The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  On August 16, riding with Biden as he raced from one Iowa event to another, the News Journal’s Nicole Guardino asked him exactly this question. Biden crushed the suggestion with such flourish and finality that Guardino couldn’t fit the whole denial into her story the next day. She reported it in full in a blog: “Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, Shermanesquely, no,” Biden declared. “No. No. I would not be anybody’s secretary of state in any circumstance I could think of and I absolutely can say with certainty I would not be anybody’s vice president. Period. End of story. Guaranteed. Will not do it.”

  Today, Vice President Biden’s sunny, spacious office sits just off the main lobby in the West Wing, at the hub of American power. The other guy on the ticket may have gotten the oval-shaped room overlooking the Rose Garden—Biden’s windows face west toward the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—but it is only a few quick strides away. Sitting across from the vice president this summer on facing colonial-vintage sofas, I reminded him of his comment in Iowa, emphasizing the word Shermanesque.

  He leaned back, folding his big hands before him, and shrugged.

  “And that was absolutely positively true when I said it. I swear to God. Ask anybody. I never, never, never, never aspired to be vice president. It had nothing to do with who the hell the president was.”

  Certain allowances need to be made, of course, for campaign rhetoric. But I believe him. Both quotes—the one from the campaign trail and the one from the White House—are so quintessentially Biden: direct, earnest, forceful, earthy, overstated—note the triple “no” in the first and the quadruple “never” in the second—and ultimately, as it turns out, negotiable.

  Biden is a salesman, a high-level one, but a salesman at heart. His father sold cars back in Wilmington, and the son has all the same moves. He is a virtuoso talker. That fluency is not a gift but an accomplishment: attaining it meant defeating a severe boyhood stutter, a feat in which he still takes pride. His prodigious loquacity is not about vanity, as his critics claim—although Biden is as vain as the next successful man. It’s about selling. It’s about the deal. In fact, that’s one of his favorite expressions: Here’s the deal.

  In What It Takes, the monumental chronicle of the 1988 presidential campaign, author Richard Ben Cramer had this to say about Biden, then in his first formal run for the presidency:

  Joe can literally talk fast. It’s like the stutter left it all pent up, and when he starts talking deal, he goes at a gallop…. He’ll talk that deal until it is shimmering before your eyes in God’s holy light … like the Taj Mahal.

  For most of his adult fife, Biden has been selling himself. In 2008, he began selling Barack Obama. The vice presidency is a perfectly respectable office, to be sure, but historically it has more often been a ticket to obscurity than to distinction. It has few official duties or responsibilities that rise above the ceremonial. It was most famously described by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s two-term VP John Nance Garner as being worth less than “a bucket of warm piss.” For a man of Biden’s abiding energy and early promise, it is a comedown. But midway through the administration’s first term, he seems to be making it work.

  “I was talking to the president about this just the other day,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief of staff. “He was saying that choosing Joe was really the first presidential decision he made, and that as time goes on, he’s more and more convinced he made a good one. From his perspective, it could not have worked out better.”

  The relationship with Biden was by no means a given. Axelrod noted that not long before being asked to take the second position on the ticket, Biden had been competing hard against Obama, and had seen himself as better qualified for the top job. Lashing together two such big egos was risky. “It’s a little like a shotgun wedding,” Axelrod told me. “Sometimes they take and sometimes they don’t.”

  Declaring his determination “not to be a pain in the ass” to the president, Biden has carved out a dynamic role, one of the most involved of any vice president’s. He is close to the president on a professional level, but seems content to remain on the outer fringe of Obama’s trusted core. The idea, he says, is to be “value-added.”

  Walter Mondale is widely considered the first truly modern vice president, in that he was not simply a replacement in the wings, but an important player in the administration in his own right. With the exception of Dan Quayle, every VP since has done the same—none more so than the man Biden would succeed, Dick Cheney, who some believed was on certain issues actually steering the ship. And while that was an exaggeration, there is no doubt that Cheney built himself a kind of shadow national security staff during President George W. Bush’s two terms. One of the first things Biden did when taking office was to hand back many of those positions: “I mean, Cheney had, like, thirty, or whatever the hell it was,” he told me. “I said, ‘Mr. President, you can’t have two national security staffs.’ So I went to [national security adviser] Jim Jones, whom I recommended for the job. And I said, ‘Jim, here’s the deal. I don’t want any of these staff.’ And he was like, ‘Holy God, you’re kidding.’ I said, ‘Under one condition: I get to help pick these guys, and I can individually task them. I’ll let you know who I’m tasking, but that’s it.’ We only need one National Security Council. There used to be two. Literally, not figuratively. I mean, literally.”

  No one believes Obama would want, need, or tolerate a Rasputin across the lobby. But whether it has been managing the tricky drawdown of American involvement in Iraq, or implementing the $787 billion Recovery Act—“Lousy job,” says Biden—or soothing worries in eastern Europe over Obama’s revised missile defense strategy, or helping select two Supreme Court nominees, Biden seems the opposite of a pain in the ass. He has made himself indispensable.

