Support provided by:

Learn More

Documentaries

Articles

Podcasts

Topics

Business and Economy

Climate and Environment

Criminal Justice

Health

Immigration

Journalism Under Threat

Social Issues

U.S. Politics

War and Conflict

World

View All Topics

Documentaries

The FRONTLINE Interviews

Evan Osnos

Author, Joe Biden

Evan Osnos covers politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker. He is the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 14, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Biden’s Decision
Interview

TOP

Evan Osnos

Chapters

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Getting to Know Joe Biden

What made you interested in [President] Joe Biden?
I initially got interested in him because he was doing a lot of foreign affairs, and I'd been overseas for a decade.So I come back to Washington, or come to Washington, and in some ways, [former President Barack] Obama was like the hard story to get; everybody was trying to interview the president.And the vice president, as Joe Biden would be the first to tell you, is the most maligned office in the country.And somebody said, “You know, he's involved in a bunch of really interesting things like Iraq and Ukraine and complex issues with Europe and Latin America.You're involved in foreign affairs.You're writing about it.Why don't you go see him?”
And so I called up his office and I said, “Can I come and have an interview?” And it turned out to be remarkably easy.And as a result, then I started having a series of interviews with him, and I found him to be much more knowledgeable about politics and foreign affairs than a lot of people you would encounter in Washington; he'd been doing it a long time.So I just made a habit of it and wrote my first profile of him 10 years ago.
He's been around so long, so many people feel like they know him.Do you think that there's something about Biden that they don't know for all that time he's been around?
Yeah, in some ways, because Biden projects such an almost typical political animal’s aesthetic—you know, he's the backslapper; he's friendly; he's easy to talk to—it's very easy to overlook the fact that he has also been navigating politics for a long time and has picked up a lot of interesting things, and a lot of scar tissue.And so as a result, I think people just came to see him as a part of the furniture, particularly journalists in Washington, and they didn't really pause to say, well, what does he actually think about where the party is going and where the party has lost some of its traction with people like the white working class?
So I remember him saying, back in 2014, "I think that the middle class is getting screwed," is what he said.And I remember thinking at the time, that doesn't feel to me like he's on the ball politically, like he doesn't see where things are going.I mean, things are moving in this obviously progressive direction.And of course, he was right, and I was wrong.
As a journalist, you keep this little running tally in your mind of who has been right and who has been wrong when they've talked to you over the years, and I began to realize this person has actually called a lot of bets correctly.I mean, on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, for instance, I'd gone to Ukraine with him after Putin had invaded Crimea, and he had a pretty worked-out theory of what he thought Putin was trying to do, and he had been early to recognize that Putin had this larger, destructive ambition.And so I started to listen to him on that, too.

Biden’s Working Class Roots

It's interesting what you said about the working-class discontent, because I wanted to talk to you first, before we get into the family, is the place that he comes from, which to some extent is a choice, because he grows up in different places, but he identifies with Scranton.Can you help me understand why Scranton, or is it really not just Scranton that shapes who Joe Biden is?
… Joe Biden's self-presentation is that he is a man who comes out of the working class, full stop.But actually the real story is richer.It's more complicated and interesting, which is of course that his father had money at one point.His father grew up with money, and then they lost it all.And as a result, there was this sense of almost like a phantom limb.They had the awareness; they had the sense memory of money.His father had little emblems of wealth left behind, like a polo mallet in the coat closet, and he had photographs of himself back in his earlier days, and photographs of himself next to a private plane and things like that.
And so Joe Biden grew up with not just the aspirational sense of wanting to get out of the working class and up to something else.It was actually that he wanted to regain on some level what the family had lost, and that was about status as much as it was about anything material.
… In some ways, I think Scranton was the place where his grandparents were.It was the place that had—I mean, some of his grandparents.It had more of a logic to him.Delaware was where they went because his father could get a job there.It didn't have quite the natural, evocative attachment that Pennsylvania did.I also think Joe Biden is a storyteller.Scranton, Pennsylvania, has a sort of immediate intuited symbolic power that Delaware really doesn't.

