SEVENTY-ONE
“I’m upset you called me a killer,” Russian president Vladimir Putin told President Biden in an April 13 phone call. Biden had been asked in an ABC News interview if he thought Putin was a “killer” and said, “I do.”
“I was asked a question,” Biden told Putin. “I gave an answer. It was an interview on a totally different topic. And it was not something premeditated,” as if that ameliorated the meaning. The Kremlin had called the insult unprecedented and summoned its ambassador in the United States back to Moscow for further discussions.
Putin also punched back publicly, saying, “It takes one to know one,” and rattled off the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans and its decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan during World War II.
The call was part of Biden’s effort to put Putin on notice to expect a chillier relationship than the one Putin had had with Trump.
Earlier on, before the call, Biden had told Jake Sullivan that he wanted a new strategy for dealing with Russia. What are we trying to accomplish?
“Let’s take a step back,” Biden said. “I’m not looking for a reset,” a reference to Obama’s approach to Russia. “I’m not looking for some kind of good relationship, but I want to find a stable and predictable way forward with Putin and Russia.”
As a first step, Biden asked the U.S. intelligence agencies to assess the quality of information about some alleged recent Russian actions.
The intelligence agencies reported they had determined with high confidence that Russia was behind three major acts of aggression: the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, the massive cyberattacks that allowed Russia to spy on or disrupt some 16,000 computer systems worldwide, and the interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election to help Trump.
During his call with Putin in April, Biden laid out the accusations.
“You’re wrong about everything,” Putin said. “You have no evidence. We didn’t interfere in your election. We didn’t do any of these things.”
Biden dismissed the denials. “I’m warning you we are coming at you with these responses,” Biden said. He described a series of aggressive sanctions. “They will happen this week and I want you to hear it from me directly. And it’s because of the specific things you’ve done. I’ve said I would respond and I’m responding.”
He also warned Putin not to start a new military incursion into Ukraine.
Putin continued his categorical denials and said he was upset about the killer accusation.
“Let’s meet,” Biden said, proposing a summit between the two of them. “Let’s you and I sit down. You bring your concerns, and I will bring mine.” On any and all topics. “And we’ll sit face to face, and we’ll talk about all of it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Putin said. “You want to meet and talk about all the issues in our relationship? All of them?”
Sullivan, who was listening on the call, thought Putin, always suspicious, wanted to make sure it was not some kind of trap.
Biden assured Putin it would be an open dialogue. He knew Putin realized a meeting would show he is respected by the American president. They had met a decade earlier, in 2011, when Biden was vice president and Putin was temporarily serving as prime minister.
Biden later told The New Yorker that during that meeting, he said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.”
Putin smiled and told Biden, through an interpreter, “We understand one another.”
For Biden, it was standard for American presidents to meet with the Russian leader. Though a declining economic power with less than 10 percent of the U.S. GDP, Russia still had more than 2,000 strategic nuclear weapons and thousands of smaller tactical nuclear weapons. Russia also had significant conventional and nonconventional military units deployed around the world.
“Okay,” Putin finally said to Biden, “I would like to have the summit also. Let’s have our teams work on it.”
Biden frequently cited former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s adage that all politics is local. “You know,” Biden said, “all diplomacy is personal. At the end of the day, you’ve got to develop these personal relationships.”
On April 15, the White House and Treasury Department announced sanctions on the Russian Central Bank, its Finance Ministry, wealth fund, six technology companies, 32 entities and individuals for attempts to influence the 2020 presidential election, and eight individuals and groups involved in Russia’s occupation and repression in Crimea.
Biden and Putin later announced they would meet June 16 in Geneva, Switzerland.
“I know there were a lot of hype around this meeting, but it’s pretty straightforward to me—the meeting,” Biden told reporters on June 16 on the Swiss lakeside after the meeting ended. “One, there is no substitute, as those of you who have covered me for a while know, for a face-to-face dialogue between leaders. None. And President Putin and I had a, share a unique responsibility to manage the relationship between two powerful and proud countries, a relationship that has to be stable and predictable.”
“Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?” CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, then asked.
Biden, who had started to walk away, turned back with irritation.
“I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior,” he said, glowering at Collins and wagging his finger. “Where the hell—what do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident? I said—”
“You said in the next six months you’ll be able to determine—” Collins said.
“I said, what I said was, let’s get this straight. I said: What will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.”
“But,” Collins pressed, “given his past behavior has not changed and, in that press conference, after sitting down with you for several hours, he denied any involvement in cyberattacks; he downplayed human rights abuses; he even refused to say Aleksey Navalny’s name. So how does that account to a constructive meeting, as President—President Putin framed it?”
Biden snapped at the 29-year-old reporter, “If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business.”
Clips of the back-and-forth went viral on Twitter. Standing outside Air Force One later that day, Biden said, “I owe my last questioner an apology. I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.” Collins said an apology was unnecessary.
The episode was a snapshot throwback to Biden’s history of self-inflicted gaffes, which had mostly been dormant as he stuck to scripted events during his presidency.
That side of Biden—his tendency to at times be testy or mangle statements—was still him and now part of his presidency. Several Biden aides privately said Klain and Dunn worked to address this issue by keeping him away from unscripted events or long interviews. They called the effect “the wall,” a cocooning of the president.
But the unscripted Biden occasionally appeared.
“The progressives don’t like me because I’m not prepared to take on what I would say and they would say is a socialist agenda,” he told New York Times columnist David Brooks in May. His comments upset many progressives for linking the word “socialist” to them.
