Word: ike
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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True, the raffish-brother act has had its more edifying counterpart. Milton Eisenhower, the brains of the family according to Ike, enjoyed a sort of unappointed super-Cabinet status during the '50s. John Kennedy formalized the fraternal arrangement by making Bobby Kennedy Attorney General...
Loud-mouthed presidential brothers are nothing new, however. One has to go back to the Eisenhower era to find a president whose siblings kept their shenanigans in the shade. And even Ike's brother Edgar, a highbrow industrialist from Tacoma, Washington, liked to get in his digs at his brother the president. "Edgar's been criticizing me since I was five," Ike once joked at a press conference...
...Eisenhower brothers kept their political disagreements largely to themselves. And, nepotism be damned, Ike drew his youngest brother Milton, a university president (Johns Hopkins) and long-time civil servant into his inner circle. Milton gave Ike important advice on his direct telephone line to the White House, and made the 40-minute drive to Washington from his home in Baltimore several times a week. It was Milton who encouraged Ike to accept the Republican nomination in 1952, and it was Milton who said he should seek a second term in 1956. He also advised Ike's 1953 atoms-for-peace...
...smiled cynically when Ike introduced his kid brother as "a man of whom I've always been proud to say: 'My brother Milton'." Jack Kennedy maintained an even closer relationship with his brother Bobby, and, though the two had fiercely clashing personalities, they got on famously. Familial embarrassment was noticeably absent at Camelot, despite the rumors of swimming pool orgies and Mafia links that crept through the tight Kennedy ring of privacy...
...time, Joe McCarthy was loose, with all the blackbirds of his paranoia. When Ike federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate the schools of Little Rock, the country had an ugly glimpse of things to come. If we think of the '50s now as the last golden age, a period of moral poise, they seemed at the time very different. Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1955: "We have entered the Age of Despondency, with the Age of Desperation just around the corner." Someone is always saying that; it is almost always true...