Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  “This was a man who, at the Democratic National Convention, didn’t spend all his time in the back rooms with donors or glad-handing,” he continued. “Instead, he rode the escalators in the arena with his son, up and down, up and down, again and again, knowing, just like Joe had learned, what ultimately mattered in life.”

  The president paused a moment before he went on, as if anticipating the political sea change that loomed around the corner. “You know, anyone can make a name for themselves in this reality-TV age, especially in today’s politics. If you’re loud enough or controversial enough, you can get some attention. But to make that name mean something, to have it associated with dignity and integrity—that is rare.”

  Near the end, the president borrowed another line from the same Irish poet he’d quoted at the start. This one encapsulated the sadness we all felt even as we smiled at Beau’s bright memories:

  “ ‘And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.’ ”

  The president stepped down from the altar and walked over to Dad, who stood to accept a long, full embrace. The president then kissed my father on the side of his head—a gesture of the brotherhood he’d noted earlier—before finally letting go.

  My sister followed the president. I accompanied her up to the altar and remained at her side, a show of sibling unity for Beau. She was funny and adoring and hopeful and poignant—the quintessential kid sister.

  “When I was in first grade, I drew a picture of what made me happy,” said Ashley, who was ten years Beau’s junior. “And it was me holding hands with my two brothers.”

  She made it clear that she saw the two of us almost as one, just as Beau and I did: two sides of the same coin.

  “It’s impossible to talk about Beau without talking about Hunter,” she said. “They were inseparable and shared a love that was unconditional. Although Beau was a year and a day older, Hunter was the wind beneath Beau’s wings—Hunt gave him the courage and the confidence to fly… There wasn’t one decision where Hunter wasn’t consulted first, not one day that passed where they didn’t speak, and not one road traveled where they weren’t each other’s copilots.

  “Hunter was Beau’s confidant,” she said. “His home.”

  Ashley had quickly shared in our bond. As with any good sibling, we loved her and were annoyed by her in equal measure.

  “It was true then and it remained true throughout my life—I feel like the luckiest kid sister to be raised and built by two extraordinary men,” she said. “Although, as my husband sometimes points out, they didn’t read all the directions.”

  Ashley then noted the events that passed as milestones in a kid sister’s eyes, including the fact that Beau and I introduced her to her future husband, Howard, after we first met him at an Obama-Biden fundraiser in 2008.

  Beau and I named Ashley when she was born, and she referred to us as Beauie and Huntie ever after. She hung around with us so much when we were in high school and college that our friends nicknamed her “flea.” Beau’s lone precondition for her presence: she had to sing “Fire on the Mountain” by the Grateful Dead. As an eight-year-old, she sometimes spent the night at Beau’s college apartment.

  Ashley recalled our annual Thanksgiving trips to Nantucket, when “my brothers would come get me out of class and we would pile up in the Jeep Wagoneer and travel seven hours—my favorite car ride.”

  The past year had weighed heavily on her, just as it had on all of us, yet she, too, saw a blessing in being beside our brother during that final phase of his life. She talked about what she termed the “tragic privilege” of accompanying Beau to his chemo appointments every other Friday. Afterward, they often stopped for breakfast, during which Beau made her listen to what she came to think of as his theme song: “You Get What You Give,” by the New Radicals. She repeated the lyrics for those sitting rapt in the full church.

  This whole damn world could fall apart

  You’ll be okay, follow your heart.

  You’re in harm’s way, I’m right behind.

  “In retrospect,” Ashley said, “I think Beau played that song during our mornings together—not for him, but for me. To remember to not give up or let sadness consume me, consume us.”

  She then summed up:

  “As long as I have Hunt, I have you. So Beauie… see you. Love you so much.”

  Ashley and I kissed and hugged. I couldn’t have been prouder. I knew Beau couldn’t have been prouder, either.