Biden’s Youth

In the story that he tells about himself as the sort of scruffy kid, the daredevil, what do you make of that in the young Biden?
I think it's very important.So Joe Biden as a kid, as we all know, of course, the stutter was a profound fact of his life, but he was also small physically when he was little.And the combination of being a small kid in the neighborhood and also being a kid who had so much trouble speaking, he had to make up for it, in his own description, by being, as he said, gutsy.And so he would start to do all these things, like kind of crazy things, like they would—at one point, there's a famous story about kids who dared him to run between the tires of a dump truck while it was moving backwards and see if he could get to the other side without getting squashed.And these little stories made their way around the neighborhood and became part of his self-narrative, that he was the kid who never backed down from a challenge.And you know, the old line is, show me the kid at seven, and I'll show you the grownup; I'll show you the adult.And there is some real truth to that.I don't think you can understand Joe Biden's political calculus around risk, like the decision to run for office at a time when there were all of these obstacles in his face, without understanding the fact that his entire story that he tells himself is that he's a person who never shies away from a risk.
What were the kinds of risks that he would say that he took as a kid?
There were these giant piles of coal waste around Scranton, Pennsylvania, called—they were called culm, and it was this kind of smoldering mound of coal debris, and they were a kind of a nasty thing.There were these little burning pockets of kind of volcanic ash within them.And at one point, somebody dared him to climb to the top of a culm dump, and he did it.He scrambled up this, to the top of this thing.And in the way that street reputations accumulate when you're living in a neighborhood, the word went around that Joey Biden would climb to the top of a culm dump.
There was another case where he went into a construction site that had a huge crane, and he kind of clambered up to the top of the crane and swung out across this construction site, and swung back to the base of the crane, these kinds of things that are kind of wild, and they're only great stories if you survive them.
And in some ways, that became a big piece of how he presented himself.And later, when he was talking to Richard Ben Cramer about his life, these are the kinds of stories that he and his siblings would tell.
I think it's pretty important.And I'll be honest with you, Mike, I didn't appreciate how important they were until this phase of his life when he is taking a risk.The truth is, 2020 was not a risk at all as a campaign.I mean, it was a period when he was in some ways the natural candidate.But 2024 is a very different set of circumstances.This is a risk, and this has much more to do with the person that he was when he was little than it does with the person he was when he was 75.
He talked a little bit about his dad and his dad's downward trajectory, and his dad isn't talked about as much as his mom in some ways as an influence.But as you said, it seems like his dad was pretty important in shaping him.How do you think he shaped Joe Biden?
I think Joe Biden's dad was very aware of class.There was a famous story that Joe Biden holds on to, which is that his father was working at a car dealership, and once at the holiday party, the owner of the dealership as a stunt kind of tipped out a bucket of coins out onto the dance floor and all of his employees could scramble around and pick up these coins.And it was supposed to be a kind of fun activity, but Joe Biden's father found it humiliating.And as Biden tells the story, he grabbed his wife's hand and said, "We're leaving," and got up and walked out of the room.
And I think that there is a degree to which Joe Biden has always had a chip on his shoulder, and that's something that he inherited from his father.His father was always alert to the risk of being humiliated for not having as much status or influence or power or education or money as anybody else.
It's interesting.It's not the only story.There's some involving his mom going to confront the nun.If you’re talking to Val [Valerie Biden Owens], you get the sense of the family against the world even, even at church.Where does that come from?
They have a very strong sense of a clannish identity.I mean, "We Bidens" is an idea.You'll hear Val, his sister, use that term.And Joe Biden uses that term.I remember talking to him about it once, and he would explain "We Bidens" as if it was like a tribal identity.It was kind of how they saw themselves.
… They are defined by a few things.They define themselves by their faith, by their Irishness, by their interest in public life, whether it's politics or being involved in some way.I think that Joe Biden has always taken some inspiration from the Kennedys, and the Kennedys had this self-identifiable kind of protective shell around them, that they would look out for one another.That was the way the Bidens looked at the Kennedys.
And in some ways, as a young person, Joe Biden decided, we want to have that same sense of distinct family identity, and that meant, “Let's build a compound in Delaware where we could all go and be together,” just like they have Hyannisport.
So there was a way in which they were—he was actively modeling his family after this other Irish-Catholic clan in politics.
And what do you think is his mom's role?We talked about his dad, but what do you think his mom's role was in shaping him?
Very important.… The way his mother saw it was that you must never allow somebody to look down on you, and you must never allow yourself to be the object of an imperious attitude.
I remember when Joe Biden went to go see the queen of England for the first time once he was in politics, his mother said to him as he was going out to do this, “Don't you bow down to her.” And it was a kind of partly a joke; it was partly about being Irish and not bowing down to the English.But it was also very much about her sense that you should never diminish your own standing in the face of another.
… When they were kids, she had this very strong sense that you're supposed to stand up to bullies.I mean, there was once a story where she gave money to his brother to go and basically get a bully in the neighborhood to back off some kid that the kid was picking on.I mean, she literally paid her son to go and beat up a bully.So that was a very strong pugilistic strain in the family.
And I don't know where that comes from.[Catherine Eugenia] Jean Finnegan was a proud Irish-Catholic woman, and that meant a lot to her.It meant place in the hierarchy.It meant faith in the people you should be devoted to.But it also meant not tolerating people who want to try to do you wrong.And I think there was a very strong sense that was imparted to the kids that you will never allow yourself to be diminished by somebody else.

