Remarks on Accepting the Adams Portraits for the White House Collection.

MRS. NIXON. Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure for me to welcome all of you here to the East Room. This is one of the most important day's in the history of the White House, because we have two life portraits of John Quincy Adams and Louisa Catherine Johnson, his wife, and they are to be presented today.

To show our appreciation and interest in continuing to add to the White House collection of important American paintings, we have not only invited the Adams descendants but also members of the Historical Society of the White House, the members of the present and previous Committee on the Preservation of the White House and Mrs. Kennedy's Paintings Committee.

The President and I are most grateful to all of you who take an interest in this house and help us try to make it the best one in America.

We have over a million and a half visitors here every year. They come to see all the beautiful objects which have historical meaning. So we are so pleased that they are going to get to see the Adams portraits beginning tomorrow morning.

We are grateful to Mr. John Quincy Adams, of Dover, Massachusetts, for his very generous gift of the valuable portraits to the White House collection. We are especially pleased to have the one of Mrs. Adams because there was not one of her in the White House until this time.

I should like today to greet Mrs. Arthur Adams, who is the mother of the donor and also the mother of the Governor of Massachusetts.

Would she take a bow, please?

It gives me great pleasure at this time to introduce Mr. John Quincy Adams, who is a great-great-grandson of President John Quincy Adams and a great-great-great-grandson of John Adams. No other family in American history has provided both a father and a son as Presidents. Mr. Adams.

MR. ADAMS. Mr. President, Mrs. Nixon, distinguished friends of the White House:

When John Quincy Adams arrived at the President's House in 1825, after a bitter campaign which he finally won not in the electoral college but in the House of Representatives, this Mansion soon to be called the White House stood largely by itself. It was surrounded by farm buildings, stables, sheds, tool houses, and dairies. Cows grazed nearby; sheep kept the grass from getting out of hand. Pennsylvania Avenue was a dust bowl in the summer and no doubt a quagmire of mud in the winter and spring. There was neither plumbing nor running water in the building, and things were, by today's standards, Spartan, to say the least.

But to a puritanical New Englander, the son of a Yankee farmer turned lawyer, this wasn't so bad. After all, during the last few months of his father's term in office, Abigail, the first First Lady to live here, hung her laundry in this, the famous East Room.

Complaining bitterly in a letter to her sister that she much preferred Philadelphia, Abigail wrote, "Not one room or chamber is finished of the whole. It is habitable by fires in every part, 13 of which we are obliged to keep daily or sleep in wet and damp places."

We hope that things are a little better now. [Laughter]

Ours was a rural society in the 1820's. The President traveled back and forth to Boston by coach and by ship unannounced and uncomfortable. When his father, John Adams, died in Quincy, on July 4, 1826--by extraordinary coincidence the same day his friend Thomas Jefferson died and, again, to the day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration they labored over in Philadelphia--it took 5 days for the news to get to Washington.

John Quincy Adams was unquestionably a man of brilliant intellect, stubborn, aloof, courageous, bound by principle and not by expediency. In short, a statesman but not a politician. Underneath it all he had a warm heart but he certainly did his best to hide it, and in this case his best was very good indeed.

Incredible as it may seem in an era of television and press conferences, he made only two public speeches during his entire 4-year term in office. I have often wondered why it was that in succeeding generations of the family nobody has been able to win a substantial victory-political victory. Certainly, there has been ability and courage and vision to wrestle with the great issues of the day. Some were determined and seemingly had the ambition. My grandfather ran for Governor of Massachusetts five times, for instance, but he never made it.

I am afraid the answer is that they were simply unable or refused to allow themselves to develop an ability to communicate effectively with the man in the street. We may have been strong on principle with all its virtues, but I am afraid we haven't been able to accept the fact that Madison Avenue, like it or not, is almost as necessary a part of the political process as a sound background in the classics and a keen sense of history.

