James Traub

Author of John Quincy Adams (subtitle: Militant Spirit), the biography Kyle read. Kyle’s notes credit Traub with two interpretive throughlines. First, on Adams’s lifelong Depression — the “blue devils” he battled from college onward — Traub traces how Adams “summoned the will to become the person his parents had told him he must be,” carrying the crushing weight of expectations that his brothers and sons did not survive. Second, Traub names Adams the “fountainhead” of realist foreign policy — skeptical of America’s capacity to do good abroad — a Realism thread Kyle pairs with Henry Kissinger’s observation that Americans won’t accept a self-described “realist” president.

Context: James Traub is an American journalist and author, a longtime contributor to Foreign Policy and The New York Times Magazine, who has written biographies and books on foreign affairs; John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit was published in 2016.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Traub is the author; the page draws on his reading of Adams’s depression, sense of duty, and place as the “fountainhead” of foreign-policy realism.