Books & Reading

A History of the American Nepo Baby

November 11, 2026

Perhaps the clearest evidence of Americans’ comfort with aristocracy is their tacit acceptance of the persistent nepotism in modern culture. Nothing better reflects our love of pedigree than the public’s obsession with “nepo babies,” the children of Hollywood stars who ride on their parents’ coattails to become heirlets and starlets. From the Barrymores of early Hollywood to the Hustons; Henry Fonda’s offspring; Kirk and Michael Douglas; the Robert Downeys; Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson; Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow; Jerry and Ben Stiller—the nepo baby genealogy grows ever longer.

Their talent is beside the point: they weren’t sifted from the unwashed masses of wannabe actors. The Ochs‑Sulzberger multigenerational family–owned New York Times had to concede there was nothing new in the phenomenon, that “children born into rich, famous and otherwise powerful families have had a leg up in life, inheriting monarchies, business empires, wealth and star power.”

Nepotism, despite its incestuous pattern of marriage within caste, extends far beyond Hollywood. It has infected network news, the publishing industry, and politics. NFL coaches put their sons on the staff. Chris Wallace, son of 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace, got his job the old‑fashioned way, which is not to say he lacks competence, but the inside connection is impossible not to see. Other “media legacies” include CNN’s Andrea Koppel (daughter of Ted), legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin (son of a TV producer), and former anchor Chris Cuomo (son and brother of New York governors).

As one critic dryly noted, greed is “natural,” too, but that doesn’t mean we ought to tolerate it.

At Fox, Douglas Harriman Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, and Peter Doocy, son of longtime anchor Steve Doocy, carry the torch. NBC earned the nickname “Nepotism Broadcasting Company” thanks to hires like Mika Brzezinski, Ronan Farrow, Willie Geist—and, for a brief, shining moment, Chelsea Clinton. One of the oddest hires at NBC was Luke Russert, all of twenty‑two and fresh out of college in 2008. He was brought in as an election correspondent two months after the untimely death of his well‑liked Meet the Press host father, Tim. In this case, the heir apparent assumed the throne before he’d had any television experience or showed substantive evidence of worth as a political analyst.

In 2003, Adam Bellow, son of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Saul Bellow, wrote an admittedly self‑serving book, In Praise of Nepotism. While he confessed that the intellectual cachet gave him a leg up when he was hired as an editor at Doubleday, which published his book, he still unabashedly marshaled a defense for what he called the “new nepotism.” Deciding for himself that it was far less top‑down than bottom‑up, nepotism struck him as meritocratic in that children of privilege must sink or swim, and could not long coast on inherited advantages. He further insisted that nepotism is so “hardwired” into human nature that it could never truly be eradicated. As one critic dryly noted, greed is “natural,” too, but that doesn’t mean we ought to tolerate it.

Bellow could not prove that there was any meritocracy involved in modern nepotism as there was no way to know (or justify) why children of privilege were being kept on the payroll. The power of their “brand” might be worth more than the bare minimum of competence they had to show. The act of getting one’s foot in the door is nearly everything in the media universe. The film industry and American television have always been about a perception of beauty and how to peddle a familiar face. Where else can a twenty-something model appear fit to star as a city detective?

Politics has always been a family business. George Washington’s nephew Bushrod was named to the Supreme Court by John Adams, setting the tone. Presidential family dynasties followed: John and John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison and his grandson Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and his fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt (whose wife, Eleanor, was Teddy’s niece). More recently, the administrations of George H. W. and George W. Bush were separated by a single president.

The nineteenth‑century spoils system made nepotism explicit, even if it was not always approved. Candidates openly defended such largesse as “taking care of their family.” Nepo baby President Benjamin Harrison ran on the memory of his grandfather’s name and gave his brother a federal appointment. He was publicly taken to task for treating this favor as a “personal privilege” that was too close to a royal prerogative. When in the 1950s The Washington Post coined the term “limousine aristocracy,” it evoked not just wealth but lineage: modern politicians pulling up to the Capitol in luxury cars was the contemporary equivalent of carriages emblazoned with family crests.

The first woman to serve as a state governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, received her appointment in 1924 after her husband died in office. Until 1976, out of a combined total of ninety‑five female members of Congress, three‑quarters of those who served as senators and half of those in the House were widows when they assumed office—though in most cases not replacing their own husbands. A political woman who was widowed could not so easily be painted as “too ambitious.”

Do they really work twice as hard? The Camelot magic had sprinkled fairy dust over the eyes of journalists.

That dynamic partly explains why Hillary Clinton was attacked for trading on the family name. First Ladies were expected to embrace the “helpmeet” role and concern themselves with beautification and other domestic duties, placing family before personal ambition until their husband died. Among the unflattering nicknames earned during her 2016 presidential run was “Her Royal Clintoness”—a not‑so‑subtle dig at her perceived air of entitlement.

