Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  Reverend Goff asked me to say a few words that morning. “I wish I could say something that would ease the pain of the families and of the church,” I told them. “But I know from experience, and I was reminded of it again twenty-nine days ago, that no words can mend a broken heart. No music can fill the gaping void.… And sometimes, as all preachers in here know, sometimes even faith leaves you just for a second. Sometimes you doubt.… There’s a famous expression that says faith sees best in the dark, and for the nine families, this is a very dark, dark time.”

  I had not planned to make any sort of speech, but I had made some notes just in case, and was ready with a psalm that had given me comfort:

  Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.

  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep.

  You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.

  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

  People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

  “I pray, I pray that the families will find refuge in the shadow of His wings, and I pray that the love that all of you have shown to them, and people around the country to me, will help mend the broken hearts of their families and mine.”

  When the service was done Reverend Goff, Reverend Darby and his wife, and Charleston’s mayor, Joe Riley, wanted to take me on a brief tour. The sun was high and bright against the white church front when we got outside, sparkling down on a memorial display festooned with flowers and notes people had dropped off in the days after the shooting. We spent some time out front, looking at the still pageant of sympathy. I was about to leave when Mayor Riley grabbed me and said there was something else he wanted me to see, and he guided us all around the side and into the lower entrance of the church, down six steps and toward Clementa Pinckney’s office. The reverend’s wife and his six-year-old daughter had hidden in that office during the massacre. To the right and fifteen or twenty feet away I could see the large fellowship hall where the Bible study group met. Nine good people had been killed on this floor, right beneath the pews, just eleven days earlier, but this parish persevered. Church members had filled in the bullet holes with putty and continued the regular Wednesday night Bible study without missing a single week. One hundred and fifty people showed up for the Bible class the first Wednesday after the massacre. “This territory belongs to God,” Reverend Goff had told the world.

  I could feel emotion rising in my throat as I walked by. I had an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the people of Emanuel and all the people who had come to support them or sent money and prayers. I was convinced the show of public support for Emanuel was emboldening political leaders in South Carolina to step up and match their bravery and humanity. I really did believe that some good could come from this tragedy, and was heartened to see that politicians on both sides of the aisle in the state legislature were already talking about removing from their capitol grounds one of the most hurtful symbols to black southerners—the Confederate flag. “I found myself trying to defend the Confederate flag,” Republican state senator Paul Thurmond, son of the onetime arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, had said. “How do you defend it? I flat-out couldn’t.”

  Mayor Riley kept me moving, right into Reverend Pinckney’s office. On Pinckney’s wall, right where he had put it, was a picture that brought me up short. It was a photograph of the reverend and me together, seven months earlier, when he had helped organize an event to rally local clergy right before the 2014 midterm elections. We were both smiling that day. Clementa Pinckney had so much ahead of him that last time we were together. Now he was gone.

  * * *

  I was up early the next morning and decided to go out for a bike ride on the hard sand beach. The weather was nearly perfect, as it had been for our entire trip to South Carolina—scattered clouds appeared on occasion but passed on the wind. There was a gentle breeze on my face as I rode up the beach, beyond the line of private houses, then beyond the Ocean Course Clubhouse and all the way to the end of the good riding, where the sand softened up and the tree line began to press nearer the water. The Secret Service agents were well back, trailing me in their dune buggies. Nobody else was around. And suddenly I remembered riding out to this very spot with Beau the last time he was down here with us. “Dad,” he had said that day. “Let’s stop and sit down here.” And so we sat, the two of us, just breathing it in. “Look, Dad, isn’t it magnificent?” he had said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  And it was like I could hear him talking to me again. Dad, let’s stop and sit down. I got off my bike and found myself standing at what felt like the edge of the earth—just ocean and beach and woodlands. It was magnificent. I found myself suddenly overwhelmed. I could feel my throat constrict. My breath came shorter and shorter. I turned my back to the agents, looked out at the vastness of the ocean to one side and the darkness of the woods to the other, sat down on the sand, and sobbed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Run, Joe, Run

  A story ran in the Wall Street Journal on our last day in South Carolina. WILL HE RUN? the headline read. BIDEN SPECULATION MOUNTS. “It’s no secret that Beau wanted him to run,” was how the Journal quoted one of my longtime friends and political supporters. “If he does what Beau wanted him to do, he’ll run.” The story didn’t get much traction in the press, for which I was grateful, because I was really struggling. In the immediate aftermath of Beau’s passing, just thinking about running for president was beyond me. “Everything we talked about is over,” I had said to my chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who had been overseeing my campaign planning along with Mike Donilon.

