Welcome everybody to this podcast introduction to this week's listening to America,

Lindsay Chirvinsky, the great wonderful, extraordinarily talented Lindsay

Trevinsky is just taking off in her career, her new book on John Adams, the Making of the Presidency,

is coming out in September.

We'll have special events, a Zoom party,

for anyone who wants to join us at some point so stay tuned for that.

She's making her book available with a special book plate to people involved in the

in the listening to America world.

Today's conversation was about enemies of,

the enemies list of John Adams.

So John Adams was the president of the United States

between March 4th, 1797 and March 3rd, 1801, all sorts of difficulties

as president.

There was a war scare with France, what's called the Quasai War. And because of that, Congress passed some really frantic,

even paranoid legislation, the aliens addition and naturalization laws. Adams had enemies within. He kept the cabinet of George Washington thinking

that that was the right thing to do and the cabinet proved to be disloyal in fact

much more willing to listen to Alexander Hamilton who was back in New York than to be honest brokers in the administration of Adams.

Jefferson himself bears some responsibility for the things that went wrong.

So her list is, Thomas Jefferson was her enemy number one,

although she did that largely to mess with me.

Alexander Hamilton is certainly part of that equation.

Timothy Pickering and other members of the cabinet come up, she said, not particularly

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