“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” So say our political families as they try to pass the torch on to generations of clunkers who dine out on the family name, even as the franchise rots.
This idea seems to imply that family members are assembly-line products who turn out more or less the same kind of people through years and/or generations, through practice suggests it’s not true. In the 18th and 19th centuries, John Adams, a founder, a diplomat, a vice president, and our second president, had one son who became our sixth president and two sons who were wastrels.
John Quincy Adams repeated, with one son who became the ambassador to Great Britain in the Civil War era and more sons who were wastrels. His son Charles Francis rang down the curtain for good on Adamses in politics, cognizant of the destruction that ambition had wrought on his family.
Henry, the last one of his line to be known to the public, lived long enough into the next century to heap aristocratic scorn on the next public dynast, Theodore Roosevelt, the son of a New York philanthropist and a secretary to Abraham Lincoln. He was the very first president to become a celebrity, and his fame was enough to put immense public pressure on his first son and namesake to slip into his boots when he died. This apple, alas, lacked the big public presence essential to stardom.
His fifth cousin Eleanor, however, whose husband (and cousin) was also a Roosevelt, later claimed center stage. Their children, who were heirs to not one but two strands of genetic ability, rolled downhill quickly, leaving the way open to a takeover that was hostile in nature by one of their father’s own aides.
Surely in 1939 and 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt called his rogue ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy home in disgrace from his assignment in England, he had no idea he was facing the man whose children would elbow his own out of politics and out of the spotlight, shaping national politics for the rest of their lives.
Not only were the four public Kennedys (father Joe, President John, Sen. Robert, and Sen. Ted) different from the Roosevelts and other politicians, they were different from each other too. Joe was an isolationist and a textbook conservative. John was a centrist and ardent Cold Warrior, Robert was an indefinable mixture of left and right feelings, while Ted was a traditional bleeding-heart liberal and a dove in the Cold War, right down to his toes.
With all this in mind, should it surprise us too much that the three-term governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, the son of three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo, a scholar and gentleman if ever there was one, should turn out to be a first-class abuser-and-user of women, famed for his outbursts and hysterics, for the profanities that he rains upon his aides?
Some dynasts win their first race on the strength of the family name and then try to undo all the things that their forebears did to make that name popular. For the Cuomos and Kennedys, it seems to be their life’s calling and a process they all have down pat.
