Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  * * *

  Nobody spoke it aloud, and they didn’t have to, but this Thanksgiving felt different, like there was added pressure to just be us. We were fastidious about observing our long-standing rituals. We slept in on Wednesday morning and lazed around as always until Nana prodded the group out the door. We drove into town and started the stroll down the same streets and into the same stores we’d visited for almost forty years. Every member of the family was already in search of the perfect prize. As I had every year, I still bought one gift for each person. We hit the Nobby Clothes Shop first, as always, and the owner heard we were there, as always. “Where’s Hunt?” Sammy yelled, just like he would when my younger son was still a shy eight-year-old and not a grown man with one daughter in college. Then it was off to the watch shop owned by Spyder Wright, a legendary surfer and surfboard designer who had known Beau and Hunt and Ashley since forever; and the Sunken Ship, a souvenir shop the younger children liked best; and Murray’s Toggery Shop.

  We traveled in a loose pack, with little groups splintering off to go into particular stores. The older grandchildren would take the younger ones in tow. I wanted to stop in at the Hub to get my coffee, and maybe a newspaper. Ashley and Jill wanted to go to Nantucket Cashmere. Champ was on his own to wander with whatever group showed him the most love. We scouted the shops for hours, cell phones buzzing. You’ve gotta come check out the … My White House physician, Kevin O’Connor, who had started making the trip with us the year before, would shake his head at the browsing extravaganza. “It’s, what? Four or five blocks of stores?” he would say. “I’ve been here an hour and I’ve seen the whole place. What are you doing all that time?”

  But it felt so good to be out in the holiday crowd again, doing something most people take for granted. Our Secret Service detail gave us a wide berth in Nantucket, so there was an illusion of real freedom. For a moment, everything felt all right. Everything seemed normal.

  * * *

  Our progress was slowed by people who wanted to get a handshake or a hug from the vice president of the United States—or a selfie. And I was not the only draw. Beau Biden was already a rising star in Democratic politics. He was just about to finish his second term as attorney general of Delaware and had already stated his intention to run for governor in 2016. His announcement had cleared the field; nobody back home in Delaware was prepared to challenge Beau in the Democratic primary. He was generally regarded as the most popular politician in the state, more popular than even his father. Delawareans saw in him what I did. Beau Biden, at age forty-five, was Joe Biden 2.0. He had all the best of me, but with the bugs and flaws engineered out. And he had Hunt in his corner as a speechwriter and trusted adviser. I was pretty sure Beau could run for president some day and, with his brother’s help, he could win. When Barack and I won reelection back in 2012, I had started thinking hard about stepping aside after the second term and shifting the family’s focus to Beau’s political future.

  I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I had begun to look up to my own sons. They were good and honorable men who shared a belief in public service and had acted on it. Hunt spent the summer after his junior year in college as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps teaching English to children in Belize. His first year after college, JVC work took him to Portland, Oregon, where he was in charge of an emergency services center in a disadvantaged neighborhood. His first big job after he graduated Yale Law School was as an executive trainee at a big bank in Wilmington, where he was on a fast track. But he came to me one night after just a few years and said he needed to do something more meaningful, so he left that high-paying position to take a job in government. By Thanksgiving of 2014, Hunt was in his third year as chairman of the board of the World Food Program USA.

  Beau had taken a similar path, propelled by his own steely sense of honor and duty. He had volunteered—as a civilian working in the United States Attorney’s office—to go to the war zone in Kosovo to help that emerging republic develop its legal system and its courts. He had joined the Delaware Army National Guard at age thirty-four, and insisted on going with his unit when it was deployed to Iraq five years later. But he had to make a firm commitment to the Pentagon that he would take a leave of absence as attorney general of the state in order to devote his full energies to his responsibilities in Iraq. He readily did that. I can’t say I was happy about how he went out of his way to put himself in harm’s way again, but I was not surprised. I considered reminding him that he had already served in one field of fire and he might not want to do it again. But I knew him well enough to know what he’d say: “I signed up for this, Dad. I can’t let my guys down. It’s my duty.”

  Beau was also determined to be a good father. There was a story that got passed around by my staff, something that happened on one of our earlier Nantucket trips: Beau and his son Hunter were riding back to the house in one of the cars in the motorcade when Beau decided to make a quick stop at Murray’s Toggery to pick up a new pair of Nantucket Reds. His wife, Hallie, would joke that Beau was too conservative to actually wear the flamboyant Reds but liked knowing they were in his closet. When Beau’s car peeled off from the main motorcade that morning to detour to Murray’s, little Hunter yelled out from his car seat in the back, “Hey, driver, you missed your turn!”

