This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.

We tell stories about everything here on this show,

from sports to arts and from

business to history. And this story, well, it's the latter. It's history. In the nation's capital,

the sun glitters on stone monuments to our first president, George Washington, and our third,

Thomas Jefferson. John Adams, the second president of the United States,

was every bit as brave as the former and as brilliant as the latter, but there is no such monument

for him. Yet no one, not even Washington or Jefferson, did as much to convince the colonies

to break from England.

Perhaps this is fitting because stone is cold and he was anything but.

Alas, we must see that the United States alone serves as the proper living monument to this intense, cranky, warm heart on his sleeve founding father.

What we are about to do now is precise. Instead of telling the all-encompassing story of John Adams, we are going to dial it in on one specific

moment in his life, one that best captures this man's humanity and ideals more than any other.

And as we will soon learn, Adams himself will agree

with our selection. Here to give us a quick overarching readers-digest-like version of Adams is none

other than author and historian David McCullough, the man who's written a definitive biography of

John Adams, the book

in which HBO based its 2008 award-winning miniseries. Here's McCullough answering the question,

what event most personified the life and character of John Adam? I think it's the, his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial.

That's where you see what that man's made of.

...