Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  Marshall was only a short time in office when he started to explain the job this way: a woman had two sons; one ran away to sea and the other was elected vice president; neither was ever heard of again. Thomas Riley Marshall spent eight years as vice president, helped to steer the country through World War I, then entered history’s witness protection program. The identity of Woodrow Wilson’s vice president is a question that would have Jeopardy fans dialing the complaint lines. But at least Marshall appeared to maintain his good cheer. Nelson Rockefeller was in office for only two years but quickly soured. “I go to funerals,” he complained. “I go to earthquakes.”

  Most vitriolic of all was Daniel Webster, who balked at his party’s nomination to be William Henry Harrison’s running mate in 1840. “I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin,” he would say. Webster miscalculated the upside of the position. Harrison became the first sitting president to die in office—only a month after his inauguration—which would have given Webster a full four-year term as president. Webster turned down the vice presidential nomination again eight years later, then watched Zachary Taylor become the second sitting president to die in office, after only sixteen months.

  I wrestled for a day or two with the idea of actually serving as anybody’s vice president. What worried me most was that I would be doing something I had not done in almost forty years: working for somebody else. As my former chief of staff and longtime friend Ted Kaufman said to me while I was deciding, “I don’t want to be in the vice president’s office the first day when the president’s chief of staff comes in and gives you an assignment.” I saw his point. “I never had a boss,” I said to Jill once. “I don’t know how I’d handle it.” Actually, I must have said it to her a good deal more than once. “What happens when I have to support administration policy I don’t agree with?” … “What’s it going to be like to be number two?” … “I’ve never had a boss. How am I going to handle this?” Until Jill finally had an answer: “C’mon, Joe,” she said. “Grow up.”

  I agreed to go through the vetting process, but not with a whole lot of enthusiasm.

  The team investigating me pored over my finances to make sure I didn’t have any major conflicts. They examined my bank accounts, assets, mortgages, bills, and other debts. They wanted to see my tax returns going back ten years, any outside business I may have had, and any stocks. There wasn’t much there. I had no business interests; I owned no stocks and bonds. We had the equity in our home and my pension. Jill had a teacher’s pension and some certificates of deposit her mother had given her. “This all there is?” Obama asked the team investigating me. The next time I saw him, after the process was concluded, Barack looked at me and joked, “That was one of the easiest vets in the world. You own nothing.”

  The last of many sessions I had with the vetting team took place in my office, just off the floor of the Senate. There were eight or nine lawyers going through the final details, following up on the few residual questions they had. As the meeting was breaking up the lead attorney said to me, “Well, just one last question, Mr. Chairman, and we’re all finished. Why do you want to be vice president?”

  “I don’t want to be,” I said.

  “Seriously, Mr. Chairman, why do you want to be vice president?”

  “I don’t want to be vice president,” I repeated. “If he wants me to do it and thinks it will help, I will.”

  Somehow that conversation got back to my family. They weren’t happy, because they thought I might be trying to sabotage my prospects.

  I remember exactly when it became clear to me that this would be the right thing to do. Barack had me flown in secret to Minneapolis during a campaign rally. Wearing jeans, a ball cap, and sunglasses, I was sneaked into his hotel suite, where we had the single most significant conversation of our early relationship. I already knew from the presidential primary debates and from working with him on the Foreign Relations Committee that we did not have substantive differences on the issues. What differences there were, were tactical. But I asked him in Minneapolis if he really meant what he said: that he wanted me to help him govern, especially in foreign policy matters. He said he did. And I asked him if he meant what he said about the restoration of the middle class being a defining issue of his presidency.

  “Yes,” he said. “I really mean it.”

  I believed him. I was convinced he was an honest and thoroughly honorable man who kept his word. I was also convinced that he could be a really good president.

  Barack asked me at that clandestine meeting what specific areas I wanted to take a lead in. My response was I didn’t want any specific area. After thirty-five years in the Senate, engaging on almost every major issue, I felt I could offer much more than that. I wanted to have an impact on all areas. I would do whatever he most needed me to do, I told him, and promised to be a vocal supporter and defender of his policies. But I wanted more than a set of specific tasks that drew sharp limits on the office. “I want to be the last guy in the room on every major decision,” I told him. “You’re president. I’m not. I get it. But if it’s my experience you’re looking for, I want to be the last guy to make the case.”

  The only remaining question after that was how I’d fit with the incredibly effective team Barack had put together. And it was clear that really mattered to him. So he asked me to meet with his campaign manager and chief strategist to talk about what my role in the campaign would be. They flew into New Castle Airport in secret in a private plane, and Beau and Jill picked them up and drove them to my sister’s house so no press would be alerted. It was an important meeting, and when we parted I think we were all convinced that it would work.

  * * *

  I was in a reception room waiting for Jill to get out of the dentist’s chair when Barack called with his final decision. He asked me to be his running mate, and I accepted without hesitation. It felt good to say yes.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said.

