Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now

Prologue

February 12, 1988

A forty-five-year-old man—white male, father of three—awoke on the floor of his hotel room. He had been unconscious for five hours. He could barely move his legs. He did not know how he got there. He remembered only a flash of agony; he had given a speech in Rochester, New York, and returned to his room, where he felt a sensation akin to a cleaver parting his skull. For months, he had ignored a strange ache in his head and neck, burying it in Tylenol, blaming it on the ludicrous rigor of running for president while heading the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. The campaign had ended in embarrassment—a product of his own arrogance, he admitted to himself—but the headaches had continued.

The man heaved himself onto the bed. From there, his assistant got him to a plane to Delaware, where doctors identified a cranial aneurysm, the ballooning of an artery that fed the brain. His prospects for survival were so grim that a priest was summoned to deliver last rites, even before the man’s wife could be there. In the hours that followed, he was rushed through the slanting snow of a storm to Washington, D.C., where a surgeon warned that the operation might rob him of the ability to speak. I kind of wish that had happened last summer, the man replied.

For three months, through more surgery, more complications, he was supine, confined to a hospital bed. Oddly enough, his failure in the presidential campaign had probably saved his life. Had he stayed on the road, crisscrossing New Hampshire and ignoring his symptoms, he might not be there at all. In the depth of his ordeal, a doctor turned to him and said he was a lucky man. Seven months passed before the man could get back up and return to work. He told the first crowd he saw that he had been given a second chance in life.

More than thirty years after Joe Biden nearly died on his back, the moment is often lost amid the official milestones of his political biography. But that instant contains the defining pattern of his life—a journey of improbable turns, some spectacularly fortunate and others almost inconceivably cruel. Biden’s ambition to reach the highest rungs of American power has driven his rise for more than five decades. When he was barely out of his teens, the mother of a girlfriend (later, his first wife, Neilia Hunter) asked about his professional goals. President, Biden said, and added, of the United States.

His political career placed him at pivotal moments of modern American history, including some of the nation’s defining conflicts around race, gender, crime, health, capitalism, and warfare. He made mistakes, explained himself, and paid a price. Time and again, he defied predictions that he was finished—only to find himself, to his astonishment, beside Barack Obama, in a historic run for the White House. In his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he said, Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.

In the vice presidency—the most maligned job in Washington—Biden often projected the look of a man who couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. The trials of his life had relieved him of some solemn self-regard. A British minister once asked him, in a private meeting, for the protocol in addressing one another. Biden gave a theatrical glance to either side, and said, It looks like we’re alone, so why don’t you call me Mr. President and I’ll call you Mr. Prime Minister.

By 2020, he was a political veteran marked by so many years and battles that his opponents, and even some of his admirers, questioned the wisdom of yet one more race. And, then, he foiled the predictions once more, emerging as the Democratic nominee for president in a showdown of such grave implication for America’s future that it made a mockery of the usual clichés about the most important election in our lifetime. He was in a one-on-one contest against Donald Trump for an office that was losing its stature as the leader of the free world.

The circumstances of a life in full and a country in peril conspired to put Joe Biden at the center of an American reckoning, prompting an urgent appetite, at home and abroad, to divine what had made him, how he thought, what he carried, and what he lacked. At the very moment that his country was lying spread-eagled before the eyes of the world, Biden had arrived at his season of history.

CHAPTER 1

Annus Horribilis

The lush, well-to-do Wilmington suburbs, in the rolling woods of the Brandywine Valley, are popular with heirs to the chemical fortune of the du Pont family. Their estates and gardens are tucked away in what is known as Delaware’s Chateau Country. On a modest patch, by those standards, Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, live on four sloping acres that overlook a small lake.

On the ninety-ninth day before the election, I pulled into Biden’s driveway. To avoid contagion, his advisers put me in a carriage house, a hundred yards from the home where the family lives. Welcome to my mom’s house, Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view. He reached the second floor of the cottage. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask.

Biden was three weeks away from becoming America’s Democratic nominee for president. The headline on the front page of The Washington Post that morning was America’s Standing in the World Is at a Low Ebb. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching 150,000, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam; the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation’s history; in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, whom Donald Trump called sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators. On Twitter that day, Trump warned that the demonstrators would destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn.

