by Joe Biden
Steve and Jill worried more than they needed to, was the way I saw it. When I looked at my schedule for the first week in February 2015, I noticed there was a lot to do, some of it truly significant—but all of it was doable.
My daily schedule card for that Monday even looked a little thin—a series of meetings in the White House and lunch with the president. But I was headed overseas in three days, and there was a lot of unfinished business I wanted to push forward before I left town. So Monday was my best chance to focus on the serious work I needed to do with the Congress. First on the list was keeping up our relations with the opposition party. I got hold of the Republicans’ new House majority leader to invite him to a breakfast at the Naval Observatory, where the two of us could sit in private and talk about where we might find some ground for cooperation on the budget, or infrastructure spending, or immigration legislation. I had worked hard to develop a relationship with Majority Leader Eric Cantor, but now that Eric had lost his seat, I had to start over with Kevin McCarthy.
I had some follow-up to do for the secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, who had been asking me to take the lead in pushing a $15 billion initiative to rebuild the country’s aging energy infrastructure. This was an urgent and much-needed fix. Power outages caused by storms, especially along the shorelines, were costing Americans billions of dollars a year because the electricity grid needed to be modernized. An inexcusable number of the nation’s water pipelines were still made of wood. Gas lines around the country were springing leaks, and no wonder. Many had been put in the ground back when Eisenhower was president. Dangerous amounts of methane gas were escaping into the atmosphere at every stage of the natural gas supply chain. My job was to sell the plan to key members of the House and the Senate, and I was hoping to get real bipartisan support. Fixing the gas supply lines, for instance, was not only a necessary safety precaution; it would also improve efficiency in the oil and gas industry and create jobs. So I called Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator from one of the leading oil-producing states, to persuade him that if Congress appropriated money to dig up and replace failing pipe segments and bad connectors, it would be a win for oil and gas producers and a win for environmental groups.
Then I placed a call to a congressman from a district just north of New York City to see if he might soften his opposition to the nuclear deal Secretary of State John Kerry was negotiating with Iran. Then I called Senator Tom Carper, from my home state, to touch base with him on the Iran deal and on the Northern Triangle, and to bring him up to date on the effort to get money set aside for the Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the Delaware River channel. After that I added calls to four other legislators who were pushing the Delaware River project.
I even managed to squeeze in a brief phone chat with the president of the University of Delaware, who wanted me to consider setting up some sort of Biden policy center at my alma mater after I left office in two years. And that got me thinking about what I was going to be doing in two years, which once again brought up the question of running for president. I had just bought myself some time by announcing on one of the morning shows that I wouldn’t be making a decision until late summer or early fall. And I was expecting a memo on the race from Mike Donilon, my chief political strategist and good friend, any day.
I already knew Mike believed strongly that I should run, and he had been making serious arguments about why I would win. But we had been talking fitfully about 2016 for almost two years now, and I’m sure Mike was getting anxious about the entire enterprise. He never pushed, because he is a kind and considerate man, and he knew Beau wasn’t doing well—though I was careful in the way I talked about it. Had I admitted to Mike or anybody else at the time that Beau’s illness might make it impossible for me to run, he would have known Beau was in real trouble. And Beau did not want anyone outside the family to know, not even good friends. So I had simply asked both Mike and Steve to do whatever they could to put me in a position to mount a serious campaign, if I did decide to run. Mike approached this charge from me as both a political technician and a friend. He’s observant and perceptive, and he’d been by my side for more than twenty years, so he understood without me saying it: keeping alive the possibility of running was important to my spirit. He knew that having that goal visible, even way out on a far and perhaps unreachable horizon, helped get me through the day.
President Obama raised the 2016 race again at our private lunch that day, once we had dispensed with the serious policy talk. He knew I was being pressured by a number of people to get into the race, and he had heard about the Draft Biden movement, complete with bumper stickers—I’M RIDIN’ WITH BIDEN. The president was urging caution. He wanted me to make sure I didn’t let this chatter get too loud. He didn’t want me to look fickle if I decided I was not going to run. “I’m very protective of your legacy,” he said. “I really mean it.” I assured him I wasn’t doing anything to promote the effort; that Mike Donilon was about to hand me a memo about how to run, if I did run, but that I was a long way from the decision. He said I should take my time and really digest Mike’s memo. I should approach the decision methodically—plug in all the poll numbers and political variables and seek advice from outside my own team. He suggested I talk to his pollster and his chief strategist and let them read Mike’s paper. He said they could be trusted to keep it quiet. “They’re the best numbers guys in the country,” the president said. “Hillary would have them in a minute if she could.” I guess he didn’t know that at least one of them was already helping Hillary. Then Barack said he would be glad to read the memo, too, and give me his assessment. “I’ll be blunt with you,” he promised.
