policy in the late 19th century. And he issues a summary judgment against economic interpretations without giving them a hearing, let alone a trial.

Many of the myths he shreds are made of straw. Serious students of American foreign policy do not hold that the United States was an isolationist nation. They do not deny that the U.S. used force to satisfy its ambitions for territory in North America and to extend its power in Central America, the Caribbean and South America. And they readily agree that Americans desired to spread their political, economic and cultural values.

Americans may have been in accord about some ends, but they had serious and substantive differences about the means. Some of them thought it un-American to acquire colonies or fight wars of occupation. Mr. Kagan acknowledges that Senator John Sherman of Ohio “spoke for many” when he asked, “What becomes of the republican doctrine that all governments must be founded on the consent of the governed?” Over the next half-century, Mr. Kagan adds, Americans would continue to ask whether in the name of democracy, people could be denied the right of self-determination. But these dissenters do not get their innings in Dangerous Nation, which dwells almost exclusively on the expansionist tendencies in America’s founding principles and gives a misleading impression that there was a consensus about how to establish the nation’s place in the world.

The dissenting tradition in American foreign policy—not the Southern center of gravity in the Democratic Party—was responsible for a foreign policy that “proceeded by fits and starts” until the 1890’s, with treaties signed and then abandoned, the annexation of Hawaii sought and then dropped, a war to liberate Cuba threatened in 1873 and not declared until 1898. And it accounts for the anti-colonialist movement that coalesced during the occupation of the Philippines—and reappeared throughout the 20th century.

Dangerous Nation ends with the Spanish-American War. It makes no mention of our current President’s war in Iraq—but a defense of that war seems to be Mr. Kagan’s subtext. (His book is strewn with the terminology of 21st-century foreign policy: Benjamin Franklin lobbied for a “preemptive strike” against the French and Indians; Reconstruction was America’s “first experiment in ‘nation-building.’”) Mr. Kagan apparently believes that George W. Bush is building on rather than breaking with American foreign-policy traditions. And because those policies are driven predominantly by a freedom-loving morality and humanitarianism, Americans can—and should—wear as a badge of honor the appellation “dangerous nation.” Welcome to Fantasy Island.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Along with Washington’s Farewell Address, Adams’ Independence Day oration is often cited as evidence of an American tradition of non-entanglement with a corrupt and corrupting world. But according to Robert Kagan, a former State Department official and influential neoconservative, Americans’ image of themselves as inward-looking and restrained—except in response to attacks—isn’t necessarily shared by others, who see the United States as an ambitious, violent nation, always ready to encroach upon its neighbors. The less flattering version was, in a sense, true, Mr. Kagan asserts in Dangerous Nation, a sweeping, essentially superficial reinterpretation of American foreign policy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Americans did exhibit an appetite for territory as they raced across the continent, trampling on Indians and Mexicans, the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana. But Mr. Kagan claims that the nation’s expansionist behavior was motivated less by acquisitiveness or a lust for power than by a commitment to spread democracy, freedom and prosperity throughout its hemisphere and around the world.

From the outset, Mr. Kagan emphasizes, neither a “restive and energetic American people” nor the politicians who represented them sought isolation. Washington’s Farewell Address was a temporary expedient for a fledgling nation, a pose struck to prevent an alliance with France. Andrew Jackson had routed the Seminoles in 1818 in an attempt to wrest control of Florida. And Americans supported independence movements in Latin America and Greece in the 1820’s. Convinced that a liberal ideology gave American nationalism an international component, Mr. Kagan declares that John Quincy Adams’ audience “barely noticed” his “comparatively brief appeal for American restraint.”

Mr. Kagan contends that slavery had a profound impact on American foreign policy. Convinced that slavery must spread to survive, Southerners pushed for the annexation of Texas, Cuba and Mexico. In response, anti-slavery politicians in the North, including Adams and Daniel Webster, who had been expansionists early in their careers, opposed empire-building. After the Civil War, Southerners, scarred by memories of military occupation and the forced enfranchisement of blacks, made sure that the Democratic Party renounced territorial ambitions. Republicans, however, were even more determined to apply the Civil War model of a “‘selfless’ war on behalf of ‘humanity’ and ‘civilization’” to would-be or could-be “sister republics.” At the end of the century, Mr. Kagan concludes, two earthquakes—economic depression and populism— broke the political logjam and brought these Republicans to power. The “new departure” in foreign policy that ensued was actually a continuation and culmination of historical forces “reaching back to before the founding of the nation.”

Dangerous Nation is provocative; it is not persuasive. Relying on the work of other scholars rather than immersion in original sources, Mr. Kagan seems to cherry-pick the intelligence, omitting information that’s not congenial to his thesis. Although politicians often have two reasons for their actions—a good reason and the real reason—he takes at face value the pronouncements that moral and humanitarian concerns shaped American foreign policy in the late 19th century. And he issues a summary judgment against economic interpretations without giving them a hearing, let alone a trial.

Many of the myths he shreds are made of straw. Serious students of American foreign policy do not hold that the United States was an isolationist nation. They do not deny that the U.S. used force to satisfy its ambitions for territory in North America and to extend its power in Central America, the Caribbean and South America. And they readily agree that Americans desired to spread their political, economic and cultural values.

