The FRONTLINE Interviews
Evan Osnos
Journalist, The New Yorker
Evan Osnos is a journalist covering politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on August 22, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Biden’s Family Tragedy
Let’s start with ’72, but we can jump into after the win.His prospects looked unlimited, of course.Then Neilia and his daughter die in the accident and his sons are injured, and he’s in the hospital all the time.He talks in his book about the rage that he had felt, that he would go with Jimmy and walk the streets of Wilmington, looking for a fight, basically.Talk a little bit about that, the position he’s in after the accident at a point which should have been the best time of his entire life, and what that created in him, where that anger came from.
The period right after the death of his wife and his daughter was a total undoing for Joe Biden.He had in his life led this kind of uninterrupted rise—I mean, one more or less series of one success after another by sheer will and ambition and audacity, all the way through making his way to the United States Senate at the age of 29.And all of a sudden it was gone.
And there was a moment, in fact, kind of eerily, right before Neilia died, she and Joe were talking about just how extraordinary it was that he had won his race for the Senate; they had these three gorgeous, healthy children.And he said to her: “It’s too good to be true.It can’t last.”
And right after the accident—he’s a very devout man, and he had spent his life reading about what God meant in his life.And all of a sudden it felt completely false.He felt like, as he wrote later, “I’d been tricked by God.”And he didn’t know how to make sense of it.For—I mean, most immediately the Senate seemed suddenly irrelevant.He thought about suicide.He thought about never going and taking his seat in the Senate.
And the press gravitated to him.The reporters, the story was so grand and almost beyond fiction that every reporter was calling him up, and they wanted him to be this very brave widower type.And he didn’t really want to play that role.He didn’t know what he was.He was incredibly angry.He was quite literally walking the streets at night with his brother Jimmy looking for a fight, just an expression of his inner turmoil at that point.
And he didn’t know what to do.And it was the elders in the Senate, particularly Mike Mansfield, who was the Democratic leader in the Senate, who said to him: “You need to come here.Give it six months and see what happens.”
He had some—when he first got to Congress, he had a couple of very influential conversations on him where people said to him: “Look, I’ve been through tragedy.I’ve been through terrible things, and the only way you’re going to do this is work.Just throw yourself into the work, all day, all night, as much as you can.”And that’s basically what he did.
Biden’s Temperament
So this temper thing.He’s had a temper all his life.Not talked about too much, but it’s true.Where does it come from?We’ve got the stories of his being bullied because he was a stutterer.We have the stories of going through this horrendous tragedy of the loss of his wife and child.But where—from what you know, from what you’ve reported, what is the situation with his temper?Define it for us and where it comes from, if you can.
Joe Biden is this person of immense emotional intensity, which is really noticeable if you put him in comparison to somebody like Barack Obama, who is this very cool-tempered person.It’s all internal; everything happens inside his mind.In Joe Biden’s life, everything he is feeling comes right out—both the good and the bad.And over the years, he’s developed this reputation among his aides, many of whom stayed with him for decades, that when he is happy with you, he is very happy, and he will support you till the end of the day.And when he’s angry, when he’s feeling unprotected, when he’s feeling like he might be embarrassed, he rages against that.And he can be very curt, very demanding with some of his staff.
I’ve talked to people—over the years, I’ve talked to people who worked with him who remember that the thing Joe Biden hates most is if he feels as if he’s been unsupported. ...
One of his aides told me that she was preparing him for a call with a foreign leader.She expected him to go one way.In fact, the call went the other way, and Biden didn’t know what to do, and he eventually hung up the phone and said: “Never do that to me again.Don’t leave me unprotected.”
I think a lot of—the moments when Biden erupts, it’s often from a place of insecurity.It’s from a place of feeling as if no matter how much he prepared for it, how much he thought he could will his way through it, he didn’t have the facts or he didn’t have the setup to be able to succeed.
So that people are underestimating him.
Yeah.
Joe Biden’s always been very sensitive to the perception that he’s being disrespected, that people don’t think that he’s smart enough or that he’s prepared enough or that he knows the facts.And when that happens, those are the moments when he tends to erupt.And he’s done it with voters.He’s done it occasionally—this is how he ends up challenging people to pushup contests in Iowa.
Biden’s 1987 Presidential Run
… So the 1987 campaign, looking for a message, and he finds Kinnock.And he absorbs it almost as if—I think these are your words—absorbed the biography as his own.What do you mean?What happened there?
Well, you know, in the ’87 race, he was—Biden was sort of hoovering up all of these influences.There was bits of Bobby Kennedy that he was using in his speeches.There were pieces of other great speakers, and one of them was the British Labor leader Neil Kinnock.And Kinnock had this incredibly evocative story about being descended from coal miners, and it was a wonderful way of tying his political ideas to his personal biography.And for a while, Biden used the story, credited Kinnock.And then eventually he just stopped mentioning Kinnock and just kind of inhabited the role.
And the problem, of course, was that Biden was not descended from coal miners; that was not his life.But something about that story was so rich and so perfect for him that he just took it on.And of course, it was an act of theft of a kind, and it began the unraveling of the campaign.
And he goes to New Hampshire, same campaign, and he, as you talked about, he has this argument with a voter who challenges his IQ, and he lies about his law school résumé.What happened there, and what [does it reveal] about him?
