(HOST) He’s President of the United States and the son of a former President of the United States. He’s headed to Russia for a ten-day visit, but it’s not George W. Bush. Here’s commentator Peter Gilbert to explain.
(GILBERT) Many Vermonters know Jim Cooke – not necessarily by name – but from seeing him at Plymouth and around the state portraying President Calvin Coolidge.
Well, Jim is a professional actor whose solo work has also made him an historian, and these days, he’s portraying America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, our second president. Before John Quincy Adams became president, he was Americas first Diplomatic Minister to Russia. And so last weekend Jim Cooke headed to Russia on a three-city tour as John Quincy Adams, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Adams first went to Russia in 1781, at the age of fifteen, to serve as French translator for Francis Dana, who was trying to persuade Russia to support the American Revolution. But Catherine the Great wanted no part of fomenting insurrection against another European monarch. As biographer Lynn Parsons notes, when word came that the American Revolution was over, it took the sixteen-year-old Adams a year to reunite with his father in Paris, having already traveled through Scandinavia, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.
Twenty-seven years later, Adams returned to Russia as the American representative; Russia was then ruled by Catherine the Great’s grandson, Tsar Alexander.
John Quincy Adams was probably more successful as Minister than he was as president. His were America’s only eyes and ears in Europe during the War of 1812. Even more importantly, it was as a result of his diplomacy and personal connections that Tsar Alexander agreed to open Russian ports to American ships. That decision precipitated a split between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon, which resulted in Napoleons disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia. It might even be said that without John Quincy Adams, we might not have had Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace.
Adams left Russia to lead the delegation sent to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent (in what is now Belgium), which brought the War of 1812 to a close. Two weeks later, Andrew Jackson would defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Ironically, Jackson, who became a war hero because of a battle won after the war was over, would later defeat President Adams, the diplomat who negotiated the peace, in Adam’s re-election bid.
I like to imagine Vermont’s own Jim Cooke in period dress, strolling through Moscow’s stately Red Square and across the beautiful bridges of St. Petersburg. While in Russia, he will meet with and perform for both English-speaking adults and high school age students, celebrating two centuries of diplomatic relations between the two countries. American-Russian have been chilly lately, and so a goodwill tour celebrating the art of diplomacy sounds to me like a very good idea.
Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.