by Jeff Wilser
Biden then paused, thought for a quick second. “Although, she’s—wait—your mom’s still alive. It was your dad [who] passed.”
Ireland’s PM awkwardly nodded.
Biden didn’t miss a beat. “God bless her soul!” he said, laughing, and the prime minister laughed, too.
JOE THE RAINMAKER
In February of 2009, Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus package to help rescue the economy from the maw of depression. That was the headline. But what happened next? Where did the money go? Who kept track of it?
Joe Biden kept track of it.
Obama gave Biden the sprawling job of overseeing the project. As Biden says, it’s “the largest economic stimulus in history, larger than the entire New Deal.” $30 billion to health information technology. $48 billion to transportation projects. $90 billion into renewable power and advanced biofuels. (Those vials of liquids from the factory again. Biofuels. Chicken manure. Heh.)
Like he does with everything, he obsessed over the details until he became a wonk. In June of 2010, for example, Biden joined Mayor Bloomberg at the Brooklyn Bridge, where funds had been allocated for repairs and upgrades. It was a fairly innocent event—just a quick speech about how the stimulus bill was helping to fund roads and tunnels and bridges. Nothing too complicated.
“But then he started drilling me on the components of every piece of spending,” remembers Ziskend. “And he had this deep understanding of the most efficient way that federal dollars can go into bridges and tunnels and roads, and he starts just asking me every piece of it. And it was amazing.”
JOE THE HUGGER
In 2009, Biden took trip after trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. He needed to. Obama had asked him to give a no-bullshit assessment of the facts on the ground, good or bad. Biden would meet with the troops, give them pep talks. (“As corny as it sounds, damn, I’m proud to be an American,” he said to one crew.) On one of these trips, Biden met with a unit of soldiers that happened to have a certain captain in their ranks—a man who had volunteered for National Guard duty…Captain Beau Biden, wearing his desert fatigues. Father and son had an emotional hug.
Then Biden hit the cafeteria to mix it up with the soldiers. “He lit up like a 1,000-watt bulb,” reported the New York Times’s James Traub. “Biden shook every hand, and threw his arm around every shoulder—hundreds and hundreds of them. ‘How are you, man?’ he cried, with fresh joy, to each table of soldiers. ‘Did you get a picture of me?’ A soldier said politely, ‘Look this way, sir,’ and Biden, who has the blinding white teeth of a starlet, whirled around with a huge smile. The vice president never stopped moving, smiling, or talking.”
Biden has always been a hugger, regardless of whether his victims are men, women, kids, grandpas, family, strangers. Take the swearing-in ceremonies of new senators (in both 2013 and 2015), which were caught on C-SPAN, and which have become something of a Biden cult classic. “You’ve got beautiful eyes, Mom, holy mackerel!” he said to one old lady. He mugged for selfies. Touched another old lady’s cheek. Rubbed shoulders. He appraised one couple and said, “You married up, son.” To a muscular guy he said, “Call me if you need help on your pecs.”
JOE (AND JILL) THE PRANKSTERS
The Internet fell in love with the idea of Joe the Prankster. And there might be some truth to this. Biden would hide M&Ms throughout the White House, as something of a gentle ribbing to Michelle Obama’s healthy eating campaign. And it’s definitely true that Biden is a prankster…
…Jill Biden.
She took pride in her nickname of “Captain of the Vice Squad,” and she earned that title with stunt after stunt, such as the one Valentine’s Day when she snuck into Joe’s office to use a stick of lipstick to graffiti the windows with “Jill loves Joe” and “Happy [Heart] Valentine’s Day.” And if this strikes you as treacly, you’ll be happy to know that on Halloween, she once surprised Joe by placing a fake rat on his podium.
One morning after getting up early, while Joe was still in bed, she raced into the room to wake him up. “Joe, don’t you have a breakfast this morning? People are coming through the gate!”
He threw off the covers, panicked, and said, “I do, I do!”
“April Fool’s!” Jill yelled out.
