Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Richard Nixon was so worried about his younger brother Donald’s willingness to trade the family name for business favors that early in his presidency he had the Secret Service put a tail on him and tap his phone.

Lyndon Johnson’s brother Sam Houston Johnson was such a falling-down-drunk that he spent a whole year of Johnson’s Senate career in a body cast from armpit to heel after breaking his leg in his own dining room.


And Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy became a national embarrassment when he registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government and received a $220,000 loan during his brother’s White House years.

The latest imbroglio involving Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham—a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report last week detailed his efforts to press the federal agency for visa approvals while his sister was secretary of state—is proof that when it comes to political embarrassment, we not only all have our mothers, but our brothers and sisters, too.

“It’s extremely common,” said Douglas Wead, a former White House aide to president George H.W. Bush who is a student of presidential families. “Among presidential siblings, there’s often a good sister-bad brother phenomenon. I’m not exactly sure why, but one of my theories is that the black sheep grows up with this star sibling and now all of a sudden, they’re president or prominent and the brother says, ‘Hey, I tied my shoes before he did,’ or ‘I got an A in spelling in third grade and he got a B-minus.’”

“I think sometimes they do bad things because they’re trying to catch up across a chasm,” added Wead, who is writing a study of presidential siblings. “And so they make mistakes.”

The visa flap is far from the first instance in which Tony Rodham or his brother Hugh embarrassed their big sister. In 1999, the brothers organized a company to harvest and sell hazelnuts from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and came to be seen as too friendly with a political rival of the country’s president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a strong American ally.

That led to a rebuke from Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel Berger, who pressed the brothers to abandon the effort. When they persisted, saying they intended only to distribute the nuts, the White House press secretary Joe Lockhart scolded them yet again.

After the Clintons left office in 2001, word emerged that Hugh Rodham had taken some $400,000 in fees from a client to lobby for a last-minute presidential pardon from his brother-in-law. “I love my brother,” Hillary Clinton said at the time. “I’m just extremely disappointed in this terrible misjudgment that he made.”

In the Rodhams’ family dynamic, Hillary has always amounted to the high-achieving eldest son her father, also named Hugh, never had, while her brothers bore the brunt of his considerable criticism and exacting standards. When the younger Hugh had his best-ever day as a high school football quarterback—completing 10 of 11 passes and throwing several touchdowns—his father’s only comment was that he should have completed the other pass, according to “A Woman in Charge,” Carl Bernstein’s 2007 biography of Hillary.

President Clinton golfs with the Rodham brothers in Coral Gables on April 29, 1996. | AP Photo

In the Clintons’ White House years, presidential aides steeled themselves for grim news about the pair they called “The Brothers Rodham.” “You never wanted to hear their name come up in any context other than playing golf,” one former aide said in 2001.

But if the brothers’ peccadillos are well known and apparently ongoing, it is less clear that they will have any real effect on Hillary Clinton’s political fortunes. The Homeland Security inspector general’s report on the visa case reserved its harshest criticism for Alejandro Mayorkas, now the agency’s No. 2 official and then the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, for creating an appearance of special treatment for Rodham and Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who was an investor in an electric car company to which Rodham’s company steered funds.

The report found that Rodham and McAuliffe both complained to Mayorkas about delays in visa approvals, but there is no suggestion that they broke any laws or regulations in doing so.

Indeed, history suggests that the sins of the siblings are seldom visited upon politicians, “unless the principal person gets dragged into the scandal, which can happen,” says historian Wead. “But usually it isn’t a problem. Brothers and sisters and moms and dads don’t usually rub off on the sibling in power. You don’t get to pick your parents and your siblings and people understand that. The same thing is not necessarily true with a spouse. Think of Geraldine Ferraro and her husband, filing taxes together and signing contracts. Then the politician doesn’t get off.”

Still, siblings’ dealings can rub off on their political brothers. In the 1960 presidential campaign, it emerged that in 1954 Donald Nixon had taken a $200,000 loan from the billionaire Howard Hughes in a futile effort to rescue a chain of Southern California drive-ins—a loan that was seen as an effort to curry favor with his brother, who was then vice president. The loan was an issue in Nixon’s losing campaign that year, and again in his defeat for the governorship of California in 1962.

Early in Nixon’s presidency, after the FBI and CIA both refused the president’s requests to spy on his brother, Nixon put the Secret Service on the case. “Don was not suspected of leaking,” wrote Nixon’s biographer Stephen Ambrose, “but of shooting off his mouth, getting favors by making promises in his brother’s name and so forth.” The wiretaps—and those Nixon ordered on several White House aides—ultimately produced nothing, but revealed the mindset and abuses of power that got Nixon in trouble in Watergate.

In the late 1970s, when it emerged that Billy Carter had visited Libya three times and then signed up to represent the country, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation and President Carter was forced to declare: “I am deeply concerned that Billy has received funds from Libya and that he may be under obligation to Libya. These facts will govern my relationship with Billy as long as I am president.”

One veteran Washington hand suggested that such conflicts can still matter, if the elected official himself is directly involved in benefiting the sibling—if Secretary Clinton had herself intervened in the visa matter, for example. And as the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email account has shown, the digital age has brought ever-greater capacity—and demand—for transparency in the workings of government.

At best, political siblings’ misdeeds can be embarrassing, and personally painful.

When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas in the 1980s, his half brother, Roger, served time in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in a sting investigation that Clinton himself had authorized. When Clinton left the White House, it emerged that Roger, too, had lobbied for pardons, in addition to the one his brother granted him for his drug conviction. And in 2001, he was arrested on drunken driving charges in Hermosa Beach, Calif., after a police officer saw him driving erratically.

“Every time I saw or talked to Mother, I was heartsick,” Bill Clinton wrote of the period during which he had to keep the drug sting operation secret from her and Roger. “Every time I looked in the mirror I was disgusted. I had been so caught up in my life and work that I’d missed all the signs.”