by Joe Biden
I knew what Beau would have done with a few more years. He would have continued his fight against the abuse of power, especially the abuse of children. It was central to who he was, and Hunter, Hallie, Ashley, Jill, and I were determined to carry that effort forward in his honor. We set up the Beau Biden Foundation to continue his work. It gave us purpose. And we all needed purpose.
* * *
The president may have been a little taken aback at our lunch six days later. He asked me again what assignments I wanted for the remainder of our administration. I was noncommittal. “What are you going to do,” he asked, “about running?” I explained that I had not entirely set aside the idea of running for the Democratic nomination in 2016. I hadn’t decided yet, and I knew I wouldn’t be in any position to make the decision for a while. And then I found myself saying, “Look, Mr. President, I understand if you’ve made an explicit commitment to Hillary and to Bill Clinton,” but I assured Barack that if I did decide to run I would engage Hillary on our policy differences only and not on questions of character or personality that might weaken her if she won the nomination. “I promise you,” I said. And we left it at that.
* * *
The next day was the busiest I had had since my return—a full calendar. The daily intelligence briefing, followed by a meeting to prepare a speech I was giving at the State Department the next week about the necessity of increasing our economic engagement with China, followed by a briefing on Central America, followed by my meeting with President Hernández. And then I was flying home to Wilmington so Jill and I could spend our anniversary together. We were in no mood for celebration, but we did want to be together.
June 17. Good day in that I was busy and was able to have some relief, I wrote in my diary in Wilmington that night. Still not believable to me that Beau is gone. I feel his presence as much as I did when he was in Iraq for a year. I know if I’m unable to compartmentalize I’ll go nuts. I can hear him saying, “Now, Dad, I’m all right. It’s all good. All good, Dad.”
Jill was downhearted that night. Summer was usually her favorite time of year, but there was no joy in it now. I wanted to be able to ease Jill’s pain, but I understood there was only so much I could do. I was hoping, but not at all convinced, that our upcoming trip might help. We were just a week away from a family vacation to one of our favorite beach spots, in South Carolina, and everybody seemed apprehensive about the trip. It was going to be difficult for us to all be together for the first time, in a place Beau loved, without him. But I had made the case that in the aftermath of our loss it was even more important that we continue to do the things that had always meant so much to the family. That we could not let our traditions drift away. That Beau would have wanted us to make the trip. I knew from past experience that as hard as it would be, it was better to go through it than to avoid it. We needed real family time together. So we agreed to try the week at the beach on Kiawah Island. The family was going to fly down on Tuesday, June 23, and I would follow a few days later.
The lead-up to the trip and the trip itself ended up being even more of an emotional roller coaster than I had anticipated. On our anniversary night, six days before Jill was scheduled to leave, came word that nine innocent people had been killed at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Among the victims was the pastor of Emanuel AME Church, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney—a man I had come to know. Reverend Pinckney was a state senator making his mark in South Carolina politics, and I had spent time with him at political events in the past few years. He was just forty-one years old, younger even than Beau, with a wife and two daughters, ages eleven and six.
The killer was a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist who had walked into the church that evening, accepted an invitation to join the Wednesday night Bible study, sat for the last half hour of the meeting, and then viciously gunned down nine of the twelve people in the group. The oldest victim was eighty-seven years old, the youngest twenty-six. Among the assassin’s professed goals was igniting a race war. Jill and I made a public statement that night, and I began making arrangements to call the families of the victims to offer our condolences. And then we began to steel ourselves for the added event on our schedule the following week. We would be making the trip from Kiawah to Charleston to attend the public memorial for Reverend Pinckney and other Emanuel victims, and to do what we could to bring some small measure of comfort to their families and friends.
I gave Jill a couple of small gifts the next night to try to lift her spirits, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. She said she didn’t want dinner. She had a cup of soup and went up to bed at eight thirty, while it was still light outside. I was talking to Hunter when she went up. Hunt was trying hard to keep me moving forward to the next big goal. He knew Beau’s wishes better than I did, but he also knew me.
“If God appeared to you tomorrow, Dad,” he told me, “and said, ‘The nomination is yours, but you have to decide now,’ I know you would say no.”
“In my heart,” I told Hunter, “I honestly believe that if we run we have a really good chance of winning.”
Hunter went on to remind me that our family, devastated or not, would grow closer and stronger under the pressure of a presidential campaign.
We both knew that the family had always been at its best when we had a clear purpose to unify around, especially when we were up against long odds. But the toll of losing Beau made this an entirely new circumstance. I just wasn’t sure that I was emotionally ready and up to the task, which would be an enormous undertaking even in the best of circumstances.