  Running for the Democratic nomination was all tied up with Beau. Was all tied up with the entire family. Before he got sick, Beau felt strongly that I should run, as did Hunt. Jill and Ashley had been very supportive. We all knew how much was at stake for the country, and we all believed I was best equipped to finish the job Barack and I had started. If Beau had never gotten sick, we would already be running. This was something we would have done together, with enthusiasm. Remember, Dad, Beau would be saying. Home base. Home base. The thought of doing it without him was painful. But as the days passed, the idea of not running started to feel like letting him down, like letting everybody down. Hunt still thought the race would give us purpose—something big to focus on that would help us deal with our profound sorrow. Jill thought we should continue to consider the possibility. I sometimes reflected on the courage Beau showed in his battle with an almost certainly unbeatable foe. “Beau lost his fight,” one of the doctors at Anderson had said, “but he was never defeated.” I wanted to be able to summon the courage to live up to Beau’s example. But I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find the emotional energy, and I knew from previous experience that grief is a process that respects no schedule and no timetable. I would be ready when I was ready, if I was ready, and not before. I had no idea when that would be.

  But I also knew that if there was any chance for me to run, the complicated mechanics of mounting a campaign had to be considered. So I asked Mike and Steve to take some time outside of their regular day jobs to do a serious analysis. Was there still a path? Could we actually have a campaign ready in time to win? It didn’t take them much time to restart the process. The truth is, we had begun talking seriously about the 2016 presidential race in the summer of 2013. When Steve dropped me off at the train station for the August vacation that year, we had already developed a message and a game plan we were going to begin to execute. But just a few days later Jill and I and the entire family had found ourselves at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center absorbing the news of Beau’s diagnosis, and we had put everything on hold.

  Now Mike and Steve got to work quickly, and by the second week of July, after conferring with other advisers, they had made a serious assessment of the current state of the race and whether there was still an opening for me. We had a series of meetings in the few blank spaces in my official calendar ov
er three days to discuss whether or not it was even plausible. The group was my most trusted circle only: Jill, Hunter, and Ashley; my sister Val; my longtime friend and chief of staff in my early Senate days, Ted Kaufman; Steve and Mike. The consensus was that the race was still wide open, and if we did well in the early states we could compete all the way to the end and had a good chance of winning the nomination. We thought there was enough time to put together the money and the ground game to compete in the four early states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. And if we did as well as we hoped, we knew there would be no problem raising money for the rest of the campaign. Somebody pointed out that defeat, especially a big defeat of a sitting vice president, would be a real hit to my legacy. “There’s no romantic dignity in losing,” they said. “Understand, if you lose, it will be a big loss.”

  I just took it in. I understood the difference between an electoral loss and real loss. I wasn’t afraid of losing a political race. And I believed that if I could muster the courage to run I’d be the best-qualified, most capable person in the field. The instinct in the room was to keep alive the possibility of a run.

  My small team got to work on the nuts and bolts of a presidential campaign: field staff, fund-raising, and message. Greg Schultz, who had run Ohio for Obama-Biden and knew the best organizers around the country, volunteered to put together a field operation; and Michael Schrum, the former deputy national finance director at the DNC, volunteered to organize a staff to develop a fund-raising plan. Mike Donilon already had a clear idea of what the message should be—it wasn’t fundamentally different from the message we had developed two years earlier—and he was going to turn it into an announcement speech. It would also function as the mission statement: here is why I am running and here is why I believe in the mission so deeply. “If you can’t write a good announcement speech,” somebody said, “you shouldn’t run.”

  I think we all emerged from those meetings with a belief that we still had enough time and that we needed to be moving forward. But it didn’t take me long to realize how far away I was from being emotionally ready for a presidential campaign, and how hard the decision to run was going to be. I flew out west on July 21 to speak at a pair of Democratic party fund-raisers, and when we touched down at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, there was a group of military personnel and their families waving hello in the distance. They were about seventy yards away, so I jogged over to greet them. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for your service.” As I was shaking hands, I heard a voice in the back say, “Major Beau Biden, sir! Iraq, sir! Served with him, sir! Good soldier, sir! Good man!” I felt a lump rise in my throat. My breathing suddenly became shallower and my voice cracked. I was afraid I would be overwhelmed by emotion, and I think the audience could see it. I waved and hustled over to the car. This was no way for a presidential candidate to act in public.

  Six days later I flew to Rochester, New York, to join Governor Andrew Cuomo in announcing a new investment in cutting-edge technology that could be used for alternative energy, medicine, construction, and manufacturing. And then I went to New York City to stand with him as he announced his extensive plans to remake LaGuardia Airport. I spent five hours that day with Andrew Cuomo, and the visit ended up being more personal than political. He understood the decision I was wrestling with, because he had seen his father, Governor Mario Cuomo, struggle over his decision about whether to run for president. Mario had died earlier that year, so he was much on Andrew’s mind. Andrew had also known Beau well; he had been elected attorney general of New York the same day Beau had been elected attorney general of Delaware. They had worked together and become friends. Andrew told me he and Beau used to commiserate about being aspiring politicians who were also the sons of well-known officeholders. They were both proud of us, proud to be our sons, but they agreed it made it hard to cut their own path. He told me they used to laugh about trying to “manage” their fathers, and joked about how demanding we could be, especially about our speeches. “My father always sought perfection,” Andrew told me that day. “If it wasn’t perfect—if the speech couldn’t sing—he didn’t want to give it. No matter what it was. If he was going to go out and speak to thirty people it mattered to him. And Beau said you were the same way.”

