If RFK is confirmed, he is likely to fail for reasons similar to those for past political choices for the cabinet.
A fter his nomination was voted out of the Senate Finance Committee, it looks as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to be confirmed by the Senate to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Nobody is voting for RFK because they actually believe he is an appropriate person to head HHS. That’s not why Donald Trump picked him, either. Fundamentally, RFK is a coalition choice: He left the Democrats, then abandoned his third-party bid, endorsed Trump, and brought some of his voters with him.
It’s traditional American politics to reward this sort of thing with a cabinet post. (If anything, this is even more common in parliamentary systems, as most recently illustrated in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet.) More conventionally respected American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln have made them. Trump is hardly the first.
That doesn’t mean it will work. Nakedly coalitional cabinet choices made for repaying campaign-season favors have often gone poorly. Consider two infamous examples: Simon Cameron as Lincoln’s secretary of war and William Jennings Bryan as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state.
The Winnebago Chief
As the leader of a brand-new political party that was only founded in 1854 and won less than a third of the national popular vote in 1856, Lincoln was acutely aware during and after the 1860 election that he led a newly assembled coalition not yet forged into a durable party. To some extent, all of his cabinet choices reflected that. While Secretary of State William Seward, the dean of the anti-slavery Whigs, represented Lincoln’s own faction, others did not. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase represented the anti-slavery ex-Democrats. Attorney General Edward Bates represented the nativists imported from the short-lived American (or Know-Nothing) Party, a rival to Republicans in the mid-1850s that was in the process of merging into the Republican fold. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair represented border-state moderates who resisted both the expansion and the swift abolition of slavery.
Cameron, however, was the most nakedly transactional choice. Seward, Chase, and Bates were eminent men of great talents who had been themselves considered for the presidency. When told that Chase thought he was a better man than Lincoln, Lincoln replied, “Do you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am? I want to put them all in my cabinet.”
Not so with Cameron, who came with a parade-ground of red flags owing to his reputation as a palm-greasing machine politician, an opportunist, and — in the words of critics — “a man destitute of honor and integrity.” As a Democrat, he had succeeded his onetime mentor James Buchanan in the Senate, then converted to the Know-Nothing Party after leaving office, then was chosen as a Republican to return to the Senate even though the legislature making the choice was controlled by Democrats. His selection was investigated for suspicions of bribery, but nothing was proven. He was nicknamed the “Winnebago Chief” for charges of cheating a Native American tribe on a supply contract.
Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s vice president, wrote that “I do not believe one man can be found amongst all our friends in the Senate who will not say it will be ruinous to ap[poin]t Cameron.” Lincoln himself told two Pennsylvania congressmen who supported Cameron that he had won the election on his reputation for honesty, and asked, “What will be thought now if the first thing I do is to appoint [Cameron], whose very name stinks in the nostrils of the people for his corruption?”
But Lincoln owed him. At the 1860 Republican convention, Pennsylvania voted for Cameron on the first ballot, helping thwart Seward’s effort to roll up the nomination early. Cameron then threw Pennsylvania’s support to Lincoln, one of the decisive steps in getting Lincoln the nomination. Lincoln had formally told David Davis, his campaign manager, not to promise anyone office, but made private pledges to Cameron that were universally understood at the time to ensure Cameron a spot to place in the cabinet, most likely for himself. Because he would have to resign from the Senate to take an executive branch post, it would need to be a good position. It was widely assumed to mean secretary of the treasury.
In the general election, Pennsylvania was the nation’s second-largest state, casting 27 of the nation’s 303 electoral votes (the equivalent of 48 electoral votes today). It voted Democrat in 1856, 1852, 1844, 1836, 1832, and 1828. In 1856, Pennsylvanian James Buchanan carried just over 50 percent of the vote in the state, but the opposition was divided 32 percent for the Republican and 18 percent for the Know-Nothing candidate. Cameron’s support in the general election, including his assurances that Lincoln was a sound supporter of the protective tariffs popular (then as now) with Pennsylvanians, helped Lincoln take 56 percent of the vote in the Keystone State.
Lincoln hemmed and hawed on what to do with Cameron almost until his own inauguration in March, in part because Cameron wanted to be treasury secretary and Lincoln didn’t trust him handling the nation’s finances. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania pushed for Chase rather than Cameron in that job. Lincoln should have known better, with seven southern states already seceded and the crisis at Fort Sumter mounting, than to think he could get away with stashing a shaky choice atop the War Department, of all places. But the logic of coalition politics prevailed. The day after Lincoln’s inauguration, the Senate waved through the confirmation of Cameron, Seward, Chase, and most of the cabinet without objection (let alone hearings, which were unknown at the time).
Predictably enough, Cameron was a fiasco in office. He lasted less than a year. He didn’t tell Lincoln before he used war powers to shutter the Baltimore newspapers. He got out in front of Lincoln on emancipating and enlisting slaves, releasing his statements in an annual report that also went to the papers without first being cleared with Lincoln. Meanwhile, after taking over the telegraph system, he authorized the military to withhold access from the president. Lincoln ended up asking Seward and the State Department to handle counterintelligence functions he didn’t dare entrust to Cameron. He even asked Chase’s opinion on war matters rather than ask Cameron.
While the navy got swiftly up to speed, Cameron’s mismanagement and inefficiency plagued the army for the first year of the Civil War. Governors bristled as they raised tens of thousands of Union volunteers and Cameron couldn’t get them armed. He had to start turning away soldiers for lack of supplies. Frustrated governors started buying weapons in Europe, and even local governments raised money to supply their own regiments — a bad look for a war supposedly waged to vindicate national authority. Cameron personally signed off on contracts that overcharged the government, and he steered military rail traffic to a Pennsylvania railroad in which he owned stock. All of this came out later in a House investigation that produced an 1,100-page report and a censure of Cameron.
