He said he wanted to observe the negotiations from within so he could write about them afterward.

Lucy Malcolm wrote afterward of the experience: "It was very moving.

Adams afterward wrote the book War of Numbers.

In fact, he answered more than 125 questions, at his hearing and in writing afterward.

"That was my first experience of the war," he wrote afterward.

"Remember the ninja analogy," he wrote to me in an e-mail afterward.

He was not yet quite at home in the language which he afterward wrote and spoke with such fluency.

But Gerry had struck me as a man who would relish such a confrontation, just so he could write about it afterward.

As part of class, they ran outside almost every day and then wrote in their journals afterward.

"We did not think it necessary to contend for a word," wrote a more mellow John Adams years afterward.