  “So am I.”

  Half an hour after I accepted, Jill and I walked through our front door and found Ashley sitting in the kitchen. She must have seen something in our faces. “Daddy,” she said, “he called, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “I told you I would, honey,” I said. “Yes. I accepted.”

  She jumped up and threw her arms around me. “Daddy, you know how you’re always quoting Seamus Heaney’s poem,” she said. I think everybody in the family could recite The Cure at Troy by heart at that point, they’d heard me quote it so many times over the years:

  History says, don’t hope

  On this side of the grave.

  But then, once in a lifetime

  The longed-for tidal wave

  Of justice can rise up,

  And hope and history rhyme.

  “Dad, this is hope and history.”

  “Oh, great,” I joked. “He’s hope. And I’m history.”

  But I knew what she meant, and I was happy that she was so happy. We got on the phone and told the entire family. And I didn’t doubt for one moment that we had made the right decision.

  * * *

  When I was being considered for vice president and reached out to Walter Mondale for advice, he told me his weekly lunch with President Jimmy Carter turned out to be the cornerstone of their working relationship. So Barack and I decided to follow that advice as a way to make sure we had regular meetings where we could talk to each other privately, and with absolute honesty, about anything that was on our minds. We started having our weekly lunch meeting the first month we got to the White House. Even six years in, I still looked forward to them. Not that we didn’t spend plenty of time together already. From the outset he included me in all his key meetings. We must have spent a thousand hours together in the Situation Room by then. We started every day in the Oval Office for the daily intelligence briefing. I was at the weekly Principals Committee meeting of his national security
team, meetings with foreign policy and economic advisers, his bilateral meetings with visiting heads of state, and meetings with congressional leaders. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that it was not just pro forma. The president wanted my read on everything that was happening, and he wanted me around. Almost everybody who comes into contact with a president is hungry for something—sometimes nothing more than an acknowledgment, or simply to be put at ease, but most of all to be heard. There was no escaping that for Barack, and it could be draining. “Why do they need so much attention?” he complained to me one day after a congressional delegation left the office. “They constantly have to be reinforced.” He knew the answer without my telling him, but he was frustrated by the amount of time and energy it took. And he was happy to have me there to carry some of that load.

  One of his longtime personal aides told me once, near the end of our final term, that she had gotten curious and done the math, and it looked to her like the president and I spent about four and a half hours together on the days we were both in Washington. I’m not sure either of us had a chance to spend that many waking hours with our wives on those days. But for all that time together, the president and I were rarely alone, except for fleeting moments between meetings. Our lunches were the one setting where we could talk frankly, without fear of being overheard. We could discuss the most important issues facing the administration, the country, and the world at that moment; and we could talk through any personal issues we were having. If something one of us had done angered or disappointed the other, the weekly lunch was the time to clear the air. Not that there was much of that. Even a “Biden gaffe” that sent the White House and 2012 campaign staff into paroxysms—when I got out ahead of the president by saying on Meet the Press that I was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage and that gay couples were entitled to all the same civil rights and civil liberties as heterosexual couples—didn’t cause any real disturbance between us. I went into the Oval Office the day after and the president just stood up and walked around his desk with a big grin on his face. “Well, Joe,” he said, “you told me you weren’t going to wear any funny hats or change your brand.” He joked that I had sent everybody into an uproar and said the campaign did have some work to do, but he didn’t take me to task for speaking my mind about an issue I cared about deeply.

  The conversation at our lunches was just as often personal. We talked about our wives. We talked about the close friendship between his daughters and my grandchildren, and what was going on in their lives. We talked about golf.

  “You know what has surprised me?” the president said to me at one of our earlier lunches. “How we have become such good friends.”

  “Surprised you!” I joked.

  * * *

  As I walked into the Oval Office for our weekly lunch on January 5, 2015, almost six and a half years after I accepted the vice presidency, President Obama was, as usual, at his desk. “C’mon. You hungry?” he said, and led me back past the little study off the main office and into his private dining room. The setting was formal. The president kept only a few personal possessions in the room—some pictures of his daughters and a pair of red boxing gloves, in a glass case, signed by Muhammad Ali. We shed our suit coats and walked to opposite ends of a six-foot-long mahogany table. He complimented me on a job well done at the police memorial in New York.

  “What do you have for today?” the president said, as we sat.

  Barack was just back from his Christmas vacation in Hawaii and he seemed to have an extra degree of calm in his already placid demeanor. The last midterm election of his political career was behind him, and though it hadn’t gone well for us Democrats, the president would never again have to stand and be judged by voters. He still had two years in office, and he was determined to make them count. There were big things out there for us to accomplish, and he had a list of priorities to talk over at lunch that day. The president was one of the few people I had told about Beau’s battle with cancer. I felt I had to tell him, because there were times when I had to clandestinely fly to Houston or to Philadelphia for procedures or consultations, and Beau wanted to keep everything private. He did not want this to be a press story, and Barack fully understood. I knew I could count on the president to keep it under wraps. But I also knew that the president still needed me, because all the major initiatives I was responsible for could not be easily handed off to somebody else. I wanted to reassure him that he could count on me, that I wouldn’t let anything fall through the cracks.