  During the nine-month deliberations over Afghanistan, Biden was the harshest skeptic at the table. Encouraged by Obama, he vetted the military’s plans so insistently that to some in the chain of command he became the enemy. These evidently included the man in charge of the war effort, General Stanley McChrystal, who was captured in a Rolling Stone article joking with his inner staff as they derided the vice president. After the president accepted McChrystal’s resignation, the general apologized to Biden, who says the gesture wasn’t necessary. “To be very blunt with you, I was flattered,” Biden told me. “I mean, it was clear that I was the only guy they worried about.”

  Like most modern vice presidents, Biden has been subjected to the constant ridicule and caricature that seem to accompany the office. And he is, by his own admission, prone to verbal blunders. But Biden’s stock has risen steadily in the West Wing, and as the Democrats appear poised to lose much of their leverage in Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, his long experience as a legislator, his warm relationships with his former Senate colleagues, and his relentless salesmanship are likely to become even more important to the president. Even his occasional well-publicized gaffes have served to humanize a leadership team that all too often seems aloof, cerebral, and elitist.

  And here’s the curious thing. By stepping back, by sublimating his own considerable ego and ambition, by settling for second place, Joe Biden may finally have found a way to transplant that Delaware magic. In making his own political fortunes secondary, he has advanced them further than he ever could have on his own.

  Getting “Bidened”

  Joe Biden doesn’t just meet people; he engulfs them. There’s immediate, direct contact with his blue eyes, the firm handshake while his other hand grasps your arm, a flash of those famously perfect white teeth, and an immediate frontal assault on your personal space. He shoulders right through the aura of fame and high office. Forget the Secret Service, the ever-present battery of aides and advisers, the photographers clicking away: the vice president of the United States moves in like an old pal with something urgent to tell you, just you. If he’s in a chair, he’ll scoot it closer; when the furniture’s not portable, he’ll lean forward, planting his elbo
ws on his knees, gesturing with both hands while he speaks, occasionally reaching over to touch your arm or leg for emphasis.

  Aboard Air Force Two, when Biden wanders back to the cheap seats to greet the reporters in his entourage, he isn’t content to simply stand in the aisle and banter. He leans, he reaches, and before you know it he’s lowering himself to the cabin floor.

  “Mr. Vice President,” a reporter protests politely, “take my seat.”

  “No, no, no,” says Biden, cheerfully dismissing the gesture. And then the second-highest officeholder in the free world is seated on the aisle floor, legs stretched out on worn blue carpet, elbows propped on the aisle-side armrests, so he can resume his monologue at eye level, close in.

  Biden is well known for commuting to and from Washington from Wilmington aboard Amtrak, a habit he started decades ago when he was a widower with two small boys. Sitting alone in one of those cramped, four-seat Acela booths around a table, Biden would often recognize passengers and wave them over to join him. I had the pleasure myself once years ago, riding the train from Washington to Philadelphia. The space was knee-to-knee intimate—perfect for his purposes—and Biden held forth animatedly for the entire eighty-minute trip. When he stepped off at Wilmington station, the sudden silence in the car seemed like a physical presence, the swift descent of a vacuum. When I described the experience to a friend who’d taken the same ride more than once, he nodded knowingly and said, “We call it getting Bidened.”

  Biden is famous, of course, for talking too much. Indeed, it is exceedingly rare to find anyone in a prominent position who does so much of his thinking out loud. It has led not only to a propensity for straying off message—a tendency which has bedeviled generations of his political handlers—but also to an outsize reputation for oratory. The vice president is a confident and skillful public speaker, to be sure, but he is best at rousing the converted, rather than at the higher art of persuading the skeptical and undecided. His thousands of turns behind public lecterns have yielded not a single indelible speech. The one for which he is most famous is the one he’d most like to forget: the disastrous campaign trail appearance at the 1987 Iowa State Fair in which he borrowed freely, and without attribution, from British Labour politician Neil Kinnock.

  Biden’s special talent is not speaking, but talking. The former is a public act, a practiced performance. The latter is personal and improvisational. All good salesmen know that the key to closing the deal is trust. You need to hold your customers’ attention and convince them that you are just like them. Biden is eager to share his own experiences, because trustworthy men have nothing to hide. He takes you immediately into his confidence—this is often what gets him into trouble with reporters—so that you will offer him your own. His language is instructive. He interjects, Look, to make sure you are listening closely. If he feels his pitch straying into abstraction, he’ll stop in mid-sentence to say, Let me break this down for you. He’ll dispel complexity with a personal story—My Dad, he used to say to me, “Joey,” he’d say…. His syntax is confiding, earthy, real, and peppered with mild profanity. He repeats himself for effect—no, no, no; never, never, never. Despite his patrician appearance, he is proudly, stubbornly blue collar—Call me Joe.

  Biden always has facts and figures handy, but he seeks your support less with logic than with bonhomie. His own emotions are so close to the surface that when he is excited you feel it; when he is disappointed or sad or angry, he chokes up and his eyes moisten, and you feel that, too. The depth of his belief is, as Cramer put it, “like a strong hand” on your back.