Americans may have been in accord about some ends, but they had serious and substantive differences about the means. Some of them thought it un-American to acquire colonies or fight wars of occupation. Mr. Kagan acknowledges that Senator John Sherman of Ohio “spoke for many” when he asked, “What becomes of the republican doctrine that all governments must be founded on the consent of the governed?” Over the next half-century, Mr. Kagan adds, Americans would continue to ask whether in the name of democracy, people could be denied the right of self-determination. But these dissenters do not get their innings in Dangerous Nation, which dwells almost exclusively on the expansionist tendencies in America’s founding principles and gives a misleading impression that there was a consensus about how to establish the nation’s place in the world.

The dissenting tradition in American foreign policy—not the Southern center of gravity in the Democratic Party—was responsible for a foreign policy that “proceeded by fits and starts” until the 1890’s, with treaties signed and then abandoned, the annexation of Hawaii sought and then dropped, a war to liberate Cuba threatened in 1873 and not declared until 1898. And it accounts for the anti-colonialist movement that coalesced during the occupation of the Philippines—and reappeared throughout the 20th century.

Dangerous Nation ends with the Spanish-American War. It makes no mention of our current President’s war in Iraq—but a defense of that war seems to be Mr. Kagan’s subtext. (His book is strewn with the terminology of 21st-century foreign policy: Benjamin Franklin lobbied for a “preemptive strike” against the French and Indians; Reconstruction was America’s “first experiment in ‘nation-building.’”) Mr. Kagan apparently believes that George W. Bush is building on rather than breaking with American foreign-policy traditions. And because those policies are driven predominantly by a freedom-loving morality and humanitarianism, Americans can—and should—wear as a badge of honor the appellation “dangerous nation.” Welcome to Fantasy Island.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Mr. Chappelle lit a cigarette. "Fuck the law-I'm a rebel!" he proclaimed after taking the stage. "I didn't vote for Bloomberg. I didn't ask for this shit! If anything happens, I'll pay the ticket. I'm rich, bitch!" He was wearing a puffy khaki vest over a green and gray zip-up shirt. The stand-up comic and host of Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central was there to try out some new material, much of it topical.

First he brought up Pat Tillman, the 27-year-old N.F.L. star who turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army in the wake of Sept. 11. He was killed in Afghanistan during a possible friendly fire incident last April. "Pat Tillman will go down in history as the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived! It's like, 'Nigga, get on the Internet and do some research before you be making rash decisions like that!'" The crowd tittered, unsure of whether or not to laugh. "And a hush falls over the crowd," Mr. Chappelle said with a smile.

A Muslim and an outspoken critic of the war (although he rarely discusses his religious beliefs), Mr. Chappelle went on to list a few of the latest statistics from Iraq. "What's going on in Falluja is pretty upsetting," he said, his face going serious. "That's why I watch Fox News-because we're winning on that motherfucker!" The crowd erupted.

He said he didn't trust the President. "George W. Bush has a box on his back, and he tells us it's nothing. Nothing? Just say it's a box of Newports or something, motherfucker, but nothing?

"I had more jokes, but I can't remember," he said, fishing a blue notebook out of his jeans pocket. "These may not be funny.

"Nobody likes AIDS more than Magic Johnson. AIDS has done more for Magic Johnson than basketball ever did! He's never looked better! Hell, I'll take some AIDS!"

Many of the women in the audience frowned in disapproval, their glossy lips pressed in a firm line. Mr. Chappelle took a sip from a white mug.

"I'm a conspiracy theorist," he continued, "and I think AIDS is a conspiracy. I mean, something comes along out of nowhere and who does it kill? Niggas, fags and junkies! How convenient! And whoever came up with that shit was evil and clever. After all, where did they hide the AIDS? In the pussy!"

The audience laughed loudly, but there were still some frowns, so Mr. Chappelle moved on to a funnier S.T.D.

"Did you know that one out of five people have herpes? One out of five of us have 'the herp'! Ain't that some shit! You know what that means?" He began pointing at people in the audience. "One, two, three, four, HERPES!" Everyone laughed.

Mr. Chappelle tried another. "Nothing does more than penises to fight racial discrimination." He smiled a knowing grin. "My penis is a straight-up humanitarian! My penis actually gave a speech the other day called 'I Have a Dream.'" He launched into Dr. King's stilted cadence: "'I have a dream … that one day … black women … white women … Indian women … will all be bouncing on top of me …. '" The comic laughed along with everyone else and, as though greatly amusing himself, he collapsed against the red brick wall behind him in hysterics.

He flipped through his notebook some more. "That shit ain't funny," he said, turning a page.

A little while later, Mr. Chappelle told a joke that didn't go over very well. He looked out at the audience and, in an attempt at recovery, he pointed at a woman:

"Herpes!" he shouted. That one got a laugh.

As Mr. Chappelle left the stage, he thanked the audience and returned his notebook to his jeans pocket. Then he galloped up the stairs and out into the rain, leaving the audience and six comics behind.

