by Mark Bowden
A Big Fucking Deal
In March, the vice president gave an informal speech at an opulent home in northwest Dallas, standing behind a lectern in a large room decorated with modern art. The subject was Barack Obama.
“I didn’t know how good he was until I joined the outfit,” Biden said. “And then I realized why it was I did not win. So for those of you who endorsed me first, you all made a mistake.” It’s not unusual for Biden to give several speeches a day, so most of the things he has to say he says more than once. This comment about the president, and variations on it, he repeats often.
Biden’s unqualified respect was not always there. Like many of those who sought the Democratic nomination, Biden felt early on that the press was giving Obama a free pass, in part thanks to his race. But now that he has spent more than a year and a half in office, any doubts about Obama’s talents have disappeared. Biden is not given to downplaying his own gifts, but it’s clear that he regards Obama as phenomenal.
In part, this transcends the president’s personal qualities. “Look, I ran for president” Biden told me, “because I honest to God believed that for the moment, given the cast of characters and the problems of the country, I thought I was clearly the best equipped to lead the country…. But here’s what I underestimated: I had two elements that I focused on, which made me decide to run. One was American foreign policy, and the other was the middle class and what’s happening to them economically. If Hillary were elected or I were elected, and assume I did as good a job as I could possibly get done, it would have taken me four years to do what he [Obama] did in four weeks, in terms of changing the perception of the world about the United States of America. Literally. It was overnight. It wasn’t about him. It was about the American people. [I]t said, These guys really do mean what they say. All that stuff about the Constitution and all about equality, I guess it’s right.”
But Biden has been impressed by Obama the man as well. “He has a backbone like a ramrod,” the vice president told me. “He sits there, he gets handed the toughest damn decisions anyone has since Roosevelt, and he sits there and he wants an opposing view. He wants to hear all of it, and he’ll sit there and he’ll listen. He’ll ask really smart questions and he’ll decide. And it’s like he goes up, he goes to bed, he doesn’t re-litigate it. I mean the guy’s got some real strength. And the thing about him is—what I find impressive is—he really starts off almost everything from a moral and ideological construct, knowing exactly who he is…. He knows what he thinks. When he talks about Niebuhr [Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian and political theorist] it’s not because he’s trying to impress. He really does think about the social contract. I mean, the guy’s thought it through.
“He reminds me of [Bill] Clinton. I don’t think he’d like it, and maybe Clinton wouldn’t like it, but whenever you’re with Clinton … he was never afraid to say to you, ‘I don’t understand that. Explain that to me.’ Or, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Because he knew you’d never walk out of the room thinking you were smarter than he was. Barack has the same internal confidence.”
That said, it’s clear that Biden feels he has the superior people skills—not that he puts it that way. He says the skill set he brings is “different,” but it’s a difference he values, and one that he sees as part of his contribution to the administration. “[Obama’s] personality is more reserved,” Biden said. “He has the ability to touch large audiences, but he is a little more buttoned-up. I’m a little more Irish. I’m more old school. What used to be normal. [Bill] Clinton and I are more similar, whereas [Obama] and probably some of the newer candidates are more similar in terms of the way they went through the system. And so I just think it’s a difference in style—but it works. I think we complement each other.”
There was some initial worry in the White House over Biden’s looseness in front of cameras and microphones. Most of his slips have proved minor—such as the one that earned him a withering look and a nudge from the president on day one when Biden, standing beside Obama behind a lectern, poked fun at Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts for flubbing his recitation of the oath of office at the inauguration. But some have been more troubling. During the swine flu epidemic of 2009, when the administration was treading a delicate line between stressing caution and triggering a panic, Biden told a Today Show audience of millions, in a nutshell, to avoid air travel. “I would tell members of my family—and I have—I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” he said. “If you’re in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me.” The air travel and tourism industries reeled. A visibly annoyed Robert Gibbs found himself at the lectern in the White House pressroom trying to explain what Biden “meant to say.”
But while Biden’s batting average for such bloopers is un questionably high, the administration has come to see it as a feature, not a bug. Gibbs explained, “It is true [Biden] has earned a reputation, and he definitely has a tendency, to say whatever is on his mind when it is on his mind, and that has been much, much more of a plus for us than a detriment. Not just in public. The president wants to know what people really think, what their opinions are, and he has benefited a lot by listening to the questions the vice president asks in meetings. His experience and his candor are valuable things for us. When you look at the two of them side by side, they share none of the same background or experience. In some ways they could not be more different. But they complement each other powerfully.”
Judged strictly by appearances, the black, youthful Obama is without question the least likely man to ever occupy the Oval Office. Biden, on the other hand, is close to what you might get if you digitally blended the portraits of the forty-three white men who have been president. Whereas Obama is cerebral, Biden is emotional. Where the president is methodical, the vice president is steered more by his gut. And where Obama is famously disciplined both in public and in private, Biden is … well, you know.