This failure to face the world as it is, and not as we would like to have it, has been, I feel, a tragedy. Somewhere among the bright younger generation--and there are some of them in this room today--I hope we will again produce a young man or maybe, who knows, a young lady, who will make it to this house on his own, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

Ladies and gentlemen, these two portraits have been in the family for 150 years. We have kept them with quiet pride on the walls of our houses in Boston, in Quincy, and lately in Dover. While we treasure them and we always will, they belong here together, in the house and in the public gaze that neither of them enjoyed, for all Americans to view.

We hope you will agree that they are quite outstanding, especially the charming one of Louisa Catherine.

And now, on behalf of all Adamses and with great pride in the memory of our distinguished ancestors, we present these Gilbert Stuart masterpieces to the American people, to our First Families, and to all who visit this, the President's house.

MRS. NIXON. I am glad to have a pretty First Lady for the White House.

I remember when I went to the National Gallery, to see the John Quincy Adams portraits, I had a wonderful companion who told me so many interesting stories. I have asked him to come here today. He is a great authority on the Adams family, and he is portraits editor of the Adams Papers, author of the book "Portraits of John and Abigail Adams," and author of the volume "Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife."

It gives me much pleasure to present Mr. Andrew Oliver.

MR. OLIVER. Mr. President, Mrs. Nixon:

Although John Quincy Adams sat for more than 60 portraits, there are only three pairs of oil portraits of himself and his wife, and this pair was the last of the three to be painted.

In 1794, when John Quincy Adams, age 27, was sent abroad by Washington as Minister to The Hague, his mother, Abigail, extracted his promise to send her a miniature of himself, which he did in 1795, and she wore it on her bracelet.

A year later he became engaged to the second of the seven daughters of the well-to-do merchant Joshua Johnson. Nothing would satisfy Abigail but to have a likeness of her future daughter-in-law, so she, too, was painted in miniature, and the little portrait sent to Abigail, which, with that of her son, have always been kept together and are even now on display together in the diplomatic reception rooms of the Department of State.

In 1797, they were married. Almost immediately afterwards, her father failed in business; fled to America to avoid his European creditors. To her, appearances suggested that in Adams, her father had simply found a promising young man and married off his penniless daughter in the nick of time. This fear long haunted her.

Shortly after their marriage, Adams was sent as Minister to Berlin where they lived for 4 years. Then in 1801, on the election of Jefferson as President, Adams was recalled to America, and Louisa had to run the gauntlet of all her husband's Adams and Quincy kin who thronged about to view the half English, London-bred wife of their young relative. She was aghast.

"Had I stopped into Noah's ark," she wrote, "I do not think I could have been more utterly astounded."

In 1809, President Madison appointed Adams Minister to Russia where he and Louisa lived for upwards of 5 years. And when he was called to Ghent to negotiate the treaty to end the War of 1812, she followed later alone with her 7-year-old son on a 40-day carriage journey across the wintry wastes of northern Europe to join him.

Life was sometimes a trial. She had, however, a brief and happy respite in London, when in May 1815, her husband, treading in his father's footsteps, took up his post as Ambassador to the Court of St. James. It was then that the second pair of portraits was painted by Charles Robert Leslie.

Then after Adams' recall again to America in 1817 to serve as President Monroe's Secretary of State, this pair of portraits were commenced. Adams and Louisa dropped into Stuart's studio in Boston one morning, and she persuaded him to sit for his portrait for their children. And presumably he agreed to do so if she would.

In his diary Adams wrote, "I sat for Stuart before and after breakfast and found his conversation very entertaining as it has been at every sitting, his own figure is highly picturesque with his dress always disordered, taking snuff from a large round tin wafer box holding half a pound, which he must use up in a day. He considers himself beyond all question the first portrait painter of the age and tells numbers of anecdotes concerning himself to prove it. And his conclusion is not very wide from the truth."

Adams' only comment on his portrait was that, "Stuart was much satisfied with what he has done, but I cannot exactly say the same."

His cousin, Ward Nicholas Wilson, however, saw the pair just before they were finished and with a keen critic's eye commented that Stuart had never given greater proof of his talents or done more justice to the precise likeness of those they were intended to represent.