Biden’s Irish-Catholic Identity

How important is that?It's not just Catholic, but it's Irish-Catholic.What does that mean growing up in those years?
Well, there's a great line that [former Sen.] Pat Moynihan used to talk about, the “Irishness of life,” and Joe Biden adopted this concept.The Irishness of life means the awareness of tragedy, and it's a combination of being both grateful for who you are and what you have, and also the knowledge that everything could fall apart.And I think there's a way in which Biden’s—the way in which his life has been bounded by tremendous good fortune and also tremendous tragedy, there is a, in his mind, truly there is almost a logic to it.
His father used to have this theory that in your life, for everything that goes well, there will be things that go badly, and for everything that goes badly, there will be things that go well.It was a kind of homespun wisdom, and it had a certain logic for them.And it's inseparable from being Irish.You know, the family came over, as so many people did, during the famine.They came to this country; they built what they had.
The truth is Joe Biden's family is part English and part Irish, but he doesn't talk that much about the English part.The Irishness gives him a stronger sense of energy, a stronger sense of having crested the hill and beaten the odds, and he likes that story.
… I guess the other profession that was open was one he considered when he was young, which was a priest.What do we know about Biden and faith and the church?
So it was very typical in that period that an Irish-Catholic family would have one child that goes into politics, another child that goes into the priesthood, somebody else who has a big family with a lot of kids.It was kind of, there was almost a logic, an arrangement to it.And Joe Biden really did face this moment of decision-making.At one point he thought about becoming a priest.He talked about it enough; actually, he spoke to a priest about it and he said, "You know, I'm thinking about doing it." And the priest took a look at him and said, "I'm not exactly sure this is the perfect path for you." And he said, "Go think about it, and come back in a year or two, and if you're still thinking about it, then we'll talk." I think—and it happened again.I mean, Biden talked about it multiple times, particularly after the death of his wife.
… I think that the church was this essential piece of what it meant to be a Biden, to be a member of this family, because it imposed a sense of ritual, a sense of hierarchy, a sense of being part of something larger than yourself.All of these were really important to the dinner-table conversation in the Biden household.
In some ways, Biden is unusual as a religious person in American politics because it's actually much more inward-looking than it is external.He's not, obviously, an evangelical Christian.… He is a quite a devout person.He's quite a sort of learned Christian.He did his work as a child.He was kind of going to Mass all the time, learning to be a devoted Catholic.His mother, of course, was very devoted to the church.
There was a period when Joe Biden went through a crisis as a Catholic, as a religious person, because after the death of his wife and his daughter, in some ways he felt like, "The church has done nothing for me."Where is this God that I have been so devoted to for my life?How could it possibly be of solace to me now?Not only did it not save me from this terrible event, but now how can I find any source of real consolation in this book?
And so there was a period of crisis.He really did go through a time when he thought, I'm not sure that this is what—the set of solutions that I thought it was for me.But over time, it's become a through line in his life.I mean, he wears a rosary on his wrist, and he is a person who is—who really does believe in the idea of saying your Hail Marys, of saying things that get you through periods of crisis.
I've come to believe that because Joe Biden had these losses in his life, these deaths in his family, he woke up to the power of ritual.And this is not unique to Catholicism.But when people are grieving, it's the time in their life that often they will say, “Oh, now I understand why this ritual exists.It imposes a sense of order at a time when everything feels like it's falling apart, and it gives me something to do, to understand.It gives me a set of steps that I can take to get through this period of agony.” And the church did that for him.
In some ways, the church went from being something that was an abstraction when he was a kid—it was something you do because your parents have enlisted you into it—into something very different as an adult, which was that it provided him a home, a kind of philosophical and mental place to go when everything else seemed to be unbearable.
I think Joe Biden has this very unusual relationship to the church in the sense that because he is in favor of abortion rights, there are Catholic priests who have said they will never give him communion.And he has more or less accepted that and said, “Look, that is the cost of being both a liberal and a Catholic.” He has these two creeds that are competing within his identity, and they coexist.
But it's an odd thing.Joe Biden is in many ways an insecure person in his life.It's just a fact of who he is.He's often trying to demonstrate his intelligence or his knowledge of specific foreign affairs and details.But when it comes to the church, there's no insecurity there.He is completely confident and at home in his religiosity.I find that always very interesting about him.

