Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

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  For my family

  the curious feeling

  swam through him

  that everything

  was

  beautiful

  there,

  that it would always

  stay beautiful

  there.

  —FROM “NIRVANA,”

  BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  PROLOGUE “WHERE’S HUNTER?”

  As I began writing this book from the relative calm of my home office, in November 2019, I sat in the center of a political firestorm, the consequences of which could change the course of history.

  The president of the United States was smearing me almost daily from the South Lawn of the White House. He invoked my name at rallies to incite his base. “Where’s Hunter?” replaced “Lock her up!” as his go-to hype line. If you wanted, you could even buy a WHERE’S HUNTER? T-shirt directly from his campaign website—twenty-five dollars, sizes small to 3XL.

  Not long after that call to arms became part of his stock repertoire, supporters sporting blood-red MAGA caps appeared outside the driveway gate of the private house I was renting in Los Angeles with my wife, Melissa, then five months pregnant. They snarled through bullhorns and waved posters depicting me as the titular character from Where’s Waldo? Red hats and photographers followed us in cars. We called the police, as did some of our neighbors, to shoo them away. Yet threats—including an anonymous text to one of my daughters at school, warning her that they knew where I lived—forced us to seek a safer address. Melissa was scared to death—for her, for us, for our baby.

  I became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be reelected. He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine. He did all this while his shadow foreign policy, led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, unraveled in plain sight.

  It was a predictable enough tactic, straight from the playbook of his dark-arts mentor, Roy Cohn, the grand wizard of McCarthyism. I expected the president to get far more personal far earlier to exploit the demons and addictions I’ve dealt with for years. Early on, at least, he ceded that tactic to his trolls. One morning as I was working on the book, I looked up at a TV screen to see Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and Trump henchman, read a magazine excerpt that detailed my addiction straight into the record of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on articles of impeachment.

  “I don’t want to make light of anybody’s substance abuse issues…” Gaetz said, snickering for the cameras as he made light of my substance abuse issues.

  “Again, I’m not… casting any judgment on any challenges someone goes through in their personal life,” Gaetz continued, as he cast judgment on my personal life.

  This from someone once arrested for driving under the influence in his daddy’s BMW, and who later had the charges mysteriously dropped. Anything to keep the reality-TV narrative running.

  None of that matters in an up-is-down, Orwellian political climate. Trump believed that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he could dispatch any candidate of decency from either party—all while diverting attention from his own corrupt behavior.

  Where’s Hunter?

  I’m right here. I’ve faced and survived worse. I’ve known the extremes of success and ruin. With my mother and baby sister killed in a car accident when I was two, my father suffering a life-threatening brain aneurysm and embolism in his forties, and my brother dying way too young from a horrible brain cancer, I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.

  I’m not going anywhere. I’m not a curio or sideshow to a moment in history, as all the cartoonish attacks try to paint me. I’m not Billy Carter or Roger Clinton, God bless them. I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr.—I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own. This book will establish that.

  For the record:

  I’m a fifty-one-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters, two in college and one who graduated last year from law school, and now a year-old son. I earned degrees from Yale Law and Georgetown, where I’ve also taught in the master’s program of the School of Foreign Service.

  I’ve been a senior executive at one of the country’s largest financial institutions (since acquired by Bank of America), founded my own multinational firms, and worked as counsel for Boies Schiller Flexner, which represents many of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the world.

  I’ve served on the board of directors at Amtrak (appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) and chaired the board of the nonprofit World Food Program USA, part of the largest hunger-relief mission on the planet. As part of my voluntary position for the WFP, I traveled to refugee camps and areas devastated by natural disasters around the globe—Syria, Kenya, the Philippines. I’ve sat with traumatized families inside homes fashioned out of aluminum shipping containers, then briefed members of Congress, or talked directly with heads of state, about how best to provide swift, life-saving relief.

  Before that, I lobbied for Jesuit universities. I helped secure funding for mobile dental clinics in underserved Detroit, after-school training programs for teachers in lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and a mental health facility for underprivileged and disabled veterans in Cincinnati.

  My point: I’ve done serious work for serious people. There’s no question that my last name has opened doors, but my qualifications and accomplishments speak for themselves. That those accomplishments sometimes crossed my father’s spheres of influence during his two terms as vice president—how could they not? What I did misjudge, however, was the notion that Trump would become president and, once in office, act with impunity and vengeance for his political gain.

  That’s on me. That’s on all of us.

  Then there is this:

  I’m also an alcoholic and a drug addict. I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.

