Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  * * *

  An early, up-close glimpse for us of the intensity of Dad’s new position, and his ability to adapt to it, came in November 2009.

  It was a fraught time, the height of an internal White House debate about whether to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Dad kept our family’s decades-old tradition of spending Thanksgiving week in Nantucket. Beau had returned from his year of deployment in Iraq just two months earlier. The house we stayed in became, in effect, a long-distance adjunct of the West Wing, filled and surrounded by military aides and Secret Service.

  Seated in armchairs inside a wood-paneled New England den, Beau and I witnessed it all, at least during those times when classified information wasn’t exchanged: the stress of life-and-death stakes; political knife-fighting at the highest level; and the best traits of our dad in vivid, frenetic action.

  It was a critical moment for him. One misstep could make his next three or seven years long and uncomfortable ones. The power that a vice president wields is whatever the president allows, and in that first year, the relationship between Dad and President Obama was not yet fully formed.

  Dad was frustrated. He felt he was being outmaneuvered by players inside the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. He’d gambled by opposing a troop buildup, putting him largely at odds with Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and General Stanley McChrystal, who’d taken command in Afghanistan and had pressed for forty thousand additional troops.

  Now he was handicapped by working from a secure phone line five hundred miles away.

  He paced the room as he held an impassioned conversation with Hillary Clinton. When they finished, he put down the phone and turned to us, exasperated.

  “Goddammit,” he exclaimed, using us, as usual, as a sounding board to clarify his thoughts. “Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”

  Beau and I downplayed his annoyance.

  “What does he know, Dad?”

  “He knows enough.” The phone rang again: Tony Blinken, Dad’s national security advisor. Dad put him on hold to take another call, from Senator John Kerry. Kerry informed Dad that McChrystal was working on Obama as they spoke.

  “Goddammit!”

  There would be brief lulls. Dad would explain for us everybody’s argument, what their interests were, which of them were purely political and which were forward-thinking and strategic. He’d talk about the implications for the Middle East and what it meant for the continuation of NATO.

  It was almost like he’d picked up where we left off around the dinner table.

  Then he’d get on another line and start an extended discussion with the prime minister of France, whom he knew well. Meanwhile, faxes (yes, there were still faxes) poured in as military aides darted in and out to ensure that the lines of communication with the White House were secure. It went on like that for hours and hours.

  At one point, Beau and I insisted that Dad fly back to Washington so he could be in the scrum. He didn’t budge. We’d finally leave the room and take the kids into town, get everybody sandwiches. When we returned, Dad was still pacing, still on the phone, still working his case.

  Obama ended up giving my dad his full ear. He eventually split the difference by temporarily calling up thirty thousand more troops and ordering a partial withdrawal within about a year. Dad had gone with his conscience and it had solidified his relationship with the president. It helped elevate his influence for the rest of that term and into the next one.

  Beau and I were incredibly proud and, frankly, honored to watch the way he conducted himself while taking such a huge political risk, and also seeing how swiftly he’d adapted to his new role. It became clear to us during those five days on that little island off the coast of Massachusetts, despite Dad’s initial doubts, that he had made the right call in accepting Obama’s offer to be vice president.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, my world was upended.

  By 2008, my firm was thriving. Kathleen and I had a $1.6 million house in a great Washington neighborhood and three kids at Sidwell.

  I was sober.

  Then Dad joined the Obama ticket and I had to find new work. Some Obama advisors vehemently opposed my lobbying and made it clear it would have to end. I scrambled to start a consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named after one of the Finger Lakes near my mommy’s hometown. It focused on advising small and midsized companies on opportunities to expand domestically and overseas. A year later, I agreed to advise in much the same way another private equity fund, Rosemont, run by Devon Archer, a self-made, supermotivated former college lacrosse player with a disarming charm who’d flown all over the world to raise money for his real estate investment firm, and his more risk-averse best friend from Yale, Chris Heinz, John Kerry’s stepson. That company merged the two enterprises’ names, Rosemont Seneca, though I continued to operate independently. A second private equity fund that Devon and Chris proposed was never started.

  I was riding the escalator without an exit. I once again had huge expenses and no savings, and now I had to bust my ass to build another career from scratch. I’d take ten meetings with ten prospects to land one client—if I was lucky. That didn’t seem bad until I realized I needed ten clients to cover my monthly nut—a hundred pitches. I was on the road constantly.

  One thing I’d learned about staying sober over the previous seven years is that you need to be as dedicated to sobriety as you were to drinking. Through practice, perseverance, and focus—as well as service and exercise and meditation—I was able to get the same sense of well-being that alcohol once provided, as well as quiet those seemingly ever-present anxieties.

  But you can’t ease up.

  Ever.

  If you do, as I did in November of 2010, here’s what happens:

  You find yourself flying home from a business trip in Madrid on the red-eye. Overworked, sleep-deprived, no exercise in three months, you’re grateful when a flight attendant stops by your seat and asks, as she has asked everyone around you, if you’d like a drink. Without hesitation—without really even thinking—you answer, as I answered, “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

  You’re off to the races.

