Sometimes everything is relative, and at other times relatives seem to be everything, at least when it comes to families of presidents and their desire to be with their kin. About to tell the world he was going to name his brother as his attorney general, John Kennedy told Ben Bradlee he planned to open his door at 2 in the morning, look down the street and if no one was there, whisper, “It’s Bobby,” and then close the door.

Two months later he named his brother-in-law Sargent Shiver to head the new Peace Corps, adding another number to the “buy one, get one free” slogan voiced by Bill Clinton years later, making it a three-for-one bargain matched only now when Donald Trump came to town, leaving his wife and youngest son back home in Manhattan, but with his son-in-law and his daughter in tow. There were complaints at the time but they turned out to be two of Kennedy’s better appointments. That was partly because the “brother” part meant less than the fact that Bobby had been his campaign manager since the 1952 Senate race, and naming a campaign manager to a government position is a tradition as old as the hills. Fears that Bobby was too young and too rash to judge wisely came to an end in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he crafted the “Trollope ploy” to answer a temperate earlier letter from Russia and ignore the bellicose one that came later, that showed the way out of a dangerous impasse. Motto: Nepotism isn’t always the worst that can happen, and it certainly beat World War III.