But Louisa, with a weakness we all share about pictures of ourselves, had a different opinion. "It speaks too much," she said, "of inward suffering and of a half-broken heart to be an agreeable remembrance."

Yet her son Charles later wrote of the picture, "Her face wears a sorrowful appearance too common to her but I shall value that picture as presenting something of her appearance in those days, for hereafter there will be nothing, and I love to think of her as she was in the midst of her gaiety and her prosperity."

And we at this distance can see at a glance that in her portrait, Stuart did live up to his own ingenuous claim to be the first portrait painter of the age.

This period was one of Louisa's happiest. She won the etiquette war of Washington which reached the level of Cabinet discussion in 1819 over whether Cabinet wives or Congressmen's wives should pay first calls on each other.

And she became famous for her parties, the most spectacular of which, long remembered as Mrs. Adams' ball, was held for General Jackson in 1824, on the ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, at which some 1,000 persons danced their way into the wee hours of the morning.

In 1819, after 4 years in the White House, for a moment she believed they would go back to Quincy and live out their lives in the peace and quiet of country life. But as it turned out, Adams was on the threshold of another and great career. We are all familiar with his 15 courageous years in the House of Representatives and his fatal stroke at his desk in the House in 1848. Where could death have found him but at his post of duty?

His career has been eloquently summed up in a few words. He served his country in every department of public occupation. He was Minister to five great powers in succession. He negotiated and signed the Treaty of Ghent, the Commercial Treaty of 1815, the French Treaty of 1822, the Prussian Treaty, and the treaty which acquired Florida from Spain. He was Senator, Representative, Foreign Minister, Secretary of State, and President. And he breasted the stormy waves of the House of Representatives at the age of 80.

When he died in the Capitol, he left no purer or loftier fame behind him, but he left a devoted wife who survived him 4 long years. And we have an affectionate picture of her by her grandson Henry Adams.

"Little Henry," he wrote, "first remembered her from 1843 to 1848 sitting in her paneled room at breakfast with her heavy silver teapot, sugar bowl and cream jug. By that time she was 70 years old or more, Louis Seize, like the furniture, thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world, more remote than the President, but more delicate.

"To the boy she seemed a fragile creature, singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her Sevres china; and of great deference to everyone and affection to her son Charles, but hardly more Bostonian than she had been 50 years before on her wedding day in the shadow of the Tower of London."

Now in a later and different century, through the generosity of another John Quincy Adams, strictly in keeping with Adams' tradition of the primacy of country before personal considerations, and after a lapse of more than 140 years, we here today can welcome back the first John Quincy Adams and his wife to their house, the President's house, to the White House, to what the President and Mrs. Nixon have so graciously said, "All Americans might call our house."

MRS. NIXON. Thank you very much. That was just great, reliving a little bit of history.

I am going to get ),our books and read them because I think they must be very fine.

Now, since we are accepting the pictures of the sixth President of the United States and his wife, I thought it appropriate that the 37th President make the acceptance remarks.

THE PRESIDENT. Mr. Adams, Dr. Oliver, all of our distinguished guests:

I, of course, make many appearances in my role as President of the United States, and each differs somewhat. Let the record show this is the first time my wife has ever introduced me, and I am very, happy. I, as most Presidents happen to be, am a student of history in the spare hours that I have, one or two a week. And as a student of history I was fascinated, as I am sure all of you were, by the remarks of John Quincy Adams and also of Dr. Oliver.

The difficulty is that after hearing their remarks there is so very little that I can add because, as I was running mentally through my own mind what I planned to say, they ticked off virtually everything that John Quincy Adams had done during his life.

But not quite everything, because it would be impossible in the brief space of time that each of them had for the life of this very remarkable man to be described.

Let me begin at the end, then go to the beginning, and then perhaps put it in the perspective of the times in which we live.

When John Quincy Adams died, as Dr. Oliver pointed out, he had a stroke on the floor of the House of Representatives, and among those who were there and saw him on that day was Abraham Lincoln, serving in his first and only term as a Member of the House.