-Noelle Hancock

Sir Bob's Tart Tongue

At the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 19, in a wood-paneled conference room bedecked with oil paintings of crusty grand strategists, a slight, aging rock star stood before a microphone. His hair was long, gray and unkempt. He wore a pinstriped charcoal suit, sneakers and a day's worth of stubble. He appeared to be chewing gum. His name was Bob Geldof. Once upon a time, he saved the world.

Mr. Geldof was answering the inevitable question about the intermingling of politics and celebrity. "I think it's fucking pathetic that some twats who get up onstage and play to 80,000 people can help create policy," he said. His audience twittered. The council hosts its share of colorful characters-Joe Biden, Donald Rumsfeld, Olusegun Obasanjo-but it's safe to say that the word "twat" doesn't get thrown around often at the organization's decorous 68th Street headquarters. Unperturbed, Mr. Geldof kept rolling merrily along in his rough Irish brogue. "Africans can't help themselves, because they're disempowered by poverty," he said. "Nobody's arguing about this, so why don't we just fucking do it?"

Mr. Geldof is a man known for his strident opinions ("the world's most effective troublemaker," The Observer of London once called him) and for his tart tongue. This is a songwriter who is most famous not for any line he sang, but for one he reputedly growled into a live television camera: "Give us your fucking money!" One and a half billion people were watching. The year was 1985. The event was Live Aid, the bicontinental concert that Mr. Geldof organized to ease the suffering of the starving Ethiopians. David Bowie, Queen and Paul McCartney played. And people did give Mr. Geldof their money. Live Aid raised more than $100 million and is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. Overnight, Mr. Geldof, the lead singer of the middling Dublin band the Boomtown Rats, was transformed into Sir Bob, the profane saint on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last week, Mr. Geldof was visiting the council on behalf of the Commission for Africa, a British governmental advisory body to which he was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair. But he had a bit of music business to attend to as well: He was hawking a new DVD box set of the Live Aid concert, which is being released in honor of the 20th anniversary of the event, and was hyping a new recording of his 1984 hit single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (All proceeds will go toward antipoverty programs in Africa.) "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was originally recorded by a group of the biggest British pop stars of the mid-80's-Boy George, Simon LeBon, Sting, Bono-under the name Band Aid, selling some 12 million copies and inspiring the even bigger American hit, "We Are the World." This year's version of Band Aid includes Coldplay's Chris Martin, Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Dido and, once again, the ageless Bono, himself no slacker when it comes to Third World do-gooding.

"We're both Irish," Mr. Geldof said of Bono. "So we know how to talk. We bore people to death." But if the U2 frontman has cultivated a genteel public image, touring Africa with a Republican Treasury Secretary and reducing Jesse Helms to tears, Mr. Geldof remains unapologetically choleric. "My vision of the 21st century is of people dying on our [television] screens forever, and it's intolerable," he said, citing the continuing suffering in Sudan as an example. Mr. Geldof laid much of the blame on unfair trade policies that force developing nations to compete on uneven economic ground with Europe and America. Citing a European Union subsidy for dairy farmers, he asked, "Are we seriously suggesting that a fucking cow is worth more than a human being?

"It's absolute madness," he continued. "I'm a pop singer. If I can see it, it's bonkers."

-Andrew Rice

For the Love of Money

When The Transom called the Learning Annex to sign up for a seminar titled "How to Marry Rich," the receptionist said: "There are only five spaces left in the class! My girlfriend is trying to get me to go," she added with a giggle, as if embarrassed. And who wouldn't be? Well, not the 75 women who showed up for the course on the night of Thursday, Nov. 18. Gathered under the florescent lighting of a shabby room in a Hell's Kitchen high-rise was every man's worst nightmare: a group of materialistic, high-maintenance women ready for marriage.

Sitting side by side on green park benches, the audience was decidedly diverse. There were twentysomething women leaning forward eagerly, thongs sticking up from the back of their Girbaud jeans. There were women in their late 50's, perched primly in nice suits, fresh off the Metro North from Darien, Conn.

"They might call you the trophy, but you're the one who gets the prize!" Stephanie Adams, the lecturer, announced to the crowd. She then instructed the women on which hunting grounds were the best bets: "Nightclubs are just not the way to meet someone!" Instead, she suggested that the manhunters hit up charity events, gallery openings, corporate functions, and expensive restaurants and bars near investment banks. "Those types of men are always keeping their eyes open for new investments!" she chirped.

"Men go to those places-it weeds out certain types of people," she continued.

Wealthy people rarely go to "regular" clubs, but instead prefer to bounce around to the "latest places," according to Ms. Adams. "Wealthy people did not get rich by being stupid. They will eventually realize that they are being hunted and migrate to new territory. But always head home around 11 p.m., because you'll find less quality people out after midnight."

Next, Ms. Adams advised the audience that, when fraternizing with the rich, dress as the rich do. "But what if we can't afford nice clothing?" a woman asked.

"Sometimes you may have to set aside money and invest in one nice outfit that you can wear to all of these places," Ms. Adams answered. The Transom recalled an old Simpsons episode where Marge finds a Chanel suit at a thrift store and, while wearing it, is invited to join a country club. The problem is that the only appropriate attire she owns is the suit, so every time she goes to the club, she has to alter it with scissors and a sewing machine to make it look like a new outfit. Eventually, all that remains could pass for a Chanel scarf.

