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In true White House fashion, John Adams used the tragedy for political advantage. Rather than receive Thomas Jefferson at the Executive Mansion after Jefferson defeated him in a re-election bid, Adams snubbed him, claimed he was still mourning his dead son.

"It was a lame excuse, considering that Charles had been buried three months earlier," Anthony writes. "Adams hadn't attended the burial, but he had appeared at numerous public events since then."

If It's Not the Kids …

Just about each of the recent presidents has had to deal in public with family squabbles. Patti Davis, President Reagan's stepdaughter, bared her body in Playboy and admitted to have used cocaine, even as her mother was promulgating the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign.

The elder president Bush had a real problem on his hands with his son Neil, who became embroiled in a federal investigation into the 1988 collapse of a savings and loan that ended up costing taxpayers an estimated $1 billion.

Yet, it's wrong to simply blame the children. Presidents are always having family problems, just like the rest of us. Who doesn't have a relative that he would just as soon forget? There's a Roger Clinton or a Billy Carter swinging from every family tree.

Jimmy Carter had to resign himself to the fact that his brother was a self-described beer-guzzling "redneck." The president once publicly thanked him for doing his share for the nation's economy by "putting the beer industry back on its feet."

"I wish Billy would have gone along with my plan to involve him in the government," President Carter once told an audience. "I was going to reorganize and put the FBI and the CIA together. But Billy said he didn't want to join any agency he couldn't spell."

Buck Wolf is a producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is a weekly feature. If you want to receive weekly notice when a new column is published, join the e-mail list.