* * *
Two days later I was having breakfast at the Naval Observatory with Hillary Clinton—a meeting she had requested. She had not yet announced her candidacy or even said if she was going to announce. But she was already assembling a big campaign structure and beginning to poach some of my staff, so her closest advisers had been encouraging her for weeks to reach out to me and make nice. The Clinton campaign hands thought the meeting was worth it, though they were sure that whatever she disclosed to me would leak. I think she knew better.
Hillary arrived at eight o’clock that Wednesday morning and we sat at a dining table in the small library, just behind the main reception room. She and I used to have regular meetings in that room when she was secretary of state and came over for breakfast to get my take on how she was doing with the president. Barack was a tough boss to read, especially for people who didn’t spend much time around him, so I think she used me as her Obama whisperer. But Hillary had an entirely new agenda that February morning, and she got right to it. She started off by telling me what a good vice president I had been, how much I had done for the country in my career, and how I had earned the right to run for president. Then she pretty much asked me straight up if I was going to jump in. I didn’t feel like I could tell her the truth about Beau. “I’m not in any position to make a decision now” was all I said, “and I think I’m going to wait.” If I did enter the race for the Democratic nomination, I assured her, I would be running for the nomination, not against her. I would run because I believed I was the best-suited nominee for the moment. But if I ran, I told her, I would not run a negative campaign. She said the same. “Although some of our supporters can get out of hand sometimes,” she noted, “it would not be me.”
Hillary told me she had thought long and hard about it, and she had decided to seek the nomination. “I have so much respect for you and all that you’ve done,” she said, “and I just wanted to tell you personally.” She told me she wasn’t ready to announce right away, and she would appreciate it if I kept it quiet. Which I did. I told no one.
As I walked her to the front door on her way out, I was pretty sure Hillary hadn’t gotten all she had come for that morning. I think she had been hoping to hear me say I was standing down. That I wasn’t going to seek the nomination. But I couldn’t do that yet. I walked her to the door, gave h
er a warm embrace, and said good-bye.
I felt a little twinge of sadness for Hillary as I watched her walk down the steps that morning. She was as determined as always and confident that she could do the job. She was also running well ahead of me and every other potential Democratic candidate in the very early polls. The sage political analysts would say she was probably on the way to a historic victory—the first woman to win the White House. But she did not evince much joy at the prospect of running. I may have misread her entirely that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making. And I had absolutely no doubt she understood how brutal the campaign would be for her. What she was about to do took real courage.
* * *
It felt like relief to be in the air the next morning, flying east over the Atlantic Ocean, into the rising sun, and headed for serious and consequential business. Added to that, I had my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Finnegan Biden, with me for the entire trip. I had made sure the final stop in Europe, right down the road from my last official meeting, would really be just private time for Finnegan and me. The vice presidency had lived up to Jill’s hopes of a new adventure for the entire family. One of the great privileges of the office was being able to take my older grandchildren around the world. It was an incredible educational experience for them, and not a burden for me or my staff. At least one of them had been to every continent save Antarctica. I had watched my younger grandchildren, Natalie and Hunter, as they floated in the Dead Sea, met the king of Jordan, and visited the United Arab Emirates and the Persian Gulf. I witnessed my oldest granddaughter, Naomi, try out her college Mandarin at a state dinner in China; saw her youngest sister, Maisy, meet new friends in Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone, then play pickup soccer on the field where South Africa was hosting the World Cup finals; watched Finnegan assess the North Korean military presence from our perch looking across the DMZ. She thought it would make a great school paper.
“They have all this artillery,” she told me later, pointing at a map, “like big cannons, right, Pop?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You realize the North Koreans can take out a hundred and twenty thousand people in Seoul, and probably a lot more, if they unleash all of their artillery?” she said, pointing at the map again. “The artillery is up here in this territory.”
Finnegan had been the most insistent of all my grandchildren. She called me up one morning in early 2011, about halfway through the first term, just as it hit the newspapers that I was making my first trip to Moscow as vice president. She was twelve. “Pop,” Finnegan said, “can I go to Russia with you?”
“Honey, you have school,” I reminded her.
“Pop, if you say something to Daddy and tell the teacher, I’ll learn a lot more on this trip than I would in school,” she explained. “They’ll say yes. And remember, Pop. Eastern Europe and Russia is my territory.”
Hunter’s daughters were a bit like the Great Powers of the late nineteenth century. They had carved out their own spheres of influence around the globe. “Remember, Naomi is China and the Far East,” Finnegan said. “Maisy is Africa. I’m Europe.”
She ended up getting permission to make the trip, with a little push from me, and was at my side the whole time. We stopped first in Helsinki, where Finnegan got to meet the president and the prime minister of Finland—both of them women. On the plane ride to Moscow afterward somebody on my staff turned to Finnegan and said, “Isn’t it amazing meeting two women who run that country?”