  You get home eight or nine hours later and you’re greeted, as I was, by your wife and your crazy-beautiful kids. They don’t know what you know: that you’ve been drinking. That prompts a whole new category of shame and guilt. It also prompts something more complicated: elation and relief. You have this revelation: I just drank and I feel a hell of a lot better. The world didn’t stop spinning. The plane didn’t drop out of the sky. My wife didn’t divorce me when I walked through the door.

  The next day, you go to work. You don’t drink at all that day. Or the next. The day after that, however, if you’re me, you think: Well, a beer. You never liked beer much anyway, so that’s safe. Maybe you can at least sneak a couple of beers every once in a while because it’s hard to stop thinking about those three Bloody Marys you had on the plane and how fucking good they made you feel. It’s a lesser sin.

  So you buy a beer, a single, on the way home from work, along with a pack of Trident. Again, the world doesn’t stop; nothing horrible happens. In fact, you feel better. Later that night, you tell everybody you’re going to the convenience store for a pack of cigarettes—nothing unusual if you’ve been, as I was, a pack-a-day smoker since college. While you’re there, if you’re me, you also buy a six-pack.

  That lasts two days. Then you think: If I drink three of those big bottles of Chimay, an ale brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium that’s 12 percent alcohol, I’ll get a better buzz for about the same amount of liquid.

  But that’s a lot of fluid to put down and you still don’t really like beer, no matter what kind of monk brews it. Why not just pick up a half-pint of vodka? A few shots would give you a lot more bang for the buck. Actually, a pint would make even more sense. And, if you’re me, you take that a step further: Why not a bottle?

  And there you a
re, drinking a bottle of Smirnoff Red every night while sitting in your garage with two coats on because it’s so damn cold, watching Game of Thrones or Battlestar Galactica or whatever else you can stream on your laptop, making sure before nodding off that you stash the bottle where it won’t be found.

  The next day, you don’t get up for work. You sleep in until nine. Everybody wants to know what’s wrong. If you’re like me, you act put out: “What do you mean, what’s wrong? Everything’s fine.”

  When you do show up for work, you don’t go to the meeting that you’re already late for. Feeling bad about that, you head to a bar.

  Ad infinitum.

  It only gets worse. There’s now another set of stresses because you’re hiding the obvious. You’re not abusive; you’re not stumbling around; you’re not driving the kids while you’ve been drinking. The worst is your wife finding that empty bottle you hid in the trash. But that old sense of impending doom is back, hovering over your head like a black cloud. Everybody sees it. The people around you—family, friends, coworkers—aren’t sure what to do. They’re seven years removed from the last time this happened. They’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to deal with it.

  They’re scared.

  You’re scared.

  And it goes on like that until you admit to yourself you need help.

  Which, finally, I did.

  * * *

  When I relapsed that time, Beau expressed neither shock nor dismay. He viewed it like he always viewed it: as part of the process. He assured me, “We’ll work it out. Let’s get back on the horse. Whatever you need me to do.” He was a fierce disciple of the Biden Rule: if you have to ask for help, it’s too late. He’d remind me that he was just a phone call away—and then he would call me first.

  Beau was always supportive, never judgmental. He never asked what most people ask: Why? I can’t overstate how helpful that was. It’s an impossible question for an addict to answer. I could point to traumas, family history, genetics, the intersection of bad luck and the wrong circumstances. But I don’t know the answer.

  Beau understood that intuitively. He refused to believe that addiction was something I chose, believing instead that it chose me. It was something he thought he could help me fix, and he did.

  My drinking couldn’t have been easy for him. Only now do I realize the distance it put between us. There were all those times I was alone with it, didn’t let him in. I’m sure it was confusing. But Beau handled it in his special way, always putting the onus on the alcoholism instead of on me.

  After my relapse in 2010, we talked about what I should do next. I suggested returning to Crossroads. Beau thought about that for a second, said, “Okay,” then booked the ticket, drove me to the airport, and walked me all the way to the security gate. When I returned, he picked me up at the airport and stayed at my house overnight.

  Beau was part of every decision I made about getting sober. He was a constant, but he wasn’t claustrophobic. He made my recovery almost as much a part of his daily routine as I did. He developed personal relationships with Jack and Josh and Ron and everyone I was close to in AA and stayed in regular contact with them—not to keep tabs on me but because he knew they were an important part of my life. He went to AA meetings with me while we were on vacation, just so we could spend more time together. He planned ultraphysical excursions for the two of us: adventure racing, mountain biking, kayaking, rappelling down hundred-foot-high arches in Utah. His purpose wasn’t solely to have a good time. He knew I needed something to keep me motivated in my recovery.

  He engrossed himself in all the things I became obsessive about. He took yoga classes with me even though he hated yoga. He asked me about books I was reading on addiction and recovery outside of the AA literature. He wanted to know how I thought the twelve steps could be applied to everyday life…

  Wish you could’ve known Beau.