  She’d set everyone at ease, including me. As I stepped behind the podium and opened my notes, I felt calm—uncharacteristically calm. I dread speaking in front of big crowds. I’d been aware of how much everyone worried about me, and not just at this moment. I’d sensed a general concern about the effect Beau’s passing would have on my sobriety. Under other circumstances, that concern would have only heightened my anxiety.

  Not now.

  With a thousand faces staring up at me, and the service being watched by millions more on TV, I felt cocooned within my family: Ashley, Mom and Dad, my aunts and uncles and cousins, my wife and daughters—they all were there with me, and they all were there for me.

  And then there was Beau. Since the day that he died, it still didn’t feel as if Beau was gone.

  After thanking the speakers who came before me, and reaffirming Beau’s love for Ashley—“He loved the way you laugh. He loved your smile”—I spoke directly to Beau’s children. They huddled together in the front pew. I repeated what I’d told them all week: that their father would always be with them and a part of them, and that their extended family would love and protect them the way that same family loved and protected me and their father.

  “Natalie,” I went on, “he is that piece of you that allows you to be so caring and compassionate. He’s the reason why you are so protective of your brother, the same way he was with me.

  “Hunter, Robert Hunter Biden the Second—he tied you and me together forever. You are his calm and his focus. You are so much like your daddy, you know, watching the two of you fish at the end of the dock was like seeing two images of the same person.

  “Just like Aunt Valerie was there for your daddy and me—just like we had Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Frankie, Uncle Jack, Uncle John, Mom-Mom and Da-Da—you have your aunt Ashley, your aunt Liz, your aunt Kathleen, your Poppy and Mimi, your Nana and Pop. We will surround you with the same love, a love so big and so beautiful. The same love that made your daddy and me will now make you.”

  I had no inkling then, of course, of just how complicated all that soon would become.

  I retold the story about Beau holding my hand when we were scared kids in the hospital room, and how mine was hardly the only hand he held over the years in someone’s time of great need. Survivors of abuse, parents of fallen soldiers, victims of violent crime—he held them all.

  “There are thousands of people telling those stories right now,” I said. “Telling the same story—about when Beau Biden held their hand.

  “He was clarity,” I continued, speaking as much to myself as to those inside the church. “A clarity you can step into. He was the clarity of Lake Skaneateles at sunrise. A clarity you could float in. A clarity that was contagious. He was that clarity not just for his family but for everyone who called him friend.

  “My only claim on my brother,” I then told everyone ever touched by Beau, “is that he held my hand first.”

  As I read those words, time didn’t exist for me anymore. I had no idea how long I’d been up there (it was twenty-two minutes at that point). I didn’t worry about what anyone thought or about anyone’s concerns.

  “Forty-two years ago,” I finally concluded, “I believe that God gave us a gift. He gave us the gift of sparing my brother, sparing him long enough to give the love of a thousand lifetimes. God gave us a boy who had no limits to the weight of love he could bear.

  “And as it began, so it did end: His family surrounding him. Everyone holding on to him. Each of us desperately holding him. Eac
h of us whispering, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’ And I held his hand as he took his last breath. I know that I was loved, and I know that his hand will never leave mine.”

  When I finished and returned to my pew, Dad stood to kiss me.

  He then whispered in my ear:

  “Beautiful.”

  * * *

  I felt hope after that long week. I even sensed that others had begun to feel hopeful about me. Standing for hours in those receiving lines, it seemed every third person I hugged or shook hands with encouraged me to move back to Delaware and run for office.

  Kathleen and I drove back to Washington the morning after Beau’s funeral. It was just the two of us. We listened to the radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania. Beau and I had loved it growing up. Now it was airing a three-shift tribute to Beau, a 1991 alum.

  At one point, I pulled the car over and told Kathleen that maybe politics was now an option for me.

  “You know, as horrible as I feel, I have a feeling of real purpose,” I said. It seemed so many people were more willing to forgive my past mistakes—relapses with drinking, administrative discharge from the Navy Reserve—than I was willing to forgive myself.