As of 2024, eleven nepo babies sat in the U.S. Congress, six Democrats and five Republicans. Seven of these held the same seat once held by their fathers, and two directly succeeded them. Donald Payne Jr. won a special election in his New Jersey district after his father’s death. Al Gore and Mitt Romney were sons of senators. Before she became senator from Wyoming, Liz Cheney received an appointment as deputy assistant secretary of state (and her husband as chief council for the Office of Management and Budget) during her father’s vice presidency. In 2002, Lisa Murkowski was appointed by her father to fill his former U.S. Senate seat when he became governor of Alaska. At that moment, five other U.S. senators were the sons of former senators. Shelley Moore Capito, U.S. senator from West Virginia, is the daughter of three‑term Governor Arch Moore, whose federal conviction for corruption and resulting prison sentence did nothing to diminish her dynastic advantage. The list goes on.

Donald Trump brought his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, into the White House, where they wielded an enormous amount of power despite their utter lack of preparation for any of the tasks they commandeered. Less often criticized, but still outlandish, were displays of nepotism involving the Kennedy dynasty, for which appointing relatives was considered a filial duty. John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert to the cabinet as attorney general; then he helped orchestrate his youngest brother Ted’s accession to the Senate seat he vacated, installing a placeholder until Ted turned thirty and became constitutionally eligible.

Though a 1967 law was passed to prohibit this kind of family favoritism, and a long list of laws have been instituted to prohibit nepotism in government contracts, supervisory roles, and appointments, the problem has hardly gone away. Politicians routinely hire colleagues’ relatives to secure allies and skirt restrictions. When Hillary gave up her Senate seat to become President Obama’s secretary of state, presidential daughter Caroline Kennedy, who had not sought a political position before and had never held elected office, allowed her name to be floated as a successor.

Many in the press corps were, not surprisingly, enamored of her. Caroline was praised and flattered for her upbringing, for her glamour, for adding “an infusion of class,” according to New York Times pundit Maureen Dowd. Tripping over the blatant hypocrisy, Dowd excused family privilege in Caroline’s case, though she had ripped into both the Bushes and the Clintons: “Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar. But then, without nepotism, W. [George W. Bush] would be pumping gas in Midland—and not out of the ground.” After reading all the drooling endorsements of Caroline, one letter to the editor published in the Times joked, “Why not rename the United States Senate the United States House of Peers?”

Others christened Caroline “our tragic national princess,” a “debutante,” and swooned over the magic of the Kennedy name. On National Public Radio, Adam Bellow compared her story to Arthurian legend, saying, “She has drawn her father’s sword from the stone,” offering the Empire State a chance for a “new queen, and her name is Caroline.” Part of her worthiness was what she had imbibed simply in being a Kennedy. It was meant as well to be an understandable picking up of the torch from her then terminally ill uncle Ted. Rationalizing further, Bellow explained, “This kind of motivation is common in dynastic families, and it is as good a reason as any to go into politics. Indeed, it is better than most. Besides, dynastic successors are often driven to exceed expectations and typically work twice as hard in order to earn their advantages.” Do they really work twice as hard? The Camelot magic had sprinkled fairy dust over the eyes of journalists.

In the end, Caroline Kennedy’s bid failed, and she went on to serve as an able U.S. ambassador. But the larger issue goes well beyond Hollywood glamour or Kennedy nostalgia. Nepotism is rooted in the formidable patronage perks that the government has granted, namely, rolling back inheritance taxes and enshrining dynastic trusts. As law professor Ray Madoff argued in “America Builds an Aristocracy,” published in the Times in 2010, the decade of the 1990s saw the strengthening of dynasty trusts in numerous states. Legal changes had eliminated the long‑standing “rule against perpetuities,” which placed a limit of ninety years on the duration of a trust. As Congress increased exemptions on estate taxes, trusts subsidized a new hereditary aristocracy.

One glaring privilege of the dynastic trust is the “spendthrift clause.” This device protects the trust assets of all kinds of nepo babies from creditors and ex‑spouses. Like corporate personhood, which shields the owner’s personal assets from the firm’s creditors, the trust lives on, even if future heirs owe people money. This supercharged trust literally reinvented how entail had kept family wealth consolidated, which Thomas Jefferson took pride in eliminating in the Revolutionary era. These trusts now empowered ancestors to “collude” with the living and perpetuate family wealth and lineage at the same time. Another legal scholar recently noted this “bizarre twist in history.” Though the perpetuities rule that limits the control future generations can exercise over inherited wealth remains on the books in England, it has now disappeared in America, making the United States, in effect, “a more feudal society than the British.”

Here lies the darker dynamic of nepotism. Nepo babies live off the largesse of their parents, obtaining advantage from the eugenic notion of “like breeds like,” that pedigree is a predictor of success. It should surprise no one that a reviewer of Adam Bellow’s book nodded approvingly at the author’s having inherited his father’s “aristocratic profile.” The newest forms of nepotism reaffirm that the feudalistic remnants of patrimony and pedigree are openly flourishing.