  “Please stop the car,” Beau said to Ethan Rosenzweig, who was driving. Ethan was the dean of admissions at Emory Law in Atlanta, but he liked to do volunteer advance work for us when he had free time during the holidays. Ethan had known Beau a long time, and he could tell Beau was disturbed. “Hey, Beau,” Ethan said, “it’s no big deal. He didn’t mean anything by it.” But Beau urged him to pull the car over. He wanted this lesson to register with Hunter. Ethan pulled onto the shoulder and Beau got out and opened the back door so he could talk to his son. “Look, Hunter,” Beau said, and he was firm, “that’s Ethan, and he’s our friend. You never ever address somebody as ‘driver.’ You never address somebody by the job they do. That’s not polite. Okay? You understand? Love you, buddy.”

  * * *

  Beau kept to himself our first day in Nantucket. His Secret Service detail had become really good at walling him away. He was easily fatigued and increasingly shy to interact with people. He was losing feeling in his right hand and it wasn’t strong enough for a good firm handshake, and he had been wrestling with a condition called aphasia. Radiation and chemotherapy had done some damage to the part of his brain that controlled the ability to name things. Beau retained all his cognitive capabilities, but he was struggling to recall proper nouns. He was working like hell to win back his strength and to reverse the aphasia. He was going to Philadelphia most days for an hour of physical therapy and occupational therapy and then an hour of speech therapy, all above and beyond his regular chemo treatments. Ashley would meet him there to keep him company at the therapy sessions while he did strength and stretching exercises, or went through sheets of pictures, naming objects. Ashley would take him out for food before he headed off for a day’s work as attorney general. He meant to prove to everybody that he could handle this and that he was making progress. And I believed him.

  The human brain is remarkably agile, and Beau was literally training other areas near his speech centers to take over the naming function. It was slow going, but he never showed frustration. Nobody in the family, or among his friends, or among his staff at the attorney general’s office, saw him angry or down. It just took a little patience, and a few extra words when he couldn’t recall mayor: “You know, that guy who runs the city.” Or dinner roll: “Pass the, you know, the brown thing you put the butter on.”

  Part of the beauty of the family vacation in Nantucket was the splendid and enforced isolation. The trip had been a no-phone zone all through my years in the Senate. I did no business unless some dire emergency arose, so that my children and my grandchildren had me to themselves. But that was the one tradition that had grown a bit tattered by 2014. As vice president, I was never
entirely free of work, even around Thanksgiving. For instance, I had to peel off from the trip to town that Wednesday and get back to the house to take a call on the secure line from Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister of Ukraine, who was anxious to fill me in on what had happened in Kyiv that day. I had been in that city just four days earlier, and things looked perilous. The movement started by the Revolution of Dignity, a remarkable people’s protest that happened on a square in Kyiv called the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, was fraying. Ukrainians seemed about to lose their fight for democracy and independence. Russian president Vladimir Putin had used the instability of the unfolding revolution as an opportunity to seize by military force a part of Ukraine called Crimea, and he kept the pressure on. He had lately been sending Russian tanks and soldiers across the border to menace other provinces in the eastern part of the country and was threatening to cut off Ukraine’s supply of natural gas, which would have badly destabilized the country’s already shaky economy. Ukraine’s newly elected democratic government was in real danger of crumbling under the weight of Putin’s cynical push.

  Ukraine’s new president and its new prime minister, meanwhile, were having ongoing trust issues. President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk were from competing parties, and the recent elections had been bruising and divisive. Their constituencies remained more invested in scoring political points than in governing. The Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk factions were wasting energy bickering with one another when they should have been creating institutions and security forces capable of defending against Putin. The Ukrainians had still not formed a workable coalition government at the end of November, six months after Poroshenko assumed the presidency. If they didn’t get that done soon it would mean snap elections. And that meant trouble. Putin operatives were sure to pump money into the campaigns of pro-Russia candidates and probably end any hopes for real independence in Ukraine. The European Union and NATO were likely to abandon Ukraine as a hopeless cause and the country would be pulled back into Russia’s toxic orbit. The bravery and sacrifice of so many Ukrainian people in the Revolution of Dignity would come to nothing.

  I had spent months exchanging phone calls with both Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, trying to convince them each, separately, to put loyalty to country over loyalty to political party. I had invested two full days in Kyiv the previous week trying to make Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk see the danger of their stubborn unwillingness to work together. I was still working the problem on my way out of Kyiv on November 22, just four days earlier. Yatsenyuk had called me as I was leaving and I invited him to ride to the airport with me. I liked Arseniy. He was smart—a Ph.D. economist—but no cloistered academic. He was a serious young leader who cared deeply that his home country be a functioning democracy with secure borders. The forty-year-old prime minister also had a streak of idealism I appreciated, and in the limousine ride over to the airport I appealed to that part of him. “Look,” I told Yatsenyuk, “you have to be with Poroshenko. You have to be a team. You cannot go your separate ways. If new elections are called, it’s going to be a disaster. You’re going to lose everything. I’m telling you, Arseniy, you’ve got to step up. You’ve got to be the big man. You can do this. It’s gonna be hard. But you can do it.”