On March 23, minutes after the signing of the national health reform bill, at which Biden famously greeted the president behind the lectern by saying, “Mr. President, this is a big fucking deal,” alarmed White House aides showed the incriminating video to Gibbs. “The sound is not that good on my office computer,” Gibbs told me, “and one of the guys said, hopefully, ‘I think he might have said, “This is a big freaking deal.”’ I said, ‘Have you ever actually heard the vice president use that word?’ Later, when [Biden] talked to me about it, he said that he didn’t think he could be heard. I said, ‘You were standing in front of a lectern in the White House with a microphone and the whole world watching!” Still, in the end Gibbs couldn’t deny that Biden had a point, tweeting, “Mr. Vice President, you’re right, it is a big fucking deal.”
If the White House is still worried about Biden’s verbal blunders, there’s little evidence of it. He is being encouraged to speak more in public, not less, and is regularly trotted out to the Sunday morning TV interview shows, where his loose oral style has long made him a favorite, and where he can mix it up with the administration’s critics while allowing the president to remain above the fray. There are some weeks when the vice president is more the public face of the administration than his boss.
And Biden has grown accustomed to the constant ridicule. He is a regular target for the late-night talk show hosts—“Joe Biden is living proof that people can give up sensitive information without being tortured,” quipped David Letterman. On Saturday Night Live, cast member Jason Sudeikas regularly portrays him as a cheerful, loud, fast-talking buffoon, wincingly tolerated by the more sober, judicious Obama. “It’s always been that way,” Biden said. “I think it’s the nature of the office. [W]hen you come to be vice president, it is clear that all you are is an appendage of, you know, a part of—it’s not a bad thing, it’s just—by nature it’s a diminishing office.”
As I watched Biden on his visits to Warsaw, Prague, and Bucharest last fall, arriving with all of the pomp and circumstanc
e of a head of state, the red carpets, the ceremonial bands, the squadrons of security … I wondered how it felt for him to have landed so close to his life’s goal, and yet short of it.
“I crossed the Rubicon about not being president and being vice president when I decided to take this office,” he told me. “The only power you have is totally, completely, thoroughly reflective. There is no inherent power. And so it depends totally on the relationship you have with the president.”
Biden is pleased with that relationship, and seems to be enjoying the perks of the office. The biggest change, he says, is his mode of travel, which has both its pleasures and its drawbacks. On the one hand, he has helicopters, jets, and fleets of armored SUVs at his fingertips. He often brings members of his family along with him on state trips. He sat in the front cabin of Air Force Two on the long flight to Warsaw with his eleven-year-old granddaughter Finnegan poring over a map, imparting lessons in history and geography. He and his wife live at the vice president’s official residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory during the week, but travel back home to Wilmington most weekends. During his first year in office he insisted on taking the train home, which was troubling for his security detail.
“First time we get on, one of the conductors sees me and he goes, ‘Joey!’ and he grabs my cheek,” he said, grabbing a thick pinch of flesh to illustrate. “He’s an Italian kid from north Jersey. And, swear to God, Secret Service was going to take his arm off because he reached out for me and he grabbed my cheek. So it drives them crazy.”
Security concerns have since prevailed: Biden now usually makes the commute on a small jet. But when he’s home in Wilmington, he insists that his Secret Service detail maintain a very low profile. “It’s so easy to get bubble-ized here,” he said. “I told them, ‘Guys, look, I’ll do whatever you tell me I’ve got to do in Washington and in other states, but in Delaware, no limos, no police escort, and I don’t want any goddamn ambulances following me.”
One weekend, he and Jill decided they wanted to see a movie, so they went to their usual multiplex on Route 202, the Regal Brandywine Town Center 16. The vice president and his wife got in line to buy tickets, and when they got to the window, learned that the movie they wanted to see was sold out. Disappointed, they turned to leave.
“And the Secret Service says, ‘What do you mean?’” said Biden, chuckling. His escort felt an exception should be made for the Second Couple of the United States. “I said, ‘Look, no, no, no, no. Do not do this. They’re sold out, they’re sold out.’”
“In Delaware,” Biden continued, “there’s a semblance of reality. I still go to the drugstore. I still go to the hardware store. I still go to the haunts that I go to, and restaurants. Because after all these years in Delaware, I’m Joe.”
The Inheritance
Vanity Fair, May 2009
I was in a taxi on a wet winter day in Manhattan five years ago when my phone rang, displaying “111111,” the peculiar signature of an incoming call from the New York Times.
“Mark? It’s Arthur Sulzberger.”
For weeks I had been trying to talk with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of the New York Times Company. We had met once before, on friendly terms, and sometime after that I had informed him I was writing a story about him. I hoped he was calling now to set something up. Instead he asked, “Have you seen the New Yorker piece?”
