What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The answer is that while all happy families are alike, the children of monsters are unhappy in their own way. Some dictatorial offspring are fairly normal while others are psychos. Nicu Ceausescu, son of the rulers of Romania, was from the age of 14 a figure of ‘comic-book evil’ whose hobbies included raping women. His brother, Valentin, is bookish and quiet, has a close circle of decent friends and works at the Institute of Atomic Physics outside Bucharest.
For Svetlana Alliluyeva, being Stalin’s daughter was like being, as she put it, ‘already dead’. We can surmise that Kim Jong-il, the eldest son and successor of North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, felt differently (fans of Team America will recall his heartfelt strain, ‘I’m so ronery, so ronery, so ronery and sadly alone’). Colonel Gaddafi apparently raised his seven sons, all ‘gruesome’ and ‘goonishly handsome’, to be sadists.
Hitler had no official offspring, but a certain Frenchman, Jean-Marie Loret, was told by his mother when he reached the age of 30 that ‘ton père s’appelait Hitler’.
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