  When Yatsenyuk reached me on the secure line in Nantucket that afternoon he had big news, and he wanted me to know first. He told me that the rival parties in Ukraine had just formed a new coalition government. He would remain prime minister, but a key Poroshenko ally would be the Speaker of the new Parliament. The two men had also agreed on an agenda going forward. “I’m keeping my commitment to you, Mr. Vice President,” he told me.

  I felt pretty good at dinner that night, with the thirteen of us at the table, working through the Christmas lists, and knowing that the parties had worked out a new government in Kyiv.

  * * *

  We got up Thanksgiving morning and did our annual Turkey Trot—a ten-mile run (for anybody who felt up to it) to the other side of the island. I rode the route on a bike with some of the grandchildren. We spent part of the day tossing a football around the beach. I showed young Hunter the bluffs where his father and his uncle used to jump off and catch passes when they were about his age. Beau and Hallie and their kids made sure to get some nice pictures of the four of them together on the beach. And we went over to the little saltbox house for our annual photo, but the lot was ringed with yellow police tape. The house was gone, a victim of rising ocean tides that had been washing away three or four feet of the ’Sconset Bluff every year for the past twenty. Bad storm years might take out ten times that in certain places. “Forever Wild” had finally run out of safe ground, and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic. The only thing left behind was a piece of the foundation.

  * * *

  We went back to town the day after Thanksgiving, making sure to be at the right spot around dusk, to watch the annual lighting of the Nantucket Christmas tree. Beau had proposed to Hallie at the tree lighting in 2001 and they were married at St. Mary’s church, in the heart of downtown Nantucket, the next year. Hallie always suspected it was Beau’s way of locking them into Biden Family Thanksgivings for all time. And it worked. They were celebrating their twelfth anniversary at the end of the week, and Hallie had never missed a Thanksgiving. Even the year Beau was stationed in Iraq, she insisted we all keep the tradition and go to Nantucket.

  While we did our family stroll, I found myself mulling an issue that was beginning to weigh on me. I was getting a lot of questions, from a lot of different quarters, about running for president in 2016. Even President Obama had surprised me by asking directly about my plans at one of our regular lunches a few weeks earlier. He wanted to know if I had thought about all the things I could do if I didn’t run. I could still have an effect, he assured me. I could set up a foundation or a center for foreign policy. I could even do a few things I had never done before—like make some money. “But have you made up your mind [about running]?” the president asked me, point blank, across the table in a little private space just off the Oval Office. “No, I haven’t,” was all I could say.

  At some point on the streets of Nantucket that day, I brought up the question of 2016 with my two sons. I had a feeling that they didn’t want me to make the run, and I said as much. Beau just looked at me. “We’ve got to talk, Dad,” he said. So when we got back to the house that evening the three of us sat down in the kitchen and we talked.

  I knew there were plenty of good reasons not to run, and uncertainty about Beau’s health was at the top. And I really suspected that my sons, whose judgments I had come to value and rely on, did not want me to put the family through the ordeal of a presidential campaign just now. “Dad, you’ve got it all wrong,” Beau said when we settled down in the kitchen in Nantucket. “You’ve got to run. I want you to run.” Hunter agreed: “We want you to run.” The three of us talked for an hour. They wanted to know what I was doing to get ready, and when was the right time to announce. There was a strong argument being made by some of my political experts that if I was going to run at all I should announce right away, at the beginning of 2015. But I think the three of us all wanted a little more time to see what happened with Beau. When I decided was not crucial, my sons told me; they just wanted me to know that they were for it. Hunt kept telling me that of all the potential candidates I was the best prepared and best able to lead the country. But it was the conviction and intensity in Beau’s voice that caught me off guard. At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty. Duty was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.

  * * *

  When we boarded Air Force Two for the trip home that Sunday, everybody seemed happy. The five days had been a success in all ways. Jill had the completed Christmas lists stowed away for safekeeping. It had been a great trip. The two of us—Jill and I—arrived back at the Naval Observatory that afternoon and went up the sweeping central staircase to the second floor to settle into the casual living quarters we used when it was jus
t the two of us. It was a small space, and somewhat cluttered, but it was our little piece of home inside a residence designed largely for public use. We had furnished the sitting room with leather couches that matched the ones in our library in Wilmington, and lined the shelves with our favorite books and family photos. There was a little table off in one corner that served as our dinner table à deux, where we ate by candlelight even in the long light of summer.

  I sat down on our couch, in the one place in the house that felt as though it truly belonged to us, to relax and reflect. But there was an image I could not get out of my head. I kept seeing the little “Forever Wild” house, undermined by the powerful indifference of nature and the inevitability of time, no longer able to hold its ground; I could almost hear the sharp crack as its moorings failed, could envision the tide washing in and out, pulling at it relentlessly and remorselessly until it was adrift on the water, then swallowed up by the sea. No Thanksgiving would ever be quite the same. I pulled out my diary and started to write. I did have one big item for my own Christmas list that year, but I was keeping it to myself: NavObs, November 30, 2014, 7:30 p.m. Just home from Nantucket. I pray we have another year together in 2015. Beau. Beau. Beau. Beau.