Two Cheers for Nepotism

All laughed, for the joke that connected everyone there was the fact that none of them would have been in that room if they had not been related to two former presidents–George H.W. Bush and John Kennedy–who themselves had been children of two rich and richly connected millionaire fathers who also held high public office. The younger Bush had become president when he narrowly defeated Albert Gore Jr., son of a prominent Tennessee senator who had raised Albert Jr. from his birth to be president and had bequeathed him his seats in the House and the Senate. Once installed, Bush began handing out choice jobs and assignments to members of the Bushes’ extended political family: Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of Vice President Richard Cheney, is a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department, while Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, is chairman of the FCC.

This good luck was not confined to the Bushes and Kennedys. In 2002, Elizabeth Dole joined Hillary Clinton in the United States Senate; they had become household names when their husbands were running for president. Once in Congress, Mesdames Dole and Clinton joined a rich assortment of wives, widows, children, and siblings of other well-known political people, including Evan Bayh (son of a senator), Mary Landrieu (daughter of a New Orleans mayor), John Sununu (son of a former New Hampshire governor), House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (daughter of a five-term Baltimore congressman), and the up-and-coming Harold Ford Jr., who took his father’s old seat in the House.

If everything in politics seems to be relative–or everyone in politics somebody’s relative–it also holds true in other professions: in the theater, where the Redgrave family is in its third generation of stardom; in the press, where the New York Times and the Washington Post are now being run by the grandsons of publishers, and in police and fire departments, where membership also runs in the family.

Of course, none of this is news to Adam Bellow, son of the novelist Saul, and one of a number of children of writers who have followed their parents into the writing profession, if not always in the same field. Bellow, who credits his father’s name with opening doors for him (if not for keeping him on the right side of them), does not find this troubling. In fact, he’s written an entire book, “In Praise of Nepotism,” about the phenomenon.

THE WORD “NEPOTISM,” from the Latin word nepote, was coined in the fourteenth century to describe the custom of appointing bastards to high civil posts. For centuries, it flourished as the handmaiden of class systems based on inheritance, meeting resistance in America, where it ran head-on into the competing values of egalitarianism, republican government, and worship of the self-made man.

Reconciling nepotism with those values has always been difficult. “The founding period,” Bellow writes, “was one in which the American attitude toward nepotism took shape as something deeply confused.” Thus Thomas Jefferson, son of the most powerful family in the most class-driven state in the Union, helped to develop the political arts of mass organization and quasi-populist campaigning. He inherited his class standing as a matter of course, unlike George Washington, son of the second marriage of a minor planter, who had to depend on the favors of a complex web of extended-family members to help his ascent.

It was John Adams who broke new ground as a republican dynast, openly raising his sons to be great. Two cracked under the strain, but the eldest, John Quincy, “accepted his fate,” and as a child would enter a cauldron of pressure from which he never emerged. At age eleven, he went with his father to France as his secretary; at fourteen he went to Russia (minus his father) as secretary to the American legate; at fifteen and sixteen he was secretary to American peace delegations at The Hague and Paris; and in 1786 he went to London as his father’s secretary when the elder Adams became ambassador to the Court of St. James. In 1794 President Washington appointed his vice president’s son ambassador to the Netherlands at age twenty-seven, and his official career had started in earnest: Thirty years later, having been secretary of state and ambassador to Russia and Britain, he did indeed follow his father, becoming the sixth president in 1824.

But this First Nepot had the misfortune to be opposed by the first great self-made man in American political history, Andrew Jackson, who turned Adams’s background against him in what would emerge as the time-honored fashion: “Adams was portrayed as hopelessly out of touch, a man who never worked an honest day in his life, and who despised the common people. . . . His family was mockingly referred to as ‘the House of Braintree,’ and his father as ‘King John the First.'”

When Theodore Roosevelt became at twenty-three the youngest member of the New York Assembly in 1882, he was elected wholly on the reputation of his father, a well-known philanthropist, who had been all but worshipped in New York. “Mr. Roosevelt has hereditary claims to the confidence and hopefulness of the voters of this city,” the New York Post advised readers, “for his father was in his day one of the most useful and public-spirited of men.” Teddy’s Roosevelt name in turn became the booster-rocket for his fifth cousin Franklin, who adopted the former president as his model and patron, married his niece, and mapped out a career path that in every particular mirrored the one taken by Theodore. Bellow cites Stephen Hess’s comment: “The young candidate didn’t bother to correct any mistaken impression that he was a son or nephew of the Roosevelt president.” He credits the big break of Franklin’s career–his selection in 1920 to run as vice president–to his “coattail connection” with Teddy. “I voted for your father!” he often heard people cry.