About a half-hour into the seminar, a man wearing sunglasses raised his hand and stood up. "I think I'm in the wrong place. I'm supposed to be in the seminar titled 'How to Meet and Pick Up Girls Any Time, Anywhere.' As he edged his way out of the room, a woman called out, "Hey! Are you rich?"

Somewhere, Gloria Steinem just took two steps back.

Ms. Adams is an interesting bird. Claiming to be a direct descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, she's a mix of West Indian, Cherokee Indian, English, Welsh, Italian and Egyptian. After high school, she signed with the Wilhelmina and Elite modeling agencies, posed in Playboy as Miss November 1992, and is now an "avid investor" in Fortune 500 companies. She's written seven books on spirituality and calls herself a "sorceress."

According to the course description, Ms. Adams "has dated some of the wealthiest and most famous men in the world."

"I went out with Robert De Niro, and that didn't work out," Ms. Adams confessed later over the phone. "We're both Leos, so we clashed big time. Also, I don't believe in sleeping with someone because they're famous, and that was a big argument we had. I guess he expects all women to fall straight into bed and sleep with him, and that's just not who I am."

She was also engaged to John Casablancas, the founder of the Elite Modeling Agency. The pair dated for over two years before Ms. Adams dumped him. "It was very public when I dated John Casablancas. He'd wanted to marry me, but I'm not like most women in that I really didn't want to get married."

She made an exception when she met her ex-husband, who, according to the course description, "is a well-known Italian Investment Banker" (capitalization not ours).

"I really did marry for love," Ms. Adams insisted. "Honestly-I didn't care about meeting someone successful. I already had seven figures in the bank, so I didn't need my husband's seven figures. Women should find someone they're really happy with, not just seek out men for their bank account. And if you're not attracted to a man, the marriage is not going to work out." But isn't that the point?

As if on cue, a Latina woman with a banana clip in her hair brought up the subject of prenuptial agreements.

"I'm not a fan of those," Ms. Adams replied, somewhat hilariously: She and her ex-husband didn't sign a prenuptial agreement, and the notoriously aggressive lawyer Raoul Felder was her divorce attorney.

During the 15-minute intermission, the mirrored wall reflected the audience. A number of people left, among them a 26-year-old pretty blond Russian named Elsa. "She doesn't tell us specifically where to meet these guys. She speaks in generalities," she complained. Elsa was right: Every time someone raised her hand and asked for specific examples, Ms. Adams said there wasn't enough time to get into it, but that she'd gladly meet with them for a private (read: paid) consultation.

An Asian girl named Jill stuck it out and started spooning up some Fruit on the Bottom yogurt. A 32-year-old scientist and '02 grad from the Yale School of Arts and Sciences, she said that while her field is dominated by men, the salaries were not that high. She said that most of what Ms. Adams was saying was common sense.

Some highlights included:

"Do not dress to the nines and troll hotels unless you want to be mistaken for a high-class prostitute."

"Give your man a little gift now and then to show him you're not selfish."

"Don't lie and say that you're an heiress or a princess in order to impress him."

"People who run companies are used to being in charge all the time, so outside of the office they like it if you take charge and start running things."

And The Transom's personal favorite: "Do not act like a floozy." (Thank goodness she said something!)

Later, we asked Ms. Adams if she ever thought she would marry again. "Well, that would be difficult," she explained, "now that I'm a lesbian."

-N.H.

Silly Joel

On the evening of Nov. 17, Billy Joel was drinking red wine and squiring his 23-year-old bride, Kate Lee, around the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda at the American Museum of Natural History. She was swathed in a black Dolce and Gabbana gown, and he was folded into a black Ralph Lauren suit. We asked Mr. Joel how married life was treating him, but were interrupted by a tray of glass goblets crashing to the floor. "Much better than that!" he laughed, gesturing to the broken shards. "My new wife is terrific! I'm feathering my nest and enjoying being married. I'm just a guy who's happy to be married. It's a rarity in these times."

He said that he was there as a tribute to his grandfather, Karl Amson Joel, an amateur paleontologist who had an exhibit at the museum that was shown for 10 to 15 years throughout the 40's and 50's. "I just love the damn architecture of the place! Look at that!" he said, gesturing to the enormous columns flanking the revolving doors at the museum's entrance. "They're Corinthian columns. Not Doric, not Ionic-Corinthian. People that come here always ask"-here he adopted a upper-crust, highfalutin accent-"'What kind of column is that?' It's a test everybody gives each other.

"Everything in New York used to look like this! Can you imagine that?" Mr. Joel continued, taking a swipe at Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for a new football stadium, arguably the city's most divisive urban-planning issue in 20 years. "The way the city spent money back then wasn't on a football stadium, but on something that was lasting. I mean, I hope I'm not putting myself in a political-football situation here, but look at this place. It's absolutely gorgeous! If I don't give a damn about football, I can come to the Museum of Natural History."