  That deep descent came not long after I hugged my brother, Beau, the best friend I’ve ever had and the person I loved most in the world, as he took his last breath. Beau and I talked virtually every day of our lives. While we argued as adults almost as much as we laughed, we never ended a conversation without one of us saying, “I love you,” and the other responding, “I love you, too.”

  After Beau died, I never felt more alone. I lost hope.

  * * *

  I’ve since pulled out of that dark, bleak hole. It’s an outcome that was unthinkable in early 2019. My recovery never could have happened without the unconditional love of my father and the everlasting love of my brother, which has carried on after his death.

  The love between me and my father and Beau—the most profound love I’ve ever kno
wn—is at the heart of this memoir. It’s a love that allowed me to continue these last five years in the midst of both personal demons and pressure from the outside world writ large, including a president’s unhinged fury.

  It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive. It carries on no matter what. My dad has often said that Beau was his soul and I am his heart. That about nails it.

  I thought of those words often as they related to my life. Beau was my soul, too. I’ve learned that it’s conceivable to go on living without a soul as long as your heart is still beating. But figuring out how to live when your soul has been ripped from you—when it has been so thoroughly extinguished that you find yourself buying crack in the middle of the night behind a gas station in Nashville, Tennessee, or craving the tiny liquor bottles in your hotel minibar while sitting in a palace in Amman with the king of Jordan—well, that’s a more problematic process.

  There are millions of others still living in the dark place where I was, or far worse. Their circumstances might be different, their resources far fewer, but the pain, shame, and hopelessness of addiction are the same for everyone. I lived in those crack motels. I spent time with “those” people—rode with them, scoured the streets with them, got high as a fucking kite with them. It left me with an overwhelming empathy for those struggling just to make it from one moment to the next.

  Yet even in the depths of my addiction, when I washed up in the most wretched places, I found extraordinary things. Generosities were extended to me by people society considers untouchables. I finally understood how we are all connected by a common humanity, if not also by a common Maker.

  Mine is an unlikely résumé for this sort of confession. Believe me, I get it. Yet as desperate, dangerous, and lunatic as that résumé often is, it also teems with basic, affirming connections.

  I want those still living in the black hole of alcoholism and drug abuse to see themselves in my plight and then to take hope in my escape, at least so far. We’re all alone in our addiction. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, who your friends are, the family you come from. In the end, we all have to deal with it ourselves—first one day, then another one, and then the next.

  And I want to illuminate, with honesty and humility and not just a little awe, how family love was my only effective defense against the many demons I ran up against.

  * * *

  Writing this book wasn’t easy. Sometimes it was cathartic; other times it was triggering. I’ve pushed away from my desk more than once while putting down thoughts about my last four years wandering the wilderness of alcoholism and crack addiction—memories too breathtaking, too disturbing, or still too close not to give me pause. There were times when I literally trembled, felt my stomach clench and my forehead perspire in too-familiar ways.

  When I was not quite a year sober, as I worked on the early parts of this book, crack remained the first thing I thought about every morning when I woke up. I became like some feverish war reenactor, meticulously going through the rituals of my addiction, pathetic step by pathetic step—minus the drug, and with Melissa asleep beside me. I reached an arm over to the side table next to the bed and fumbled around for a piece of crack. I imagined finding one, then imagined inserting it into a pipe, drawing it to my lips, igniting it with a lighter, and then experiencing the sensation of complete and utter well-being. It was the most alluring, most enticing…

  Then I’d catch myself and stop. Melissa would awaken and a new day, free from all that, would begin. My dad would call from a primary stop in Iowa or Texas or Pennsylvania. My oldest daughter would call from law school in New York, asking me again if I’d read the paper she’d sent for me to look over. A hawk would whirl above the canyon outside my window, teasingly, tauntingly, beautifully, and all I could think of was Beau. Yet as far as I’d come, those old, bad days never felt far away.

  This is the story of my journey, from there to here.

  CHAPTER ONE SEVENTEEN MINUTES

  We took Beau off life support late on the morning of May 29, 2015. He was unresponsive and barely breathing. Doctors in the critical care unit of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, told us he would pass within hours of their removing his tracheostomy tube. I knew he would hold on longer—that was Beau. So I sat at my big brother’s bedside and held his hand.

  A throng of family stood by as well—twenty-four Bidens slipping in and out of the room, wandering the hospital’s halls, lost in thought, waiting. I didn’t leave Beau’s side.

  The morning seeped into the afternoon, then into the evening, then late into the night. The sun came back up, its light scarcely leaking through the room’s drawn shades. It was a confusing, excruciating time: I wished for a miracle and for an end to my brother’s suffering, both in the same prayer.