In that case, the voter—a voter pressed him on his law school record, and Biden erupted.He sort of—he seethed at him.He said, “I probably have a higher IQ than you do.”He said: “I graduated in the top half of my class.I had a full academic scholarship.”And none of those things were—I can’t say none.I would say, and neither of those things were true.The [reality] was he had received a financial scholarship, mostly on the basis of need.He had graduated towards the bottom of his law school class after having had to repeat a course because he had failed to footnote a paper, and when he was asked about it later, Biden said, “Look, when I get angry, I exaggerate.”And that became a pattern that we would see over and over again from him. ...
And in a way, it came to be a reflection of his notion of an idealized politics, in which every story was a slam dunk, every anecdote worked and found its audience and connected.And it led him away from the facts.
The Clarence Thomas Hearings
The ’91 Thomas hearings.He’s in an awkward position.He’s, of course, the guy who was always the mediator, the guy that tries to make everybody happy.Here he has a Black justice and he has a female Black worker for Thomas with Anita Hill.Talk about, number one, what’s at stake for him in this situation because of being the chairman and how he attempts to thread the needle, and with what results.
The Anita Hill hearings presented him with this incredibly complicated racial and political puzzle, because he did not want to appear as if he wasn’t giving Clarence Thomas, who would be at that point a Black member of the Supreme Court, a full, fair hearing, and he was acutely sensitive to that.And at the same time, now he was—at the same time, Thomas was now being accused by his former assistant Anita Hill, who was also African American, of sexual harassment.
And Biden was faced with this decision about who gets more credibility and time in this process —Clarence Thomas, the nominee, or Anita Hill, the woman who is coming forward to accuse him.And Biden made a series of choices that essentially privileged the Republican demands in that hearing.It gave them the chance to have Clarence Thomas speak both before and after Anita Hill.He allowed white members of the Republican side of the committee to ask insulting questions, very harsh, harsh questions of Anita Hill that made it hard for her to tell her story and have it be received in that sort of full hearing.
There were three other women who wanted to testify, and Biden made a choice to say they could write their testimony out, but they didn’t testify in person.And as a result, the impact was much less than it might have been had they been allowed to testify in person.
The cumulative effect was that it felt to many people, particularly in the Democratic Party, that Joe Biden had not given Anita Hill a full hearing, a fair hearing of her complaints. ...
Joe Biden was so worried about looking like he was being too hard on a Black Republican nominee that he ended up going too easy on the nominee and not listening enough to the complaints.
How does understanding his past help to define the trouble that he got himself in there?
Joe Biden was coming into this hearing known to have been the Democratic Party’s leading anti-busing crusader.He’d always had this very complicated balancing act around race.He regarded himself as an advocate of civil rights, but it was a complicated record, and he knew that how he performed in that hearing, overseeing the nomination of a Black justice to the Supreme Court, was going to become a referendum, a public hearing, in effect, on how Joe Biden thought and acted about race.
And I think as a result, he leaned too far.And he believes it, too. ...Over the years Biden has explained his actions by saying, “I gave too much credibility to Clarence Thomas.”And that was a mistake.He hasn’t brought himself to saying, “I made a mistake.”What he says is, “I’m sorry that Anita Hill was treated the way she was treated.”But to a lot of people that doesn’t go quite far enough.
But he understands the situation he’s in.And he’s a survivor that always gets back up.So what he does, fascinatingly enough, is he decides to change the Judiciary Committee. ...What’s the other side of the story?
... Joe Biden has always had this—he’s very alert to the political impact of his own actions, and he recognized that the Anita Hill case had damaged his credibility, particularly with women.And what you saw in the years that followed was his attempt to try to restore some of that relationship, and it’s one of the reasons why he then became a prominent advocate and author of the Violence Against Women Act, because he was trying to say, “I can learn from my own mistakes.”
And I think—that is one of the patterns that you see over the course of his life.I know, probably, we don’t need to zoom out to that effect, but that is a pattern that you see, is when he recognizes that—when you see—when he makes some mistake in his legislative record or in his personal conduct, very often, either explicitly or implicitly, he goes back later and tries to figure out how to fix it.
Obama Selects Biden as Running Mate
We skip up to 2007.He’s running for president again, and right out of the gate he makes this gaffe.He says something like—he’s talking about Obama and trying to praise him in this way, and he says Obama is “articulate and bright and clean,” and it blows up in his face.What happens?And as far as you know, how does the Obama campaign view that?
... You know, that was a case in which, as Biden often says, the mistake was not that he said something; it was that he said what he actually believed.And he didn’t mean it in a way that was as offensive as it was to many people.What he thought he was doing was praising Barack Obama, but of course what it sounded like was a terribly patronizing and dismissive comment, not only about Obama but about the entire ancestry of Black political leadership going back for a generation.
And at the time, Obama played it off and he said, “Well, I don’t hold that against Joe Biden.”
And of course, sure enough, within a few months they were sharing a ticket together. ...Barack Obama decided to take the high ground on that moment, and what he said was, “I know what’s in Joe Biden’s heart.”They’d served together in the Senate.And he tamped down the controversy; he didn’t elevate the controversy.And Biden was embarrassed.It was not at all the kind of thing that he would want to be judged by.
At the center of Joe Biden’s self-narrative has always been that he got into politics because of the issues of civil rights.And so it’s been frustrating to him that he often finds himself sort of foundering on the shoals of issues around race.It’s always been baffling in some ways to him because he doesn’t see himself as somebody who has a conflicted relationship with race.
... The fact that Obama picked Joe, why, and why didn’t the slight affect that choice?And how in some ways did it work for the first Black president of the United States to pick somebody like Joe?