  The power of the presidency had grown enormously during my time in Washington, and the public expectations of what a president can and should accomplish had grown with it. The gravity of the issues he or she faces on a weekly basis is overwhelming; nothing gets to a president’s desk that isn’t momentous and pressing. And everything but locusts had hit this young president’s desk—from his first day on the job. Barack Obama was sworn into office in the middle of the worst global financial crisis in four generations. The situation was so dire that the entire economic team met in the Oval Office for an hour every day to plan how to deal with the unfolding crisis. “No matter what we do,” the president’s chief economist told us shortly after we took office, “we’re going to continue to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs a month for at least six months.” Major banks were failing. The economy was careening off a cliff. Americans were losing their homes, their health care, and their life savings. They were losing hope. Diminishing tax revenues were squeezing federal, state, and local governments. Cities were near bankruptcy, forced to lay off so many teachers and police officers that the American pillars of education and public safety were becoming shaky. President Obama also inherited hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no clear strategy for victory in either. The wars were costing us nearly fifteen billion dollars a month at a time when we could least afford it.

  Even Barack Obama, talented and capable as he is, could not possibly have done it all. Like all modern presidents, he was obliged to delegate big pieces of the executive business to his cabinet secretaries, his national security specialists, his chief of staff, and his vice president. But that requires trust. And it was clear from the outset to everyone who knew him that President Obama did not easily place his trust in others. He “travels light,” one staffer said of him. Obama’s improbable rise in politics—he was a little-known state legislator from the South Side of Chicago in 2003 and president of the United States five years later—was based in part on the fact that he did travel light. Barack Obama did not appear to belong to anyone except Michelle and his daughters—not campaign donors, or labor leaders, or civil rights groups, or even friends. I think voters intuited that he would not permit political debts, racial identity, personal attachment, or emotion to cloud his judgment on any big decision. They really believed he would call it as he saw it.

  The president had the further benefit of near absolute self-sufficiency; unlike most people I know, his own sense of his worth seemed entirely independent of what other people thought of him. He was almost never ruffled by the slights and unfair criticisms I saw him endure. There were times when I got so irritated at the way people disrespected him—the president, right in the Oval Office—that I was ready to lay into them. Barack knew when I was angry on his behalf and he would occasionally tell me to back off. “Hey, Joe,” he would say, “you’ve got to take the good with the bad.” I knew he could defend himself just fine when he was moved to do so, and I usually let it pass, but there were times when I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t talk about the president that way,” I growled at one former Democratic Senate colleague, who said that while she agreed with the president, she didn’t like him. “Don’t talk about my friend that way,” I said. “We’re going to have a problem.”

  Not that I didn’t get frustrated with the president on occasion. He never gave me a reason to doubt his strategic judgment in eight years of close-up observation. And there was rarely any daylight between us in matters of policy. But sometimes I
thought he was deliberate to a fault. “Just trust your instincts, Mr. President,” I would say to him. On major decisions that had to be made fast, I had learned over the years, a president was never going to have more than about 70 percent of the information needed. So once you have checked the experts, statistics, data, and intelligence, you have to be willing to rely on your gut.

  There were times when we were unhappy with each other, but when he was upset with me I heard about it in private, not on the nightly news. At the end of the day I was appreciative that he was straight with me. And the few times I was really upset with him, I was straightforward and direct about my anger. I made no bones about it. But that’s how friends treat one another. They level. I think those occasions actually deepened our relationship.

  I felt like he treated me as much as an equal as a president is able to. He never gave me an order. “I don’t keep Joe’s schedule,” he would tell staff, “and Joe doesn’t keep mine.” Most important to me, he honored the one request I had made of him before I accepted his offer to be vice president. Obama reportedly joked with his campaign team that he had said to me, “I want your advice, Joe. I just want it in ten-minute, not sixty-minute, increments.” But he kept his end of the bargain, all the way through to the end. He invited me in to be the last person in the room to offer counsel before any big decision was made.

  I offered what advice and wisdom I could, but I also tried to offer simple encouragement. The cares of the presidency sit heavy on any person in that office, and there were times when Barack got down. He would become quieter, more reflective, and more withdrawn. He had a distant look. When I saw him start to retreat like that, I always made a point to stick around after our next meeting in the Oval Office. I would wait until everybody else filed out and close the door behind them. “Remember, Mr. President,” I would say when it was just the two of us, “the country can never be more hopeful than its president. Don’t make me ‘Hope.’ You gotta go out there and be ‘Hope.’”