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 predators 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.”

Remember home base.

Beau lost his fight against cancer on May 30, 2015.

Delaware lowered its flags to half-mast. “Beau measured himself as a husband, father, son, and brother. His absolute honor made him a role model for our family,” Joe said when his son passed. “Beau embodied my father’s saying that 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.”

Obama gave the eulogy at Beau’s funeral. “From his dad, he learned how to get back up when life knocked him down,” Obama said. “He learned that he was no higher than anybody else, and no lower than anybody else—something Joe got from his mom, by the way. And he learned how to make everybody else feel like we matter, because his dad taught him that everybody matters.”

We can’t pretend to understand the grief that flooded through Joe Biden, but we can admire the way that he carried himself with strength, dignity, and grace. He allowed us just a glimpse of the pain on an unforgettable appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The segment started much like any late-night segment. With the 2016 election looming in the background—and with Joe yet to declare—Colbert gently asked him, “Do you have anything you’d like to tell us?”

“Yes,” Biden said, not missing a beat. “I think you should run for president again, and I’ll be your vice president.”

In hindsight, a 2016 matchup of Trump versus Biden is now one of the most enthralling what-ifs in American history. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats did not “connect with the working class”; Biden always has. Biden is authentic. And in this world where the U.S. president has bragged about sexual assault, suddenly Biden’s gaffes, by comparison, seem as harmless as using the wrong salad fork. “That’s the biggest tragedy in the last election,” says his old foreign policy guy, Mike Haltzel, adding that Biden would have “trounced Trump.”

Yet it was not to be. Even putting aside the issue of whether Biden could have edged out Clinton in the primary, he explained to Colbert why he couldn’t do it. Not then. Not so soon after Beau. “I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and two, they can look at folks out there and say, ‘I promise you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion,’ ” Biden said. “And, I’d be lying if I said that I knew I was there. I’m being completely honest.”

And in one of the realest moments ever broadcast on television, Joe opened up about his grief. “Sometimes it just sort of overwhelms you,” he said, and then showed just one more reason why we love him. He deflects the attention, he doesn’t make it about him, and instead he thinks about the grief of others. “[There are] so many people who have losses as severe, or maybe worse, than mine, and don’t have the support I have,” he said.

These aren’t just words. Joe decided to back up that sentiment with action. Every year, roughly fifteen thousand men and women die from brain cancer. Enough, Biden said.

Flash forward to Obama’s final State of the Union. “Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer,” Obama said. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

The Cancer Moonshot would be more than symbolic. And Biden would do more than just lend his name and prestige. He put himself to work. In June 2016, he unveiled the federal Genomic Data Commons—a database for consolidating all the key clinical trials, stats, and treatments. He gave a speech to the world’s largest cancer conference, about thirty thousand medical professionals. “Imagine if you all worked together,” he said. And as the crowd laughed he added, “I’m not joking.”

He’s not joking and he’s not quitting. Joe Biden doesn’t give up easily. He didn’t give up on conquering his stutter. He didn’t give up on the Violence Against Women Act. He didn’t give up on Bosnia.

Biden keeps fighting, and he remembers the words and the values of his son. Those values sustain him. In 2011, Beau gave a commencement address at his old alma mater, Syracuse Law School. “You’ll find peace when there are certain rules that are not malleable,” Beau said. “Your conscience, your conscience should not be malleable. Your values…These are the things that will guide you. They’ll also be the things to save you.”

WISDOM OF BEAU

Your values guide you. Your values save you.