She has been known to wear disguises, like the time she pretended to be a server at a party she hosted. She has worn red wigs.
Yet nothing will top the time that Joe, on Air Force Two, reached up to open the overhead compartment, ready to stow his luggage.
Boo!
Jill had climbed into the overheard compartment, just to surprise him.
But just like her husband, beneath the pranks and the jokes is a person of rock-solid values, hard work, and a lifelong devotion to public service—in her case, through teaching. She taught English at community colleges for decades, earned her doctoral degree at the University of Delaware, and then Dr. Jill Biden became, as Obama put it, “the first Second Lady in our nation’s history to keep her day job,” as she kept teaching classes. She wrote a children’s book titled Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops, inspired by Beau’s deployment in Iraq, and how that affected his daughter. Along with Michelle Obama she cofounded Joining Forces, which supports veterans and military families, and she also found time to launch the Biden Breast Health Initiative.
So it’s easy to understand why Joe sometimes introduces himself as “Jill’s husband.” Although other times he’s less smooth, like when he gave a speech praising the nation’s teachers, calling them “the best-kept secret in America,” and then said, “I think I’d have the same attitude [even if] I did not sleep with a community college professor every night.” The crowd laughed. Biden quickly clarified. “Oh, the same one, the same one!”
We all know that oldest of clichés, “Love takes work,” and perhaps that’s true, but sometimes it just takes a damn good laugh.
JOE THE COOL BOSS
In January of 2009, on his very first team meeting, Biden told his staff something that they didn’t expect to hear. They had likely envisioned a talk about the importance of the job, the long hours they would need to work, or the sacrifices that they would make. And of course they would indeed work long hours and sacrifice, but that was not Biden’s message.
“The absolute most important thing is your family,” Biden told his staff, as Ziskend remembers. “Make sure that’s all taken care of. I don’t want to hear that you’re putting off going to a Little League game, or that you’re straining your relationships because you’re not seeing your loved one.”
Ziskend couldn’t believe it. “This was our first staff meeting. He really set the example.” And Biden stuck by that principle. Years later, in 2014, he sent a memo to his staff on work-life balance. It’s worth printing in full:
To My Wonderful Staff,
I would like to take a moment and make something clear to everyone. I do not expect, nor do I want, any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include, but are not limited to, family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies, such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations, and times of need, such as an illness or a loss in the family. This is very important to me. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if I find out that you are working with me while missing important family responsibilities, it will disappoint me greatly. This has been an unwritten rule since my days in the Senate.
Thank you all for the hard work.
Sincerely,
Joe
The staff was touched. The world was touched. And when we know Joe Biden’s full story—especially the story of what would happen just a year later, with Beau—we know that when it comes to family, he means every damn one of these words. By nearly any conceivable standard, Biden’s run as VP had been a success. He had racked up the wins. Yet no matter how well things are going in your career, as Biden once said, “Reality has a way of intruding.”
Reality intruded in 1972. Reality would intrude onc
e more.
9
Beau (1969–2015)
“A parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did.
In the words of the Biden family:
Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”
Nothing about this chapter in Biden’s life feels fair. How could one man survive so much tragedy?
Ever since the accident of 1972, Biden had a close relationship with his two sons. He knew it, too. “The incredible bond I have with my children is the gift I’m not sure I would have had, had I not been through what I went through,” he said in 2015.
That bond seemed especially strong with his elder son.
Beau’s life, his values, and his choices help us gain an even richer understanding of Joe. The similarities between the two are striking. Joe went to the Catholic Archmere Academy. Beau went to the Catholic Archmere Academy. Joe went to Syracuse Law School, inspired by Neilia. So did Beau. Joe devoted his life to public service. Beau devoted his life to public service, serving as Delaware’s attorney general.
