Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  We spent so much time together that we developed unspoken cues and inside humor to ease the pressures of office. Sometimes he would muse out loud: Why would Senator X do this? And why would Congressman Y do that? It was so gratuitous, or so unnecessary, or so impolite. Why? And I would tell him about my uncle Ed Finnegan, who had an answer for this kind of thing that was not exactly specific but always satisfying. “Ya know, Joey,” Uncle Ed would say, “there’s no accountin’ for horses’ asses.” And Uncle Ed’s line became a key bit of shorthand between us, a private joke. When one foreign head of state came to the White House for a visit, he strutted into the Oval Office and almost the first thing out of his mouth was this: “They say I am strong, Barack, and you are weak. I tell them, ‘No, no. You are strong, too.’” We just looked at one another, and the president, cool as always, turned to me, raised an eyebrow and said, “Uncle Ed.”

  The president did hand me plenty of specific jobs right from the start and didn’t look over my shoulder. At a meeting of Obama’s foreign policy and national security team a few weeks after we were sworn in, when the president’s foreign policy principals said they were prepared to present a plan for keeping the president’s campaign commitments on Iraq, the president turned to the group and said, “Joe will do Iraq. He knows it. He knows the players.” He made me the sheriff of our first crucial piece of legislation, enacted less than a month after we took office: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. He tasked me with getting the votes we needed in Congress, then left it to me to make sure the $787 billion appropriated in the stimulus package was spent fast and spent well, avoiding the waste and fraud that always accompany big public-works bills. When budget negotiations between the president and the Republican House Speaker—or among congressional leaders—became irreparably broken, the president dispatched me to the Hill to work out a deal with my former colleagues and to make sure we got the votes for passage. When Vladimir Putin began a campaign to destabilize Ukraine, the president assigned me Ukraine. When a crisis erupted after unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle in Central America began pouring across our border, he turned to me and said, “Joe, you’ve got to fix this.”

  At one point soon after, the president asked me to take over the job of repairing our wobbly relations across the entirety of the Americas—the Northern Triangle, Brazil, the Caribbean, everything. “Joe, you can do this,” the president joked. “You’re good at making new friends. And it’s in the same time zone.” I didn’t point out that most of it was not in the same time zone. I just accepted the new assignment. And he knew I wouldn’t drop the ball.

  The president never said it to me himself, directly, but in a long talk as we headed to an event in Chicago near the end of the first term, Michelle Obama said to me, “He trusts you, Joe.”

  The trust went both ways, and it gradually became more than merely professional. I came to feel I could depend on him, too. Barack was the first person outside my family to know about Beau’s illness. In 2013, the president and I happened to be doing a political event together in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the town where I was born, the day after I got back from our first harrowing visit to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The rally drew thousands, which gave the president the opportunity to say things to me he never would have been able to utter in private. “Today is a special day for Joe and me,” he told the crowd, “because five years ago today, on August 23, 2008, I announced in Springfield, Illinois, my home state, that Joe Biden was going to be my running mate. And it was the best decision that I ever made, politically, because I love this guy.…

  “And so I just want all of you to know that I am lucky to have Joe—not just as a running mate, but more importantly, as a friend. And we love his family.”

  In the sixteen months since that week we got the diagnosis, I had been careful not to reveal the true desperation of Beau’s situation to anyone outside the family—not even to the president. Barack had inklings that Beau was struggling, but he never pressed for details. And I didn’t bring it up often. But in the middle of 2014, when Beau’s aphasia was getting worse, he worried that his illness might eventually affect his cognitive capability. And knowing Beau, Hunt and I became concerned that he might feel honor-bound to resign before his term as attorney general was over. The only income he had at the time was his salary. I told the president about this at one of our private lunches.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Well, he doesn’t have much money, but we’re okay,” I said. “Jill and I can take out a second mortgage on our house in Wilmington if we have to. We’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t do that,” Barack said, with a force that surprised me. I could see him getting emotional. Then he got up out of his chair and walked around behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I’ll give you the money. I have it. You can pay me back whenever.”

  * * *

  We spent the first part of our lunch on January 5, 2015, running through some of the big initiatives I was quarterbacking at the time: Iraq, Ukraine, and Central America. They had become three of our administration’s most pressing foreign policy priorities. The president had recently announced his comprehensive long-term counterterrorism strategy to degrade and eventually destroy ISIL in Iraq, Syria, and throughout the Middle East. I was working with the new prime minister in Iraq to shore up his coalition government and get him the resources he needed to roll back some of ISIL’s recent gains in that country; and I was trying to convince the president and the prime minister of Turkey to become more active in the fight against ISIL in Syria. My staff was already preparing my early-February trip to the annual Munich Security Conference, where I needed to press our NATO allies for more support for Ukraine in its struggle against Putin. A few weeks after that I was headed to Guatemala for a two-day summit with the leaders of the Northern Triangle countries. My job there was to persuade them that they had to make the hard political choices that would convince the United States Congress to fund their Alliance for Prosperity.