Others that came to the Museum Ball to raise money for the AMNH's educational and scientific programs included Sarah Jessica Parker, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, mannequin-about-town Karolina Kurkova and TeenVogue editor Amy Astley. Under the enormous, newly refurbished whale and the undulating, digital blue sky of the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, the group merrily noshed on braised beef short ribs, whipped parsnips and potatoes, and desserts inspired by museum exhibits.

Mr. Joel scampered off to get another glass of red wine. Once he returned, The Transom asked him the question that was on everybody's mind: Did he "pour one out" for recently deceased rapper Old Dirty Bastard? "Well, I tell you, I was not shocked by his death. I have a feeling that a lot of these recording contracts are predicated on the fact that after three years, you have to either die or be killed! I'm not celebrating anybody's death, but a lot of these guys do die too early, and too young-but they do sell a lot of records, and that's good for the music business." He paused. "Let me ask you this: Aside from having a hit record, what's the sexiest thing in entertainment?"

Uh, we give up.

"Death!"

-N.H.

The Transom Also Hears That ….

Yes, that was Don King who came to the rescue at Jean-Georges' V Steakhouse and the Stone Rose at Time Warner Center on Nov. 22. The woolly-haired boxing promoter turned human metal detector when Rita Cosby dropped her $500,000 diamond brooch in front of guests Henry Kissinger, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Bolton, Jocelyn Wildenstein, Evander Holyfield and Steve Forbes at the Wild Wild West Celebrity Gala and Poker Night, the site of a 40th-birthday party for Fox News' Ms. Cosby. Mr. King scooped up the jewel and returned it to the birthday gal. Later, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude, Harry Winston heir Richard Winston and his wife, Susan, lassoed Mr. King to play at their table.

-Marcus Baram

Last November, in the waning months of the Clinton administration, an unfamiliar man approached the White House claiming to be the President of the United States. He was wearing a powdered wig and insisted that it was the year 1800, but still he was granted entry and allowed to roam the complex at will, unguarded. A dangerous security lapse? A creative pardon-seeker's ruse? No, just an actor impersonating John Adams, hired to liven up the 200th anniversary of the White House.

Of all the giants of early American history, Adams might be the easiest to impersonate, for the simple reason that few of us remember what he looked like. That will change soon. With this ambitious biography, his first since Truman (1992), David McCullough is sure to reconfigure the American pantheon one more time. Truman, readers will recall, launched an unabashed revival: Suddenly, liberals and conservatives were wild about Harry (both camps hated him in his prime). To this day, the Truman Show is going strong. The Man from Independence is routinely included in the "great" or "near-great" categories, a fact that would have sent Eleanor Roosevelt running for the smelling salts, and still drives Gore Vidal crazy.

David McCullough is our most venerable historical commentator. He's not an academic, though he holds 27 honorary degrees. He personifies a centrist approach to American history that mixes highbrow themes with popular formats-think Ken Burns with good hair. Telegenic looks and soothing pipes make Mr. McCullough a natural for TV, and he has not squandered the opportunity. From 1988 until recently, Mr. McCullough hosted The American Experience on PBS, and he has narrated countless other projects, including his own popular books on tape. In so doing, he has become something unique-the literal voice of history to most Americans.

In 1993, Mr. McCullough came across Joseph Ellis' excellent biography, Passionate Sage, and ruminated on a new project on the friendship between Adams and Jefferson-the greatest epistolary relationship in American history. In so doing, he was anticipating a mildly disturbing trend in which 20th-century Presidential biographers lurch backward in time as they troll for new material (TV historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss are doing Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt biographer H.W. Brands just wrote on Franklin). What's next, Edmund Morris' Dutch Too: An Intimate Portrait of Peter Stuyvesant?

Despite his popularity, Mr. McCullough is a serious researcher. And as he pored over the manuscripts, he made two discoveries, both of which are important, and one of which he trumpets. First, he fell in love with John Adams. It is easy to see why. The Adams papers are a historian's dream, their 608 spools of microfilm coiling across five miles, candidly unveiling an extraordinary family's innermost doubts and demons as its members proceed from one triumph to the next. And Adams himself, for all his crankiness, suits Mr. McCullough's fondness for contrarians. He's Truman in knee breeches-a hard worker, overshadowed by glamorous personalities, who cusses out his enemies and doggedly follows his homespun instincts to do what he thinks right.

Second, Mr. McCullough fell out of love with Thomas Jefferson, who has a stench about him these days. It's not just the unpleasant Sally Hemings business. Mr. McCullough also discovered that Jefferson, for all his greatness, was a vacillating, deceptive politician whose luster dims when you peek into the nooks and crannies of his career. Mr. McCullough is too courtly to broadcast the fact that he dumped Jefferson, but his disappointment is noteworthy and comes through in more than a few sections of the book. Famously, Adams and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of independence, and Adams' last words were "Thomas Jefferson survives." Jefferson still survives, but his reputation will not be enhanced by David McCullough's new book.