When we peel one level deeper, the parallels are even more revealing. Joe worked to end the genocide in Bosnia. In 1998, after the war had ravaged Kosovo, as a private lawyer, Beau traveled to the region, where he helped train local judges and prosecutors. (Kosovo would later name a highway in Beau’s honor, marking “a symbol of the enduring friendship between Kosovo and the United States.”) Beau had his father’s eloquence, his earnest charisma, and even his jawline. As Obama said, “He even looked and sounded like Joe, although I think Joe would be first to acknowledge that Beau was an upgrade—Joe 2.0.”
Joe has a go-to saying: I give you my word as a Biden. Beau internalized the lesson; his life is filled with story after story of personal integrity. Consider: When Joe visited Beau’s National Guard’s unit in Iraq, Stephen Colbert offered to film a segment of a father-and-son reunion. Beau nixed the idea—he didn’t want the free publicity, and why should he be treated differently from his fellow soldiers? At the time he was Delaware’s attorney general, and clearly that segment would have been good for “optics.” Beau wasn’t an optics guy. (“He didn’t want any special attention,” remembered Colbert. “He didn’t want to leave his unit. He didn’t want to be singled out.”)
Beau did things the hard way, the right way. At first, Delaware’s governor offered to appoint Beau to be the attorney general, filling a vacancy. He turned it down so that, as Obama said, he could run in an election and “win it fair and square.” (After Beau won the election, one local paper ran with the headline “Biden Most Popular Man in Delaware—Beau.”) He then poured his energy into punishing the worst of the worst—sex offenders. Biden’s father had a saying: It takes a small man to hit a small child. Beau had learned from the elder Bidens, and just like his father, Joe, he looked out for the little guy.
Beau did this in college, too. When speaking to students at Syracuse, Joe Biden told a story about courage, about what it means to be a man, and about his son Beau. The story was about sexual assault on campus. First he acknowledged something that we never talk about: For most guys, if we spot trouble with the way a man is treating a woman, it can be hard to speak up. It’s none of my business, we’re tempted to think. “It’s hard. It’s a hard thing for a guy on campus to step in,” Joe acknowledged.
“My son stepped in,” Joe told the crowd of college students, speaking in a slow, level, deadly serious voice that had no trace of Uncle Joe. “He stepped in when a guy was mauling a coed in a coed dorm….He said, ‘Hey, man, what are you doing?’ ” And then Beau separated the guy from the woman.
Joe continued: “He [Beau] ended up paying a price, because this guy [the groper] was the captain of a particular team, and the word went out, Get Biden…. [But] they didn’t count on Beau Biden’s little brother,” Joe said, and then, for the first time in the speech, he smiled and flashed those pearly whites. “He came up and beat the hell out of the captain.” The crowd laughed. “You think I’m joking? I’m not joking.”
Classic Biden values: The Biden clan sticks together. Joe had always placed family above all else, and he passed the lesson on to his sons. “The first memory I have is of lying in a hospital bed next to my brother,” Hunter said, fighting back emotion, when speaking at Beau’s funeral. “I was almost three years old, I remember my brother, who was one year and one day older than me, holding my hand, staring into my eyes, saying, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ over and over and over again. And in the forty-two years since, he never stopped holding my hand, he never stopped telling me just how much he loves me. But mine wasn’t the only hand Beau held. Beau’s was the hand everyone reached for in their time of need, Beau’s was the hand that was reaching for yours before you even had to ask.”
Beau didn’t just look out for his little brother; he protected his father, too. After Joe Biden’s 2012 debate against Paul Ryan, some critics said he “laughed too much.” Well, Beau would have none of that nonsense, rushing to the morning shows to defend his old man: “Anytime folks on the far right are going after my father for smiling too much, that’s a victory,” Beau said. “My father spoke clearly to the American people about the facts. He did that for ninety minutes straight. This is not about how much my father smiled….It’s about talking directly to the American people about very important facts.”
But as strongly as Beau protected the Biden name, he didn’t want to use it as a crutch. Obama told a story about how in his twenties, Beau was stopped for speeding outside of Scranton. “The officer recognized the name on the license, and because he was a fan of Joe’s work with law enforcement, he wanted to let Beau off with a warning,” said Obama. “But Beau made him write that ticket. Beau didn’t trade on his name.”
