By Barbara Spindel Correspondent Historian and memoirist Henry Adams never forgot the family gardener who, when Adams was a child, made him question his birthright with the stinging reproach, âYouâll be thinkinâ youâll be President too!â Adams, a great-grandson of Founding Father and second president John Adams and a grandson of sixth president John Quincy Adams, never achieved the political prominence he at one time took for granted. In an excellent new biography, âThe Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams,â historian David S. Brown vividly conveys Adamsâ altogether different accomplishments. Adams recalled the gardenerâs dig in his celebrated autobiography, âThe Education of Henry Adams.â In the book, in which he refers to himself in the third person, Adams assumes the ironic pose of a failure whose formal schooling (he received a traditional liberal Protestant education at Harvard, where he later taught briefly) left him woefully unprepared for the period of massive flux that followed.Â