Family Business

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is not only the story of Bush, trying to follow his father and brother as president, but also of Hillary Clinton, who is trying to walk in the tracks of her president husband, and also, too, of Edward M. Kennedy, who in 1979 became the last of three brothers to run for that office. Each began with the highest of great expectations, tripped coming out of the gate, and endured a tough slog while attempting a reboot. Each struggled also with legacy issues, which proved in the end a more than mixed blessing and some part of which each would be forced to disown.

As is true of the rich, dynastic families are not quite like the rest of us, in a number of obvious ways: They live in a world where the White House was a family residence, access is assured to most things and most people, and nice things—invitations and offers to make money in business—somehow keep coming their way. Bushes and Kennedys have been millionaires (Prescott Bush and Joseph P. Kennedy), ambassadors to serious countries (George H. W. Bush and Joseph P. Kennedy), elected officials (Senators Prescott Bush, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Governor George W. Bush of Texas), and, when their fathers or brothers hadn’t themselves been president, they were people whose calls he would take.

But while it took the Bushes and Kennedys a number of generations to get to the big time, the Clintons managed to do it in one generation, with Bill and Hillary together racking up a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars and holding no less than five major offices—governor of Arkansas, president, first lady, senator from New York, and secretary of state—between them and all by themselves. But however it came or how long it took, dynastic family members share the idea that the White House is reachable, and, if they have or are told they have talent, they may think it is what they deserve. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were told from a young age how brilliant they were, and they seemed to believe it: Jeb was the Phi Beta Kappa who finished school in two and a half years, and Hillary Rodham was told—even before she set eyes on Bill Clinton—that she could and should seek the big time herself. No one ever told Ted Kennedy how brilliant he was (and certainly never his brother the president), but by the time his two older brothers had both been murdered he had been turned into a sacred vessel of sorts by the people around the family, the very last prince of the blood left standing, and their last chance to hold power again. If this leads to swelled heads it is hardly surprising. And there is one other element to be reckoned with: When a family has held power for a long enough time, it accumulates an army of aides, friends, and donors—a court party—whose purpose in life is to care for the family interests. The upside of this may be self-evident, but the downside is that these loyal retainers are unlikely to question the queen or young master, or to tell them they’ve made a mistake.

The effect of this mindset on practical matters doesn’t take long to play out. “The assumption was that merely being available would be sufficient,” wrote Peter Collier and David Horowitz of Ted Kennedy’s doomed 1979-80 effort. “It was almost as if he felt that the decision finally to do it .  .  . would in and of itself take care of all the loose ends.” This being the case, actual preparations had been kept to a minimum, which was most likely the reason his notoriously stumbling interview with CBS’s Roger Mudd, three days before he made his announcement, all but sandbagged Kennedy’s race at its start. His “handlers didn’t treat him like an ordinary political candidate who needed to be prepped for his media close-up,” biographer Edward Klein tells us: Words such as “Chappaquiddick” and “drinking” and “Joan” were seldom mentioned, and when they were, they were bundled as one into the “character issue,” which also was seldom brought up. “I don’t think that I was ever asked or given the opportunity to really explore” Chappaquiddick, pollster Peter Hart told Klein. “My view,” said Mudd, “is that he wasn’t prepared because he had never really sat down and asked himself .  .  . Why do I .  .  . want to run this country? .  .  . I suspect [he thought he] could sort of ascend to the nomination and he didn’t have to go through that rigorous self-examination that [other politicians] .  .  . are supposed to go through.”

Before he ran, Ted Kennedy led his putative rivals—President Jimmy Carter and the GOP’s Ronald Reagan—by two-to-one margins, and, as biographer Burton Hersh noted, “The euphoria around Kennedy persisted almost until the day he announced.” It started to fade with the Mudd interview, then when Iran seized the American embassy, it collapsed even further, as he came out with a slam at the shah. “In December, the anxiety at the Kennedy headquarters was apparent—not just over what Iran was doing to the campaign, but also over what Kennedy himself was doing to it,” wrote Elizabeth Drew in the New Yorker. “People who had joined up thinking they were about to ride the crest of a wave were adrift.”