When he joined the National Guard and then served overseas in Iraq, he feared getting special treatment because of his famous father, so he requested the Biden name tag be stripped from his uniform. (As Joe later remembered, he used a fake name instead, something like “Roberts.”)
“He abhorred people who had a sense of entitlement, and he went the other way,” Joe later said of his son. “He won the Bronze Star and came home, and made us all promise that we wouldn’t tell anybody that he won the Bronze Star.” When he was awarded the Legion of Merit, he wouldn’t put it on his uniform until his general ordered him to.
And in a generational echo of Joe’s playfulness, Beau had a lighter side, too. “When he’d have to attend a fancy fund-raiser with people who took themselves way too seriously, he’d walk over to you and whisper something wildly inappropriate in your ear,” Obama remembered, laughing a bit. At Thanksgiving, he was known to dance in a sombrero and shorts, just to get a laugh out of his family. For Halloween he once dressed as Don Johnson in Miami Vice, all decked out in a white jacket and shoes with no socks.
That upbeat personality of Beau’s, if he wanted, could have easily glided into the U.S. Senate. For thirty-six years, Joe Biden had a steel grip on his Delaware seat. When he became vice president, many assumed that the old seat would go to the heir apparent, his son. It would be so simple. Beau was the attorney general, making him perfectly qualified to step in and fill his father’s shoes. The governor offered to appoint him to the vacant seat—no election, no fund-raising, no muss, no fuss.
Beau turned it down.
He already had a job, as attorney general, and he wanted to finish his work. “I have a duty to fulfill as attorney general,” he said at the time, “and the immediate need to focus on a case of great consequence. And that is what I must do.” Specifically, he was spearheading the case against a child molester; to Beau, it was more important that he mete out justice than accelerate his personal career. As Obama put it, “He didn’t cut corners.”
And he did his job well—he fought to imprison people guilty of child sex crimes, notching 180 convictions. “Nothing is more important than keeping our kids safe,” Beau wrote in an op-ed. “No one likes talking about pedophilia and preda
tors who want to hurt our kids, but we have no choice….As adults, we all have a responsibility to protect children and take action when we believe a child is being abused.” This sounds, in other words, like the son of the man who had passed the Violence Against Women Act.
In 2010, while in the best shape of his life—and after serving overseas in Iraq—Beau went for a ten-mile run. He collapsed from a stroke, was taken to the hospital, and was later diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma cancer in the brain. As with his father before him, they cut into his head. He had surgery. Chemo. Radiation.
In 2013, a small lesion was removed from his brain and then, briefly, he was given a clean bill of health and went back to work as attorney general. For a spell the cancer retreated. The Biden family fought it by banding together. And this time the Biden family included a new honorary member.
You know all the memes about how Obama and Biden were Best Friends Forever? Those memes hint at a deeper truth. As far too many families know, the costs of health care can be crushing. This is true even for the powerful families of DC. As Beau received cancer treatment, Joe knew that he might need to help with the costs. But after forty years as a public servant, he was long on love but short on cash. (Way back in 1972, as that brash twenty-nine-year-old, he’d vowed that “I’ll never own a stock, bond, or debenture as long as I’m in public life.” He kept that promise.) If things got any worse, the only way to make ends meet would be to sell the house.
Then Joe received an offer of financial assistance from a man who had become like a brother: Barack Obama. As Biden remembers it, Obama told him, “Don’t sell that house. Promise me you won’t sell the house. I’ll give you the money. Whatever you need, I’ll give you the money. Don’t, Joe—promise me. Promise me.”
And then another promise was requested—this time from his son. During what must have been agonizing cancer treatment, Beau seemed more concerned about how others were doing, not about his own pain. “Dad, I know how much you love me. Promise me you’re going to be all right,” he told Joe. His very last words to Joe were to soothe. “Dad, I’m not afraid. Promise me you’ll be all right.”