“You know what’s more amazing?” Finnegan answered. “Almost half the members of the Parliament are women.”
There were only a few places Finnegan was not allowed to go with me on that trip. She had to wait patiently in an anteroom at Vladimir Putin’s private office in Moscow when I had my meeting with the Russian leader. Putin was biding his time as Russia’s prime minister while his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, sat as a temporary placeholder in the presidency. President Obama had been working hard to strengthen our relationship with the Russian government. Our administration had convinced Medvedev (which really meant Putin) to sign a major new treaty that called for an enormous bilateral reduction of nuclear weapons, but the relationship was already showing new strains. I was in Moscow to make the case that Russia had no reason to fear the recent redeployment of launchers for the missile defense shield in Europe, which was designed to intercept attacks from Iran. Putin was not happy that the launchers were to be repositioned in countries so near his border, like Poland and Romania, and kept asserting that the interceptors were aimed at Russian missiles. He had already sent Medvedev out to make threats about walking away from all the nuclear arms treaties, old and new, which would land the world back in a new cold war. I was there to explain the planned changes to the system, to offer complete transparency in deployment and operation, and to assure Putin that it was not designed to—nor would it—interfere with Russia’s own strategic defenses.
I wasn’t sure just what I was walking into. President George W. Bush famously said he had looked into Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul.” I wanted to see for myself. While I had been encouraged by Putin’s willingness to sign on to the nuclear arms treaty, I thought the Russian leader had proven himself unworthy of our trust in almost every other instance. Our meeting that day did nothing to dispel that notion. It was long and contentious. Putin was ice-cold calm throughout, but argumentative from start to finish. I explained that as long as Iran was a nuclear threat, it was in our vital interests to protect the United States and our allies in Europe. He changed the subject, complaining that the previous administration had lied to him and had publicly attacked his record on human rights. I pulled out maps to show him the proposed trajectory of the interceptors, to assure him that our missile defense system was not aimed at his ICBMs. He disagreed vehemently and called in his own military advisers to back him up. The meeting went on for hours and ranged through other points of contention. I explained to Putin, for instance, that while we strongly objected to the Russian occupation of parts of Georgia, we were not encouraging Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to make trouble. “I speak to Saakashvili regularly on the phone and I urge him not to take provocative actions, just as I urge you to restore Georgia’s sovereignty,” I said. “Oh,” Putin replied, “we know exactly what you say to Mr. Saakashvili on the phone.”
We never got near a satisfactory mutual agreement about the missile shield. We would keep him informed, I finally told Putin, but we were going ahead with the planned redeployment. He was not happy. As the meeting was coming to an end, Putin asked me to have a look around his office. The furnishings were elaborate and impressive. “It’s amazing what capitalism will do, isn’t it?” I said, gazing up at the high ceiling. “Magnificent.”
As I looked back down, I was face-to-face with him.
“Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes,” I told him, smiling. “I don’t think you have a soul.”
He looked at me for a second and smiled back. “We understand each other,” he said.
And we did.
* * *
Out over the Atlantic that Thursday afternoon, four years later, cruising at more than six hundred miles an hour, I sat in my small private cabin reading through the briefing books and talking with my trusted foreign policy staff about what exactly we needed to accomplish on the trip. Air Force Two would be touching down that evening in Brussels, where I had meetings scheduled with the highest-ranking leaders of the European Union and a one-on-one with the prime minister of Belgium the next day. But that was just warm-up for the critical business at the Munich Security Conference that weekend. The security conference was like coming full circle and facing a new reckoning with Vladimir Putin, who was once again president of the Russian Federation—and acting badly. I had been to the Munich Security Conference in 2009, just three weeks after we took office, to make a speech laying out President Obama’s major goals in foreign policy to a world a
udience. Part of that speech was meant for Putin.
The Russian leader needed to hear the president’s commitment to European security, as well as his desire to have Russia as a partner in that effort. Our new administration supported “the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, a fundamentally stronger NATO-EU partnership, and a deeper cooperation with countries outside the Alliance who share our common goals and principles,” I said. “The United States rejects the notion that NATO’s gain is Russia’s loss, or that Russia’s strength is NATO’s weakness.…
“It is time—to paraphrase President Obama—it’s time to press the reset button and revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.… The United States and Russia can disagree and still work together where our interests coincide. And they coincide in many places.” I made the president’s position crystal clear. We were open to cooperation, but there were basic ground rules.
“We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence,” I assured the conference, and everybody in that room understood I meant that the United States and its NATO allies would not permit Russia to force former Soviet republics back into its orbit against their will. “It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.”
Our administration was seeking to promote and extend the liberal international order that had been in place for forty years: a Europe free, whole, and at peace, with each and every independent country having agreed-upon and secure borders.