Biden’s Insecurities

… Going back over it, one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that he still remembers the names of the kids who bullied him.What does it tell you?What do the stuttering and the bullying and the still remembering tell you about Joe Biden?
I think that it's easy for us to overlook how searing it really was on Joe Biden as a young kid to be told that he wasn't smart, to be told that he couldn't communicate.That was a genuinely traumatic experience for him, and so he remembers the names of the kids who bullied him because it was such a profound moment in his life.It was a period when it could have gone in a lot of different directions.
And in some ways, the fact that he was able to figure out a way to get through it, by learning to recite poems in front of the mirror, and he became almost an evangelist for the idea of overcoming these constraints in your own life, in your own body, in your own physicality.And he would later tell other kids who were stuttering: “Hey, here's something you can do to get through it.”
And I think that gave him a sense of, “I was born with this disadvantage, but actually I figured out a way to pick the lock.” And that was a kind of hyper-confidence.And it would carry him through these moments when his own actions or the things he was encountering were setting him back.He had this in the back of his mind, he had this notion of himself as somebody who could will himself across the canyon and figure out ways of solving problems that others couldn't.
I guess the question is, is it at the root, is it a hyper-confidence, or is it a projection of hyper-confidence?
It's the core of the question.You know, confidence and insecurity are two sides of the same thing.I've talked to a lot of people over the years who see Joe Biden defined by his insecurity, and I've talked to a lot of people who see him defined by his confidence.And it's not a contradiction.These two things go hand in hand.I mean, in some ways, the fact that he is striving, even at the age of 81, is a measure of the fact that he is not a man at peace, ultimately.He is a man who is fundamentally in some turmoil with himself about what he can achieve, what kind of mark he wants to make on history.
And it's very, very different from Barack Obama.I've interviewed Obama over the years.Nobody will ever tell you that Barack Obama is a man defined by insecurity.He's not in any way.In fact, there's a kind of serenity about Obama that comes from achievement; it comes from his intellectual qualities.And it's very different than Joe Biden.
Obama sort of greeted retirement with some relish and said, “OK, I'm done with politics.I've made my mark.I've done my bit, and now I'm done.” Joe Biden doesn't approach retirement with the same idea.He looks at it and says, “There's more for me to do.There's more validation for me to receive and for me to establish.” I think that's a big piece of it for him.
Looking back on it now and thinking probably about Hunter [Biden], the story about his uncle who stutters, who has a drinking problem, how influential do you think his uncle was?
Yeah, it was very important.When Joe Biden was a kid, he shared a bedroom with his uncle, who was known as Uncle Boo-Boo, and he was a person who had struggled with substance addiction for years and had struggled with a stutter.And in some ways, his uncle was this case study, this object lesson for Joe Biden about what was a conceivable path: He could end up like his uncle.And Biden made this unusual decision as a young person to say, “There is the risk of addiction within me.It's in my genetic code.And it is a permanent risk.” And he just turned away from alcohol and really has never gone back to it.
There is a very strong sense within Biden that some families have this within them, the risk of addiction; it's just like having brown hair or blond hair.And he knows that this is there, and I think it infuses his relationship with Hunter. ...
Beau Biden and Hunter Biden, both offspring of Joe Biden, you know—also their sister, but, you know, the addiction gene was passed to Hunter Biden.There's no other way to put it, and it was very strong.And Joe Biden tried over the years.You see this in some of their private communications.He would try to reach his son when he was in the throes of this addiction, and there was just no way for him to break through.
But it was a pretty unusual act of will as a young man to say, “This demon within my genes could throw off all of my ambitions if I don't get it under control.” And it's part of the reason why Joe Biden said, “I'm never going to take a drink.”
And it's like one and the same as like a kid in front of the mirror, it's the not drinking and it's this sense of being really driven.
Yeah, I think that he became—at a pretty young age, Joe Biden awakened to the power of his own will; I mean, the will to recite these poems in front of the mirror, to beat the stutter, which seemed like this assignment from God, this sense that he had been given this body that was frail.He couldn't overcome this stutter in the beginning, and he got through it with this act of devotion, in a sense, this devotion to himself and to this idea of getting through this problem.
And I think it seeded in him this belief that he could, through an act of will, he could get himself to places that other people didn't think he could.And he started to see it.He started to have this habit of mind where he would visualize things.He called it "gaming it out," that he could game out the idea that other people found impossible.He could game out the idea of beating this political giant in Delaware politics, or he could game out the idea of buying this giant house that he really couldn't afford.And it gave him a sense of who he was.