In so many ways, Biden was a counterweight to Obama in a lot of ways.He had this deep foreign affairs experience.He had deep connections in Washington with politicians across the spectrum.... I think the blunt way to put it is that Joe Biden, because he was essentially an older white man from Pennsylvania and Delaware with connections to the working class, could make Obama more agreeable, more acceptable to a certain kind of voter who might be uncomfortable with a former Black community organizer from Chicago.And that was absolutely a theme that ran through the choice.
And I think in some ways Biden knew on some level that he was there partly to make Obama more attractive to voters who might not feel connected to him.They might not feel like they knew what his worldview was.And Biden was happy to play that role because he thought he was doing both something for Barack Obama and also something for the country.He thought he was figuring out a way to help voters like him reach this new stage of American politics, to advance the cause of civil rights and to get the first Black president into office.
But you know, interestingly—I don’t know if you guys go into this, but at first, when Biden was approached about being the VP, he had a lot of hesitations.He’d never worked for anybody else.He had been his own boss, essentially, for 36 years in the Senate.And frankly, he thought he knew a lot more than Barack Obama.He’d been in the Senate for years; he had all these experiences, and he thought he would be the best president.He said so.He told some of Obama’s aides—David Axelrod and David Plouffe—“I still think I’d be the best president.”But he was willing to go along with it.
In fact, it was Jill Biden, his wife, who persuaded him.She said to him, “Look, you got into this business for reasons of civil rights and advancing the cause of the Black freedom struggle.How could you not want to support potentially the first Black president and help him succeed?”
So when he’s trying to make the decision if he’s going to accept, he’s talking to his wife, and Jill says to him, “Grow up.”Tell that part of the story.
Yeah.Biden was really anguished about the decision, and he says, “I’m not sure I can work for somebody else.How am I going to do that?”And his wife says, “Grow up.”And that, in the end, was persuasive.That helped him make the choice.And he put his ego on the shelf to some degree, and he said, “All right, I’ll go in as a No. 2.”But he really—I’ll tell that story in a slightly different form, too, but he—
In the final moments, he’s really torn about it, and he says, “I don’t know if I can be a No. 2.How am I going to do that?”And his wife says, “Grow up.”And I think that had an impact on him. ...
Obama and Biden’s Relationship in the Senate
One area that we stepped over but we should get is, their relationship in the Senate was a bit contentious.Joe didn’t consider Obama to be that savvy—certainly knowledgeable.Then there’s the story that you tell, which we always have loved and we’ve used it before in our films, of Obama in one of the committee hearings when Joe is going on and on.Can you tell that story, because it’s a wonderful insight.
In one of the first Foreign Relations Committees that the newly elected Obama attended, he heard Joe Biden go on at some length, and Obama scribbled a little note to his aide and handed it to him, and the aide opened it up, and it said, “Shoot. Me. Now.”So they had this very different approach to how you communicate.
The Senate is a very hierarchical place, and the older senators expect the younger senators to treat them with some deference.And Obama looked at Biden and thought, this guy’s a little long-winded; he’s a little too proud of himself and his experiences.And he was—he kept his distance from him a bit.
But I think he also respected him.That’s one thing that is useful to point out.Like he—both of them, both Obama and Joe Biden, recognized that each one of them had things the other did not.In Obama’s case, he simply didn’t have the depth of experience to be able to talk about the details of national security and foreign affairs policy.And of course, Biden never had the kind of transcendent ability to communicate the way that Obama did.So they looked at each other with a little bit of wariness and a little bit of respect.
Biden’s Role on Race as Vice President
... The sensitivities of the first Black president looking like he was the president for the Black part of America and not all of America was something they thought was quite significant.And so in walks Joe.Talk a little bit about his understanding that he could help Obama in this area as well, in an area that was very surprising that Obama had so much difficulty with.
Obama was always wary of talking about race because he knew that what he said would be interpreted in ways that they wouldn’t be from a white politician.Obama was wary; he would often—Obama has often said that he was wary of sounding angry, of sounding as if he was correcting Americans, that he was trying to lead them to a better place, because he knew that it could engender this backlash, these antibodies in the public if people who were wary of him from the outset would feel that he was talking down to them, that he was telling them that they were racists or they were wrong.
And in some ways, Joe Biden became his counterweight to that, because Joe Biden, because he was the white guy from Pennsylvania and Delaware, he was the guy who was able to talk about race sometimes in ways that Obama couldn’t; he was prevented from talking about it because he was inhibited by the knowledge that it would cause a backlash.
There was one amazing moment—I don’t know if you guys go into this in the movie, but the Skip Gates scene, the “beer summit.”That’s a—that was—what’s fascinating about that was, in the beer summit story, the only reason Biden is there is because they looked at the scene and they realized they were going to have two Black men—Skip Gates and Barack Obama—and one white man, the police officer.And they said that’s going to read wrong to some portion of Americans.And so they brought in Joe Biden.He doesn’t even drink; he couldn’t even have a beer.But he was there to serve this political counterweight function, and he was aware of that.He’s always been aware of how that sort of symbolism is interpreted.
Biden’s 2020 Presidential Run
... He was not emerging at a time in 2007 or 1987 as someone who had the qualities that allowed him to merge with what America needed at that point, but now we’re in 2020.Talk a little bit about why he is seemingly the perfect kind of candidate to run in 2020.