After he had the stroke, he was moved to the Speaker's room and 2 days later there he died. I do not recall exactly what his last words were, but I think I can paraphrase them. It was something like this: My life on earth is finished, but I am content.

And well he could be content, not simply because his life had been a long one but because, of perhaps all of the men who have served as President of the United States, it was the most complete life in terms of the areas of service: United States Senator, Congressman, diplomat for 37 years, President of the United States, and the whole history of America from the time of its beginning until the time of his death.

He was born 7 years before the Revolution, but at 14 years of age--and let all young Americans note this--before he finished Harvard he was Secretary to the American delegation which negotiated the treaty ending the Revolutionary War, which began a long diplomatic career of very great success.

Here was a man who was in Moscow at the time that Napoleon's armies came through Russia and finally were turned back not so much by the Russian armies, but by the weather.

Here was a man who later was in Paris and saw Napoleon when he came back from Elba.

A man who negotiated many treaties-as Dr. Oliver has pointed out, the one ending the war in 1812--and one, and this little historical note should be added, who served as Secretary of State in President Monroe's Administration, and in that capacity, at least according to an authority as respected as Carl Sandburg, probably had more to do with the concept and the execution of the Monroe Doctrine than President Monroe himself.

And then who, after serving as President of the United States, did not quit, but went back and served in the House, and even there rendered a service that probably would not have been rendered had he not been there.

There was a gag rule then in the House of Representatives. For 8 years he fought it. The first time the vote overwhelmingly was against him. But he was a persistent man, and after 8 years the gag rule was abolished.

So he could well say at the end of that life, looking back over the history, of his country and the history of his service, President, Congressman, Senator, Secretary of State, diplomat all over the world representing his country: My life on earth is finished, but I am content.

There is a little vignette which tells us something about this man, which perhaps, as the John Quincy Adams of today has already alluded to: the fact that he was shy, the fact that he perhaps may not have had the ability to communicate with people generally that many in political life are supposed to have, but a man who had a very warm heart.

Among his antagonists in the House of Representatives was Alexander Stephens, a very brilliant man, sometimes bitter, but extraordinarily eloquent. Lincoln, in his 2 years, said that Alexander Stephens made the best 1-hour speech he had ever heard made in his whole life up to that time.

Alexander Stephens, as we know, later went on to be Vice President of the Confederacy. But Adams, despite the fact that he and Stephens were on different sides of the great issue of slavery, had the ability to communicate across that chasm of difference and to retain a friendly relation.

He also had a capacity to express himself perhaps not so well in speeches--and maybe two speeches in 4 years is enough for any President, may I say--but an extraordinary capacity to express himself sometimes in bits of poetry.

One day after a bitter debate he wrote a poem and sent it across the aisle to Alexander Stephens. What Adams said to Stephens on that occasion I think is worth reading in this ceremony today:

"We meet as strangers in this hall, but when our task of duty is done, we blend the common good of all and melt the multitude into one.

"As strangers in this hall we met, but now with one united heart, whate'er of life awaits us yet, in cordial friendship let us part."

That Adams legacy is something we all could well remember today, and for that and many other reasons we are proud to have in this house, which belongs to all of the American people, our house as we often describe it which means yours and ours together--these two portraits.

There is one, incidentally, as you know, of John Quincy Adams hanging in the White House, painted at a time when he was 78 years of age. And this is when he was 51 as Secretary of State. And, of course, the first one of the fifth First Lady.

So joining Mrs. Nixon, we express our appreciation to the Adams family, one of the really great American families, for their generosity. And the gratitude of the Nation goes to them for making it possible for millions now to walk through these rooms, to think of the past and, as they look at these portraits and see this man, they will think of a man who has seen more of American history and has, participated more in it, in more capacities, than any President in history.

MRS. NIXON. And now I invite you for refreshments in the State Dining Room and for a chance to visit with you, too.

Thank you for coming. And thanks to all the Adams family for parting with their treasures. Thank you.