The article in question, just published, was bruising. It had surely been painful for him to read. Among other indignities, it featured a quotation from the celebrated former Timesman Gay Talese, the author of one of the most popular histories of the institution, The Kingdom and the Power. Speaking of Arthur Sulzberger, the fifth member of the Sulzberger-Ochs dynasty to preside over the newspaper, Talese had said: “You get a bad king every once in a while.” I told Arthur that I had not yet fully read the story. “Well, I’m getting out of the business,” he said. Startled, I looked out the window at the cars and people shouldering through the cold rain, the headline already forming in my mind: Publishing Scion Resigns!
“Wait, Arthur,” I said, “is this a major scoop, or are you just saying that you aren’t talking to writers anymore?”
He laughed his high-pitched, zany laugh. “The latter,” he said.
Now, I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence, but ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—hundreds—into the field every day to seek answers. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.
He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, the New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, New York Times Company stock is officially classified as junk. Arthur made a catastrophic decision in the 1990s to start aggressively buying back shares ($1.8 billion worth from 2000 to 2004 alone). This was considered a good investment at the time, and had the effect of increasing the stock’s value. Shares were going for more than $50. Now they are slipping below $4—less than the price of the Sunday Times. Arthur’s revenues are in free fall: the bottom has dropped out of both newspaper and Internet advertising. He has done more than anyone else in the business to showcase newspaper journalism online. It hasn’t helped much. The content and page views of the newspaper’s website, nytimes.com, may be the envy of the profession, but as a recent report from Citigroup explained, “The Internet has taken away far more advertising than it has given.” Layoffs have occurred in the once sacrosanct newsroom.
Having squandered billions during the newspaper’s fat years—buying up all that stock, buying up failing newspapers, building gleaming new headquarters—Arthur is scrambling to keep up with interest payments on hundreds of millions in debt, much of it falling due within the next year. To do so, he is peddling assets on ruinous terms. Arthur recently borrowed $250 million from Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, who owns the fourth-largest stake in the Times Company. Controlling interest is held closely by the Sulzberger family, which owns 89 percent of the company’s Class B shares. These shares, not traded publicly, are held by a family trust designed to prevent individual heirs from selling out, and ultimately to shelter editorial matters from strict concern for the bottom line. The family owns about 20 percent of the Class A shares, which is about the same percentage owned by the hedge funds Harbinger and Firebrand. The third-largest Class A shareholder is T. Rowe Price, with 10 percent. Slim comes next, with 7 percent. Given the current state of the investment and credit markets, Slim would appear to have the inside rail should the paper ever be sold, a prospect once unthinkable. It is now very thinkable. Among the other prospective buyers whose names have surfaced in the press are Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City; Google; and even, perish the thought, the press baron Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal has emerged as journalistic competition for the Times in a way it never was before. (Murdoch has publicly dismissed reports of his interest in the Times as “crap,” but this has served only to heighten speculation.) This quarter, for the first time since Times Company stock went public, in 1969, the fourth- and fifth-generation Sulzbergers who hold shares (there are forty of them in all) received no dividends. As recently as last year they divvied up $25 million.
Beyond these professional trials, Arthur
has personal ones. He has separated from his wife of more than three decades, the painter Gail Gregg, and embarrassing speculation about his sleeping partners has surfaced in tabloid columns. His son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is now working as a reporter at the paper, as his father and grandfather once did, but for the first time in five generations the heir apparent’s inheritance is in doubt.
While the crushing forces at work in the newspaper industry are certainly not Arthur’s fault, and many other newspapers have already succumbed to them, the fate of the New York Times is of special importance: it is the flagship of serious newspaper journalism in America. The Times sailed into the economic storm that began in 2001 in good financial shape, bearing the most respected brand name in the profession. It was far better equipped than most newspapers to adapt and survive. What is increasingly clear is that the wrong person may be at the helm. Arthur Sulzberger’s heart has always been in the right place, but he assumed leadership from his father uniquely ill-equipped for this crisis—not despite but because of his long apprenticeship. To their credit, the Sulzbergers have long treated the Times less as a business than as a public trust, and Arthur is steeped in that tradition, rooted in it, trained by it, captive to it. Ever the dutiful son, he has made it his life’s mission to maintain the excellence he inherited—to duplicate his father’s achievement. He is a careful steward, when what the Times needs today is some wild-eyed genius of an entrepreneur.
The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: journalism sells. Arthur says as much at every opportunity, and clearly believes this to his core. It encapsulates his understanding of his inheritance and of himself. But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: advertising sells; journalism costs. Good journalism costs more today than ever, while ads have plummeted, particularly in print media. This is killing the Times, and every other decent newspaper in America. Arthur has manfully tied himself to the wheel, doggedly investing in high-quality reporting and editing even as his company loses more and more money. Few investors or analysts consider this to be sound business practice.
