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Biden began to look toward something utterly unfamiliar: a life out of office. But others were skeptical. “A fish is going to swim, a bird is going to fly, and Biden is going to run,” a friend of Biden’s once said.
Biden told Ricchetti, “All I want to do is keep doing what I’ve always done. How can I still work on the things that I have spent my life working on, the things that I care the most about?”
Biden and Ricchetti sketched out pillars of his coming life: the Biden Foundation, the Biden Cancer Initiative, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.
“Hillary’s going to be elected and we’ll find a way to contribute,” Biden said.
A year later, on November 8, 2016, Biden assembled his top advisers at the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence, to watch the returns.
The night started off well with projections pointing toward a Clinton win. Biden’s wife, Jill, relaxed and headed upstairs with a book and a glass of wine.
Jill and Joe Biden had been married since 1977. He had spotted her, then a teacher and part-time model in the Philadelphia area, on an advertising billboard at the airport and sought out her phone number. He proposed five times before she agreed to marry him.
Jill helped him raise his two boys, and they had a daughter together named Ashley. She eventually earned a doctoral degree in education and taught English at Northern Virginia Community College. She was an avid runner, and considered herself an introvert, uncomfortable in the spotlight giving speeches, yet an ardent defender of her husband.
As the evening wore on, the needle swung toward Trump. Joe Biden was unsettled. Trump won Ohio at 10:36 p.m. and Florida at 10:50 p.m. At 2:29 a.m., the Associated Press declared Trump the winner, and a shocked Hillary Clinton soon conceded.
Biden immersed himself in phone calls. “My God, the world has just turned upside down,” he said.
As Biden ambled around the first floor of his home, he told friends he had sensed trouble for Clinton for a long time. Trump had seemed to be stealing away the party’s support among rank-and-file labor workers without much of a fight.
“You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making 60,000 bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant,” Biden said later, at a 2017 appearance at Penn.
On January 20, Biden sat through Trump’s stark “American carnage” inaugural address and then turned to writing a second memoir, Promise Me, Dad. It was a chance to think and talk about Beau, a “search for a way forward in his own life,” as Ricchetti explained it to others. Biden wanted to show a person could get through even the most debilitating tragedy and find purpose in the memory.
Soon, the Biden family was back in the news. Hunter’s wife, Kathleen, had quietly filed for divorce in December, citing drug use and infidelity, and filed a new motion asking the court to freeze his assets. On March 1, the New York Post first reported that Hunter was dating Beau’s widow, Hallie.
Joe Biden issued a statement to the New York newspaper: “We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.”
It was a bleak time for Hunter. In his memoir, he wrote his daughters were rattled by his conduct and his business began to collapse. Clients deserted him. “Worse yet, I started backsliding” into drugs.
Promise Me, Dad, Joe Biden’s second book, was published that November, three months after Charlottesville. It was raw, and Biden charted the inner emptiness overwhelming him. But this time, it was Beau, at the end of his life, saying, Get up!
“You’ve got to promise me, Dad, that no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right. Give me your word, Dad,” Beau Biden said, according to the book.
“I’m going to be okay, Beau,” Biden replied.
“No, Dad,” Beau Biden said. “Give me your word as a Biden. Give me your word, Dad. Promise me, Dad.”
“I promised,” Biden wrote.
Although Beau was speaking of his father’s well-being, the book’s title was interpreted by many as Beau asking Biden to promise to run for president.
Biden began his national book tour in the middle of the 2018 congressional campaign season.
Cedric Richmond, 44, the only Democratic member of Louisiana’s congressional delegation and chairman of the powerful Congressional Black Caucus, asked Biden to go on the road for Black Democrats.
Richmond was a rising star in the party and a skillful strategist whose colleagues in the House thought he might one day become the first Black speaker. He loved the backroom talks on policy, the mapping of relationships across the House and the party.
Richmond also had the build and easy swagger of a star athlete. He had been a center fielder and pitcher at Morehouse College before going to law school. During the annual Congressional Baseball Game, he had a reputation for being the only truly good player.
Richmond noticed Biden was welcome everywhere. Other big names prompted caution in certain slices of the country. But with Biden, he told others, “there wasn’t a district in the country that didn’t want him.” Liberal New York, the Midwest, conservative suburban enclaves, the South.
Mike D. also monitored Biden’s reception. There was a practical political reality to a former vice president actively supporting 65 candidates in 24 states. The key question Donilon asked was: “Did Biden still have real standing in the party and in the country?” The answer, he concluded, was yes. The book hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for one week. Biden was drawing crowds.
Donilon and Ricchetti kept nudging Biden to consider another campaign. They told him the data showed a path in a fast-changing party. Trump had changed some Democratic voters’ motivations and priorities. Most of all, they wanted Trump gone.
Biden’s pollster, John Anzalone, a son of Teamsters in Michigan who had worked with Biden since his unsuccessful 1988 campaign in Iowa, produced slides, known as “Anzo’s decks,” for Biden to take on the road and flip through with candidates and donors.
On one slide, Anzalone wrote “Democratic primary voters tended to support more traditional, establishment candidates over progressive firebrands.”
A final slide concluded, “Importantly, there is no urgent demand for a younger generation of leadership among voters.”
Biden would not say whether he would run. He was coy, and let the slides make the argument.
“Cedric, is there anything I could do for you when I come down for the book tour?” Biden asked Richmond ahead of his June 2018 book stop in New Orleans.
“I don’t need a fundraiser,” Richmond said. His seat was safe. Instead, he proposed a round of golf at the Joseph M. Bartholomew Golf Course, a historic public golf course named after the Black architect who had designed many of Louisiana’s best country club courses but could not play on them in the segregated South.
When Biden showed up, Richmond noted he was dropped off by a single publishing representative. No security, no aides.
After the first nine holes, rain started to fall, and the group moved inside the clubhouse where 30 older Black golfers were waiting for Biden. Richmond had trays of food and drinks brought in.
Richmond studied Biden as he went around the room asking questions. What do you do for a living? Are you retired? The curiosity seemed genuine. Some were Vietnam veterans and Biden told them his late son was an Army lawyer who had volunteered for duty in Iraq. He described Beau’s brain cancer and the wound left by his loss. He gave no political speeches.
“You should run,” one of the men said. Another agreed, then another. “Run!” voices said, building to a crescendo.
“I’m not making any commitment on running,” Biden said. “I just want to get us to a place where we can beat Donald Trump. I don’t have to be the person to beat him.”
Biden spent two hours with the men. It was as honest a human encounter that Richmond had ever seen from a politician.