Here we are in 2020.We’re a country and a people in mourning, literally in mourning; you’ve had so many people who have died from the virus.You’ve had a country in an uproar about systemic injustice and race.And here is a person who not only has he suffered loss in his life of a scale and a depth that most people can never even approximate, and he can talk about that and he can inhabit that, but he has also followed this journey on matters of race that are, in its own way, they follow the arc of the American story over the last two generations: a man who grew up with his own unease about busing, who eventually became the vice president to the first African American president of the United States.
And there’s, in that journey, in that passage, in all of the pain and all of the moments of redemption that come with it, Joe Biden turns out to be almost curiously perfectly suited for the moment that America finds itself in and the needs that Americans have and the things they need to hear from leadership, because when, when Joe Biden in the year—there have been times in 2020 when Biden has literally looked into the lens at times and said to people, “I can understand what you’re going through.”And that can read as a really insincere gesture from somebody who doesn’t really understand what that pain is.But Americans, even those who are wary of Joe Biden, they see something in him that they recognize he does know that pain.
I think it’s like—it’s sort of a political story you could not have imagined: This man who has wanted to be president for half a century and failed to do it over and over, and now finds himself at this moment of really abject national crisis, and that’s the moment when the country sees him for the first time, really.
The “Obama Halo”
... You started talking about this, and I think it’s a point we should double down on, which is, after eight years of working with Obama, it gave him, somebody else told us, the Obama halo.It anointed him as a good guy, as a guy that—some of the things that he had been involved in that the Black community might not be so happy with, like the anti-busing and the 1994 crime bill and stuff, it cleansed him of his sins.Talk a little bit about that phenomenon.And of course it’s very significant to this day.
The experience of serving Barack Obama, and serving him loyally, and serving him ably in a way that the public saw, had this effect of transforming Biden’s image.Instead of looking like this ambitious senator with a frustrated desire to be president, all of a sudden he became this avuncular, supportive figure who helped the first Black president make history.And that changed the way he was viewed in the eyes of many Americans.Even people who had been watching him for decades suddenly saw in him a very different role and a very different potential.And in places like South Carolina and elsewhere, where Black voters play this crucial role, all of a sudden he was no longer Joe Biden, the former senator or the vice president; he was the natural heir to the legacy of Barack Obama.And that was this extraordinary political power.
Not too long ago, there was a poll taken in South Carolina that showed that Joe Biden didn’t really have much of a base there.But over the course of the Obama presidency, when he became latched in his public image very closely to Barack Obama, the two of them together, it transformed the perceptions of Joe Biden, and he became somebody that particularly African American voters thought cared about them and would carry their issues at the center of his campaign.
Biden’s Struggle to be Taken Seriously
Let’s talk a little bit about the dismissiveness that some of Obama’s staff viewed Joe, to the point where they attempted at some points, because of his gaffes and speaking out on things, like gay marriage, before Obama had a chance to do it, they tried to tell him to read from the teleprompter.And Joe was not very happy about this.Talk a little bit about that reality within the White House.
There was this real culture clash between Biden World and Obama World.Biden is a politician who obviously does everything from the gut.He is making stuff up sometimes as he goes along.He’s working the room.And there were members of Obama’s staff that really thought that Biden was undisciplined.He wasn’t reading the notes in advance.He wasn’t following the script.He was veering off of the prepared speeches in ways that then they thought they had to mop up later, causing them political trouble.And it bothered them.
And at one point early on they decided that they needed to try to get Joe Biden to read from a teleprompter, something he hadn’t done for 36 years in the Senate.And he took pride in the fact that he could give a speech off the cuff and he could give something that would have an impact on people.What they didn’t talk about publicly was, one of the reasons Biden never liked reading off a teleprompter was because of his stutter.It made it harder for him to speak, and it tripped him up.Here he was, he’d had this—he had a sort of full political toolbox from decades in power, and suddenly he’s being asked to go back to remedial English, essentially, on political communication.And it bothered him.But he did it.
And you know, I think one of the things you see happen over the course of those years was that Biden was learning some things from Obama—his discipline, his sense of precision in the way that he would go about his politics.And he was absorbing those lessons, and they were making him a better politician.
And Obama’s view of all this?
Very early on, just after they’d sort of starting running together, Obama made a comment that was a little dismissive at a—in front of reporters.He said, “I’m not sure what Joe was talking about, unsurprisingly.”And Biden raised it with him over lunch, just the two of them, a few days later, and he said to him, “Look, if you’re going to undermine me in public, this isn’t going to work.”
And Obama agreed with him.He took the lesson.And what you saw over the years that followed was that they very rarely, almost never would criticize one another because they recognized that would undermine the quality of their partnership and what they were trying to do.
You write something very interesting, I thought.You’ve talked about the thin-skinned feeling about the condescension issue, but you also said that it fed a certain openness and vulnerability in him.Explain.
I think Biden often knows that there are people who look at him and think, well, maybe he’s not the smartest guy in the White House; maybe he shouldn’t be here.And he reacts to that with a bit of insecurity, but also with a kind of openness about wanting to learn, wanting to make himself better, wanting to figure out what it is that he doesn’t know.Oftentimes, even people in Washington who are critical of Biden will often say, “He’s always trying to get a little better at what it is that he’s doing.”
