Opinions may vary about Donald Trump Jr., but nearly all can agree that his meeting with the mysterious Natalia Veselnitskaya—and two or four or seven other people in Trump Tower last summer—has done his father no good. I plead agnosticism on this particular case, tending to conclude that it affirms the Trump presidential campaign’s status as the most bumptious and chaotic since George McGovern’s 45 years ago. But it also reminds us that presidents, as well as presidential candidates, can choose their staff and confidants but cannot choose their families.
The past, in this instance, is a contradictory guide. Some very good modern presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan—have yielded less-than-stellar children; while some less-than-stellar presidents—William Howard Taft, Lyndon B. Johnson—produced admirable offspring. Raised involuntarily in history’s goldfish bowl, most modern presidential children have tended to pursue a respectable low profile—John Coolidge, the Wilson daughters, John Eisenhower, the Ford brood—endeavoring to avoid embarrassing their parents and doing no damage to their fathers’ reputations. Others—Margaret Truman, Ron Reagan, Chelsea Clinton—have embraced their celebrity status, with mixed results.
Yet when it comes to familial headaches, it is siblings rather than children who have tended to do genuine harm. The reasons are not especially difficult to guess: Presidential children tend to be raised in a political environment and imbibe certain lessons that can keep them out of trouble. Presidents, however, are usually family outliers and distant from brothers and sisters in pertinent ways. Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of six brothers, all of whom found success separate from Ike’s career. The same can be said of Harry Truman’s younger brother and sister and Ronald Reagan’s older brother, none of whom were ever cause for brotherly concern.
The Kennedy siblings were insulated by wealth, or junior partners in the family political firm. The sisters and brothers of George H.W. Bush—and Bush’s children, for that matter—have only added luster, in varying degrees, to the family name.
Jimmy Carter, however, was not so fortunate. Carter had two sisters, one of whom was a mildly colorful Georgia matron who rode a motorcycle; the other was an evangelical “healer” whose most famous convert during her brother’s presidency was the pornographer Larry Flynt—who swiftly relapsed. Neither sister, however, was ever likely to have caused sleeplessness in the White House. The same cannot be said of younger brother Billy. Manager of the family peanut business and proprietor of a ramshackle gas station in Plains, Billy Carter, with a Marine pedigree and good-ol’-boy persona, was initially embraced by the press as “colorful” copy.
Billy’s escalating alcoholic antics, however, and his willingness to profit from Jimmy’s position took a sinister turn. During 1978-79, he undertook a series of well-publicized visits to Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya, was obliged to register with the federal government as a foreign agent, and became the subject of a (Democratic) congressional investigation into influence-peddling. This yielded a statement from his sibling unmatched in the annals of presidential mortification: “Billy has had no influence on U.S. policy or actions concerning Libya in the past,” declared President Carter, “and he will have no influence in the future.”
Richard Nixon suffered from an errant sibling as well. Younger brother Donald was a serially unprofitable businessman in California, and when it became known during the 1960 presidential campaign that, three years earlier, he had pocketed a $205,000 loan from the secretive financier Howard Hughes—intended to shore up a drive-in restaurant in Whittier that featured the “Nixonburger”—the Hughes loan became a minor scandal in his brother’s candidacy.
Given the narrowness of candidate Nixon’s loss to Kennedy that year, President Nixon might well have believed that the Hughes loan was decisive. Or so my own theory of Watergate would suggest. When, in the early 1970s, it became known that a onetime Hughes associate named Robert Maheu was conferring with Lawrence O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (as a baby DNC staffer I had witnessed Maheu’s coming and goings), the impulse to prevent a new Hughes scandal in 1972 could easily have prompted the Nixon White House to bug the DNC.
Not all black sheep lead to scandal, of course: Some, like Lyndon Johnson’s younger brother Sam Houston, are merely embarrassing. Sam Houston Johnson, a lawyer, spent most of his career as a staffer and fix-it man in Texas for his brother in Washington. But like Billy Carter, Sam Houston drank too much—and by the time LBJ had become president, his brother’s misbehavior had grown so acute that Johnson required Sam Houston to live in the White House, where he could be monitored.
In due course, this presidential vote of no-confidence produced a response. In 1970, Sam Houston published a volume entitled My Brother Lyndon that, while largely benign, contained enough bile about the thin-skinned LBJ to cause an estrangement.
Among presidential memoirs, My Brother Lyndon is a particular favorite of mine—partly for an incident related to Sam Houston’s publicity tour. Appearing one evening on David Frost’s TV talk show, Sam Houston was asked to comment on a passage (read aloud by Frost) where the author complained about his chronic inability to penetrate his brother’s army of “sycophants.” Before he could respond, Sam Houston explained, Frost would have to tell him what “sycophant” meant.
Let that be a lesson to ghostwriters everywhere.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
