Andrew Jackson insisted that John Quincy Adams only ascended to the presidency because of a so-called corrupt bargain between Adams and Henry Clay, wherein Clay threw his vote in the House of Representatives to Adams in return for being appointed Secretary of State. This was nonsense. A true corrupt bargain wouldn’t be struck for 149 years, but I’ll get to that in all due time.
Alas, corrupt bargain or not, Adams seems to have reached his level of incompetence. He was an intelligent man and he did well as a Representative and as a Secretary of State, but the office of the president didn’t suit him. He wasn’t a bad president in that he didn’t leave the country worse off, he just didn’t accomplish much.
When he was President, Adams was in the habit of rising an hour or two before dawn and taking long walks or rides or going down to the Potomac for a swim in the buff. When the New York political leader Thurlow Weed first visited Washington, he determined to see the President swimming. On the morning after his arrival he rose before daylight and went to the river bank. There, he said, he saw “a gentleman, in nankeen pantaloons and a blue pea jacket, walking rapidly from the White House toward the river… I moved off to a respectful distance. The President began to disrobe before he reached a tree on the brink of the river, where he deposited his clothes, and then plunged in head first and struck out fifteen or twenty rods, swimming rapidly and turning occasionally upon his back, seeming as much at ease in that element as upon terra firma. Coming out, he rubbed himself thoroughly with napkins, which he had brought for the purpose in hand. The sun had not yet risen when he had dressed himself and was returning to the presidential mansion.”
Adams was an excellent swimmer, but once in a while he ran into trouble. One morning someone stole his clothes while he was swimming so he had to ask a passing boy to run to the White House and get him some others. Another time, he planned to paddle across the river in a canoe and swim back, but everything went wrong: the canoe filled with water in midstream and sank; Adams’s loose sleeves filled with water and “hung like fifty-two pound weights upon my arms,” making it hard for him to reach shore; and, since he lost half of his clothes in the water, he had to return to the White House only “half dressed.” He did, though, have “ample leisure” while swimming, he said afterward, “to reflect upon my own indiscretion” in planning such an outing.
The most famous JQA swimming story (probably spurious) involved journalist Anne Royall. She followed him to the river one day, the story goes, bent on getting an interview, and parked herself on his clothes after he entered the water. “Come here!” she cried.
Surprised, Adams swam back to shore and asked, “What do you want?”
“I’m Anne Royall,” she snapped. “I’ve been trying to see you to get an interview out of you for months on the State Bank question. I have hammered at the White House and they wouldn’t let me in, so I watched your movements, and this morning I stalked you from the Mansion down here. I’m sitting on your clothes and you don’t get them till I get the interview. Will you give it to me or do you want to stay in there the rest of your life?”
“Let me get out and dress,” pleaded Adams, “and I’ll promise to give you the interview. Please go behind those bushes while I make my toilet.”
“No, you don’t,” replied Royall. “You are President of the United States and there are a good many millions of people who want to know and ought to know your opinion on this Bank question. I’m going to get it. If you try to get out and get your clothes I’ll scream and I just saw three fishermen around the bend. You don’t get out ahead of that interview!”
She got her interview while Adams was chin-deep in the water.
— Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller, Jr.