EIGHT
“You know,” Joe Biden once told Mike Donilon during that period, “the family will make the decision.”
Joe and Jill called a family meeting in early February 2019 that included their five grandchildren, a signal to advisers that he was inching closer.
“What do you think?” Jill asked her grandchildren. “Pop’s thinking about this.”
The Biden grandkids were excited. “Pop has to run! He has to do this.” But Joe and Jill Biden held back. They knew if Biden got in, the race risked becoming torturous, with malicious attacks on the family.
We understand, Pop, his grandchildren assured him. Biden recalled later that year each youngster “gave their own story that they had written out, a note as to how mean they knew it was going to be,” but also why Biden and the family should be all-in on a run.
Biden’s grandson Robert “Hunter” Biden II handed him a photo taken of the two of them at his father, Beau’s, funeral. He was then nine years old, and Biden had bent down to comfort him with his hand cupping the boy’s chin.
Corners of the right wing online had lit up with wild allegations about Biden’s gesture, suggesting Biden was a pedophile. The younger Biden told his grandfather he knew a campaign could be nasty.
“We do everything by family meetings,” Biden told an audience at the University of Delaware on February 26, 2019, saying there was a “consensus” he should run.
“They, the most important people in my life, want me to run.”
What Biden did not disclose was that his family also was in severe crisis. Hunter Biden was in the throes of addiction to crack cocaine. Biden’s closest friends confided to each other that Hunter seemed to be on Biden’s mind every hour.
Hunter had dropped out of his treatment center and was holed up in a New Haven, Connecticut, motel. He was smoking as much crack as he could score, roaming the streets late at night or taking long drives in his Porsche. He wrote in his memoir he had a “death wish,” seeing his ability to “find crack anytime, anywhere” as a “superpower.”
“It was nonstop depravity.”
Joe Biden frequently texted and called Hunter, asking about his well-being and whereabouts.
“I’d tell him everything was fine,” Hunter wrote. “All was well. But after a while, he wasn’t buying it.”
In March 2019, the family staged an intervention.
“One day, out of the blue, three or four weeks into this madness, my mother called,” Hunter wrote in his memoir.
“She said that she was having a family dinner at the house, that I should come, even stay in Delaware for a few days. It would be great; we hadn’t had everyone together in ages. I was in lousy shape, but it sounded appealing.
“I believe I arrived on a Friday night. I walked into the house, bright and homey as always.” He was surprised to see his three daughters—Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy. “I knew then that something was up.… I then saw my mom and dad, smiling awkwardly, looking pained.”
Hunter spotted two counselors in the room. He recognized them from a rehabilitation center in Pennsylvania.
“Not a chance,” Hunter said. He recalled Joe Biden looking at him, terrified.
“I don’t know what else to do,” his father pleaded. “I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”
“Not fucking this,” Hunter said.
“It was awful. I was awful,” Hunter recounted, and the evening “devolved from there into a charged, agonized debacle,” with Joe Biden chasing Hunter down the driveway as he tried to leave, grabbing his son and hugging him tightly, crying. One daughter grabbed his car keys.
To end the scene, Hunter agreed to go to a nearby rehab center in Maryland. “Anything, please,” Joe Biden pleaded.
But minutes after he was dropped off, Hunter called an Uber ride and returned to his hotel room where he smoked more crack cocaine. “For the next two days, while everybody who’d been at my parents’ house thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag.”
Hunter then booked a flight to California, and “ran and ran and ran.” He was, he wrote, “vanishing.”