  CHAPTER FIVE FALLING

  The first weeks after Beau’s burial had the veneer of peace and purpose.

  I was committed to the idea of building on my brother’s legacy. I sat down with Aunt Val, Hallie, and Patty Lewis, who worked closely with Beau as a deputy attorney general, and together we started the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children. The nonprofit was an outgrowth of Beau’s work fighting child abuse as attorney general and now has programs in twenty states. I continued my work on various boards and memberships, including World Food Program USA (which lobbied the government for funding for the UN’s World Food Programme, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020), and the Truman National Security Project, which, among other missions, promotes veterans running for public office. I returned to my consulting business and my work with Boies Schiller Flexner, where I’d been of counsel since 2010.

  Still, as the weeks passed, previously invisible fissures appeared and widened. This was especially true in my relationship with Kathleen. Some of those cracks had been there before Beau got sick, created in part by my relapses with alcohol. Without Beau, those issues were magnified. Beau was always an unflagging lodestar for me whenever a problem appeared. Now I felt at sea. Every relationship in the family was rocked to some degree by Beau’s death; every relationship had to adjust.

  Beau left a hole that was hard to fill.

  Dad was quiet—and sad. We each dealt with our grief in ways that often were incongruent with helping each other. I made myself unavailable for affection, too easily retreating into my thoughts and fears. Dad soldiered on, as he had so many times before. He resumed the business of being vice president, which takes up an enormous amount of time and focus.

  Soon after the funeral, the family planned to go away together to Kiawah Island, a white-sand retreat on the coast of South Carolina, about twenty-five miles outside of Charleston. We’d gathered there before, but this time, with the noise and emotion and ceremony of the funeral finally having subsided, we would all see how hard Beau’s death was on each of us.

  Then, as so often happened during my father’s decades of high-profile public service, a national calamity rocked our personal agenda. A week before we were scheduled to leave for South Carolina, a twenty-one-year-old white racist opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in downtown Charleston. He murdered nine Black women and men during a Wednesday-night Bible study, reportedly telling the congregants before mowing them down, “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.” Victims included the church’s forty-one-year-old pastor and state senator, Clementa Pinckney.

  Our family arrived at Kiawah the following Tuesday. Dad attended the memorial service three days later, where, from behind a purple-draped pulpit, President Obama brought together the congregation, the victims’ families, and the rest of the country with his tearful rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

  I went with Dad two days after that to Emanuel’s regular Sunday service. We never really discussed going. One of us just asked, “What do you think we should do?” and we both immediately thought, “Of course we should go.” Dad had arranged to attend quietly and without notice. He hoped that his appearance, so soon after his oldest son’s death, would be a source of strength for a congregation in such pain and that they, in turn, would be a source of strength and grace for him.

  We drove into Charleston early that morning. The church was packed. I love going to AME churches. It’s such a welcoming community, and I always find it to be an uplifting experience. Beau and I had attended countless services with Dad since we were kids, in Delaware and elsewhere across the country.

  Dad seemed to know everyone. He had spent a lot of time in South Carolina over the decades and had deep roots in the Black community. Early in his career, he campaigned for a dying breed of white Southern Democrat, like the state’s longtime junior senator Fritz Hollings, as these politicians reversed their positions on civil rights. With alternatives like Strom Thurmond, they served as a transition until a generation of Black leadership,
energized by the civil rights movement my Dad saw up close in Wilmington, began to rise. Dad’s friendship with James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, dates back to the early 1980s, and in speaking about his late wife Emily, the congressman has said that “there’s nobody Emily loved as a leader in this country more than she loved Joe Biden, and we talked about Joe all the time.”

  Dad hadn’t planned to speak publicly to the congregation, filled that Sunday with visitors from all over the country. But Reverend Norvel Goff Sr., the pastor who had replaced the murdered Reverend Pinckney, spoke directly to us from the pulpit—about loss and grief and understanding—and then asked Dad to take the pulpit and say a few words.

  “I wish I could say something that would ease the pains of the families and of the church,” Dad began, the familiar trace of hurt and empathy in his tone. The crowded church was hushed and rapt. “But I know from experience, and I was reminded of it again twenty-nine days ago, that no words can mend a broken heart. No music can fill a gaping void… And sometimes, as all preachers in here know, sometimes even faith leaves you just for a second. Sometimes you doubt… There’s a famous expression that says faith sees best in the dark, and for the nine families, this is a very dark, dark time.”

  The congregation stood as one for Dad after he read a verse from Psalms (“People take refuge in the shadow of your wings”) and stepped down from behind the pulpit.

  Afterward, Joe Riley, Charleston’s longtime mayor, grabbed us and led us down to Reverend Pinckney’s tiny basement office underneath the two-hundred-year-old brick church. On one wall was a photo of Reverend Pinckney with Dad, taken just months before. Both of us were moved to tears, though the truth is we had both been crying throughout the service.