A member of the Obama administration told me that Biden invited him in for briefings a lot, and sometimes in those briefings, Biden would talk for 90% of the time.But at the end of it, he really had picked something up, and they’d walk to the door, and he’d sort of clasp this younger aide on the back and say, “Good talk.”But the truth was, he was having the briefings at all.And I think often, even among some of Obama’s aides who thought that Biden was a little sloppy, wasn’t as tutored on the technocratic details, they did have this admiration for the fact that he was trying to get better, always trying to figure out what it is that he didn’t know and how he might be able to acquire it.
Biden as a Moderate
And talk a little bit about this phenomenon that he’s a weathervane for the moderate left and how that’s important to understand about him and his decisions.
You’ve seen this pattern over the course of his career.Joe Biden is really like a weathervane for where the center of the Democratic Party is going.And it’s moved.You know, at times it’s been more conservative.At times the party has become more liberal.And as it moves, Joe Biden has moved with it.
So early on, for instance, early in his career when there were Democrats who were segregationists, Joe Biden was bridging those gaps.He was sometimes working with the racists in Congress, and sometimes he was working with the liberals.He never wanted to be in one camp or another.He always kept himself a little mobile.
And then years later, when he sensed where things were going, he saw that Americans were becoming supporters of gay marriage before the Obama administration had embraced it, and he said, “I’m going to get there, and I’m going to do that first.”In fact, he got out in front of Obama.
And at the time, some people looked at it, and they said, “Well, maybe that’s just a classic Biden gaffe, said something he shouldn’t have said.”But people who know the politics closely and know him said, “No, no, that’s Joe Biden recognizing where America’s Democratic Party is moving, and I’m going to get there.”And he was willing—he calculated what the cost would be.He knew it would inflame some members of the Obama administration if he got out in front of him.And you know what?He said, “I’ll take that hit because it will end up putting me in the right place politically.”It was actually quite a very—it was a very prudent thing to have done.
And Obama—Obama was bothered by it.But these are two professionals.They didn’t get where they are by being casual about politics.I think on some level Obama kind of respected a little bit of a canny, crafty move on Biden’s part.
Biden’s Decision Not to Run in 2016
So 2015 rolls around, and he’s interested in running for president again.Talk a little bit about the internal debate within the White House.It’s apparent that before Beau’s death that aides for Obama are jumping on board Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the president himself is looking at it and realizing that Joe doesn’t have a chance, that this is Hillary’s time.Talk about that reality of what Biden was interested in and what he found to be the truth of the opinion of those in the White House, including Obama.
Biden saw his chances as a natural opportunity.Here he was, a vice president to a very popular Democratic president.He had run for president before.He said: “This could very well be my time.Why shouldn’t it be my time, after all?”And he began to make not that subtle indications, began to talk about it in a stage whisper, letting people know that he was thinking of running for president.And almost immediately he started to get the sense from others, including Obama, that that was not going to be a candidacy that the president was going to support.
Obama started talking to him privately over their lunches and their times together saying: “Think about this, Joe.Are you sure that you want to end your distinguished career with a potential loss?”Obama worried that Biden could end up being embarrassed; he could lose badly to Hillary Clinton.And if it did, not only would it look bad for Joe Biden, but Barack Obama also knew that it would look bad for Barack Obama’s legacy, and it would potentially imperil the things that they had been able to achieve in the White House.And it would perhaps open up a weakened Democratic Party to a Republican challenger.
So there was—there were a lot of reasons why Obama was concerned that a fierce contest between Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton could end up being destructive for the Democratic Party and could end up looking very bad for Joe Biden.Obama actually asked some of his political aides, his pollsters and his advisers, to talk to Biden, basically try to talk him out of the idea of running for office.They showed him some of their data, their analysis that suggested that he might lose in Iowa, that he wouldn’t be able to beat Hillary.And Biden wasn’t convinced, actually.Biden had his own team working on the idea of a campaign, his advisers who’d been with him for years and years.And they had a very different analysis.They looked at the numbers and they saw huge negative feelings about Hillary Clinton in some states.They thought that Biden had this built-in positive image that they could use.They thought he had a very good chance.
And there was another element of this I think that’s worth mentioning, which is, Obama had reasons to support Hillary Clinton.She would have made history as the first woman president.It would have been a natural follow-up to his own breakthrough in history.They were kinship.They were sort of—Obama and Clinton were a kind of kindred spirits, both very cerebral, very intellectual.They did all their reading.They were known to be the types who were involved in all the technocratic details.They went to the same kinds of schools.
Joe Biden wasn’t like that.He came from a different part of the Democratic Party, a different culture, and there was always an aroma of condescension a bit around the way that some of the Obama and Clinton people talked about Biden and his crowd.And they never really saw that Biden was the natural heir to the Obama legacy.That, they thought, was going to be Hillary Clinton.
I look on that period, it’s unbelievably interesting, because if Obama, over the course of the months as they were—as Biden was thinking about the race, Obama became increasingly explicit to him that he was not encouraging him to run.He came everything short of telling him not to run.And I think that was a mistake.This is the blunt reality is, Joe Biden might have beaten Donald Trump in 2016.This is the—there is—the single greatest parlor game in American political circles in Washington is, could Joe Biden have beaten Donald Trump in 2016 if he was the nominee?It’s a sort of counterfactual of American history: Could things have gone differently?And we’ll never know.
And the reaction of Joe to his bro, his brother in arms here, dissing him?
