Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

  Because I was not a Socialist.

  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

  Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

  Because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

  Finnegan and I were escorted through the camp by a tour guide and Mr. Mannheimer. It was the same path I had taken with Finnegan’s father, Hunter, thirty years earlier, but it was different. It seemed as though things had been rearranged to make visitors less uncomfortable. They had softened the cruel edges over the years, as I should have expected from a line in the Dachau site literature. “As every season has its own charm in Germany,” it read, “you can also plan to visit the camp according to your own preference.” The bunks in the living quarters at Dachau were still there, so you could see how the Nazis packed tens of thousands of people into the camp. I remembered seeing names carved into the wooden frames of the bunks on earlier visits, but now the bunks appeared clean and varnished.

  At first the guide seemed reluctant to take Finnegan and me to the camp’s notorious gas chamber, but I insisted. I was thinking of the first time I went there, with Beau, how we walked into that building and they explained to us that the prison guards would tell their victims that they were going to the showers and instruct them to remove their shoes, their clothes, and their false teeth. Then the guides led us into the chamber itself and slammed the door behind us with a frightening clank. There are guides at Dachau today who insist the prisoners were never gassed there, or that it was used only a handful of times. But I wanted Finnegan to see all of that, and I wanted her to see the ovens where the guards cremated the victims after they were shot, hanged, starved to death, killed as part of medical experiments, or actually gassed. Max Mannheimer was a living witness. He had been forced to load into wagons the corpses of victims who had died at nearby work camps, then haul them to the ovens at Dachau to be cremated.

  Finnegan saw and heard it all, and then we walked back outside and looked through the fencing at the rows of tile-roofed, middle-class houses just blocks away. The people who lived in those houses in the 1930s and ’40s had to have known what was happening inside this prison camp, I wanted her to understand. They were near enough to literally smell the burning human flesh. How could they not know?

  The thing I wanted Finnegan to feel was the same visceral jolt that had animated so much of my own career in public life. “Look, honey,” I said to Finnegan as we walked back through the gate and back into our own time. “This can happen again. This is happening in other parts of the world now. And you have to speak out. You can’t remain silent. Silence is complicity.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It Has to Be You

  The night sky seemed unusually dark and increasingly ominous. The five of us in the library of my quiet home peered out through the big windows and watched as the cloud cover seemed to thicken and push down toward earth. The barometric pressure was rising steeply. The temperature had already fallen below fifteen degrees and was heading toward single digits. We could trace the flight of an occasional snowflake as it fell through the halo of the Naval Observatory’s outside lights. But the mood in the room that Thursday night, February 19, 2015, was determinedly upbeat. Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti had joined Beau, Hunter, and me to talk through Mike’s new twenty-two-page memo about 2016. He had handed it to us nine days earlier, so we had all had a chance to absorb it in detail. Mike’s message could not be missed: the presidential race was coming to me.

  Mike’s memo had laid out the arguments in straight, unornamented prose. The economy was on the rise in early 2015, the memo noted, finally starting to shake free from the last effects of the long, gray recession that had followed the implosion of the financial system. He argued that I had earned the right to claim some credit. From the Recovery Act stimulus, to the stabilization of the banks, to the auto industry rescue, to the numerous knotty budget and tax deals I had negotiated with the Republicans in Congress, I had been a critical partner in shaping and executing the plan that helped President Obama take the country from crisis to recovery to the beginnings of resurgence. Who better than me, Mike argued, to finish the job?

  Mike was convinced that the restoration of the badly beat-up American middle class, meanwhile, would be central to the 2016 campaign. Even Republicans were talking about it. And Mike’s analysis showed that there was nobody in the field in either party who was more closely identified with the middle class than I was. Middle-class concerns had been central to my entire forty-five-year career in public office, as Mike pointed out. He believed nobody spoke with more understanding and empathy about what the middle class had suffered in recent years, or with more authority about the necessity to remake the bargain the country had long had with decent, hardworking families, or with more credibility about the many opportunities we had to do that.

  The voting public was tired of careful and carefully packaged candidates. My reputation as a “gaffe machine” was no longer looking like a weakness. The public could see that I spoke from the heart and I meant what I said. “Authenticity matters,” Mike had written. And if the voters craved authenticity, I was at the top of the chart.

  I had a long and wide-ranging career in foreign policy, and had met with virtually every world leader. Mike argued that voters believed I knew the challenges the country would face in the near future and had a real strategy for where and how to use our incredible power to greatest effect.

  Then, too, my longtime (and legendary in some donor quarters) discomfort at raising huge sums of money to run a campaign—even while going out and raising huge sums of money for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns—might finally be seen as a strength. Voters were increasingly uneasy at the way the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision had permitted, and even encouraged, unlimited campaign spending by a handful of billionaires who seemed to be getting their way on policy matters. “This shouldn’t be a holier-than-thou, you’re-pure kind of position,” Mike wrote, “but one held by someone who knows what’s wrong with the system, who’s been a part of it, and who can see it spiraling out of control.… One of your very first bills (if not the first) as a young senator was to support public financing, and you have a long history on this issue.”

