June 3

On the 3rd in 1800, John Adams, the first vice-president and the second president of the United States, became the first American president to occupy the White House. Following as he did George Washington, he had an extremely tough act to follow. Nevertheless, the cream always rises to the top and as Benjamin Franklin noted of Adams, “he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise man but sometimes, in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Three out of four ain’t bad though and I just wish our contemporary leaders scored as well in the measure of a man.

In his youth, Adams turned to politics after watching James Otis, Jr. argue a case against an English law authorizing warrantless searches, in a Massachusetts court. Shortly before Otis died, on May 23, 1783, he had said to his sister “I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning." He was shortly thereafter struck and killed by a bolt of lightening as he stood in the doorway of a friend’s house.