Dynastic Voyage.(The Talk of the Town)(politicians and their families)

Shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy for President last winter, Roger Cohen, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared that "a delicate problem confronts her that few people are talking about: almost two decades of dynastic domination of American politics." Well, they're talking about it now. "Forty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House," a recent Associated Press story, by Nancy Benac, begins. "Talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate," Benac goes on. "If Hillary Clinton were to be elected and reelected, the nation could go twenty-eight years in a row with the same two families governing the country. Add the elder Bush's terms as Vice-President, and that would be thirty-six years straight with a Bush or Clinton in the White House." And a cover story in the Economist a couple of weeks ago, while noting that a woman President "would undoubtedly be a good thing for the country," adds, ominously, "But there is a downside: dynasty."

Ruling families are not supposed to be a big part of the picture in our democratic republic, whose very Constitution states firmly, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States." Even so, we've dabbled in dynasties from the beginning, when the Lee family, of Virginia, got to work spawning two signers of the Declaration of Independence, three governors, two senators, nine members of Congress, and four Confederate generals, including Robert E. (The Lees' Washington, Randolph, and Harrison in-laws won some elections, too.) The New Jersey Frelinghuysens are well into their third century of political droit du seigneur, from Frederick (born 1753), a delegate to the Continental Congress and later a United States senator, through Rodney (born 1946), a current member of the House of Representatives.

If anything, the dynastic dynamic has picked up speed in the past half century or so. It reached a perfect storm in 1962, when Massachusetts voters filled the Senate seat vacated by John F. Kennedy, grandson of Congressman and Mayor John F. Fitzgerald and son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, when he was elected President--the very seat that, in 1952, J.F.K. had wrested from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who was a great-great-great-grandson of Senator George Cabot, a grandson of the Senate titan Henry Cabot Lodge, and a son of George Cabot Lodge, who, though himself a poet, married a Frelinghuysen. (Are you following this?) The 1962 Democratic nominee for senator was, of course, Edward Moore Kennedy, then thirty years old. His Republican opponent was--wait for it--another George Cabot Lodge, this one a son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a great-great-great-great-grandson of, etc. Nor was that all. There was a third-party "peace" candidate, too, a professor of European history at Harvard: H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, Chief Justice of the United States, and 1916 Republican Presidential nominee. During a primary debate, Kennedy's opponent for the Democratic nomination told him that if his name were just Edward Moore his candidacy would be a joke. A real zinger, but it might have been even zingier if its deliverer, Eddie McCormack, had not been the nephew of John W. McCormack, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Teddy won. But even if one of the others had prevailed the result would have illustrated the point, which is that a country with such a plenitude of political patriarchies--not only Kennedys, Lodges, Hugheses, and McCormacks but also Bayhs, Browns, Cuomos, Daleys, Dodds, Longs, La ...