Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  I was homesick. Dad knew it. He would call with some excuse he made up about needing to remain overnight in Washington and invite to me stay with him at a hotel near the Capitol, where we’d have dinner and hang out. It was the only thing that made my first few months bearable. Though things got better, I never really settled in at Georgetown.

  I drank, but usually not more than everybody else. I had a natural governor to help keep it in check: I didn’t have the money to drink a lot in bars, though I did find ways around that. At the Tombs, a popular student spot, if you had enough money to buy a pitcher and knew the bartender, you could keep getting the pitcher refilled. There were times I arrived for brunch with friends and didn’t leave until 2 a.m.

  I spent most free weekends visiting Beau at Penn or working a part-time job parking cars for a valet company. I also became friends with several young, progressive Jesuit priests and got involved in various campus groups. These included Agape, a retreat program for spirituality; and the school’s Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, one of the country’s first justice reform groups for immigrants.

  Between my junior and senior years, I spent a month in Belize with the Jesuit International Volunteers—a kind of Jesuit-led blend of the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. With a dedicated priest named Father Dziak and nine other students, we established a summer camp program for disadvantaged children in the little coastal town of Dangriga that’s now taught in several other countries.

  Another priest, Bill Watson, encouraged me to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for a year in the United States after I graduated, pointing out that there were communities in just as much need here as there were internationally. I signed up straightaway and was slotted to serve on an Indian reservation in Washington State. The four student volunteers who had been there the previous year all chose to stay, however, so I was offered a spot at a church in Portland, Oregon, instead.

  I worked out of a small food bank in the church basement. I remember single mothers coming in who didn’t have food for the week, or had their utilities shut off, or were being threatened with eviction. I’d advocate for them by calling the utilities to get their heat turned back on, or talk with social services to make sure their families weren’t tossed out of their homes. I’d later deliver essential groceries from our food closet, mostly to seniors and mothers with small children who had no transportation. In the afternoons, I’d help with an after-school program for kids between grades three and six whose parents would then pick them up after work.

  When the last kid left, I’d take a bus across town to another church that housed a socialization center for adults with intellectual disabilities, many of whom were veterans. I hung around there because of the pretty blond volunteer from Chicago who ran it: Kathleen Buhle.

  We’d met during orientation. There were three Jesuit volunteer houses in Portland, each with six to eight volunteers. We’d all get together all the time. We’d pool our food allowances for potlucks and sit around and talk for hours. We came from schools all over the country—Kathleen graduated from St. Mary’s in Minnesota—but we were like-minded in our idealized devotion to social justice and making the world a better place.

  There was tremendous camaraderie. Our heroes were the six Jesuit priests murdered in 1989 in El Salvador. We adopted the liberation theology that they preached, radical within the Catholic Church mainstream, which emphasizes social and political concern for the poor and oppressed. We were inspired by the activist prayer: “Touch me with truth that burns like fire.”

  It felt freeing. Living three thousand miles from where I grew up, I almost felt like I had escaped the person everyone back there expected me to be. I was more confident, felt closer to my authentic self. I grew a beard, wore a leather jacket, rode the bus. I’d sit in Powell’s Books with enough money for an endless cup of coffee, then go to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. I read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favorite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly—a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.

  I had kept journals, written poems, and drawn in sketch pads for years, always toying with the notion of someday writing books or painting. Now I’d found an environment that seemed to nurture all of that. Dad once told me that my mother, long before she died, had said she knew even while I was in the womb that I was going to be an artist. I drew constantly as a kid, getting lost in sketching figures and concocting endless mazes on notebook paper.

  Later, in my teens and throughout college, I’d share with Beau poems that I wrote and sometimes submitted anonymously to journals and magazines. He loved them and encouraged me to keep it up; he told me he wished he’d become a singer-songwriter. Dad always made it clear I could be anything I wanted to be, but I never found the courage or the confidence to take those artistic pursuits any further.

  Then Kathleen got pregnant. We married four months later, on July 2, 1993. We threw an engagement party for friends and family at Dad and Mom’s house in Delaware, then held the ceremony a week later in Chicago, at St. Patrick’s Church, an Irish neighborhood mainstay known as Old St. Pat’s because the yellow-brick building predates the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The reception afterward was at the Knickerbocker Hotel ballroom, across the street from the Drake. Everybody had a blast. Kathleen and I were very much in love; we would’ve gotten married soon anyway, regardless of whether she was pregnant. Naomi, named after the sister I lost, was born that December. I was all in.

  I was also at a crossroads. I had been accepted to law school at Georgetown, Duke, and Syracuse. Beau was in his second year at Syracuse, where Dad also got his law degree, and already had his mind set on public service.

  I knew Syracuse had a renowned creative writing program—one of my favorite writers, Raymond Carver, had taught there, and another favorite, Tobias Wolff, was currently on the faculty. I had applied to the MFA program and been accepted. I considered getting a joint MFA-law degree.