Biden’s Early Political Aspirations

The other thing remarkable about it and that is hard to understand is the gaming out of “I want to be president.” I guess a lot of kids say that, but it doesn't ever go away with him, so I think we can assume it meant something even more.We talked a little bit about that choice for him between being a politician and being a priest.Can you help me understand a little better that ambition so early, but especially from a kid who stuttered, for whom speaking was hard?
… So Biden as a young teenager begins to get over the stutter, and what he discovers after doing so is that people look at him completely differently.And what he realizes is the combination of being sort of physically gutsy—he was also an athlete—and that he'd gotten over the stutter, all of a sudden he was having a pretty good time.I mean, all of a sudden he finds, “You know, I'm OK; I can become—” He became the senior class president at school, and he discovered that this thing which had been an affliction, his ability to speak, suddenly became a superpower.And he would—he was able to persuade people.He was a charming kid, and that awakened within him this realization that, well, maybe there's a longer story there for me.
And look, a big piece of it was, when he was in high school, John F.Kennedy became the president.And all of a sudden, an Irish-Catholic, the first Irish-Catholic to reach the White House, became this enormous symbol for Biden and an inspiration.In fact, when he was at Archmere [Academy], he went to the library and started looking up Kennedy's background to figure out, how did this person become president?What does it take to get there?And what he discovered was, you have to become a lawyer, not because Kennedy, but because what he realized was, a lot of people who get to the Senate, like Kennedy did, and eventually many of them who have gone on to the presidency, have done it by becoming lawyers.And so that's one of the reasons why young Joe Biden decided “I’ve got to go to law school” was because that was a demonstrated pathway to politics.
Yeah.And I guess even by that point, and I credit— I think I believe him when he says, you know, the priesthood is off limits at this point because he’s interested in girls.
Yeah, good point.I forgot that point.I think that was a powerful motivator.
Yeah, look, I think this is one of those—look, the reality was Joe Biden was a young, handsome guy who discovered that the world responded pretty favorably to him.He's a white male growing up at a time in which that was essentially an unimpeded glide through the life of Delaware, and he discovered that, OK, life's pretty good to me.And in some ways, I think the reason why that's important is that, really, for the first 29 years of his life, after having solved the problem of the stutter, Joe Biden had almost a kind of blessed existence, which meant that at the moment when it all came falling down, it wasn't clear that he had the philosophical equipment to deal with it.Honestly, he didn't know if he did.And his life could have gone in a very different direction at that point.
As he gets into the run for Senate against [former Sen. J. Caleb] Boggs, is he modeling the Kennedys in that race and with the family? Can you see the parallels there?
Yeah, very much so.You know, he looked at the Kennedys, and here you had this example of this handsome, young candidate and a beautiful family of kids, his wife; they were all part of the operation.And in many ways, he modeled his own candidacy after that.And he and Neilia [Hunter Biden] would go out with the kids, and it was an amazing tableau, and it was a big part of his pitch to voters because, after all, he was pitching himself as the voice of a new generation.His slogans at the time were all about how young Joe Biden knows what's going on now.And he was running against the Vietnam War.