There's plenty in the life of John Adams to sustain a long biography. It's a great story, filled with all the ingredients of a sizzling historical novel. Our hero prevails time and again against incalculable odds. As "the Atlas of Independence," Adams argued more forcefully than anyone else for the almost unspeakable act of separating from England, knowing he would be hanged if the weak American army failed to hold off the redcoats. As envoy to Europe, he secured independence with crucial loans and recognition, though he was temperamentally unsuited to the subtleties of diplomacy and was undercut by his fellow Americans, including Ben Franklin. As the first Vice President, he buttressed a fragile government with his loyalty to Washington and his imperviousness to bitter partisan attack (members of Congress lampooned him as "His Rotundity," and one wrote a poem attacking "Daddy Vice" for carrying an "ass-load" of pride). As President, he navigated the lethal shoals of extremism dividing Jefferson and Hamilton and preserved American neutrality between France and England. And as ex-President, he retired to his modest home (which he called Montezillo, to spoof Jefferson), where he achieved intellectual elegance as a great letter-writer and interpreter of the history he himself had created.

It's also a love story. Mr. McCullough was captivated early on by the correspondence between Adams and his wife, Abigail, and draws heavily on it. Adams began writing to "Miss Adorable" when they were courting, and throughout his life she served as his close political confidante, even during the long years when they were separated by the Atlantic. Through their correspondence, we get all the daily anxieties that accompanied the great deeds. There is simply nothing like it for any other founder. Abigail wrote, "[W]hen he is wounded, I bleed."

Finally, it's a book about family, in the great tradition of Dynasty and Dallas. Like Roosevelts and Kennedys, Corleones and Sopranos, the Adamses offered each other a protective cocoon that made everything else possible, even when they wanted to throttle each other. During one of his unhappy periods abroad, Adams wrote, "I make a little America of my own family." This book may pick up mileage because of the historical rhyme that a Presidential son is again occupying the White House, and the Bushes will encourage the comparison. But Mr. McCullough's portrait of John Quincy Adams as a sensitive, preternaturally intelligent offshoot who spends far too much time thinking about foreign policy pokes a few holes in that theory. This is not exactly a portrait of the W. as a young man.

Mr. McCullough's great strength is his accessibility, but it can also pose problems. At times, his writing has a lapidary quality, and it's difficult to escape the strange feeling that you're hearing his voice reading every word, as if the book were already blaring from the tape decks of a million minivans. In its breezy, novelistic tone, it resembles the popular histories that were written two generations ago, like Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia or Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin. Mr. McCullough lacks a deep interest in what used to be called the life of the mind, and skips quickly over Adams' writings and the intellectual underpinnings that drove his relentless push toward independence. He could probe more deeply into character flaws, including Adams' emotional distance, even from the wife and children he loved.

But that would mean a very different book, with less popularity, and therefore less impact. To his credit, Mr. McCullough succeeds in conveying a great deal of the drama of the Revolution and early Republic -drama that we too often forget as we cast a bored glance at the familiar portraits of the founders, all blending together in powdered pomposity. Readers will learn how many petty jealousies simmered alongside the noble gestures. They will be moved especially by Mr. McCullough's ability to paint a vivid scene. The description of the first meeting between George III and Adams is wonderful, as the former adversaries trembled to find the right words to convey their new situation as something like equals. Quite a few other details are unforgettable: Franklin's French paramour wiping up her dog's urine with her chemise; Jefferson and Adams on holiday in England, scraping wood chips off Shakespeare's chair like besotted tourists; and, of course, the day Adams and Jefferson met their Creator, and America mourned and exulted in their exquisite timing.

If Mr. McCullough succeeds in boosting Adams to a higher level in the founders' circle, it will be entirely in keeping with his iconoclastic career and his particular fondness for the battle-scarred underdog. Adams, with his bilious temper, his clumsy dancing and his unpresidential appearance, fits the mold perfectly. Just last week, the decision of the Kennedy Library to honor Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon was universally praised. One of the authors of that proposal was David McCullough, who lobbied for Mr. Ford with Caroline Kennedy.

These historians' pirouettes have consequences, especially in Washington, where war monuments can quickly turn into battlefields. While Bob Barr, whose very presence in Congress justifies Adams' skepticism toward Jeffersonian idealism, clamors for more and gaudier monuments to Ronald Reagan, Mr. McCullough is quietly building bipartisan support for a John Adams monument. When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, Chou En-lai famously replied, "It's too soon to tell." If Mr. McCullough's book stimulates the debate it should about the relative merits of the founding fathers, it may prove, yet again, that the American Revolution is far from finished.

Ted Widmer is the director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, and the co-author, with Alan Brinkley, of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races (Dorling Kindersley).

observers who will shape and comment on the events of his administration ready

themselves with preliminary grappling.

The first to die in action, even before taking office, was

Linda Chavez, nominated for Secretary of Labor. She claimed that the

illegal-alien woman who lived in her house, did odd jobs and got walking-around

money was being battered by her boyfriend, and had been taken in as an act of charity. I am sorry to miss her

cross-examination in the Senate by such noted friends of the distressed

as Senator Clinton, who itemized her husband's old underwear (washed, one

hopes) as charitable donations. But Ms. Chavez committed a graver sin-not

telling those who nominated her absolutely everything in advance. So the

Bushies got cold feet, and she withdrew. The time will come when the only

person who can be nominated to public service is Madonna, about whom everything

is known, and photographed. Interestingly, the Portuguese couple employed by

Christine Todd Whitman, who was tapped to be head of the Environmental

Protection Agency, dropped from the news soon after they were first mentioned.