  But I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.

  I suppose her response—Are you serious?—was entirely warranted.

  We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride.

  Or, really, ever again.

  CHAPTER THREE GROWING UP BIDEN

  My father believed Beau could one day be president and that he’d get there with my help.

  It seemed wholly natural. The two of us were raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn. The rule Beau and I had as kids was that we could go with our dad to Washington whenever we wanted, though there was an unspoken limit to missing school too many days in a row. So two or three times a month we took the train with him to the Capitol and spent the day there. It was more like visiting the house of out-of-town relatives than being on one of those school field trips we saw all the other fidgety kids on. The people who worked for and with my father were like surrogate aunts and uncles. It wasn’t unusual for someone like Bill Cohen, say, then a Republican representative from Maine and later secretary of defense under Clinton, to ride the train back to Wilmington with Dad, have dinner with us, hang out, and stay overnight.

  I’d sit on Dad’s lap during staff meetings, or take off with Beau to roam the Senate gym in the Russell Senate Office Building, which for us was just this big, rambling neo-Greek playground with a pool. Beau and I sometimes wandered into the steam room, where we’d find big-eared, bearlike Howell Heflin, Democratic senator from Alabama, chewing on his ever-present cigar as he shot the breeze with the youngish, still athletic-looking Ted Kennedy and an aging, angular Strom Thurmond.

  They’d spot us and call out, “Hey, boys!”—we were always the only kids around—and we’d settle into some nearby corner to eavesdrop. Amid the swirling steam, the room filled with a chorus of mellifluous accents and clashing ideologies—conservative Democrat, liberal standard-bearer, rock-ribbed Republican. To our young ears, their chatter was as much music-making as politicking.

  We were fixtures in the Senate cafeteria, knew all the waitstaff. Dad sat with us when he could, ordering a tuna fish on wheat and calling over whoever caught his eye. If Dad got pulled away, a senator would essentially babysit us. While I slurped navy bean soup and dug into a BLT (Beau always ordered a grilled cheese and fries), someone like Dan Inouye, from Hawaii, would share stories between bites about his Army buddies during World War II. I didn’t connect those tales to the shirt and jacket sleeve he pinned to his shoulder until years later, when I wrote a thesis paper in college about the senator’s heroism in leading an assault in Italy with the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the all Japanese American fighting unit, and losing his right arm to a grenade.

  John Glenn, the astronaut-turned-senator from Ohio, would spot us waiting for Dad and call out, “Okay, boys, up to my office.” He’d lead us up there to show off models of his Project Mercury rocket, point to where he sat inside the Friendship 7 spacecraft, then regale us with tales about what it was like to be the first American to spin around in space and look down on entire oceans and continents. We’d just stare, our eyes wide and mouths open.

  We absorbed some lasting lessons along the way, especially from when our father was new enough to have mentors and teachable moments, Washington style. I recall him telling us about a tutorial he’d gotten not long after arriving in office from Mike Mansfield, the longtime Senate majority leader from Montana.

  Jesse Helms had been elected to the Senate the same year as Dad. When the Rehabilitation Act, a precursor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, was introduced in 1973, the hard-shell conservative from North Carolina—and bearer of another one of those mellifluous accents—went on the Senate floor to excoriate it as a massive federal overreach. Dad was so disgusted afterward that he responded with his own not-so-measured rant and asked, in effect, how anyone could be so callous, uncaring, and mean-spirited as to oppose such a magnanimous and much-needed bill.

  Later, Mansfield summoned Dad to his office. “Iron Mike”—quiet, courteous, unfailingly persuasive—laid down his unwritten but inviolable law: you can question a colleague’s judgment, whether it be a Democrat or a Republican, but you should never question his or her motives. Everybody comes to the Senate for a reason, he went on, but nobody comes for the sole purpose of being mean-spirited or un-American. Someone’s judgment might be off, but his or her motives weren’t open to questioning, particularly on sensitive issues like this.