… I think Biden was torn.Intellectually, he could understand the arguments why Hillary Clinton was the natural choice: She’d make history; she and Obama had a relationship.But he couldn’t help but be insulted by that.Biden believed that he had been a faithful and productive vice president to Barack Obama, and on some level he expected that his end of the bargain was going to be that Obama might at least not put a thumb on the scale, let the two of them have a fair contest and see who prevailed. ...
Beau Biden
Meanwhile, while this is all happening, Beau becomes—is already sick, but he dies in May.Talk a little bit about their relationship, this whole idea that Beau was Joe 2.0 and Joe expected great things from him.The effect on Biden of the death.And one other point that you bring up, which I’d never read before, which I think is fascinating, is this idea that it kills off an arrogant side of Joe that had existed.
That was an insight from somebody who knows—who’s worked for Biden very closely.It’s almost impossible to overstate how much of a—just how horrible it really was to have Beau Biden get as sick as he did, as suddenly as he did.Biden had—Joe Biden had always thought of his son Beau as the natural heir and really the sort of new and improved version of Joe Biden.Around the family, he was known as Joe 2.0. Biden liked to tell people that, “Beau had all of my best strengths and none of my worst qualities.”
And he really also—I think he respected the fact that Beau Biden had joined the Army, had gone off, served the country in a way that Joe Biden never had.He looked at him almost as the sort of consummate political prospect, the thing that Joe Biden had always imagined of himself, but better, subtler.He was not quite so transparently ambitious.He didn’t read quite the same way that Joe did, turning some people off.
They were very close, I mean, tactically and politically.When Joe Biden was running for president, it was Beau who would stand behind him, often, and would be the person who would whisper very quietly, “Time to wrap it up, Dad.”And he listened to Beau on political matters in a way that he really didn’t listen to anybody else.He just trusted him implicitly.
And suddenly Beau is dying.And he’s dying in a particularly awful way.It was a kind of—it’s the same kind of cancer that killed Ted Kennedy and John McCain, other people very close to Joe Biden in his life.
And I was once in Biden’s office in 2014, and at that point it was still a secret just how sick Beau Biden was; I didn’t know it.And at one point, they interrupted our interview, and they said, “There’s a call that you need to take.”And he goes into the other room to take the call, and he comes back, and he’s emotional.And he said: “I wish I could tell you what it was, but I can’t.But we just got some great news.”And it was this temporary, ultimately, of course, unsuccessful upturn in his treatment.They were trying everything; they tried all these experimental treatments.He had surgery.And it was this really long ordeal.And it just hung over Biden like a cloud for years at the end of the presidency, at the end of the Obama administration.
And Obama, of course, tried to give him some space.He sort of pulled back a bit, tried to understand that was going to become Joe Biden’s consuming fixation, as it should.And in its own way it also, I think, pushed Biden and Obama’s relationship into a completely new place.There was a time at one point when Biden got some news of test results about Beau, and people in the White House remember Obama sprinting down the hall to go hold him.I mean, it really was like this very human moment for these two men with completely different life stories.As we all know, Obama’s this very self-contained man who doesn’t express his emotions very much.And in some ways, Biden, I think by the fact that he inhabits his emotions so obviously and was going through a period of such extraordinary trauma, it sort of drew out a side of Obama that we hadn’t really seen before.I mean, the eulogy, the scene at the funeral, it’s—it’s pretty amazing.
But it also then became—it added this dimension to the politics.Right at the moment that Joe Biden is trying to decide whether he can run for president, his world is falling apart.His son is dying, and he’s trying to grapple with that in public and in private.And it ultimately became impossible to do both.
And this idea, though, that it adjusted Joe.
That’s a key point.People around Biden in that period saw a change in him.When Beau died, it really sacked something.It actually, as somebody put it to me, it killed off the arrogant side of him.It was a humbling.He was sort of humbled by the fates.And it really changed him, almost physiologically.He carried himself differently.He approached people differently.And for years, Biden had been this tense competition between the ambitious guy and the understanding guy.And the ambitious guy just kind of folded for a time; it just—it made him actually—to many people he was suddenly reborn in a new light as this more thoughtful, more pensive person.
Why Biden Runs in 2020
So let’s jump to 2020.After two failed attempts and one almost attempt, he’s decided to run in 2020.He’s 77 years old.Why now?
Well, the story that he tells, which is a real story, is that in the summer of 2017 he watched Donald Trump say of the marchers in Charlottesville that there were very fine people on both sides, and to Biden that was sort of incomprehensible.It was such an insult to his conception of America and American politics.I think it stirred something.And he realized: “This can’t go on.It simply cannot continue.And I might be the person who can do something about it.”
I will say there’s two other—I mean, there’s so many ways to answer that question.One is, after Beau died, there were a lot of people around Biden who really worried about what he was going to be able to do.I mean, how was he going to carry on?Was this just going to finally end his public life?And what he believed was that if he had purpose, if he had some larger purpose, that that would become the motivating fact of his life.And for a time that purpose was advancing cancer research and trying to make an impact in the world of medicine, to try to in some ways respond to Beau’s death.
And then all of a sudden he looked at the political field and he realized, “There is no obvious front-runner here, and I might be the person, because of my own complex biography, I might be the person who’s able to step in and make some sense of this race.”That’s what he did.
I mean, there was a—the other way to answer this is the political answer, which I find incredibly interesting.Biden basically believed that a lot of the other contenders in the Democratic field were making a mistake.They were running to the far left of the party.They had looked at the 2018 congressional elections and they saw in that the rise of this much more powerful progressive voice.And he saw a very different message in that.What he saw was that 40—he saw something like, what was it, at least 40 congressional seats had gone from Republicans to Democrats.And to him, that meant that a moderate running at the center of the Democratic field, rather than to the left, might be able to put together a coalition that just might be able to win.So that was the strategic reason why he ran.