  I had always felt a kinship with Mario Cuomo. When I heard him give his celebrated speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, I remember thinking how much of his sense of fairness and justice and his disdain for those who abused their power flowed, like mine, from the teachings of the Catholic Church. I had told his family at his wake in January, and I had said it before in public, that Mario Cuomo was one of the few officeholders who I ever looked at and thought, whoa, this guy might be better than me.

  And I had a growing appreciation for the difficulty of Mario’s deliberations about running for president; no matter what the outside world was saying, for or against, the final decision had to feel right for him. Just as my decision would have to feel right for me. What Andrew did express to me that day at the end of July was that his father never truly made peace with declining to seek the presidency. “Whatever decision you make, make sure you won’t regret it,” he told me. “Because you’ll live with it the rest of your life.”

  * * *

  “Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his associates have begun to actively explore a possible presidential campaign, which would upend the Democratic field and deliver a direct threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton, several people who have spoken to Mr. Biden or his closest advisers say,” read the lead of the front-page story on the New York Times on August 2. The news story relied on a column published the same day by the paper’s own Maureen Dowd, who accurately reported that Beau had urged me to run. But the front-page news story, unlike Maureen, inaccurately portrayed this as a deathbed scene, with Beau speaking to me as he “lay dying.” (They formally corrected it, but only months later.) The calls from outsiders, both in favor of my running and against, multiplied in the following days.

  A few days after the story ran, Mike brought me a polished new draft of the announcement speech we had written, and it was all there in twenty-five hundred words—the mission statement. This would be a campaign based on one very basic principle: “We’re one America,” it read, “bound together in this great experiment of equality and opportunity and democracy. And everyone—and I mean everyone—is in on the deal.”

  We had to speak to those who felt left behind. They had to know we got their despair. It never ceased to amaze me the reaction I got when I would tell audiences that the longest walk a parent ever had to make was up a short flight of stairs to tell their son or daughter they were going to have to move because they couldn’t find work or the bank was taking the house. I would tell them how my dad made that awful walk, and to just think of how many people had been forced to do the same in recent years. Tears would well up in so many eyes. It was real. They were living it.

  We also had to speak to folks who were doing well. I took a lot of ridicule for saying rich folks were just as patriotic as anyone else. But I meant it. I had no doubt that most wealthy Americans were willing to forgo one more tax break in order to better educate our children, or to rebuild this nation’s infrastructure, or to provide decent health care to everybody who needs it. They know that the opportunity to get richer isn’t the whole deal. Lifting up their country is part of the deal, too.

  We had to remind corporate America and Wall Street that just taking care of themselves and their shareholders wasn’t good enough. They had a responsibility to their workers, their communities, and their country, too. Not to shame them, not to harangue them, but to remind them that a long history of shared prosperity and a secure and growing middle class is why America has had the most stable political democracy in the world. If we lose that—and we were losing it—no amount of money will hold back the anger and the pitchforks. This wasn’t just about profits and economics. This was about the social stability of this nation.

&nb
sp; And most of all, we had to speak to the great middle class of the nation. And not just to their concerns, but to their aspirations, too. Revitalizing the hopes of the middle class—not shrinking them—was what this campaign was all about.

  To speak to the middle class, I felt we had to do one more thing: Biden for President was going to reject the super PAC system. It was tempting to play the game because we would be getting such a late start. And for the first time in all my years of campaigning, I knew there was big money out there for me. But I also knew people were sick of it all. “We the People” didn’t ring so true anymore. It was more like “We the Donors.” And everybody understood that in a system awash with money, the middle class didn’t have a fighting chance. Rejecting super PAC money wasn’t a hardship for me. It felt like coming full circle. One of the very first bills I wrote as a United States senator was for public funding of elections. Now, foolhardy or not, I was going to try to upend the new money rush that was overwhelming our politics.

  I was sure this message would stand out, because the campaign I was witnessing in the summer of 2015 was so negative, so dreary, so divisive, so personal. So small. I didn’t buy the woe-is-me attitude about our national prospects that was being peddled by the other candidates. We had come through so much as a nation, and we were heading in the right direction. The country had dug out of an incredible hole in the previous six years, thanks to President Obama. Our administration had helped to create thirteen million new jobs and overseen a record sixty-seven straight months of private-sector job creation. The nation’s deficit had been cut in half. And we were finally moving from recovery to resurgence; the country was poised to take off.