“Roll up your sleeves and your mothers and fathers,” Kennedy exhorted one audience. His campaign, dubbed the “Bozo Zone” by reporters, was ridiculed. “Frequently his manner seemed desultory and uncertain between bursts of rhetoric, as if he found himself shoved out onto the stage and suddenly seemed puzzled about what people expected,” Hersh noted. “Whenever crowds responded listlessly, he attempted to harangue them to life.”

Similar problems beset the dynastic hopefuls trying to rise to the top in this cycle, such as Jeb Bush’s troubles as he tried to explain, over four days of interviews, what he thought of his brother’s decision to declare war on Iraq. As Jonah Goldberg wrote, he seemed “out of sync and off-tempo.” The issues he cared for seemed not quite of the moment. He had needlessly antagonized the base of his party and did not try enough to make up.

“Fair or not, the impression is that Bush has been merely biding his time and now believes that this is his moment,” writes Jonathan Tobin of Commentary. Like Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Hillary Clinton this year, a sense of connection with crowds of voters is missing. “At times, attempts to create the illusion of genuine enthusiasm have bordered on comical,” wrote National Review’s Eliana Johnson, as lobbyists were bused into events to make them seem lively. “There’s even a lack of excitement among his own staff.”

Much the same has been true of Hillary Clinton, who has been biding her time since her husband’s election, if not for some years before that. Described as unbeatable in 2008, she was blindsided in Iowa by Barack Obama (and by John Edwards) and never recovered. In 2013, when she left the State Department after four years as first diplomat, her approval ratings were in the mid-60s. She tried to leave nothing to chance. But in 2014 her book launch went badly—she said she and Bill had been “dead broke” when he left office—and her numbers began to drift down. In 2015 various scandals emerged, and the numbers came down even further. Her response was to limit the chances of failure by avoiding occasions when things could go wrong. Announcing on video, she took off on a no-contact tour of the heartland in a black van with blackened windows. She held closed-door meetings with “everyday Americans,” who turned out to be well-vetted liberal activists. In 29 days she took all of eight questions from journalists. “Democrats wonder if they can find a 3-D printer that could produce a new Candidate Hillary,” wrote the Hill’s A. B. Stoddard. “What we do know is she is consulting with 200 experts to find a message and a platform. .  .  . She appears with friendly audiences, avoids the press, and attacks Republicans in tweets.” 

At a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire, she had the press cordoned off inside rope lines, but the real joie de vivre that infused her campaign seemed best expressed when she and aide Huma Abedin stopped for lunch at an Ohio Chipotle where the two—grim-faced and wearing dark glasses—entered, ordered, and ate in absolute silence. “What are she and Huma doing?” asked Bill Clinton as he looked at the footage. “Are they robbing that place?” Dynasty candidates tend to stagger at first when their names, organizations, and oceans of money fail to produce the success they took for granted. They may reboot and improve their performance. But by then, it is often too late.

Beyond these missteps, dynasts seem plagued by other dysfunctions that have little to do with themselves. By the time that he or she faces the voters, a dynast may inherit as many as three generations of aides and retainers, 30 years or more removed from each other, and with different, sometimes clashing views. Ted Kennedy in 1980 had Jack people from 1952-60, Bobby people from 1964-68, and his personal aides from the Senate; Jeb Bush has Bush 41 and Bush 43 people, as well as his own people from Florida; Hillary has her staff from the State Department, her staff from the Senate, the people she worked with when she was first lady, as well as what remains of Bill’s original Arkansas mafia. Light-years apart, they often have different issue agendas and fail to merge smoothly. Time may be lost in dealing with their arguments. And then, there are problems with famous relations, both dead and living. If they look too big, they can make you look smaller; if all too human-sized, then there are things to explain.

Kennedy’s hope in 1979 was that voters would see his brothers in him, and look at all three as a contrast to the squalor, bungling, and general haplessness that had beset the country since 1968. But as he blundered his way through his campaign’s first phases, people saw him less as the cure than as part of the problem, and unimpressed voters moved away. Stylistically, he had none of his brothers’ quickness and wit, much less of their eloquence, and on policy matters he was not quite their heir. A defense hawk and tax-cutter, John Kennedy would have been called center-right by post-’60s standards, while Ted had morphed into a lunch-bucket liberal, more like Hubert Humphrey, his brothers’ old rival, than like his brothers themselves. 