We expect what Michael Lind calls our overclass to have dusky help around the

house; only conservatives who are themselves dusky seem to get into trouble for

it. If Mrs. Whitman can get through the first cabinet meeting without frisking

Colin Powell, she should be home free.

Attention now turns to former Senator John Ashcroft,

nominated to be Attorney General. A speech he gave at Bob Jones University came

to light in which he said how lucky Americans were to live in a country where

there was "no king but Jesus." Bells went off at the cattle wire that separates

church and state. Literally, the phrase commits no one to any religious belief.

It is like the joke about Unitarians, that they believe in at most one God. If

you don't believe in Jesus, then you have no king at all; and since Jesus said

that His kingdom was not of this world, then, according to Mr. Ashcroft's

phrase, no one has an earthly king.

But the phrase is more interesting than that, for it has a

history. In the 1670's, radical Presbyterians in England and Scotland said, "No

king but Jesus!" This was at a time when the country was ruled by a king with

absolutist pretensions, and people who said such things risked their necks.

(These days, all anyone in my line of work risks for an inflammatory statement

is a dinner invitation.) The anti-monarchists did not win their case in the

1670's, but people like them came here, and ultimately had better luck. One

reason the United States has no king today is because Protestant radicals three

centuries ago said, "No king but Jesus."

Mr. Ashcroft has said that he is not trying to legislate

"spirituality," only "morality." This is simply axiomatic. All laws, except

those that prevent you from driving north on Lexington Avenue, legislate

someone's notion of morality. Because we think it is wrong to kill people

(except fetuses and, increasingly, old people), if you do it-or even try-you are

subject to arrest. The laws of contracts reflect, albeit dimly, the Eighth

Commandment. We think it is wrong to waste the gifts of nature, so we ask

Christie Whitman to look after them for us. We legitimately debate the notions

of morality that laws and proposed laws invoke, and how efficaciously the means

serve the ends. As a Senator, Mr. Ashcroft opposed needle-exchange programs on

the grounds that they "accomodat[e] the culture at its lowest denominator." But

suppose we want to keep addicts alive and AIDS-free while we raise their

denominator?

The left has waged war on Mr. Ashcroft not because of any

philosopher's quest to find laws untinged by systems of morality, but because

he is politically conservative; because he is so culturally "red country"; and,

most importantly, because they want to forestall any nomination of him-or

anyone like him-to the Supreme Court. He will be cut and bruised, but unless he

has a Guatemalan washing his underwear, he will probably make it, and do a

better job than Janet Reno, his predecessor, whose morality licensed

witch-hunts against alleged pedophiles and siege warfare against Branch

Davidians.

With or without his cabinet, Mr. Bush will be inaugurated on

Jan. 20, and demonstrations have been promised. This will be a foretaste of

four years of bad humor from the non-partisan left, energized by the Seattle

riots and the Nader campaign, and the Democratic Party, eager to keep the pot

boiling for 2002 and 2004. In facing these uproars, Mr. Bush should study the

example of John Quincy Adams, and do otherwise.

Mr. Bush and Adams are the only two sons of Presidents to

become President themselves. They also won office in famously turbulent

elections. John Quincy Adams won the four-man race of 1824 when it was thrown

to the House of Representatives. The fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, threw

Adams his support, and Adams rewarded him by making him Secretary of State.

Andrew Jackson, who had finished first, resigned his Senate seat and spent the

next four years howling about the corrupt bargain that elected his enemy. When

he faced Adams one-on-one, he crushed him.

Adams had a miserable term, ending in failure, in part

because of how he won office. But Mr. Bush must realize that Adams failed

because he himself believed that his bargain with Clay was unseemly. John

Quincy Adams' father was a Founding Father; as a boy, he had heard the gunfire

at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He believed that he, and his family, were above

politics-and when it turned out that he wasn't, he punished himself. He froze;

he could not campaign for himself or fight his enemies; Andrew Jackson picked

him off because he made himself a sitting duck.

What beliefs of his enemies does George W. Bush risk

internalizing? Mr. Bush risks believing that he is unlovable-a fatal notion for

him, because he is a "compassionate conservative." He was going to put the

human face on the wax-museum dummies of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom

DeLay. He was going to show how Republicans could help the poor and minorities.

Linda Chavez took them into her house; he was going to take them into America's

house.

When the new President drives down Pennsylvania Avenue, he

is going to hear a lot of people who don't like his face. He doesn't have to

surrender anything, in his program or his attitude. He just has to know, ahead

of time, that his enemies don't like him, and won't thank him.

That's old stuff these days. Now we cover campaigns as we cover the stock market. Get the money or forget about it. Even the opinion polls have been pushed aside for bar charts showing who has raised the most, who has spent the least, and so forth.