  The five of us—my two sons, my two closest staff members, and me—spent a few hours going through Mike’s main points, and also his last section, about how to proceed from here. His memo laid out a very specific agenda for the next two months: I had just given a speech the previous week in Iowa about my plan to extend the economic recovery to all Americans, and Mike thought I should build on that with a speech in New Hampshire about middle-class dreams; then a speech in Washington laying out the aims of foreign policy in a Biden presidency; then a speech in New York challenging Wall Street and business leaders to look beyond quarterly results and personal bonuses and start meeting their responsibilities to their workers. We also needed to start identifying and hiring key staff and we needed to start building a campaign structure in the early primary and caucus states. Mike thought I should not wait for the summer or fall, but announce my candidacy that April. All of that seemed plausible, except maybe the announcement part. But I also wanted to be sure we didn’t schedule anything that intruded on the preparations for my trip to the Northern Triangle the last weekend of February and into March. There was a lot riding on that trip, and I had to be ready.

  My eye was drawn to Beau as we talked. His term as attorney general had ended six weeks earlier, so he was no longer pressed by job concerns, and it wasn’t yet late in the evening, but he was already tiring. He was so gaunt, and his face seemed drained of color. I could see the outlines of the leg brace through his pants. For more than twenty years, at any meeting about any political campaign, I had looked to Beau for counsel. He was the only other pers
on in the room that night who had ever stood for and won elective office. Beau’s advice was the advice I would have most valued at that moment. But that night he mainly just sat and observed. Beau had been losing recall of more and more proper nouns lately, and he seemed less willing to fight through it. Ashley had told me that Beau was no longer inviting her into the room for his speech therapy, because his decline really bothered him. Beau said almost nothing that chilly February night in Washington. He would whisper something to his brother instead, and Hunter would speak for him.

  It occurred to me as I watched Beau and Hunter that everybody in that room was playacting to some degree. Whether or not we really bought into Mike’s arguments was a secondary consideration that night. It was as if we were all keeping up an elaborate and needful charade. Steve and Mike knew it as well as my sons and I did. We all understood how much Beau wanted me to run for president. We all knew that, more than anything, Beau did not want to be the reason I did not run. He would be there for me. He could handle it. Beau was trying to reassure us, and we were trying to reassure Beau. So what were the five of us to do that night but put everything else out of our minds and talk about next steps? I had two speeches scheduled in New Hampshire in six days. We should make sure the focus was on middle-class dreams.

  The snow was coming down by the time the meeting began to break up. Hunter lagged behind when everybody else got up to call it a night. “Could we talk, Dad?” he said.

  “Sure, honey.”

  So after Mike and Steve went out to their cars and Beau left with the Secret Service detail that was going to drive him home, Hunt and I went upstairs to our private family space on the second floor. I could see how badly he needed to talk. His older brother’s rapid deterioration was really tearing at him. The two of them were headed down to M. D. Anderson in Houston the next week for Beau’s regular scans, and as the date approached they were both growing more apprehensive about what the new images would reveal. Hunter was showing the strain. Beau still appeared so calm and so free of emotion to anybody who watched him. “All good. All good.” He was like the proverbial duck on the pond—gliding effortlessly above the surface of the water and paddling like hell below. Only it was Hunter who was his brother’s unseen and hard-pressed propeller. I had watched my two sons together—and they were always together. From the time in the hospital after the accident when they were just little boys, to when Hunt helped with the strategy for Beau’s first race for attorney general. Forty-five years now. I knew the dynamic. The more Beau battled to keep his emotions in check, the more Hunt would take them on as his own. It was as if Beau wore his emotions on Hunter’s sleeve.

  “I can’t stand Beau being afraid like I know he is, Dad,” Hunter said, when we were finally alone.

  “That’s what bothers me most, honey,” I told him. “It’s the thing that keeps me awake at night.”

  A night like tonight, planning out 2016, was a godsend, Hunter said. He was convinced the entire family needed to have this purpose, this outlet. Then Hunter told me that what worried Beau most was that if the worst happened, we would both give up. He said we couldn’t let that happen. Hunter told me that at the end of 2012, just after Barack and I were reelected, he and Beau had talked about the future. They thought Beau would win his race for governor in 2016; and then, whether or not I ever made it to the White House, Beau would have his chance to run for president.

  “But now,” Hunter said, and I knew he was talking for both of them, “it has to be you, Dad.”