It was the breach over Cameron’s unauthorized report on emancipation and arming slaves that gave Lincoln the cause, or at any rate the excuse, to demand Cameron’s resignation at the end of 1861. Lincoln exiled him to a remote posting as ambassador to Russia — a humiliation that brought Cameron to tears — and replaced him with the ruthlessly competent Edwin Stanton.
Lincoln ended up winning back Cameron’s loyalty, but at the price of expending his own personal credibility to argue that the House report had unfairly blamed Cameron for missteps that were simply the result of haste in the face of military emergency. That, too, chilled Lincoln’s relationship with some in his own party on Capitol Hill. Lincoln’s alliance with Cameron yielded one more disaster for the nation in 1864, when it was Cameron throwing Pennsylvania’s support from Hamlin to Andrew Johnson on the second ballot at the Republican convention that secured the vice presidency for Johnson.
Cameron’s stewardship of the War Department wasn’t all bad, and he suffered along with the rest of the nation when his brother was killed in the war’s first battle. But pretty much every bad consequence that might have been predicted from giving him charge of a key cabinet post came to pass at a time when the stakes could not have been higher and the administration’s political position could ill-afford the embarrassments.
The Great Commoner
Lincoln had to worry about building a coalition. Woodrow Wilson was trying to expand one without losing its existing base. He made William Jennings Bryan his secretary of state in hopes of avoiding the sort of schism that had elevated him to the presidency when it happened in the opposing party.
Bryan’s populism had led Democrats to defeat, with a shrinking coalition, in three of the four elections between 1896 and 1908. He had previously demonstrated, on many occasions, his willingness to bolt the party or sabotage its nominees if they dissented from his views. At 52, still four years younger than Wilson, he remained a vigorous presence in the party. He required careful handling in order to keep his supporters in the fold while attracting new ones.
Wilson, an Easterner and the most credentialed and elitist academic ever to reach the White House — Ph.D., university professor, head of the American Political Science Association — was a progressive like Bryan, but the furthest thing in temperament and appeal from the prairie fundamentalist from Nebraska. In attempting to win the 1912 nomination, Wilson flattered Bryan so effusively that he survived the public disclosure of letters in which Wilson had displayed his contempt for Bryan. This helped Wilson win the election by default when Teddy Roosevelt, the Republicans’ own 800-pound gorilla, split the party by running against the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft.
With Wilson having won a tenuous plurality victory, the logic of his coalition demanded the most prestigious post for Bryan he could ask. Bryan had little foreign-policy experience, and (as it would turn out) fundamental disagreements with Wilson’s foreign-policy views, but into the State Department he went.
At first, it went well. Bryan and Wilson both styled themselves as stern Christian moralists in foreign affairs. Bryan, a critic of the imperial goals of the Spanish-American War (which he had initially supported), had demanded before taking the post that Wilson agree to his program of pacifism, which was inspired by a 1903 meeting between Bryan and Leo Tolstoy. Every foreign nation that Bryan approached agreed to a utopian non-aggression pact, except for Germany and Austria-Hungary. Like Hillary Clinton with her Russian reset button, Bryan presented his treaty partners with a miniature plowshare.
Both men tried to make the partnership work. Bryan swallowed his pride to defend Wilson’s plan for a Federal Reserve system that even ran on the hated gold standard. When Bryan embarrassed the administration by going out on a speaking tour for money, which he claimed he needed to pay for entertaining foreign diplomats (in fact, diplomats hated his gatherings because he refused to serve alcohol), Wilson defended him.
Bryan, with Wilson’s approval, tried an incoherent policy of threatening force, with no intention of using it, to restore order in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico. Bryan ultimately lost control of the policy, which turned by degrees more forcible and ended up with Marines landing in Vera Cruz and the Dominican.
Shocked by the outbreak of war in Europe in July 1914, Bryan retreated into utopianism. He demanded total American neutrality in the war to the point of cutting commercial ties with the combatants. He proposed more toothless peace treaties. Wilson, grieving the death of his first wife in August 1914, let Bryan have plenty of rope to run foreign policy for a while. Ultimately, however, the unreality of Bryan’s approach was eventually too much even for Wilson, who raged against German submarine attacks and grew increasingly convinced that America had a messianic role to play in Europe. Wilson was soon telling friends that “if I run again for the Presidency, it will only be to keep Bryan out.” He regarded Bryan as “ruinous to the country” and started sending his closest confidant, Colonel House, abroad as an envoy behind Bryan’s back.
When German U-boats sank first a British steamer with an American passenger and then the Lusitania, killing 128 Americans, Bryan blamed the British and argued that any American taking a British ship under these circumstances was, in effect, asking for it. Wilson branded Bryan’s stance “both weak and futile.” In June 1915, Bryan resigned, telling Wilson with some bitterness, “I have never had your full confidence.” He would become a critic both of Wilson’s entry into the war and his proposed peace on the terms of the Versailles treaty.
Typhoid Bobby
Cameron’s disastrous tenure in the Lincoln Cabinet was for all the predictable reasons. Bryan’s failure as secretary of state was more a matter of falling out with the president over events. But both reflect the dangers of giving significant power to a man ill-suited to the job simply as a payoff to a leader of one faction of the president’s coalition. We don’t know yet how RFK might fail Trump or break with him, although we can make some educated guesses. What we do know is that trouble ahead is predictable for anyone who knows the history of these sorts of nominations.