That’s the weathervane Biden.
That’s the weathervane.Joe Biden, who had always been a weathervane for where the center of the party was, he looked at it in the 2020 election, and he said: “I’m not sure my competitors have it right.I think that the party is not as far to the left as they think it is.And I think I can peel off some disaffected Trump voters and some older conservative Democrats who are uneasy about the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren vision of this party.And they may gravitate to me.”And there were unbelievable doubts.I mean, the press was convinced that he was wrong.His candidates that he was running against were almost dismissive and sort of condescending about his choice.And he just sort of plugged away at it, believing that eventually he would be proven right.
Is there also part of it that he was still trying to prove something to the Obama people?
Absolutely.
Explain that.
Absolutely.There’s no question Biden saw 2020 as a chance to finally run the race that he wasn’t really allowed to run in 2016.Biden saw in 2020 a chance to prove a lot of those Obama and Clinton administration people wrong, to show them, in fact, “I could have won.I certainly should have been able to run.”
And Joe Biden is a prideful man.And it bothered him that he had never been treated with enough respect that he’d been given a shot to run in 2016.And in 2020, even at the age of 77, he said, “That’s my chance, and I’m not going to miss that opportunity.”
It’s an incredible political tale, if you really think about it.He had never won a state in any of his previous presidential runs.I mean, he had never gotten above 1% in Iowa back in 2007 and 2008.And here he was, in arguably the most important election in American presidential modern history, and he’s saying, “I’m the one who can win.”It was a very audacious thing to believe, actually.
And then when Iowa and New Hampshire happens, what are they thinking?It’s at a point where the campaign is starting to think, how do we close this thing down?
Yeah.It was so close to the end that they were trying to figure out, how much money do we need to have on hand to pay the final salaries to people?Because we might not be able to go on.Joe Biden was riding the train to New York to go on The View, and one of his senior advisers had to call in and have what she described to me as the conversation you never want to have with a candidate, which is “We may be approaching the point of having to shut this thing down.”
And you know, interestingly, I asked a lot of people around him, “How did Joe Biden process the point of oblivion, of maybe being driven out of the race?”And he said over and over to people: “Look, this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and it may not be the worst thing that will ever happen to me.I know what real loss is.”I think that’s sincere, actually.
Biden’s South Carolina Primary Win
And South Carolina and Congressman Clyburn?How utterly important was that?And why was that?And how significant is that, again, in the wild, long journey that he’s been on?
If Joe Biden had any shot at all, it was going to come down to South Carolina.Two-thirds of the Democratic electorate there is made up of African American voters, people who credited him with having served Barack Obama in this important role.And he came into South Carolina, and really there was only one person in South Carolina that he needed to persuade, the godfather of South Carolina politics, and that’s Congressman Jim Clyburn.He needed Clyburn to give him the stamp of approval, to say, “Yes, we know that Joe Biden has a history in which he was against mandatory busing, and we know that he was the author of the crime bill in 1994, but he is our guy.”
And Clyburn wasn’t at all sure at the very beginning that he could give that endorsement.Clyburn didn’t want to endorse somebody who wasn’t going to win; that wasn’t going to be good for Clyburn.And there was a moment about a week before the primary when he pulls Joe Biden aside at a reception.They go in to a room together, and he says to him, “You need to straighten up the campaign.”He says to him, “Your speeches are too senatorial,” which, coming from a member of the House, is not a compliment.What he meant was, you’re holding forth; you’re broadcasting.You’re not talking to people about the things they really need to hear.Clyburn told him, he said, “Remember what my father, the fundamentalist preacher, used to do.All of his speeches had three themes—the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.Yours should be about yourself, your community and the country.”
And Biden did straighten up.He tightened up his speeches.He tightened up his campaign in South Carolina.They had a few really important moments when he spoke to audiences in a way that really resonated. ...
And importantly, Clyburn then stepped forward and gave him an endorsement, an unusually emotional endorsement.And he said, “This is a matter not only of our politics, but really of our future.”And I think that was transformative.I mean, there was just—three days later, Biden won South Carolina in a rout.And what began to happen was a cascade of endorsements from his other opponents.There was a recognition within the party at that point—this was now a two-man race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, and there were a lot of Americans who were not ready for a Bernie Sanders candidacy, much less a Bernie Sanders presidency.And that meant that this big swell of moderate support converged around Joe Biden.And all of a sudden he went in the span of three days from having been almost out of the race to being the undisputed winner.
Let’s talk about the Kamala Harris moment during the debate, where she brings up and really attacks him on his anti-busing stance for many years.What does that say?Was he prepared for that moment?Was he not working on debates and expecting to be hit on certain issues?What does that say about him and the way he responded and the amazing moment that really was?
Yeah, that moment.Kamala Harris had clearly prepared a line to attack Joe Biden with, which is that she said, “You know, I was one of the students who was bused in a program that you opposed.”And Biden didn’t really have an answer for it; he wasn’t ready.I mean, he was defensive, and he tried to defend his record in sort of technical terms.And it was unpersuasive.
And Joe Biden had hoped in some ways that he would be judged mostly on the basis of his eight years of serving Barack Obama, and it became clear in that moment, no, no, his whole record going back to 1972 was fair game, and he was going to be evaluated on that.
