The Bell Curve:

I’ve been caught up for the past six weeks in the HBO series portraying the life and times of our second president, John Adams. He died July 4, 1816. So did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Watching these two lifelong philosophical opponents who became close friends die within minutes of each other on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence seems a coincidence too monumental to dismiss the possibility of some other hand in it.

But that isn‘t where the Adams chronicle took me in our year of a presidential election. Rather it would seem to offer some lessons in history — in both what it said and didn’t say — to which we should pay attention.

Adams, who shared George Washington’s political views, was his heir apparent from the beginning, and the transition to an Adams presidency went as expected in 1796. But in those times, the candidate with the second-highest number of votes became vice president — and that was Thomas Jefferson. So for the four years he was president, John Adams had a states-rights vice president in a Federalist administration — rather like Al Gore serving as vice president to George Bush.

But in the election of 1800, the Jeffersonian party prevailed, largely because of the New York electoral vote delivered by a slick politician from an aristocratic New England family named Aaron Burr, who had been a youthful and courageous colonel in Washington’s army. When the electoral votes were counted, Burr, whose views were somewhere between Jefferson and the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton, was tied with Jefferson for the presidency.

As the Constitution required, the decision went to the House of Representatives, which chose Jefferson as president and Burr as his vice president. The Adams TV narrative chose to ignore these developments and what followed, which seem to me to offer parallels with the political campaign we are watching more than 200 years later.

Burr had supporters as well as vitriolic opponents in both political camps. But the determined opposition of Hamilton — whose father-in-law had lost his Senate seat to Burr several years earlier — was key to Burr’s rejection as president and four years later his candidacy as governor of New York.