WHEN FRANKLIN HIMSELF first ran for president, one of his backers was Joseph P. Kennedy, a financier with nine children who, by making his children’s advancement the work of his lifetime, lifted nepotism to stunning new heights. Dreaming of seeing his four sons in government, he devoted twenty-nine years to raising his first son, Joe Jr., to grow up to be president. He insisted his second son John take his place. As senator and president, John Kennedy had known and had worked with two other senators, Prescott Bush of Connecticut and Albert Gore of Tennessee. In 1962, Prescott Bush retired, but his second son, George Herbert Walker Bush, was planning his run for a House seat in Texas and dreaming of becoming president himself.

Meanwhile, Gore had presidential ambitions both for himself and his son, who was raised from his birth as an oncoming president, and whose nickname at school was “Prince Al.” His birth was announced on the front page of the Tennessee newspapers; at age six, he was hailed as a politician in training; at twenty-eight, he took his father’s old House seat, and then jumped to the Senate at age thirty-six. At just under forty, he ran his first race for president, because his father had asked him to do it. Four years later, he ran for vice president on Bill Clinton’s ticket, and they ousted George H.W. Bush, who was seeking reelection. Eight years after that, he made the run for the presidency his father had planned all his life. In what was billed as a battle of dynasts, he lost to Bush’s eldest son, George.

Does this mean that nepotism is always triumphant? Not quite. To the surprise of all who had known them in prep school and college, family cut-ups George W. Bush and John Kennedy turned out to have political skills and real leaderly qualities. But Al Gore never developed such instincts, despite a quarter century in public life. Katharine Graham saved the Washington Post, but the newspaper empire of the Binghams of Louisville was torn to shreds by their heirs. Neither the four sons of Theodore Roosevelt nor the four sons of Franklin and Eleanor ever got far in national politics.

And as for the twenty-six surviving grandchildren of Joseph P. Kennedy, torrents of cash, Hollywood stars, endless publicity, and the best advisers that love and money can purchase have been unable to create a single distinguished political figure. In 2000 (with Al Gore) and in 2002, Democrats were badly burned by two children of major political talents who got their first jobs on the names of their families, and proved unequal to tough races in more exposed venues, where family feeling carried less weight: Maryland Democrats are ruing the day they forced Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley out of the gubernatorial primary to make room for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. And at this writing, the one member of the third Kennedy generation now in a major political office is a single lackluster member of Congress, who won his first seat in the Rhode Island State Assembly by spending $73 a vote.

What this may suggest is that the tension between nepotism and merit is not quite as great as it seems. Theodore Roosevelt got his start as the son of his father but turned himself into a dynamic and forceful political presence. Franklin Roosevelt at first spun off from his cousin but quickly established his singular presence. The three Kennedy brothers who had major careers were markedly different, not just from their father, but from one another, with different causes, and styles, and followers. As a politician, George W. Bush is different from both his father and grandfather, and, much as John Kennedy did, defines himself in opposition to what he perceives as his father’s misjudgments. As Bellow points out, Ted Kennedy’s name put him into the Senate, but forty years later his talents have kept him there, and turned him into a figure of consequence. By contrast, the younger Kennedys who were flushed out of office failed to establish compelling personae. To succeed, a dynast has to push off from the family name and in some sense redefine it. If he doesn’t, he appears doomed to fail.

Failure, of course, is the flip side of glory, and one to which dynasts are prone. Well-meaning dynasts have pushed sons till they broke (the sons of both John and John Quincy Adams); pushed them into the wrong line of work (Albert Gore Jr.); or set them adrift at a level of fame and temptation that exceeded their powers to cope. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were “underinvolved” with their children and gave them scant attention and discipline. The sons they got “were just the kind you would expect,” Bellow informs us, “spoiled opportunists who didn’t hesitate to sell their family name.” After Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968, his many young children grew up more or less without adult supervision, while being indulged as celebrities. After many addictions and accidents, some have now gotten their lives back in order. Some of them did not survive.

Adam Bellow is right that there’s at least something to praise in nepotism. But to look at the children of dynasties is to see that there’s something to worry about as well.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.