While Jack urged people not to ask what their country could give them, Ted urged them to ask more and more from it. While Bobby had moved in his last days away from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and its big government, big spending models, Ted had embraced them. And where Jack had become a household name in World War II when he swam three miles from his sunken boat pulling an injured shipmate to safety, Ted had driven off a bridge and into the water, and left a young woman to die in his car. 

The difference between these two watery episodes tells the whole story. While the sole Kennedy loss before 1980 had been Bobby’s loss to Eugene McCarthy in 1968 in the Oregon primary, Ted would go on to lose and lose massively, in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Illinois, losing 44 of 59 primaries and caucuses, winning, as Michael -Barone tells us, “only when his backers argued that he would not be nominated anyway, and when Carter made an error, as in the March 25 contest in New York.” Ted Kennedy would go on to be one of the longest-serving senators in American history, deeply beloved by the liberals who distrusted his brothers. But his hopes to establish himself as a genuine national leader were gone.

Unlike Ted Kennedy’s brothers, the relations of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton aren’t dead and revered but alive and contentious, which puts a different species of strain on their kin.

It may be the case that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would not have been reelected had they not passed the crime bill, welfare reform, and Medicare Part D, but the parties that produced them are now convinced they want no more of these heresies and are making it clear to their heirs. If Jeb Bush has been promising not to invade Arab countries, Bill Clinton has been disowning his signal achievements on behalf of his candidate wife. NAFTA, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, not to mention the Defense of Marriage Act, have gone under the bus, as Hillary feels the need to placate serial blocs of Obama supporters. “Expressing a centrist philosophy, Mr. Clinton sought to recalibrate his party by enacting tough-on-crime legislation,” said the New York Times’s Peter Baker. Now he has disowned it: “The expression of regret was the latest effort by Mr. Clinton to reframe his record nearly 15 years after he left office and clear the way for his wife’s own White House bid.” Ah, relatives! If they’re dead and adored, they make you look smaller; and if they’re still alive and around, they only cause problems. What’s a poor dynast to do?

Have there been times when dynasts succeeded? Perhaps. But only when conditions were special, and when they broke out of the box. Robert F. Kennedy’s short, compressed run in the 1968 cycle (which ended in June, when he met the fate of his older brother) broke all the rules of dynasty politics: He ran for emotional, not really political, reasons; he did not enter big; he was never the favorite; his polls did not start out high and then crater; and he was not at a loss to explain why he was running, or what he intended to do. He did not live to win, and no one knows if he could have done so, but he had established himself as a very strong voice, with a strong base of power, who would have been a huge presence for years to come. 

The second exception to the pattern of dynastic dysfunction was the second George Bush. He was put forth not by himself or his family’s backers but by his fellow Republican governors, the most popular politicians of the late 1990s, who worried the Republican Congress had all but destroyed the brand of their party and decided it was time to get the functioning grown-ups back in command. They saw in George W. Bush the Republican version of President Clinton, an affable southerner with good people skills who had a record as a creative and capable governor, and was able to soften his party’s harder edges. Neither fit the profile of the heir who is raised as a prince. Bobby had been fairly low down on his family’s food chain—seventh child, third son—and had been the behind-the-scenes fixer for his brother the president, so much so that the sudden change to becoming pack leader as well as head of the family enterprise had been a disturbing and wrenching emotional moment. Bush, though the first-born and namesake, was not the “anointed one” of his generation: That had been Jeb, seven years his junior, the early self-starter, while George had belonged to another tradition of prominent families, the one that had made alcoholics over two generations of four out of six Adams sons. But for George, life had restarted at 40, when he stopped drinking and then launched a long-shot run for governor against a popular female incumbent. 

Instead he won, on the same day that Jeb lost his own race in Florida, a day that upended the two brothers’ lives. Thus it was George who was tapped for the nation’s highest office, while Jeb was just starting his own term in Florida, a reversal of fortune that no one expected. In spite of their privilege, the runt of the Kennedy litter and the one-time black sheep of the Bush family did not have the sense they were ordained and special. They had more of a sense of the complications and problems of life, and a more proportionate sense of their own places in it. George W. Bush did not think he was doing his country a favor by running for president; he thought he was lucky to serve, and luckier still to have conquered his demons. 

Can dynasts run well? Yes, but only if they are able to control the assets they have while escaping the traps of entitlement, arrogance, and insularity that do in so many. It does not happen often. Good luck with that.

Noemie Emery, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is author most recently of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.