THE BELL CURVE:

I’ve been caught up for the past six weeks in the HBO series portraying the life and times of our second president, John Adams. He died July 4, 1816. So did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Watching these two lifelong philosophical opponents who became close friends die within minutes of each other on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence seems a coincidence too monumental to dismiss the possibility of some other hand in it.

But that isn‘t where the Adams chronicle took me in our year of a presidential election. Rather it would seem to offer some lessons in history — in both what it said and didn’t say — to which we should pay attention.

Adams, who shared George Washington’s political views, was his heir apparent from the beginning, and the transition to an Adams presidency went as expected in 1796. But in those times, the candidate with the second-highest number of votes became vice president — and that was Thomas Jefferson. So for the four years he was president, John Adams had a states-rights vice president in a Federalist administration — rather like Al Gore serving as vice president to George Bush.

But in the election of 1800, the Jeffersonian party prevailed, largely because of the New York electoral vote delivered by a slick politician from an aristocratic New England family named Aaron Burr, who had been a youthful and courageous colonel in Washington’s army. When the electoral votes were counted, Burr, whose views were somewhere between Jefferson and the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton, was tied with Jefferson for the presidency.

As the Constitution required, the decision went to the House of Representatives, which chose Jefferson as president and Burr as his vice president. The Adams TV narrative chose to ignore these developments and what followed, which seem to me to offer parallels with the political campaign we are watching more than 200 years later.

Burr had supporters as well as vitriolic opponents in both political camps. But the determined opposition of Hamilton — whose father-in-law had lost his Senate seat to Burr several years earlier — was key to Burr’s rejection as president and four years later his candidacy as governor of New York.

Typical of the attacks on Burr was an editorial in the “American Citizen” calling him “the most immoral, the most perfidious, the most unprincipled of men, possessed of an evil of great magnitude.” Anonymous lists of prostitutes frequented by Burr and married women divorced after seduction by him appeared in newspapers. He was even accused of being too friendly with a British author who subscribed to the notion that sex was essential to good health.

Throughout these vendettas, Burr’s political machinations were shredding the beginnings of the two-party system that would later take firm root in the U.S. Burr’s blue collar faction of the Republican party frequently brawled on the streets of New York against Hamilton’s Federalists, sometimes with the leaders present. But Burr’s main attraction in his meaningless role as vice president was that he wasn’t Thomas Jefferson.

Years of this sort of poisonous rhetoric ended as it so often does, in tragic reaction over a relative slight. At a political dinner, Hamilton made some demeaning personal remarks about Burr who demanded an explanation when he was told about them. When he considered Hamilton’s response unsatisfactory, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. And on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, N.J., Burr shot and killed Hamilton.

Is it frivolous to say we have progressed little in civilizing the political process in the intervening years? Is the comparison odious because the bullets now being fired are verbal? Is the Karl Rove brand of bile any less destructive than the pistol in Burr’s hand? Can personal attacks be anything but divisive when candidates of the same party direct them at one another. Is civility impossible unless both parties embrace it?

Maybe the answer to the last question can be found in the final episode of the series.

Two of the men most vital in crafting our form of government that has survived and always found the resources to deal with challenge died on the same day.

For more than 50 years they had believed in differing means to put their creation into service, Adams by a strong and active federal government, Jefferson by a government more directly of the people and focused on state’s rights — a debate that can and should persist today.

But without invalidating any of their convictions, they worked together, representing their differences but never allowing them to immobilize the nation they had created. In the 1860s, part of that nation tried to split it apart and failed. Today we are faced with decisions that — if less dramatic — need to discover that place yet again, maybe more urgently than we realize. And we won’t find it by dueling to death, but rather by reproducing, in spirit, the many years of debate and correspondence between these two founders of our country.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.