* * *
We were in Kiawah at just after ten o’clock on the morning of June 26, preparing for the ride to the memorial service in Charleston, when the news broke. “A historic day here at the Supreme Court,” came the report from CNN, from just outside the court. “You can probably hear gay rights advocates to my right cheering this decision, authored by Justice Kennedy, saying that the right to marriage is a fundamental right and gays and lesbians cannot be excluded from that right. In this broad ruling by Justice Kennedy, he says ‘the right to marry is a fundamental right,’ and same-sex couples may not be deprived of liberty, or that right to marriage. So again, ruling today that same-sex marriage is a nationwide constitutional right. This is one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time and this is what gay rights advocates have been hoping for for decades.”
The decision was 5–4. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was sworn in during the final year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was not only the swing vote but also the author of the majority opinion in the landmark decision. I took some real pride in the ruling, in part because I had been the Judiciary Committee chairman who had presided over Kennedy’s confirmation hearings. Anthony Kennedy wasn’t Reagan’s first choice. He was only nominated after the confirmation hearings for Reagan’s original pick, Robert Bork, had revealed Bork to be so narrow in his reading of the fundamental privacy rights afforded by the Constitution that the Senate had rejected him, 58–42. The no votes included six from Reagan’s own party. I had worked hard in that hearing to be fair to Bork, who was a distinguished jurist and a remarkably intelligent man. But I also worked hard to show that Judge Bork’s views and his record of jurisprudence were at odds with how most Americans viewed our Constitution. Judge Bork believed there were no individual rights in the Constitution that were not literally written into the document itself. The Constitution did not speak explicitly of the right to privacy, or the right to use contraception, or the right of women to be treated equally under the law, or the right to marry somebody of the same sex, so it required a legislature to grant those rights. Courts, in Bork’s view, had to defer to the political process in all those matters. Majority rules.
I could tell from Anthony Kennedy’s testimony in his nomination hearing that he would have a much more generous reading of the Constitution and a much more expansive view of individual rights and equality under the law, and history has shown that to be the case. His majority o
pinion in the 2015 gay marriage case was the high mark of his three decades on the court.
The fight for marriage equality was a long, slow battle that required incredible moral and physical courage on the part of really brave gay men and women. Just being public about who they were was an act of courage until not so long ago. Gays and lesbians who came out, stood up, and made their case for equal treatment and equal rights risked a hell of a lot. They demanded their rights in the face of flat-out hatred in a few quarters, which made them prey to physical and emotional abuse. I remember that during the awful scourge of AIDS, many in the conservative fundamentalist clergy and many right-wing officials cruelly claimed that the disease killing thousands of young gay men every year was a judgment from God. But the toughest obstacle gays and lesbians faced was probably not hatred; it was the ignorance of most of their fellow citizens. It took a long time for Americans to begin to understand the simple and obvious truth that gay men and women are overwhelmingly good, decent, honorable people who want and deserve the same rights as anyone else. I didn’t fully grasp the pervasiveness of the difficulty they faced until one night in the 1990s. I was a senator then, and got on a train to go back to Wilmington after a Judiciary Committee hearing about gays in the military. One of the men servicing the snack bar of the Amtrak train, a guy I had known for years, had been watching the proceedings and was really demoralized by some of the talk he heard from the antigay crowd. “You know, Senator,” he said to me, “I’m gay.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.
“I’ve got two sons, and one is also gay,” he told me. “And you know what gets me about these guys? They think that this is a ‘behavior.’ They think we woke up one morning and said, ‘Goddamn, wouldn’t it be great to be gay? Wouldn’t it be great to be gay? Goddamn, this will make life easier. Wouldn’t it be wonderful. I think I’ll be gay.’”
I also remember watching a Senate colleague struggle to comprehend the testimony of Jeffrey Levi, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who came to provide testimony at a Judiciary Committee hearing in 1986. Levi made one of the last appearances of the many representatives from outside groups who came in to offer statements at the tail end of the confirmation hearings for William Rehnquist’s nomination to be chief justice.
By the time Levi began his statement, Strom Thurmond and I were the only two committee members left at the hearing—the only two there when the witness presented the statistic that about 10 percent of the American population is gay, which means something like thirty million Americans. Strom was genuinely stunned. I think the eighty-four-year-old senator, who had been in elective office since 1933, truly believed he had never known a gay person. “Joe,” Strom said to me during Levi’s statement, “is that true?” I quietly whispered to Strom that some experts did argue that up to 10 percent of the population is gay.
Strom turned to the young, well-spoken, conservatively dressed witness. “Are you sure that figure is correct?” he asked. Levi then cited the statistics developed a generation earlier by renowned sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Strom had a hard time processing this fact and wandered down a line of questioning that was not intended to be mean-spirited, but was nonetheless wounding.
“Does your organization advocate any kind of treatment for gays and lesbians to see if they can change them and make them normal like other people?”
“Well, Senator, we consider ourselves to be quite normal, thank you. We just happen to be different from other people. And the beauty of American society is that, ultimately, we do accept all differences of behavior and viewpoint.… It is—all the responsible medical community no longer considers homosexuality to be an illness but rather something that is just a variation of standard behavior.”