  The discussion meandered, as always, toward more personal topics as the lunch wound down. Barack remained preoccupied with the question of my running for president. He had been subtly weighing in against—for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the president recognized the media’s increasing appetite for the drama of politics over real policy. The minute I announced I was running for the nomination, Barack and I both knew, coverage in the West Wing would shift from his agenda to my chances. I also believe he had concluded that Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the nominee, which was good by him. He thought of her as really smart, really prepared, and backed by the formidable campaign machine the Clintons had spent the past forty years engineering. The president had been Solomon-like when pressed by reporters to choose between Hillary and me. “Both Hillary and Joe would make outstanding presidents and possess the qualities that are needed to be outstanding presidents,” he had said. “And they’ve got different strengths, but both of them would be outstanding.” But I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton.

  In January 2015 the president was convinced I could not beat Hillary, and he worried that a long primary fight would split the party and leave the Democratic nominee vulnerable in the general election. More than anything, he did not want to see a Republican in the White House in 2017. I got it, and never took issue with him. This was about Barack’s legacy, and a significant portion of that legacy had not yet been cast in stone. I didn’t think it possible for a new Republican administration to roll back Barack’s landmark health care program, or the Violence Against Women Act, or the gains made by the LGBT community. But we both knew that if a Republican won the presidency, he or she could really unravel Barack’s legacy on foreign policy. Neither of us wanted that. I think the president was also concerned that if I ran and lost, it would diminish my own legacy. And finally, I think he wondered about my ability to do my job
as vice president and run for the nomination while dealing with Beau’s battle with brain cancer.

  When Barack brought it up at lunch that day, he did it with a soft touch. “If I could appoint anyone to be president for the next eight years, it would be you, Joe,” he told me. “We have the same values. Same vision. Same goals. You’ve earned the right to make a decision based on how you feel about the race.”

  I told him that after watching him do it for the last six years, I had no desire to live in the White House. “It’s the most confining thing in the world,” the president said, but he didn’t stop to dwell on it. He was almost in a reverie about his own future. He told me his Christmas vacation had allowed him for the first time to picture what the next twenty-five years could be like. “I think I can do more than I was able to do as president,” he said. He said he understood how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. “Joe, have you focused on that? How do you want to spend the rest of your life?”

  How do you want to spend the rest of your life? It was a hard question for me to answer that day. I wish I could have said, “Sure, I can ride off into the sunset, too, and be satisfied and content.” But it wasn’t that simple for me. Part of it was my own pride: if I decided not to run, I had to be able to look in the mirror and know that it was not because I was afraid to lose or afraid of taking on the job. I could not live with walking away like that. And then, too, the question of running for president was all tangled up in Beau, and purpose, and hope. Giving up on the presidential race would be like saying we were giving up on Beau. “We can’t give up hope, Joe,” Jill would remind me. “We can’t give up hope.” The mere possibility of a presidential campaign, which Beau wanted, gave us purpose and hope—a way to defy the fates.

  How do you want to spend the rest of your life? Barack Obama was my friend, but I found myself unable to fully confide in him. This much I knew, I explained to him: I had two choices. I could have a good ten years with my family, laying the foundation of financial security for them and spending more time with them. Or I could have ten years trying to help change the country and the world for the better. “If the second is within reach,” I told him, “I think that’s how I should spend the rest of my life.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Keeping Busy

  I knew on Monday that it was going to be a hard week—in all ways. The next day, February 3, 2015, was Beau’s forty-sixth birthday, not that he wanted me to make a big deal of it. He expected me to keep doing my job, and doing it well, while he was fighting for his life. Beau’s effort, fierce but quiet, was inspiring. He had already exceeded the twelve-to-fourteen-month time line of survival for somebody with glioblastoma multiforme. And the most recent scans showed no clear evidence that the few cancer cells Dr. Sawaya was unable to remove were starting to multiply. The mere fact that Beau was hanging tough, determined to do whatever he had to do to make it, gave the entire family hope. From the very beginning, way back in the late summer of 2013, Beau had opted for the most aggressive course his oncologist could chart. When Dr. Yung recommended that Beau endure triple the amount of the standard chemo drug, called Temodar, while also taking part in the first field trial of an experimental drug treatment designed to boost the effect of Temodar, Beau said, “Let’s do it.” A few months later, when Dr. Yung suggested adding an unapproved but promising new drug to combat one of the mutations that made his tumor especially virulent, Beau said, “Let’s do it.” Dr. Yung cautioned that while there was evidence in animal studies that the drug worked, there were no human studies to back it up. There could also be uncomfortable side effects. “If there’s a skin rash,” Beau said, “I’ll just wear long sleeves and a baseball cap. All good.”

  In April 2014, when Beau began having difficulties with his speech about eight months into his treatment, the doctors could not be sure from the scans whether the difficulties were caused by new tumor growth or the delayed effects of his earlier six-week run of radiation. After receiving special permission from the pharmaceutical company, Dr. Yung asked Beau if he could start him on a well-tested drug that might diminish swelling and seal up leaky blood vessels around the tumor bed. Beau said, “Let’s do it.” The new drug was given intravenously, and the big needle could be incredibly painful, but Beau never complained. Jill knew, though, and she went with him to the weekly procedure in Philadelphia and made sure he got the nurse who was the gentlest and most expert at inserting the IV.

