John Adams appears in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a cited authority and as a historical actor invoked in arguments about property, law and the federal judiciary, rather than as the subject of an episode. Across the excerpts he is quoted on the sanctity of property and on human nature, credited with the court-packing of 1801, and named as one of the two former presidents whose correspondence Benjamin Rush set in motion. No excerpt supplies a biography, a date of birth or death, or an account of his presidency as such.
Adams as a cited authority
In the episode on civil asset forfeiture, Bob Zadek introduces Adams by quotation, dating the remark to 1787: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny shall commence.” Zadek places the quotation immediately after the colonial cry of no taxation without representation and immediately before the constitutional guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, making Adams the bridge between the colonists’ grievance and the text of the Constitution Cops Are No Better Than Criminals (2011).
Adams is quoted a second time in a later episode on policing for profit, this time from the trial of the Boston Massacre: “Facts are stubborn things.” Zadek uses the line to close the interview with Brian D. Kelly, applying it to Kelly’s data on forfeiture and expressing the hope that stubborn facts would persuade legislatures Brian D. Kelly on the False Promise of Policing-for-Profit (2019).
A third invocation is attributed to Adams in the episode on crony capitalism, where Zadek paraphrases him: if all men were angels, we would not need laws, but men are not angels and businesses need a referee. Zadek offers this as his own framing of the limited role of government, in answer to a caller who had argued for abolishing government altogether Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
Court packing and the election of 1800
Adams figures most substantially in the two episodes on court packing, recorded roughly eight months apart. In the earlier of the two, Zadek raises the practice as going back perhaps to the Adams presidency: bitter at losing to his former friend Thomas Jefferson, Adams set about appointing as many justices as he could, and his Congress enacted legislation creating new district court judges so that he could appoint them. Zadek describes this as leaving the incoming president a legacy of appointments made through the political sphere, and says the practice goes back to the very founding How to Create a Legitimacy Crisis (2019).
In the later episode, Zadek returns to the same ground, calling Adams his favorite founder and dating the episode to 1801, when Adams had lost the election to his former friend, his party controlled the legislature, and he was still in power. Zadek says Adams somewhat successfully packed the court, and offers the episode as evidence that the tactic goes back literally to the first decade after the founding. Josh Blackman, the guest, agrees and supplies the detail that Adams made a number of lame duck appointments on his way out, filling both the lower courts and the Supreme Court, and that his most famous appointment was John Marshall, confirmed shortly before Jefferson took office and serving more than 30 years Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020).
Adams and Benjamin Rush
The episode on Benjamin Rush supplies a different kind of Adams material. Zadek says his first exposure to Rush came through Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage, a book on Adams’s retirement years, and that Adams has since become his favorite founder. From that book he learned that Rush was instrumental in reuniting former President John Adams with former President Thomas Jefferson, who had stopped communicating after Jefferson beat Adams in the presidency campaign in 1800. Rush brought them together and started them corresponding, producing what Zadek calls a rich history of the country in the 150-odd letters they wrote to each other Founding Healer (2019).
Across episodes: the 1801 appointments
The 1801 appointments are the one Adams topic the excerpts treat in more than one episode, and the treatment shifts between them. In the 2019 episode with Ilya Somin, Zadek raises Adams himself, hedges the date as perhaps the Adams presidency, and frames the appointments as an early instance of a practice that is nothing new; Somin does not take up the Adams material and instead discusses the failure to fix the number of justices in the Constitution, the several packings of the nineteenth century, and Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937 How to Create a Legitimacy Crisis (2019). In the 2020 episode with Josh Blackman, Zadek returns to the same episode with a firmer date, 1801, and a firmer characterization, court packing, and Blackman supplies the supporting detail of the lame duck appointments and of Marshall’s confirmation and tenure Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020). What changed between the two is less the substance than the division of labor: in the earlier episode Zadek carries the historical claim alone and the guest moves past it; in the later one the guest elaborates it and adds the Marshall appointment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of Adams’s presidency, his diplomacy, his legal career before 1770, or his death, and no episode is devoted to him. The quotations attributed to him are given without surrounding context beyond the occasions Zadek names — 1787, the Boston Massacre trial, and an undated remark on angels and laws. The reconciliation with Jefferson is described only as Rush’s achievement, with no detail from the correspondence itself.