THREE
Joe Biden’s first two runs for the presidency, in 1988 and 2008, were disasters, plagued by plagiarism charges in the first and by mangled remarks on race in the second.
Following his second botched candidacy, Biden wrote a new prologue for the paperback version of his 365-page campaign autobiography, Promises to Keep. His own words tell the story of a man who kept moving through the reeling dramas of life and presidential politics, going back to the horrific death of his first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, in a 1972 car accident, when he was 30 and newly elected to the Senate.
Biden’s father, Joe senior, never gave up and never complained during Biden’s childhood in Scranton, Biden wrote. “He had no time for self-pity.
“Get up! That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say, Get up! You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! The girl’s parents won’t let her go out with a Catholic boy? Get up!
“It wasn’t just the small things but the big ones—when the only voice I could hear was my own. After the surgery, Senator, you might lose the ability to speak? Get up! The newspapers are calling you a plagiarist, Biden? Get up! Your wife and daughter—I’m sorry, Joe there was nothing we could do to save them? Get up! Flunked a class at law school? Get up! Kids make fun of you because you stutter Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden? Get up!”
Biden’s 2008 failure offered a consolation prize: then Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, soon to be the nation’s first Black president, picked him to be his running mate. He gave Biden important roles in foreign policy and budget negotiations, seemingly setting up Biden for his clearest shot at making another run for the presidency.
But nearing the end of his second term, President Obama was hinting strongly it was Hillary Clinton’s turn. She had almost beaten Obama for the nomination in 2008 and then ably served as his secretary of state. He also flatly told Biden it would be tough to beat her.
Biden kept the idea on the table. He liked Obama. They were close. But he told his aides he never felt like he had to follow his cues on another run.
Biden’s youngest son, Hunter Biden, and his then wife, Kathleen, came to dinner Friday night, February 6, 2015, at Woodward’s home in Washington. Woodward’s wife, Elsa Walsh, and Kathleen had become friends through Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school their children attended.
Hunter’s alcoholism, drug addiction and financial problems would later generate headlines. But neither Woodward nor Walsh were much aware of them, other than a brief October 2014 story that Hunter, a Yale Law School graduate, and lobbyist, had been discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. Nor did they know of the brain cancer threatening Hunter’s brother, Beau, a secret held closely by the family.
At dinner, Walsh asked them, is your father going to run for president?
Hunter—45 and thin, with jet-black hair—quickly answered yes. Sitting and speaking confidently at the dining room table, Kathleen recounted how several days earlier, her father-in-law had called and said he wanted to come for dinner. He had important news.
Kathleen, who worked with domestic violence victims, said she scooped the already plated spaghetti back into the pot to await the arrival of “Pop” at their nearby home.
Once there, the vice president explained he had decided to run. Hunter and Kathleen seemed thrilled. This might finally be Joe Biden’s time.
In his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, Hunter Biden wrote “Beau and I always knew that Dad wouldn’t retire until he became president. That was the collective dream of the three of us.” Beau and Hunter, who had also been in the car that day, had been injured but survived the 1972 crash. Hunter also wrote he detested the doubters inside the West Wing who “undercut” his father.
Woodward and Walsh were not particularly surprised. Presidential hopeful was embedded in Biden’s character. It seemed he was always running for president.
When told later about Hunter’s assertion that February, Biden advisers insisted they were not aware of Biden’s decision at the time. But Biden often kept his latest thinking tight, in the family.
A few months later, on May 30, 2015, Beau Biden died at age 46, ending a life that included a Bronze Star for military service in Iraq and two terms as Delaware’s attorney general.
Joe Biden was devastated.
“This is going to be a very tough time personally,” Biden told Steve Ricchetti, his chief of staff for nearly three years and another principal in Biden’s political brotherhood.
“The only way I’m going to be able to get through this,” he said, “and we’ll be able to get through it as a family, is if we just, you know, you have to keep me working and busy.”
Ricchetti—like Donilon, gray-haired and balding, and averse to appearing on television or on the record—loved Biden. The resilience, the generosity, the friendliness. If Biden said he needed to work, he knew how to keep the vice president busy. Schedule. Action.
Ricchetti later reflected to others that “sometimes, it sounds almost cruel.”
But keeping busy meant taking another hard look at a presidential campaign.
Biden asked Donilon to make an honest assessment of whether there was still enough time to run and win.
In the final “go or no-go” meeting on October 20, 2015, Donilon ventured that Clinton was vulnerable in a general election and even vulnerable in a Democratic primary race against Biden.
Donilon recalled to others, “I never wavered from the view that I thought he could run, and I thought he could win.”
But as Donilon looked at Biden, he could see how the heavy burden of Beau’s death weighed on him—the loss of a second child and the third member of his family gone. Biden was taut with pain, the usual easy smile now a jaw clenched.
“I don’t think you should do this,” Donilon finally told him.
It was the first time in years that Donilon had advised him against running. Biden took it as the best advice from a friend, and Donilon left with instructions to put together a statement.
The following day, Biden stood in the White House Rose Garden, with President Obama at his side, and announced he would not run for president.