JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: A Public Life, A Private Life.<i> By Paul C. Nagel</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 438 pp., $30</i>

The most dramatic event in the life of John Quincy Adams was his death. The 80-year-old congressman was stricken Feb. 21, 1848, on the floor of the House as he rose to protest the Mexican War. He lingered for two days in the speaker’s private rooms before he died.

It was a fitting end for Adams, not simply because he had spent virtually his entire life in government service but because he never hesitated to speak his mind, whatever the price. “He who is equal to the task of serving a nation as her chief ruler,” he had confided to his diary during his presidency, “must possess resources of a power to serve her even against her own will.”

Despite Adams’ disdain for the popular will, he enjoyed a remarkable career. In addition to serving as ambassador to several European nations, he was a U.S. senator (1802-1808), secretary of state (1817-1825), president of the United States (1825-1829) and member of Congress (1831-1848). He turned down an appointment to the Supreme Court.

Although his presidency was largely a disaster, Adams’ other accomplishments were major. As secretary of state, he negotiated a treaty with Spain in 1819 to acquire Florida and provided the basic principles of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers against interference in the domestic politics of the Western Hemisphere. In the last decade of his life, he was a tireless and ultimately successful opponent of the gag rule, a motion prohibiting discussion of slavery in Congress. John Quincy Adams, in short, was one of the most important figures in the early American republic.

He was also one of the most difficult. By his own admission, he was short-tempered and distant. He lacked what he called “the powers of fascination.” He lacked the charisma of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. He disliked political parties, hated the business of courting voters, took contrary positions on a variety of issues and complained endlessly about corruption and personal nastiness. He campaigned for office only when he could justify the process as necessary to protect his honor from the lies of his enemies. Part of his motivation for taking up the issue of anti-slavery in the 1830s was to seek revenge on the Southerners who had traduced his reputation and destroyed his presidency.

Paul C. Nagel, a distinguished historian who has written two other books about the Adams family, focuses on the sources of Adams’ curious mixture of duty and defiance. He is only vaguely interested in the details of Adams’ career, and his brief treatments of Adams’ tenures as secretary of state and president conform with standard textbook interpretations. Rather, it is the character of the man, his personality, that dominates this biography.

Adams’ public difficulties, Nagel argues, were the direct results of his ambivalent relationship with his parents. With good reason, Adams felt smothered by his parents’ high expectations. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” his father, John Adams, told him when he was a 26-year-old lawyer, and “if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”

Adams’ greatest antagonist was his famous mother. Nagel presents Abigail Smith Adams as a domineering woman who profoundly distrusted men. She lectured her son on his manners and his appearance, forced him to break off his first serious love affair and repeatedly interfered in his career with unsolicited advice.

John and Abigail Adams produced a son who internalized impossible standards. Unable to live up to them and afraid of the shame of failure, John Quincy Adams experienced frequent periods of deep depression. He was inhibited, afraid to ask other people for favors or votes because they might reject him. Plagued by self-doubt and self-recrimination, Adams struggled to maintain his composure by exercising intense self-control. Still, nothing he did was ever enough. He could always read more or swim farther. He hungered for the presidency because he thought being secretary of state was not enough to protect him from the shame of mediocrity.

Counterbalancing his parents’ role in shaping his character were Adams’ long sojourns in Europe. In the 1770s and 1780s, he accompanied his father on diplomatic missions in Paris and, later, London. He also spent two years with an American diplomat in St. Petersburg and traveled extensively in Scandinavia. This period was decisive in determining the course of his life. Free from his mother, he developed a love for the theater and elegant society that he never lost. This second education made him a leading candidate for a diplomatic career when he was only in his 20s.

It also made life in Massachusetts seem provincial by comparison. Adams enjoyed conversation and conviviality as a student at Harvard in the late 1780s. But he hated living in small New England towns as he prepared for a career as a lawyer, a profession that held no joy for him. He despised both the tedium of the work and the necessity of soliciting clients. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he accepted an appointment as ambassador to the Netherlands in 1794. Adams was never happier than when he escaped to Europe.

In 1794, on a stopover in London, he fell in love with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul. Typically, Adams wanted to delay marriage as long as possible. The problem was not love but his desire to be independent. Louisa finally talked him into it with the mixture of assertion and affection that would serve their long and happy marriage well.

Back in New England, Adams showed no interest in politics until his father lost a presidential reelection bid in 1800. When his parents moved back to Massachusetts, Adams suddenly found the prospects of life in Washington, D.C., attractive. He won election to the United States Senate in 1802, ostensibly as a Federalist, but he confounded nearly everyone by siding with the Jefferson administration so often that he had to resign his seat in 1808. Adams then escaped again to Europe in a series of diplomatic posts, which made him the obvious choice for secretary of state when James Monroe was elected president in 1816.

Adams always justified his rebellious behavior as a matter of principle. But it was not until the 1830s, after his single term as president, that he became a spokesman against slavery and the power its defenders exercised in Congress. He found an issue that combined principle and pique. Denouncing the arrogance of Southern slaveholders allowed him to rage against abusive authority and win the approbation of growing numbers of Northerners. John Quincy Adams found what he most craved, independence, and was content at last.

Ironically, the great virtue of Nagel’s engaging biography is also its great liability. His primary source is Adams’ massive diary. By quoting liberally from the daily entries and from John’s and Louisa’s letters, Nagel effectively re-creates the texture of Adams’ eventful life. We learn about his houses and his clothes, the books he read and the parties he attended, his devotion to early morning walks and swims. We learn about his sexual desires and his delight in writing poetry. We get to know Adams in a way few biographers of American political figures have ever achieved.

The price that Nagel pays for this extraordinary accomplishment is that he tells his story almost entirely from Adams’ perspective. We are in his world. With the exception of Louisa, the people who pass through his life rarely speak for themselves. Because we see these people through Adams’ often angry eyes, we have nothing to balance his opinions of Abigail Adams, Andrew Jackson and many others who figured prominently in his life.

Some historians may find Nagel’s preoccupation with Adams’ mental health anachronistic. They may find that he overemphasizes late 20th century concerns with low-self esteem and rebellion in his analysis of Adams’ personality, creating a John Quincy Adams for the narcissistic 1990s. Others will point out quite rightly that the ambivalence about public service and hostility to partisanship that Nagel attributes to Adams were commonplace in the early American republic. They may argue that Nagel distorts Adams’ quest to live as a gentleman, a leisured person of letters and a statesman into an occupational crisis more appropriate to the late 20th than to the late 18th century.

Still, his approach has much to recommend it. One wonders from reading many recent biographies and monographs whether public figures in this period of American history ever did anything but obsess about capitalism and republicanism. It is somehow reassuring to read about Adams’ struggles with the issues of birth, life and death, the attractions of love and hate, which make up the bulk of most people’s lives. Nagel has given us a John Quincy Adams with a heart as well as a head.