Nepotism defended
Ideas
`No person connected with me by blood or marriage will be appointed to office," declared the 19th U.S. president, Rutherford B. Hayes. His firm stand against nepotism was one way he hoped to clean up Washington after the corruption-filled administration of his predecessor, Ulysses S. Grant.
But nepotism has never been easy to banish from American public life--or, for that matter, from other American pursuits. Even the Founding Fathers, despite their opposition to hereditary privileges, found ways to advance their relatives' careers in public office. And no recent political figure has matched John F. Kennedy, who appointed his own brother Robert as attorney general.
Today, with the Oval Office occupied by the son of a former president and the grandson of a senator, many observers charge that politics in Washington is again becoming a family affair. True, most forms of outright family cronyism were brought to an end by a 1967 federal antinepotism statute and other reforms. But a goodly number of relatives by blood or marriage hold prominent posts not only within the same branches of government but across different ones. And a rapidly expanding network of relatives connects the offices of Congress with the lobbying shops of K Street.
To be sure, there is nothing illicit about the way in which Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter, became a deputy assistant secretary of state. And no law bars Sen. Tom Daschle's wife, Linda, from working for a lobbying firm. But the British-born pundit Andrew Sullivan is not alone in suggesting that these and other cases are a "worrisome sign that America's political class is becoming increasingly insular."
One person who is emphatically unworried is Adam Bellow. His new and distinctly contrarian book, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, is a forthright polemic wrapped in an anthropological and historical examination of a subject that has been curiously neglected in the annals of scholarship. (The only other book-length study of the subject is a 17th-century Italian treatise on papal politics, Il Nipotismo di Roma.) Bellow has two related aims. He wants to show that nepotism, in various forms, is universal and irresistible throughout history and across all human cultures. And he wants to make the case that a distinct form of "meritocratic nepotism"--which has developed over centuries and which tempers family advantage with demonstrated ability--is not only consistent with the ideals of our meritocratic democracy but, when openly acknowledged and legally restrained, beneficial to its functioning.
Checks and balances. "I'm not saying we should get rid of obstructions to nepotism," Bellow said in an interview. "I am trying to show that the way it is pursued today does include many checks and balances--legal, psychological, and cultural. I am saying there is a distinction we are not making between good and bad nepotisms." Drawing those distinctions, he claims, will allow us to get over much of the needless hypocrisy that surrounds the subject. And it may even help us to see that the return of such things as "public-service dynasties"--think of the first father-son presidential duo, John Adams and John Quincy Adams--can be a good thing.
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