  Now all of that sounded a little silly. Studying fiction at Syracuse was a dream that would not lend itself to supporting a family. Besides, we weren’t particularly keen on living with a newborn in a place that seemed very far from home. The more grown-up choice was to go on to law school at Georgetown and shelve the artistic stuff.

  That’s what I did. I returned to Georgetown, though my first choice had been Yale Law, where I hadn’t been accepted. Following my first year, I applied to Yale again and included with my application a poem I wrote—something everyone discouraged. Yale’s acceptance letter noted that my success and dedication during my first year of law school at Georgetown more than qualified me, but that my poem was unlike anything they’d ever received and earned me my spot there.

  Beau understood each step, but still was disappointed I didn’t take the leap and pursue an MFA.

  * * *

  New Haven was a grind, scholastically and financially.

  It was also a ball, in the way those periods are when you’re too young and dumb to know better. I paid for tuition and room and board with loans, and bought books and food with a small Pell Grant. Kathleen and I and little Naomi lived in a tiny garden apartment we had to enter through a basement. It was so run-down that when Dad, Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Frankie, and Beau drove up to help us move in, Uncle Jimmy looked around and said, “There’s no way you’re living in a place like this.” He enlisted the others to help tear out the thirty-year-old wall-to-wall carpeting and repaint every wall, working around the clock. As usual, Uncle Jimmy transformed a disaster into something beautiful and, in this case, turned a dilapidated rental into a quaint little home. Then we moved in our furniture, four pieces in all.

  Kathleen stayed home with Naomi, a choice born as much out of necessity as of desire: we couldn’t afford childcare. We took turns putting Naomi to sleep and waking up with her. We had just enough pocket change so that Kathleen could go to the movies on Tuesday nights while I stayed home with the baby, and
I could go out on Thursdays, while she stayed with Naomi. I usually went to a tavern where I got to know a bartender named Flo. She knew how broke I was. If I bought two drinks, Flo gave me a third one free.

  That was the entirety of our social life, except for the potlucks with people from school that we held regularly at our apartment. We were the only couple, it seemed, that had a kid.

  I worked like hell. The day after the spring semester’s last final exam, I started the first of two eight-week summer internships for two different law firms in Chicago. I’d return to school a week late in the fall so that I could earn that one extra paycheck. The money I made during those sixteen weeks was what we lived on the rest of the year.

  After I received my law degree in 1996, we moved back to Wilmington. I joined my father’s Senate reelection bid as a deputy campaign manager, while also getting a job in the executive management training program at MBNA America, a leading credit card company that has since been acquired by Bank of America. Beau was working in Washington for the U.S. Department of Justice, and soon became a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.

  Being a corporate lawyer was the antithesis of what I’d thought I’d be doing. But I had $160,000 in student loans from college and law school, a burgeoning family, and no savings. Whether I made money from a law firm or a bank didn’t make much difference to me: I had to make money.

  Much like when I turned down the chance to get an MFA at Syracuse, I felt like I had no choice. In part, it was the fear of the unknown. In my mind, I couldn’t afford to work for the Justice Department or as a public defender. Obviously, people who have families and debts get by on those salaries every day. What I didn’t realize until later is that whatever I made wouldn’t pay enough for what Kathleen and I thought we wanted.

  The first things we did were buy a house, get a decent car, and put Naomi in private school. It wasn’t lavish, but we were on our way to establishing a lifestyle that’s difficult to turn back from. Every decision I made after that was based on how to maintain what I had and how to make more. One private school tuition would turn into three, one car into two, the $300,000 mortgage into a $1 million mortgage. I kept climbing the escalator and didn’t know how to get off.

  That year after law school, we bought a big, run-down pre–Revolutionary War redo. It had been used as a boardinghouse/frat house for ten dudes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. When we moved in, a refrigerator with a hole drilled through the door for the tap from a beer keg still stood in the living room. There was a pool table in the dining room. Kathleen, Beau, Dad, and I, along with a bunch of friends, went to work on restoring it—much like Dad had done with the house we grew up in. We put in new plumbing ourselves, gutted the bathroom. We tore out walls, redid floors. We scraped, caulked, primed, and repainted every square inch of the place.

  Beau moved into the third floor while I covered the mortgage. Everybody we knew convened at our house. In 1998, Kathleen and I had our second daughter, Finnegan, and before long Beau started dating a dark-haired, blue-eyed woman we’d known growing up named Hallie Olivere.

  We flipped the house for about twice what we paid for it. I had more money in the bank than any Biden in six generations. I helped my brother pay off his student loans. I left MBNA and got a job at the U.S. Department of Commerce as executive director for e-commerce policy. We moved to Washington and enrolled Naomi at Sidwell Friends, one of the city’s most exclusive schools. The tech bubble burst not long afterward, temporarily putting a damper on e-commerce policy, so I started my own law firm/lobbying shop. I eventually worked mostly on behalf of Jesuit universities and hospitals.

