Reply #23: Some of my best friends are pointy-headed intellectuals.

[saltpoint]

In fact, most of them are.

Yes. Hawthorne's biography of Pierce reads like sort of a propaganda brochure, which is ok, I guess. Not ok for a serious biographical study but more or less ok for a project by a close pal trying to promote one's profile.

Hawthorne's son, Julian, gives me a glimpse of Pierce the person (as opposed to Pierce to politician):

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“There was a winning, irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father, there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent recognition from him, but his voice, his looks, his gestures, his gait, the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious, patriotic, strong, man and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and athletic, but life used him hard and he was far from considerate of himself, and he died at 65, when he might under more favorable conditions have rounded out his century.”

--Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathanial Hawthorne, writing as a boy in his teens,
on Franklin Pierce, quoted in FRANKLIN PIERCE, by Roy Franklin Nichols

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Julian was I think 15 years old when he wrote that. Not many modern-day U.S. teenagers could match his command of language, I don't think.