  To illuminate his point, Mansfield told Dad a story about Helms. Several years earlier, Jesse and his wife, Dot, who’d been married for twenty years and were the parents of two teenage daughters, woke one morning around Christmas and read a newspaper article about a nine-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. In the story, the boy, who used a wheelchair, said that all he wanted for Christmas was a mother and a father and a real home. Jesse and Dot decided right then, Mansfield’s story went, to adopt him and bring him into their family.

  “You can question his judgment,” Mansfield then reiterated to Dad, “but certainly you can see how you shouldn’t question his motive.”

  Dad swiftly learned that if he didn’t put an opponent’s character front and center, he often could find a way to change minds or work out a compromise. No one walks out of a meeting when you say, “I don’t think you understand the ramifications of what you’re doing, how people won’t have access to things they need in their daily lives.” That prompts debate. But if you tell an opponent, “You’re just a mean-spirited jackass who’s clearly prejudiced against people with disabilities”—well, if you’re Jesse Helms, or anyone else for that matter, the conversation is over.

  That lesson, long a foundational one for my dad and our family, is one that too many politicians today have failed to pick up. The result is the toxic atmosphere that blew the door wide open for somebody like Trump, who has since turned that lesson on its head. Trump’s motives can and should be questioned because, hell, most of the time he flat-out states them. And take my word, those motives ain’t pretty.

  Having been around the Senate since I was three years old, I’ve watched the evolution of the people who’ve come into that chamber as conservative firebrands and later voted for liberal-backed issues not because they changed ideology, but because it was the right thing to do—like marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday, as Strom Thurmond eventually did, or supporting an extension of the Voting Rights Act, as did John Stennis, as staunch a Mississippi segregationist as there was.

  Even Jesse Helms, who’d once declared AIDS “God’s punishment for homosexuals,” supported funding for AIDS relief in Africa during his last years in office.

  Men and women can come to the Senate with one view of the world, but it’s difficult to stay
in that office for any length of time and not be exposed to more diverse viewpoints and ways to arrive at judgments—at least, it was, before the fearmongering cult of Trumpism. It’s hard not to turn more empathetic. Most longtime political observers think those days of bipartisanship are gone for good. I hope it’s not true. Jeff Flake came to the Senate as Arizona’s right-wing counterpart to John McCain, and look at him now: a confirmed never-Trumper.

  In the midst of the political storm that swirls around me, I try to stay optimistic. I’m not always successful. I’ll glance up at a TV in the middle of the day and see Lindsey Graham, a man from the opposite side of the aisle whom my dad and family have long considered a friend, morph into a Trump lapdog right before my eyes, slandering me and my father in the coldest, most cynical, most self-serving ways.

  * * *

  Beau and I didn’t grow up in Washington. We didn’t really hang out with other senators’ kids. Especially in those early days, we took the hour-and-a-half train ride with our dad from Wilmington to the Russell Building and back again, and that was pretty much it—the extent of our Washington upbringing.

  Home was Delaware. That’s where politics formed us and made it possible for us to get to know the entire state like the backs of our hands. Delaware is often viewed as an irrelevant blip by many who aren’t from there, and for obvious reasons: With not quite a million residents, it’s the sixth smallest state in the country in population, and it’s the second-smallest state in area, behind only teeny Rhode Island. It’s easy to miss on a map if you’re not looking for it, squeezed as it is between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey.

  Yet Delaware is an overlooked, underappreciated microcosm of America and a key contributor to my dad’s broad national appeal. The state’s history, culture, and politics reflect aspects associated with bigger distinct regions. It is at once a Northeastern suburb of Philadelphia; a cradle of Southern agriculture and race relations; a slice of the industrial Midwest; and a watery, port-centric belt like so many other areas up and down the mid-Atlantic.