  Not long after our third daughter, Maisy, was born in 2000, we moved back to Delaware to be closer to family. I kept my firm in DC, started to drink more heavily after work, and missed the last train to Wilmington more and more often. I was a functional alcoholic—I always could drink five times more than anyone else—but now I was staying overnight, not making it home in time to take the kids to school in the morning.

  I tried to quit drinking when we returned to Washington, in 2003. I’d stop for thirty days, then binge for three. I couldn’t get control of it.

  I knew what I did and did not want. I wanted to build a successful business. I wanted to get my brother elected attorney general. I wanted to run a marathon, do a triathlon. I wanted to write a book and to paint. I did not want to be an absent father. I did not want to have a partnership with Kathleen in which drinking became the fault line between us.

  Later that year, with Kathleen unsure of what to do, I admitted myself into the Crossroads Centre, a residential rehab program in Antigua. Founded five years earlier by Eric Clapton, Crossroads follows a twelve-step approach modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. I stayed there for a month. It worked.

  Despite its celebrity-musician roots and Caribbean setting, Crossroads was nice but no-frills. A one-story building above the water with about twenty rooms, it offers scholarships to those who can’t afford the program and admits anyone who lives on the island for free. There are no daily massages or trips to the market. There are no phones or computers. Everybody has a roommate, makes his own bed, does his own laundry, helps with chores.

  I didn’t know what to expect. I had a desire to be free from the compulsion to drink, but I had no idea what that meant. At age thirty-three, I couldn’t imagine what I would fill my time with if I wasn’t filling it with all the things connected to alcohol: drinking after work, drinking at dinner, drinking at parties, drinking while watching football games on Sundays…

  I was immediately struck by the program’s compassion, simplicity, and promise. I was incredibly moved by the hard-core, often harrowing stories told by people from all different backgrounds. They had gone through their own hells, some self-inflicted. But all told stories of trauma that gave me a new sensitivity and understanding of what people were dealing with. By the time I left, I learned how to look forward to life in a way that didn’t involve needing to change the chemical equilibrium of my brain. I learned that I could fill time without a drink.

  When I got home, Beau picked me up at the airport and the next day accompanied me to my first AA meeting, in Dupont Circle. It was too daunting for me to go alone.

  Beau’s presence proved to be serendipitous. It was an open meeting, meaning you didn’t have to be an alcoholic to attend. Afterward, everyone stayed for coffee and the regulars introduced themselves to any newcomers. The goal was to find a sponsor as soon as possible—someone who had been through it all and could help you stay sober using the tools of AA’s twelve steps.

  If I’d gone alone, there’s no doubt I would have left immediately and headed straight home. But Beau being Beau, he insisted we stay. He milled around, chatted up everybody. Before I knew it, he introduced me to Jack, who would be my sponsor for the next seven years and, for that period at least, save my life.

  * * *

  Politics is not the family business—service is. But politics is tied to much of that service and needs to be calculated during decisions of when to run, what to run for, and how to campaign.

  One thing that was always difficult for Beau and me to game out was his political path while our dad’s career continued to rise. We were as intimately involved in what Dad did politically—Senate races, presidential runs, choosing to join the Obama ticket—as we were in mapping out his own strategy.

  Beau was elected Delaware attorney general in 2006, and two years later Dad’s Senate seat opened up when he left for the Obama administration. The conventional wisdom was that the Democratic governor would appoint Beau to the seat until a special election was held two years later, at which time he’d be the front-runner.

  Beau wouldn’t have it. He wanted to be viewed as his own entity and not as someone riding in on his prominent father’s coattails. The appointment went instead to Dad’s friend and longtime chief of staff Ted Kaufman. There was no one more qualified to be a United States senator than Ted,
who was also one of Beau’s closest confidants and like an uncle to both of us. When the special election then came up, Beau had just returned from Iraq and didn’t want to disrupt his family even more after being gone for a year. He set his sights on becoming governor, most likely in 2016, and neither one of us planned ahead for anything more than that.

  Beau and I always knew that Dad wouldn’t retire until he became president. That was the collective dream of the three of us. It was never talked about in that way, but we knew that was the trajectory.

  When Dad had to decide whether to join Obama as his vice president, Beau and I privately weighed the pros and cons. My initial reaction: “You’re one of the most powerful members of the Senate, you’re chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and you can keep your own voice.” Beau’s reaction was less reflexive, more diagnostic, like that kid considering whether to leap into the quarry pond from the top of the cliff. “Turning down the nominee of your party in a historic election just isn’t done, out of protocol,” he advised. “The vice president’s job will become what you make of it.”

  As always, Beau, Ashley, our mother, and I were the last in the room with Dad when he made his decision. Huddled at our parents’ house, inside Dad’s study, with its fireplace and Chesterfield couches and book-lined wall, we all agreed that Dad had both the power of persuasion and the innate loyalty needed to make that job work. We believed he would go on to become the most influential vice president ever—that is, if you discount Dick Cheney, who had the advantage of manipulating his commander in chief.