A best-selling biography has John Adams in the running for the “comeback president of the year” award.

        David McCullough portrays the much-maligned second president as an early American hero, pointing out that even rival Thomas Jefferson called Adams a “colossus of independence.”

        The phrase is a chapter heading and is used in the lead sentence of the dust jacket of the book, which tops the New York Times and other national nonfiction best-seller lists. Publisher Simon & Schuster used the phrase in publicity material, and several prominent historians have picked it up in reviews.

        The only problem: Jefferson never said it.

        Mr. McCullough acknowledges the mistake, which is pointed out in a review by historian Richard Rosenfeld to be published in the September issue of Harper's Magazine. Mr. McCullough said it will be fixed in subsequent editions.

        “I made it. I regret it. I'm glad it's being fixed,” Mr. McCullough said.

        Simon & Schuster, which has sold 870,000 copies of the book since it was published in May, said it would change its publicity material, promotion and advertising if Mr. McCullough changes the book.

        “It diminishes neither the accomplishments of Adams nor the author,” company spokesman Adam Rothberg said of the mistake.

        Mr. Rosenfeld, who wrote a 1997 revisionist account of the revolutionary era called American Aurora, ran the quote through a database of Jefferson writings being compiled at Princeton University. Nothing turned up. He asked other Jefferson experts, who said they'd never heard it.

        Mr. Rosenfeld insists that the mistake is critical, because he says it undermines Mr. McCullough's entire heroic portrayal of Adams. Mr. Rosenfeld thinks Adams attacked civil liberties, and that Jefferson never really forgave him.

        After Mr. Rosenfeld called him, Mr. McCullough discovered that the quote had come from an 1870 book recounting a visit by Daniel Webster to Jefferson, who called Adams “a colossus on the floor of Congress,” during the Continental Congress.

        Mr. McCullough said, however, that there is plenty of other evidence to support his thesis that Adams played a critical and positive role in the Revolution and early republic. He pointed out that Benjamin Rush, another delegate at the Congress, called Adams the “Atlas of independence.”

        If Jefferson didn't call Adams “a colossus of independence,” Mr. McCullough said he would. He also said he won't drop the phrase as a chapter heading.

        “It does not change my thesis at all. I'm perfectly within my rights to say he was the colossus of independence, as others have said,” Mr. McCullough said. “It does not change Adams' role in the Declaration of Independence.”

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