The money angle finds a way into every election story, as with this one in The Washington Post , ostensibly about Gee Dubbya Bush as a campaigner: "Candidate Bush is supremely confident, even cocky. On a recent afternoon he was calling signals at a football camp in Sacramento, Calif. 'Sixty-two,' he barked. 'Seventy-seven. Thirty-six-point-two-five.' The crowd broke up in laughter. The last number was a reference to the amount of money ($36.25 million) his campaign had just announced it had raised." In the old days the campaign managers used to come out from behind the curtains to trumpet that Boss So-and-So's organization had endorsed the candidate, thus assuring that his boy would carry Missouri. Not nowadays. They don't give a flying fig for endorsements and there are no organizations. The managers come out from behind the scenes to shout to the world that another couple of million have been deposited and that's why we're going to carry Colorado.

The minutiae of campaign money manipulation are the staple of political reportage. The other day, The New York Times had a piece explaining that Mr. Bush's expenditure of $43,500 for a strategically located place in the amphitheater where next month's Iowa's Republican straw poll would take place did not come from his hard-money campaign fund but from his soft-money campaign fund. (If you don't know the difference between hard and soft money, you don't vote so you needn't read any further into this screed.) Would that we had as clear a grasp of the meaning of Gee Dubbya's compassionate conservatism as we do of his fiscal shrewdness.

The same Times article carried a quote from one Keith Appell, described as a spokesman for Steve Forbes, who declared, "This [soft money expenditure] raises a serious question about how ethical a Bush Administration would be, especially when we know he's raised a gazillion dollars from Washington special-interest lobbyists." Don't you love it when the rich preach money morals? Not that we ought to put Gee Dubbya, who has a few coins in his jeans, in the category of the downtrodden poor, but it has been the Forbes tactic to watch his rivals ensnare themselves in the confining strictures of the Federal election laws and then outspend them. Gee Dubbya has stepped around that snare by refusing Federal matching funds and thereby reducing Mr. Forbes to carping about ethics.

Mr. Forbes evidently is rich enough to indulge in ethical poses on such topics as "Washington special interest lobbyists." There being no general interest lobbyists, who else is a politician to take money from?

As we are coming up on the quadrennium, Mr. Forbes is off his yacht and back on dry land, a candidate again. He hasn't done this quite often enough yet to be scored off as a rich crank but one or two more times and he will be food for Jay Leno. Yet each time he runs, the same set of questions offer themselves up. They are more pressing this time than last, because he has spent enough, long enough to be taken as a real political figure. Editorial writers listen to this man, who himself lays claim to but one accomplishment, to wit, arranging to have a very rich father. They've gotten used to the idea that this whack-a-doodle is a plausible public figure.

In the Jesse Ventura era, maybe he is. Nonetheless, compared to Steve Forbes, Hillary Clinton is a politician with a respectable record. Even next to Ross Perot, who, incidentally, really did have a respectable record before visions of conspiracies drove him slightly cuckoo, Mr. Forbes is a slow-witted, ordinary college-boy Republican. A formulaic plodder.

Other than his checkbook telling him he can afford to if he wants to, why does Steve Forbes keep running for President? It's not the same as John Adams and John Quincy Adams, not the same as Papa Bush and the shrubs, but one wonders if there is some kind of slightly bent motive concerning his father in Steve Forbes. Rather interesting, eh, wot? He was a nothing, a zero, a non-object until his sire died.

The father had a middling successful career as a New Jersey politician. He wanted to run for President himself, but, after getting skunked in a run for the Garden State's governorship, he became famous beyond New Jersey's borders as the flamboyant, not to say flaming, publisher-owner of the magazine founded by Steve Forbes' grandfather, Bertie. During all the years of Malcolm's glory, which grew more garish and somewhat scandalous as he slouched into old age, the boy Steve was invisible. He was, you might say, just hangin' out.

The guy did nothin'–zilch–as long as the old man was alive. The father dies and shaazzaam! The son bursts out of nowhere in an apparent psychic contest with his father's shade to buy greater fame and respect as a big-time Republican politician. No, more than that, Steve actually aims at fulfilling his father's ambition to live in the White House. Can money, which seems to be able to do everything else in politics, make this rich boy's psycho-fantasy dream come true?

Maybe, maybe not. It can assuredly get him back on television. He's on the air again with that mad gleam in his eye, flashing his goofy serial-killer smile which makes him look like a nightmare doll in a horror movie. Of course, if he does succeed in buying his way into office, it will be a horror movie because this boyo has no truck with compassionate conservatism. That puss of his is the self-satisfied face of a heartless reactionary.

He seems to have had some coaching on his public speaking since the last time he left the stable. He's a little smoother and his line has changed. In '96, he was running as some kind of Flat World Society libertarian, while this time he's gone over to the blue-nose crowd and is now content to see police power used to enforce private morals.

When all's said and done, Mr. Forbes may end up looking good with his inherited money. If he is able to buy the Republican nomination despite Gee Dubbya's best efforts at shaking the money tree, we could end up with a Gore-Forbes race or silver spoons versus filthy fingers. With Tony Coelho as his campaign chairman, Mr. Gore won't lack for money with or without the backing of Buddhist temple ladies. Never mind that if Mr. Gore wins, he and his chairman may go straight from the inauguration to the penitentiary.

We are a nation preoccupied by money and the system we have devised for picking our public officials suits us. The best movie is the one with the biggest box-office gross. The best book is the bestest seller. You wait and see–candidates will shortly be issuing I.P.O.'s for their campaigns. So, may the candidate with the most moola win.