David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
Should reporters be asking Justin Trudeau whether his father crossed a line in the October Crisis of 1970? Should they be asking whether Pierre Trudeau went too far in imposing wage and price controls in 1975?
These questions may seem academic, but below the 49th parallel the early days of the 2016 presidential election are being dominated by repeated inquiries into whether Jeb Bush agrees with George W. Bush's decision to initiate a war in Iraq – and whether Rand Paul, who parts ways with his father on legalizing marijuana, agrees with former presidential candidate Ron Paul on moving the United States toward global isolation.
These questions often materialize when the son also rises, and, in the case of Marine Le Pen, when the daughter becomes prominent. The younger Le Pen recently read her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the National Front party he founded in France because of his remarks sympathizing with the Second World War Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime.
Long before Ivan Turgenev's 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, sometimes translated as Fathers and Children, the political relationship between family members has been a troublesome issue. But more than a century and a half later, the issue seems to have new resonance – and presents political figures from prominent families, who often are considered to enjoy an unusual advantage, with a burden that their rivals do not possess.
Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, has broken with her husband, Bill Clinton, expressing skepticism over the North American free-trade agreement (NAFTA) that the latter supported as president. But the very prominence of the phrase "the Clintons," often rendered as a disparagement, in the American political conversation almost assures that Mrs. Clinton will be asked to delineate the occasions and issues with which she disagrees with her husband's policy positions and decisions.
In the case of Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor must contend with two prominent family members. His father, former president George H.W. Bush, has emerged as a beloved symbol of reason and rectitude, so it is unlikely that he will be held up to scrutiny, though within the contemporary Republican Party there remains great resentment about his 1990 disavowal of his "read my lips" promise not to support new taxes. It is, rather, Mr. Bush's older brother, the 43rd president, whose record presents a challenge. The younger Mr. Bush stumbled this spring when he was asked whether his brother was right to invade Iraq. He has made it clear that his brother was too much of a big spender during his eight years in the White House. But generally he has married an "I'm-my-own-man" approach with an expression of family loyalty. "I love my brother," he said at a political event in New Hampshire, site of the first 2016 primary election, "and people are just going to have to get over that."
Generally family members march in lock-step. When William Gladstone wanted to disclose his conversion to Irish Home Rule in 1885, it was his son, Herbert, a Liberal member of Parliament from Leeds, who told the press – an episode once known to every Canadian student of British history as the famous "Hawarden Kite." Winston Churchill idolized Lord Randolph Churchill – and replicated much of his father's rashness and over-confidence before emerging as Britain's great wartime leader.
The Chamberlains – Joseph and his two sons, Austen and Neville, the latter the appeasement prime minister of Britain and all three of them former Lord Mayors of Birmingham – always stuck together. The great exception are the Milibands of Great Britain. David Miliband was foreign secretary and the coming man, but he was successfully challenged for leadership of the Labour Party by his younger brother, Ed, who this spring presided over a devastating political defeat.
The departures of the children from their parents are often subtle and difficult to discern. To the untrained 21st-century ear, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his composer sons sounds very similar. And yet to the 18th-century ear, there were marked differences. The same goes in politics – which may explain why the younger Mr. Bush has been under so much pressure to set himself apart from his brother.
Justin Trudeau, like Pierre Trudeau an ardent federalist, nonetheless has broken with his father on energy, pointing out that he was 10 years old when the national energy program was promulgated and should not be judged by it. He is more careful in cultivating the West than was his father.
But no one should forget his affecting "Je t'aime papa" remarks during the September, 2000, funeral of the man who for 15 years served as Canada's prime minister. Nor should it be overlooked that he has employed the "just watch me" line that his father made famous. With a brashness that matches his father's, that line may well be his answer later this year to the sort of questions that right now so bedevil Jeb Bush and Rand Paul.
David Shribman