Late in life, John Adams looked over the wreckage of his family and advised his presidential son that family and kindness were paramount. But they had educated John Quincy too well for too long. In John Quincy’s own words, he was a rigid, cold, unyielding martinet.

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His youngest son, Charles Francis Adams, became Lincoln’s inestimable ambassador to England. John Quincy also had a daughter, named for his wife Louisa Catherine, who died in infancy. Unfortunately, his two eldest sons, George Washington Adams and John Adams II, were not spared the family disposition toward alcoholism and depression. John Quincy was a frequently absent father, serving brilliantly in diplomatic missions around the world or posts in Washington. Once, after a six-year separation, John Quincy and his wife did not recognize their sons when the boys were presented to them. (The Adamses had taken Charles Francis with them.)

George showed great talents for fiction, poetry, theater and music. As a boy, he bested Ralph Waldo Emerson in a poetry contest. He also had a rebellious nature that required a firm hand as well as an understanding heart. Ironically, his grandfather recognized that and tried to mediate between father and son. “George is a treasure of diamonds,” John Adams wrote to John Quincy. “He has a genius equal to anything, but like all other geniuses requires the most delicate management to prevent it from running into eccentricities.”

But John Quincy was incapable of heeding his father’s advice, and reports of transgressions only brought punishments and lecturing. A 16-year-old George recorded in his diary that he had had a sex dream involving a young woman in which his father suddenly appeared, stern and fierce, wagging his finger and saying, “Remember George, who you are and what you are doing!” George then wrote that he awoke and “sank into a gloomy torpor.” Tragically, this feeling became common.

By the time John Quincy became president in 1824, George was mired in alcoholism, depression and insolvency. He was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1826 but lasted less than a year. His father supported him financially, but the family did not know about George’s reputation as a womanizer.

One bright spot was his engagement to Mary Hellen, his first cousin. He wrote poetry to his love, and it was hoped that marriage would settle him down and give him badly needed self-confidence. But soon his younger brother John II, recently expelled from Harvard, stole his fiancée away; when they married in 1828, neither George nor Charles Francis attended the grim White House wedding.

Like his father, John Quincy was defeated for reelection. Knowing of his son’s desperate straits, he called George to Washington in 1829 to help in the move back home. The idea of being with his disapproving father in the White House — a constant reminder of the family’s devotion to duty — the betrayal by his brother, his alcoholism, depression and utter terror that his father would discover he had impregnated a maid and feared blackmail all proved too much. While on board a steamer bound for New York, George began hallucinating and complained that the passengers were laughing at him. He demanded to be put ashore. Soon it was discovered that George was gone, although some of his things remained on deck. Officially it was listed as an accidental drowning.

Six weeks later, a grief-stricken John Quincy was passing through New York when word came that George’s body had washed ashore on nearby City Island. The distraught ex-president was soon at the scene, and he had to be forcibly restrained from prying open the coffin. In his diary, the cold, distant, self-disciplined John Quincy wrote that he knew in his heart that George had committed suicide, and he beseeched God, “Let not my errors be visited upon my child!” George was 28 years old.

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