In late June, Biden announced he had struck a major bipartisan deal on infrastructure with Republican senators, but shortly after seemed to upend the agreement by saying the deal was contingent upon a more liberal spending package that would be passed through reconciliation.
“Both need to get done,” he said, “and I’m going to work closely with Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer to make sure that both move through the legislative process promptly and in tandem. Let me emphasize that: and in tandem.”
His remarks surprised some Democrats, who always saw a two-track strategy. And they annoyed Republicans, who were unhappy he added a caveat after making a splash about striking a big, bipartisan deal.
Steve Ricchetti worked the phones for days, repairing the White House’s relationships on both sides of the aisle and keeping talks alive. Biden ultimately issued a 628-word statement to clarify his position.
McConnell pounced on the runaround. “It almost makes your head spin,” he said.
Biden carried on. Infrastructure was central, a must-pass part of his agenda. You make a mistake, you move on.
“Get up!”
And sometimes, you even had to deal with a literal stumble.
Biden fell to his knees on March 19 as he climbed the steps of Air Force One, boarding a flight to Atlanta. He got up, climbed a few more steps, then fell again.
Republicans ridiculed Biden and savored the video footage, particularly since Biden’s campaign had mocked Trump’s at times halting gait during the 2020 race.
The White House assured reporters Biden was “100 percent fine.”
Biden, however, was frustrated. He later told others that once he got up the steps and ducked inside the cabin, he muttered to himself.
“Fuck,” Biden whispered. “Fuck!” He was loud enough for others to hear him.
Russia lingered. U.S. intelligence traced a massive number of ransomware attacks to Russian criminals. Electronically blocking access to computers until money, often millions of dollars, was paid was a huge problem. The attacks were not only cyber war but economic war. There was not yet evidence tying Russian intelligence and Putin directly, but like everything in Russia, Putin had iron grip control.
President Biden and Putin spoke by secure phone on July 9. Biden demanded that Putin crack down on the Russian-based criminals involved in the corrupt and malicious attacks.
“If you can’t or won’t, I will,” Biden said. “I just want to be clear about that so there’s no ambiguity.”
At the end of the conversation, Biden added, “You know, Mr. President, great countries have great responsibilities. They also have great vulnerabilities.”
U.S. offensive cyber capability was formidable, as Putin knew. Biden left it at that. It was as close as Biden came to delivering a direct threat to the Russian president.
Biden had spent his life angling for the presidency. But once he arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his top aides could see he was uncomfortable. He missed Delaware. His own house.
Biden privately started calling the White House “the tomb.” It was lonely. Cold. The virus made social events impossible, at least at the start, when it was just him and Jill, and their two German shepherds. Family members made sure to visit, but relaxing with the grandkids back in Delaware, where he liked to eat chocolate ice cream out of the freezer at night, seemed appealing in comparison.
Biden made sure to tell aides and friends that the staff at the White House was great. Everybody was kind. They were always asking him what he wanted, or if they could get him a snack. It was like a fancy hotel. Even the residence, which he never visited during his eight years as vice president, was laid out that way. The beautiful carpets. The paintings on the wall. The ornate chandeliers. It reminded him of the Waldorf Astoria.
“I’m just not used to taking off my coat and someone grabbing it and hanging it up,” Biden said. “But they’re very nice people.” The vice presidential mansion, tucked away by trees and up on 13 acres, two and a half miles from the White House, suited his casual tastes.
Weekends in Wilmington quickly became the norm. Get on Marine One, head over to Andrews, and get back home. He could wander around and make those long, winding phone calls to old Senate pals and people in Delaware who still called him Joe.
“He is not comfortable living in the White House,” Ron Klain told others. The valets and staff at 1600 Pennsylvania, “that’s just not who he is. He likes to go live in a house.
“Joe Biden has always been, I’m either at work or I’m at home. And being upstairs at the White House feels like you’re staying at someone else’s house.”
With his closest advisers, who had worked with him for decades, Biden retained a tight-knit sense of trust. They knew each other. They knew him. No bad day, or disaster, could really rattle that, or him.
There was hope. When they launched on Inauguration Day, January 20, the United States had 191,458 new Covid-19 cases and 3,992 new deaths. By late June, the daily coronavirus death total in the U.S. had dropped under 300, a dramatic reduction of more than 90 percent. This was largely due to the successful vaccine program.
The Centers for Disease Control announced that fully vaccinated people could gather and go about their activities without a mask. Businesses reopened and cafés and restaurants welcomed people inside. A hustle and bustle began to return to the streets.
Yet the future trajectory of the pandemic remained uncertain. The aggressive and highly contagious Delta variant threatened the world. Vaccine hesitancy and opposition still might prevent the U.S. from reaching herd immunity. The long-term effectiveness of the vaccines against a mutating coronavirus remained unknown.
“Now he comes into the office every day kind of in a mid-range emotional space,” Klain once said privately.
It was as much hope as reality. As president, Biden remains an emotional man, expressing himself openly on everything. “Mid-range emotional space” was not natural.
“There is no news I can walk in and give him in the morning,” Klain said, “that is worse than the news he’s been given many other times of his life.” The death of his first wife and young daughter in 1972, the death of Beau in 2015.
“Conversely, there’s no news I can walk in and give him in the morning that’s better than the news he’s gotten at some other time in his life.”
After finishing fifth in the New Hampshire primary, for example, Biden was elected president of the United States nine months later.