“You don’t think gays and lesbians are subject to change, or you don’t think they could—”
“No more so, Senator, than—”
“—you don’t think they could be converted so they’d be like other people, in some way?”
“Well, we think we are like other people, with one small exception. And unfortunately, it’s the rest of society that makes a big deal out of that exception.”
“A small exception? It’s a pretty big exception, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, society makes it a big exception.”
Strom put his hand over his microphone and turned to me. “I think I should go,” he said, “shouldn’t I?”
Well, as of June 26, 2015, the law of the land would no longer make exceptions in recognizing marriage. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death,” Kennedy had written in the opinion he read aloud at the Supreme Court that morning. “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
I cannot claim to have risked much in advocating equality for the LGBT community. But I felt incredibly proud that day to have played some role in the gay marriage decision. I thought of Beau, who as attorney general of Delaware made a point of attending a same-sex wedding on July 1, 2013, the day marriage equality was implemented in our state. He had also filed a legal brief supporting marriage equality in a case before the Ninth Circuit back in the fall of 2013, when he was just finishing his first round of radiation and chemotherapy. A few months later he announced that Delaware would recognize same-sex marriages performed in Utah in the narrow window of time when it was legal there. “Marriage equality is the law in Delaware,” he had said, “and I strongly believe that individuals outside our state borders should be equally free to choose whom to love and whom to spend their lives with.”
I also thought of my dad that morning in Kiawah, and one of the greatest life lessons he taught me, when I was a teenager. We were at a traffic light in downtown Wilmington, and my dad and I caught a glimpse of two men on a nearby corner. They embraced, kissed each other, and then headed off separately to face their days—as I supposed thousands of husbands and wives all over the city did every morning. I just turned and looked at my dad for an explanation. “Joey, it’s simple,” my dad told me. “They love each other.”
* * *
Barack spoke at the memorial service in Charleston later that afternoon, and he did it magnificently. I’m not sure I ever saw him make a better speech. I focused my own attention on physically embracing the victims’ families I had already spoken to, to offer what comfort I could. And at the funeral, after meeting the families in person, I decided I wanted to go back to Charleston two days later for the regular Sunday services at Emanuel AME Church. I didn’t want to draw attention to my attendance, so we contacted an old friend and longtime supporter, the Reverend Joseph Darby, the presiding elder of the AME churches in a nearby district. Reverend Darby advised us on how to arrange with Emanuel’s interim pastor for me to go in quietly and without notice. Reverend Darby understood why I wanted to be there without my having to tell him. This congregation was hurting and in need, and I knew my showing up so soon after my son’s death could be some source of strength for the Emanuel family. I also knew it would give me a sense of solace to be of comfort to these people in pain. The act of consoling had always made me feel a little better, and I was hungry to feel better.
More than that, I think, I really wanted to feel the extraordinary embrace of Emanuel AME Church and its parishioners. I was in need of their strength. I was in need of their grace. Read about the history of that church and the aftermath of its awful new tragedy and you will understand why. Mother Emanuel had been a haven for its flock and a bulwark against the predations of slavery and racial discrimination for nearly two hundred years. The church was struggling to keep hold of the younger community, and losing membership in 2015, but it had not lost its way. The people of Emanuel I had read about, and the parishioners I had
met at the memorial a couple of days earlier, seemed free of the emotional scar tissue of bitterness and cynicism one would have expected from people who had been struggling so long against others who were determined to hate them. I had been awestruck by their capacity for forgiveness, even for a murderer who remorselessly shot and killed nine of their best and most beloved. The daughter of one of the victims had gone to the bond hearing to talk to her mother’s killer. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again,” Nadine Collier said of her mother, as the gunman stared blankly. “But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives you. And I forgive you.”
The mother of the youngest victim was having a harder time with forgiveness. Felicia Sanders had been there in the room, cowering in fear, and heard her son’s last words. “You don’t have to do this,” he had said to the killer. “We mean you no harm.”
“I have to do this,” the gunman said, before he shot Felicia’s twenty-six-year-old son. “I have to finish my mission.”
Felicia Sanders admitted to struggling. “With me, forgiveness is a process,” she would say. “Sometimes I have to have a prodding from God to forgive people for small things. When it comes to something this magnificent, it would be a whole process for me.” There was an incredible grace, to me, in her effort.
Hunter wanted to come with me, so we drove over that Sunday morning and pinned EMANUEL 9 ribbons onto our lapels on the way into the church. Emanuel was overflowing that day, and when the pastor who had replaced Reverend Pinckney, Norvel Goff Sr., called on all visitors to stand, I was surprised by how many worshippers got up on their feet. People from all over the country had come to share fellowship and show support to that church family. There were as many white visitors as black at the church that morning. The shooter had not incited a race war; quite the opposite: he had incited an incredible outpouring of support for Emanuel among both whites and blacks.
