White House Kids

PRESIDENTS' SONS (451 pp.) -- J. J. Perling--Odyssey ($4).

Ulysses S. Grant, a good general and a poor President, credited his sons with virtues they never had. He reportedly thought that Ulysses Jr. had a "marvelous business capacity; that Colonel Frederick Grant was fit to command armies; that Jesse was a mathematical genius." The less indulgent New York World insisted that "the Grant sons, but for the accident of their father's presidency, might have been respectable drygoods clerks in Galena."

In Presidents' Sons, Author J. J. Perling has gone to the unrewarding trouble of probing the obscurity that most of the presidential sons desired and deserved. A measure of their achievement is that by the time the book is finished, the reader has forgotten all but a few of them. Of the 60 sons that Perling writes about, only John Quincy Adams, a President's son and a President himself, is apt to be remembered long. Presidents' Sons is oddly content with the simple act of exhuming its subjects. They are neither understood nor studied; the only interesting possibility (the effect of their fathers' eminence on their personalities) is not even explored. Readers will learn that:

P: John Quincy Adams, who died at 80 as a Congressman, had an eye for the female form. (Excerpts from his diary: Miss Frazier "has what is called a genteel shape"; Miss Cazneau "has nothing in her person to recommend her but a very good shape. . . . Mrs. Jones . . . exhibited an arm . . . which might fire the imagination of a sensual voluptuary. . . ."

P: John Alexander Tyler served in the German Army during the Franco-Prussian War.

P: Richard Taylor, son of Old Rough & Ready, surrendered the last of the Confederate armies east of the Mississippi.

P: Jesse Grant refused to attend the dedication of his father's tomb in New York until the city paid his and his family's round-trip expenses from Tia Juana.

P: Harry Garfield, at 16, assured his father when his party nominated him for the presidency that he would respect him "even if he were nothing but a Congressman all his life."

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