  A few months later, in the summer of 2014, Beau went out and bought an expensive new powerboat so he could take Natalie and Hunter out for long rides and fishing on the Susquehanna River or Chesapeake Bay. Beau loved to be on the water—the spray on his face, a fishing rod in his hand—but he had also been careful with his money over the years. I didn’t say anything to him or anyone else, but Jill and I both wondered if Beau was starting to accept the idea that he might not have much time. Why wait for a tomorrow that might not come? But it was so easy to quash that anxiety whenever I saw him. He still looked good. He was still exercising. And we all believed, like he did, that if he could just hang on long enough, science might outrun his disease. There were so many things happening in the field. There might be a breakthrough treatment, we told ourselves, or even a cure.

  Beau held his own all through that summer, until August 2014, exactly a year after the diagnosis, when he had a sudden loss of strength and numbness in his right arm and right leg. He didn’t complain. He didn’t panic. “What’s next?” he asked his oncologist. “How do we fight this?” Dr. Yung suggested a more potent drug, with likely side effects including nausea, fatigue, mouth sores, and diminished appetite. The drug would also increase his risk for infection, anemia, and even more serious blood diseases. “Okay, Doc,” Beau said, “let’s do it.” I knew he had to be frustrated by then. He had no real control over what the disease or the treatment was doing to his body; no real control over his blood work; no real control over what his scans looked like every two months; no real control over when and how aggressively his tumor might begin to grow again. What he could control, he did. He kept doing his job as attorney general of Delaware, and doing it well. His office won a forty-five-million-dollar settlement from Bank of America for its misconduct before, during, and after the financial crisis of 2008. This brought the total won from the banks for the state and its citizens to $180 million. He persuaded forty-three other state attorneys general to join him in pushing for federal money to provide support for victims of child pornography. The Child Predator Task Force that Beau created and oversaw had arrested and convicted more than two hundred child abusers and rescued 129 children from abusive situations by then. “My focus from the beginning has been to protect the most vulnerable among us,” he said, “and no one is more vulnerable than our children.”

  And Beau also kept going home at night to be with Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter. “I read to my children every night,” he said to the advanced practice nurse in Houston, Eva Lu Lee, the first time they ever met. “I need time to read to my children.” He insisted on climbing to the top of a beautiful mountain trail on our family trip to the Tetons, even though his weak leg made it a real struggle. Beau refused to burden anybody outside of his brother, Hunter, with his actual dread, not even his mother or me.

  So tomorrow was his forty-sixth birthday, February 3, 2015, but he did not want to make a big to-do. And besides, Beau reminded Jill, this was Hunter’s year. Hunt’s birthday is the day after Beau’s, and the two of them had always alternated years on who got to pick the birthday meal. “Chicken potpie, right, Mom?” Hunter would say. “Homemade.”

  * * *

  I had a full schedule that week, as I had almost every week since Beau’s diagnosis. I had planned it that way. When I got back to Washington after we learned Beau had brain cancer, I called my chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, into my office to talk. Steve knew the whole family had been down to M. D. Anderson with Beau and he knew that we had returned with bad news. But he didn’t know how bad it was. “I’m just going t
o tell you this is very serious and it’s going to be a very difficult time,” I said to Steve as we both settled into our chairs in my West Wing office. “The only way I’m going to get through this is if you just keep me busy. Schedule me. Try to keep everything that we would normally be doing. Keep it in front of me, and keep me working.”

  Steve is an easygoing guy who had proven willing to do almost anything I asked, but I could tell by the way he was looking at me that this request went against his natural humane instincts. “Look, Steve, this is going to be hard on you, too, but I’m pleading with you to do this for me,” I explained. “I know what’s best because, unfortunately, I’ve lived through this before. The only way I survived, the only way I got through it, was by staying busy and keeping my mind, when it can be, focused on my job.”

  Steve said he would do whatever I asked of him, and he was as good as his word. There were a few times in the next eighteen months when Jill pulled Steve aside to talk. “Joe’s working too hard,” she would say. “He’s exhausted. He’s not sleeping. It’s going to kill him.” It put Steve in a tough spot. He agreed with Jill. There were times when he thought my schedule bordered on cruel, but he was under strict orders from the boss. Steve had also come to believe that part of my insistence on keeping up with the demands of my job was a desire to prove to Beau and Hunt and Ashley that I was fine. That I was still capable of handling anything and everything that was asked of me.

  “I would be happy to do anything he’d let me do,” Steve would say to Jill, diplomatically. And then the two of them would conspire to get me to ease off for a while. I would hear them out when they made the case to me and say no to a few events or meetings—before going right back to the fifteen- or sixteen-hour workdays. Then Jill would call Steve again and say, “This has to stop,” and Steve would say he agreed. And sometimes when we were at home alone, Jill would say the same to me—“You’ve got to stop, Joe. You’re going to get run down and you’re going to get sick. I’m really worried about you”—only I wasn’t so quick to agree.