  Biden admits his weakness for revealing too much on occasion, but he sees it as a strength, a part of his “brand”: his gaffes reflect his determination to remain just Joe, to tell it like it is. In truth, his problem runs deeper. Biden has the limber storyteller’s propensity to stretch. Though hardly a hanging offense—which of us hasn’t burnished a tale now and then?—it’s a dangerous tendency on the national political stage. In addition to the plagiarism scandal, in which he embellished his family’s humble origins, Biden has in the past exaggerated his scholastic résumé. And for many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and daughter in December 1972 as “drunk,” which the driver apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add a baseless charge?

  More recently, Biden has told a story of privately upbraiding President George W. Bush over the Iraq war. Challenging Bush’s assertion that he was a “leader,” Biden claims to have told him, “Mr. President, look over your shoulder. No one is following.” The former president’s chief of staff, Karl Rove, insists the exchange never took place, calling the vice president “a blowhard and a liar.” And though Biden sticks to his story, his past brushes with embroidering the truth continue to haunt him.

  Though plenty smart, Biden is not an intellectual. He makes few references to books and learned influences in his speeches and autobiography, and he displays little interest in theory. An indifferent student at the University of Delaware and Syracuse University College of Law—he describes the latter as “a bore”—Biden got by with prodigious cramming sessions. Today, by contrast, he is described by Tony Blinken, who advises him on national security issues, as a compulsive studier who likes to be “overbriefed.”

  “He likes to tell the story of the time he got up on the Senate floor to deliver a speech on a bill concerning stripper wells”—i.e., oil wells nearing the end of their productive lives—said Blinken. “When he finished, an opponent, Senator Russell Long from Louisiana, got up and asked, ‘Senator Biden, have you ever seen a stripper well?’ He had not. Long proceeded to demonstrate such an intimate knowledge of wells and oil extraction that the import of Biden’s own argument was just overwhelmed. Now he demands that his briefings go fifty feet deep even if the discussion is only expected to go five feet deep.”

  When he was a senator, his proudest legislative accomplishment was the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which broadened law enforcement tools to protect women from abusive partners, and which the National Organization for Women called “the greatest breakthrough in civil rights for women in nearly two decades.” Biden’s congressional voting record was generally left of center, but not dramatically so. He was inspired as a young man by the civil rights movement, he is a strong civil libertarian, and he clearly sees an active role for government in American life. But at the same time, the national Chamber of Commerce has sometimes rated him highly for a liberal lawmaker—as high as 62 percent in 2004. In his personal life, Biden could hardly be more traditional. In the scruffy 1960s, when so many young men of his generation went unkempt as a social and political statement, Biden attended college classes wearing a suit and tie. He says his first wife, Neilia, described him as “the most socially conservative man I have ever known.”

  Though Biden prides himself on his fluency in foreign policy, he’s been all over the map on national security issues. Author Tom Ricks likes to point out that Biden voted against the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 (a quick triumph); voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (a prolonged disaster); and voted against the “surge” in troops to Iraq in 2007 (a remarkable success). Though Biden has tended to oppose military action, during the Bosnian war his was the loudest voice in Congress in favor of arming the Muslim minority and encouraging NATO’s air strikes against the Serbs.

  On the global stage, as in Delaware, the guideposts in Biden’s political landscape are often not ideas, but people. Many of the world leaders with whom the United States has business are men and women he has known for years, even decades. In the fall of 2009, for example, after Obama had decided to dismantle land-based missile defenses in eastern Europe—a move interpreted as a concession to Moscow—the White House sent Biden on a three-day swing through Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic to reassure the leaders of those countries that their security would not be compromised. Biden had mastered the details of the issue—the virtues of sea-based versus land-
based antimissile technology, and so on—but his most important asset was that he knew many of the leaders personally.

  Barry Pavel, senior director for defense policy on the National Security Council, was along on that trip. He describes how, in high-level meetings, Biden would wave his hand and reduce the expert advisers accompanying him to decorative furniture. “It’s a thing he does,” Pavel said, referring specifically to discussions Biden held in Warsaw with President Lech Kaczynski. “We’re across the long tables with the coffee and the water and stuff in these formal meetings, and he’ll say, ‘Now, these guys are going to tell you all the statistics and these are the brainiacs, but I’m here to tell you this is much better for Polish security. I’m here to tell you this is in your interest.’ He connects in a very streetwise way…. And that’s something I couldn’t do, and there are few people in the government who could play the role, I think.”

  And once he’s connected, once he’s leaned in close and has your undivided attention … well, watch your wallet.

  Here’s the deal.

  Rags to Riches

  In his 2005 book, The Seven Basic Plots, British author Christopher Booker distills what he considers the archetypal human narratives. The second of these (after “Overcoming the Monster”) is “Rags to Riches,” which he defines thus:

  We see an ordinary, insignificant person, dismissed by everyone as of little account, who suddenly steps to the center of the stage, revealed to be someone quite exceptional.

  This is, in effect, the story that Biden tells in his 2007 campaign autobiography, Promises to Keep.

  We begin with little Joey Biden, growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, crippled by a stutter so dreadful that he is dubbed “Joey Bye-Bye” or “Joe Impedimenta” by classmates and teachers alike. He overcomes the disability through diligent practice and eventually delivers the valedictory speech at his high school graduation.