The man who stood between Americans and four more years of Trump looked pleased to have company. In the strange summer of 2020, the Biden place was as solemn and secluded as an abbey. The cottage, styled in Celtic themes (green shutters, a thistle pattern on the throw pillows), doubled as a command post for the Secret Service, and large men with holstered guns stalked in and out. Biden settled into an armchair across the room from me and splayed his hands, a socially distanced salute. The docs keep it really tight, he explained.

Later that afternoon, the Bidens were due on Capitol Hill, to pay their respects to the recently deceased John Lewis, of Georgia, a civil rights icon who endured a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, before rising to the House of Representatives and becoming known as the conscience of Congress. It would be a rare excursion. Since the Covid-19 shutdown began, in March, Biden had circulated mostly between his back porch, where he convened fund-raisers on Zoom, a gym upstairs, and the basement rec room, where he sat for TV interviews in front of a bookcase and a folded flag. The campaign apparatus had scattered into the homes of some twenty-three hundred employees.

Before I could ask a question, he explained the origins of the cottage. When his father, Joe Sr., fell ill, in 2002, Biden renovated the basement of the main house and moved his parents in. God love him, he lasted for about six months, he said. I thought my mom would stay. She had other ideas. (Biden’s late mother, the former Jean Finnegan, plays a formidable role in his recounting of family history. In grammar school, he recalls, a nun mocked him for stuttering, and his mother, a devout Catholic, told her, If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head.)

After Jean became a widow, Biden said, she offered him a proposition: She said, ‘Joey, if you build me a house, I’ll move in here.’ I said, ‘Honey, I don’t have the money to build you a house.’ She said, ‘I know you don’t.’ She said, ‘But I talked to your brothers and sister. Sell my house and build me an apartment.’ For years, Biden, who relied on his government salary, was among the least prosperous members of the United States Senate. (In the two years after he left the vice presidency, the Bidens earned more than $15 million, from speeches, teaching, and book deals.) Biden renovated an old garage and his mother moved in. I’d walk in and she’d be in that chair downstairs, facing the fireplace, watching television, he said. There’d always be a caregiver on the stool, and she’d be hearing her confession.

Joe Biden has been a public man, as he puts it—holding office, giving interviews, dispensing anecdotes—for five decades. I last interviewed him, mostly about foreign affairs, in 2014, when he was in the White House and Donald Trump was hosting Season 14 of The Apprentice. Biden is seventy-seven years old, and he looks thinner than he did six years ago, but not markedly so. He has parted with youth grudgingly. His smile has been rejuvenated to such a gleam that it inspired a popular tweet during the 2012 campaign: Biden’s teeth are so white they’re voting for Romney. His hairline has been reforested, his forehead appears becalmed, and Biden generally projects the glow of a grandfather just back from the gym, which is often the case. His verbiage is as meandering as ever. James Comey, the former FBI director, once wrote that the typical Biden conversation originated in Direction A before heading in Direction Z. (In December 2019, Biden’s campaign released a doctor’s summary of his medical records, which pronounced him a healthy, vigorous man of his age.)

The implications of age, in one form or another, hovered over the presidential race. Trump took office as the oldest president in history. By the summer of 2020, he was seventy-four. To deflect questions about his mental acuity, he and his allies presented Biden as senile, a theme that dominated right-wing TV and Twitter. Biden saw little of it; he didn’t look at social media. (Compared to Trump, Biden’s campaign made only perfunctory use of it. Trump had over 114 million combined followers on Twitter and Facebook; Biden has less than ten million.)

If there is something big, his staff included a tweet in the morning roundup of news that he read on his phone. But, he said, I don’t look at a lot of the comments. I spend the time trying to focus on the trouble people are in right now.

By the end of August, ten weeks before the election, Biden led Trump by an average of at least 8 percentage points. But no earthly inhabitant expected an ordinary end to the campaign. Some polls showed the race tightening, and it could be transformed by a sudden jolt in the economy or in Congress or the Supreme Court. I feel good about where we are, Biden said. But I know that it’s going to get really, really ugly. As Trump disputed the legitimacy of mail-in voting, his postmaster general was brazenly cutting service in ways that could prevent ballots from being counted. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest Supreme Court justice, had recently begun chemotherapy, raising the prospects of a bitter partisan fight over a successor. Republican operatives were helping Kanye West, the pro-Trump hip-hop star,