  * * *

  I had my second call in three days with President Poroshenko the next morning. He was feeling forsaken. Merkel and Hollande had made the new cease-fire deal with Putin—Minsk II—after Poroshenko acceded to Putin’s need for “face-saving.” Poroshenko had grudgingly agreed to let Russia control parts of the Ukrainian border until new elections in a few oblasts had been held. And what had it bought Poroshenko? Minsk II looked at the start to be about as useful as Minsk I. Ukrainian separatists with Russian backing had killed at least twenty-eight civilians and Ukrainian soldiers in the hours before the cease-fire was to take effect, and increased its assault on the transportation hub of Debaltseve in the days after. The Russians did not appear to be pulling back much heavy artillery, and there were reports that they had rolled another sixty tanks up to the Ukrainian border. There wasn’t a lot more I could do beyond sympathize and tell him we were still with him. I had publicly condemned Putin’s blatant new cease-fire violations, and I told Poroshenko I would try to get real monitors to keep score on the agreed-upon withdrawal of Russian tanks and heavy artillery. I reminded President Poroshenko that, fair or not, he still could not give his European allies any excuses to walk away. His own military had to remain pure as Caesar’s wife along the border, I told him. They could not do anything that allowed Putin to claim Russian-backed separatists had been provoked. And he and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk had to continue to work together to pass anticorruption and reform legislation if they wanted the International Monetary Fund to keep writing them much-needed checks. I also let him know I would do what I could to help him meet his critical military needs—like antitank weapons. I said the same to Yatsenyuk that morning, but in a separate call. The two men still would not be in the same room together.

  I got off the call, gathered my national security staff, and we started to game out how to get additional economic sanctions on Putin and his agents in Ukraine, and how to get the Ukrainian military more equipment and better training. If the Ukrainians were able to make Russia pay a real price for the incursion—like Russian soldiers coming home in body bags—Putin might rethink the wisdom of continuing his attacks.

  * * *

  The day I flew to New Hampshire, Wednesday, February 25, to sing the song of the Obama-led economic recovery and how we needed to do more to extend it into the middle class, was a rough one. I woke up with a scratch in my throat, and by the time I started the first speech of the day at the University of New Hampshire’s Rudman Center I was having a hard time suppressing a cough. I was feeling worse by the minute, but I was determined to lay down a marker. “When our government doesn’t work, it’s not the politicians who get hurt, it’s the American people. It’s hardworking ordinary Americans who get up every day, go to work, pay their taxes, pay their bills, take care of their families,” I said, then I coughed aloud. “Excuse me, I have a cold—and take care of their communities, they’re the ones who get hurt—the middle class. And let me tell you something: the middle class has enough to overcome without having to overcome dysfunctional politicians and dysfunctional government.” This message mattered. It was important. The defining issue of 2016 was the very real challenges faced by the American middle class: “All we have to do is give the middle class a fighting chance. It’s not hyperbole. When the middle class does well, everybody does well. The economy expands, and working-class and poor folks have a way up. Never, ever, ever in the history of the journey of America, when ordinary people have been given a fighting chance, have they ever let their country down. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

  I did two talks on the theme that day, with long question-and-answer sessions, and I was sure I was connecting with the people in those rooms. They wanted someone to speak to the dreams of the middle class. Someone who understood how tough things had been. Someone who gave them hope that their dreams weren’t dead. This was a message people were ready to hear, and one I was sure I could deliver.

  By the time I boarded Air Force Two for the return trip to Washington, where I had a meeting to prep for my trip to Central America, I was feeling drained. I had a fever by then and could hear a crackle in my left lung every time I took a deep breath. I went into my private cabin and lay down on the couch. Doc O’Connor came in before takeoff, had a good long look at me, and put me on Mucinex and antibiotics.

  I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and went to the office, but as the day wore on, I felt worse. This was not getting better, even with antibiotics. Doc O’Conno
r came in to check on me and looked worried. This was only the second time I had been sick in the six years he had treated me. My cough was dry but insistent, and my fever was increasing—probably because I had developed pneumonia in my left lung. Doc put me on triple antibiotics and an IV drip to get some fluids back in my system. He came by the residence the next day and pronounced me only marginally improved, if improved at all. Doc told me I was sick enough that I should scrub the upcoming trip to Central America. I was scheduled to fly to Uruguay the next day, Saturday, February 28, spend two days in Uruguay for the new president’s inauguration, then two days in Guatemala City for major negotiations with the presidents of the Northern Triangle countries. I told Doc to forget the idea of my staying put. This was too important. I could get some sleep and recover on the plane, and he could stay right by my side to monitor me. But I had to make this trip.

  “Sir, I understand pulling down an international trip is a big deal,” Doc said. “I get it. It’s not good press. It’s embarrassing. But you know what else is embarrassing and not good press? Collapsing on camera. You remember the state dinner in Japan when George Bush threw up on the table, right? If that’s the YouTube video you want, go ahead.”