Like JFK, the most momentous decision Biden will make impacts his family
National Post, 30 December 2020
He faces a dilemma no president has had to confront in 60 years: how to choose an attorney general whose department will decide on whether to prosecute his family?
U.S. president-elect Joe Biden is facing a dilemma that no president has had to confront in 60 years: how to choose an attorney general whose department will decide whether to prosecute his family?
In 1960, John F. Kennedy prevailed in an exceptionally close vote. Many believe, then and now, that he stole the election. Of the corrupt political machines that delivered for him in Chicago and Texas, JFK would exclaim, “Thank God for a few honest crooks!”
Indeed, so widespread was the view that JFK stole the 1960 election that even laudatory Kennedy biopics invariably include a scene where old Joe Kennedy Sr. says some version of, “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll buy an election for my son, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
Richard Nixon, who conceded the election to avert the “agony of a constitutional crisis,” nevertheless believed that there was widespread voter fraud.
JFK did not know what evidence of voting fraud may have been collected by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Independent of the election, JFK likely suspected that the FBI had more than a little interest in his father’s dubious business dealings, and everyone in Washington believed that the Kennedy patriarch was a crook, and not of the honest kind.
So what does a president-elect do when he comes from a corrupt clan, as JFK did? He keeps it in the family. And the family, led by Joe Kennedy Sr., opted for an efficient, if brazen, solution: JFK appointed his brother, Robert, to be attorney general, so the Kennedys would have nothing to worry about from the Department of Justice, or its investigative branch, the FBI.
JFK was the youngest man ever elected president. Biden is the oldest, so the dynamic this time around is not the son protecting the father, but the father protecting the son.
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