Content area
Full text
Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic.By Charles N. Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 432 pp.
John Quincy Adams was, in many ways, his father's son-bright and thoughtful, hardworking and conscientious, moral and direct-and like his father, he embodied these qualities to a fault. He was also, like John Adams, a one-term president who nonetheless accomplished much in his long and active life. But as Charles Edel ably recounts in his astute study of the younger Adams, John Quincy's career was his own, with a broad understanding of the path the American nation trod and a much different trajectory than his father's in the autumn of his life.
Edel models John Quincy Adams as a political actor with a diverse background that spanned the years of the early republic and who "stood as the bridge between the founders' vision and Lincoln's nation" (p. 298). Although this observation is not a completely new one, he examines Adams in an unconventional way, using the notion of a grand strategy to frame his narrative. Edel defines a grand strategy as "a comprehensive and integrated plan of action" (p. 5), one that incorporates both vision and implementation. The...