  More hours crawled past. I talked to Beau continuously. I whispered in his ear how much I loved him. I told him that I knew how much he loved me. I told him we would always be together, that nothing could ever separate us. I told him how proud of him I was, how fiercely he had fought to hold on, through surgeries and radiation and a final experimental procedure, in which an engineered virus was injected directly into his tumor—directly into his brain.

  He never stood a chance.

  He was forty-six.

  Yet from the moment of his diagnosis less than two years earlier, and throughout those many procedures, Beau’s mantra to me became two words: “Beautiful things.” He insisted that when he got well, we would dedicate our lives to appreciating and cultivating the world’s boundless beauty. “Beautiful things” became a catchall for relationships and places and moments—for everything. Once this was over, he said, we would start a law firm together and work on only “beautiful things.” We would rock on the porch of our parents’ house and look out at the “beautiful things” spread before us. We would luxuriate in the “beautiful things” our children and families became during each incremental passage along the way.

  It was our code for a renewed outlook on life. We would never again let ourselves get too tired, too distracted, too cynical, too thrown off course by whatever blindsiding hurdle life threw in our way, to look, to see, to love.

  * * *

  “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  I’ve had a single flash of memory from the earliest and most consequential moment of my life. I can’t be sure how much of it is a composite of family stories and news accounts I’ve heard or read through the years, and how much of it is actual repressed memory finally trickling up to the fore.

  But it’s vivid.

  It is December 18, 1972. My dad has just won the race for junior U.S. senator from Delaware—he turned thirty three weeks after the election, barely beating the Senate’s age requirement before taking his oath in January. He is in Washington, DC, that day to interview staff for his new office. My mother, Neilia, beautiful and brilliant and also only thirty, has taken me; my big brother, Beau; and our baby sister, Naomi, Christmas-tree shopping near our fixer-upper house in Wilmington.

  Beau is almost four. I’m almost three. We were born a year and a day apart—virtually Irish twins.

  In my mind’s eye, this is what happens next:

  I’m seated in the back of our roomy white Chevy station wagon, behind my mother. Beau is back there with me, behind Naomi, whom we both call Caspy—pale, plump, and seeming to have appeared in our family out of nowhere thirteen months earlier, she was nicknamed after one of our favorite cartoon characters, Casper the Friendly Ghost. She’s sound asleep in the front passenger seat, tucked into a bassinet.

  Suddenly, I see my mother’s head turn to the right. I don’t remember anything else about her profile: the look in her eye, the expression of her mouth. Her head simply swings. At that same moment, my brother dives—or is hurtled—straight toward me.

  That’s it. It’s quick and convulsive and chaotic: as our
mother eased the car into a four-way intersection, we were broadsided by a tractor trailer carrying corncobs.

  My mother and little sister were killed almost instantly. Beau was pulled from the wreckage with a broken leg and myriad other injuries. I suffered a severe skull fracture.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital with Beau in the bed next to mine, bandaged and in traction, looking like he’s just been clobbered in a playground brawl. He’s mouthing three words to me, over and over:

  “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  That’s our origin story. Beau became my best friend, my soul mate, and my polestar since those virtually first conscious moments of my life.

  Three weeks later, inside our hospital room, Dad was sworn into the Senate.

  * * *

  Beau was Delaware’s two-term attorney general and father of a young daughter and son when doctors diagnosed him with glioblastoma multiforme—brain cancer.

  It likely had incubated inside him for at least the previous three years. In the fall of 2010, about a year after he returned from deployment in Iraq, Beau complained of headaches, numbness, and paralysis. At the time, doctors attributed his symptoms to a stroke.

  We monitored Beau’s progress after that. Something seemed off. Beau would joke to friends that all of a sudden he heard music. It wasn’t a joke to me: it was eerie. He couldn’t figure it out, but looking back I’m sure it was the tumor impinging on a part of his brain that caused auditory hallucinations—a growth touching a neuron that triggered another neuron, and suddenly you’re hearing Johnny Cash playing in the background. That’s what Beau was experiencing.

  Finally, on a warm early evening in August 2013, inside a small-town hospital in Michigan City, Indiana, I watched in horror as Beau endured a grand mal seizure. It confirmed that more sinister forces were at work. The day before, Beau had made the annual eleven-hour car trek from Delaware with his wife and kids to vacation with me and my family on Lake Michigan, not far from where my then-wife, Kathleen, grew up. I’d arrived at the summer house that day after spending the weekend serving in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Norfolk, Virginia, and was changing clothes to meet the whole crew at Kathleen’s cousin’s house, a block away, when I spotted Beau and our families walking back up the driveway. Everyone around him was in a panic.