... The decision to run again.He’s famous for having these family meetings where everybody gets together and they talk.Do you know anything about the family meeting about the run?
In the Biden family, there is a tradition that anybody can call a meeting.And it’s usually the elders who do it.But in this case, the grandchildren, Joe Biden’s grandchildren, asked to have a family meeting.And in that meeting, they made the case for him running for president.And they said: “Look, we know this is going to be ugly.We know this is going to be a difficult race, more difficult than any you’ve run before.”And in fact at one point, one of his grandchildren pulled out a phone and showed Biden a picture of Biden with one of them, one of the grandchildren, and somebody on the internet had framed it as a kind of lecherous old man taking advantage of a kid.And they said, “We know this is the kind of race that we’re up against, but that’s all the more reason why you have to run.”
So it was kind of an amazing testament to how much that family sees itself completely braided in to the American political story, that they felt almost a personal responsibility to get into this race, even if it was going to be a savage one.
... What must it mean to have won the nomination?
The curious thing about Biden is, his life has had this impossible trajectory of good fortune and disaster—some of it fate that he never could have imagined, some of it mistakes of his own making.And then there is this moment at the end of this 50-year journey through public life in which he finally grasps the nomination he’s been wanting.And I actually think Joe Biden looks at that and says: “Of course.Of course, I got it.I was always going to get it.”
This is a man who, when he was barely out of his teens, he said to the mother of his first wife, Neilia Hunter, she asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, “President of the United States.”It’s been something that has been a part of his life forever.And I think Joe Biden was always a little mystified that it never worked.It never quite landed.The pieces never fell into place, either because he made mistakes, or something happened along the way, or it wasn’t his time.And I think he is now at a point in his life where he’s calmer than he was before.Some of that ambition, that desperate ambition has weathered a bit.He knows what it means to actually lose in life, to lose something of real consequence.
And he sees in this moment a moment of extraordinary importance.And it is the combination of all the things he’s been doing his whole life.It’s sort of the—in its own way, it’s the culmination of all of his training and ambition and his mistakes and his regrets and his attempts to be better.And it came together, at last.
I just—it’s an incredible story.
Biden Adds Harris to the Ticket
And the decision to, after all of this history—the Anita Hill saga, the anti-busing debate—he picks Sen. Harris.What does that say about this journey?And what does it say about who he is now?
A lot of people said, “Well, he won’t pick Sen. Harris because after all, she kicked him in the primary, and he’s going to carry that around with him.”And in fact, he didn’t see it that way.He said, I think—
On some level, he looked at Harris; he knew what she had done to him in the primary, and I think he respected the political moves behind it.He understood what she was trying to do.She was trying to break out of the pack.A young Joe Biden probably would have done the same thing.
And I think he also recognized that she was a person who would make history in a way that he would not.He’s going to be another white man in the presidency, but he takes tremendous pride in having been somebody who helped Barack Obama make history as the first Black president.And I think Joe Biden looked at Kamala Harris, and he said, “That is a way in which I, after all of the ups and downs of my life, particularly around matters of race, am able to help nudge this country forward another step: put the first Black woman in the White House as a vice president and eventually perhaps on the pathway to a presidency.”
I think Joe Biden has always imagined himself in somewhat grand, kind of poetic political terms.He sees—he’s always wanted to be this agent of great things.And he was able to help Obama to some degree get the presidency and succeed in it.And I think he saw in Kamala Harris, who would be, after all, the first Black woman, the first South Asian, the first woman in the vice presidency, a chance to make history again.I think that resonates with him.
... The convention speech that he gives upon his nomination, where he draws together his entire life, he draws together the struggles, the bullies, the stuttering, the perseverance, the empathy, the issues of civil rights that he’s been involved in, this is a moment when his life story converges with the country’s.Talk a little bit about the importance of that speech and how it really does resonate and define what this moment is.
People didn’t know what he was going to say.I mean, in some ways Joe Biden, he can sometimes give a good speech, sometimes give a bad speech.And that moment was the—that moment was the ultimate combination of the strange events of 2020 and the full scope of his biography.Here he is, confined to a camera without a crowd around him, trying to give the biggest speech of his life without a single person there to clap.And he has to give a speech that tells people in this country who know all of the blemishes on his record and all of the moments of glory that there is a meaning to all of that, and that it makes him stronger, not weaker.
And in some ways, this race has always come down to the fact that there are people who say: “Well, is it really enough that Joe Biden says ‘I’m just not Donald Trump’?There has to be more there.”And what Joe Biden was saying is, “It’s not just that I’m not Donald Trump.”He’s saying, “I come to this as a man in full with a life full of mistakes and regrets and struggle and will and attempts to try to be a little bit better.”And in a way, that’s sort of an echo of the American story: trying to get a little bit better than we were the year before.
And I think there’s something about the fact that—I think people look at Biden’s imperfections today in a way that’s a little bit different than they used to.It used to be that Biden’s mistakes were the sign of somebody who was maybe trapped in the past, trapped in the period when people opposed mandatory busing.And instead, I think they’ve come to see that Biden is this product of some self-reflection, the ability to learn, to change, to acknowledge mistakes.And people are—there’s a kind of hunger for it among voters.You hear it when you talk to them.They say, “I just want somebody to be honest with me about themselves, about what they’ve done and about what they’ve learned from it.”
And he kind of took on that role in that speech in a way that stunned people, I think, really surprised people.
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