He was really positioning himself to be an alternative to an older generation that had come before, much the way that JFK had done that.And I think it provided a logic to him.Later on, he got in trouble because he was quoting [former U.S. Attorney General] Robert Kennedy without giving him credit for it, and at one point, he acknowledged it, and it was damaging to Joe Biden.The joke that went around was, “The Kennedys quote the Greeks, and the Bidens quote the Kennedys.” And there was a way in which he was struggling to both emulate the Kennedys, but also not be in their shadow.
I guess the other question is that people look back on him and say he was following the image of the Kennedys, but was there substance there?Did his campaign have the energy— not just energy, but the actual change and those things?
For a long time, the rap on Joe Biden as a young man was, this is a young man in a hurry.And people didn't really know, well, what does he stand for?What are his principles?Does he have the kind of substance that somebody like Robert Kennedy had?That was a real question, and it dogged him.From the time that he started running, even after he got to Washington, there was this suspicion of, is this man too young, too ambitious, too callow?
Eventually that feeling, I think—you don't get to politics without having a sense of how to read the room; what are people beginning to think about you?So part of the way he compensated for that was by becoming somebody who would try to bone up on the details of policy, almost to an absurd degree sometimes.He'd be writing to scholars who he'd read in Foreign Affairs or The New York Review of Books, and he would try to get them to come brief him.
You quote an article that's like from 1973 I think, where it says, you know, “Senator Biden doesn’t believe issues make much difference in an election—personality and presentation are the key.” He's sort of open about it at that point.Where does that come from?Is that from who he is, or from Delaware, or [the thought of] personality as being so key for him, that everything is personal?
Well, that's a slightly separate question.That's a really interesting one about things being personal.He developed—there's a question about the kind of personality and superficiality of politics, and let's talk about that.And then the personal thing I think is just massively important.I didn't sort of fully appreciate it until recently.
His first election to the Senate, in which he had relied partly on the charisma of his family and himself, he had pulled the levers of public relations really effectively, he had gone out and more or less persuaded each individual voter of Delaware to vote for him over this much older, more established candidate, what that taught him was that if you can envelop people in a sense of who you are and just make them feel something, not shower them in facts and figures but make them feel something, that that is a more effective political tool than having every policy detail at your disposal.
That was both a strength and a weakness because it gave him a reputation for being slightly callow.But there's another thing going on, which is Joe Biden discovered early on and realized early on that, as far as he could tell, politics was not just local.It wasn't about the issues in an area.It was personal, meaning it was about relationships of one person to another, and what did that person really understand of the others' needs and fears and incentives?
And that applied to voters, but it also applied to individuals in politics.If you were trying to win somebody over to your cause, it mattered much more what that person thought of you as an individual and a person than it did what the specific policy details were.That became a core to his belief.
Where did that come from?Gosh.I think, Mike, I think it is, in some ways, it's the reflection of all of the things we've been talking about, that Joe Biden had made his way in the world not by mastering all of the details that he learned in school—in fact, in many cases he was barely going to class by his own description.He had gotten where he was through sheer will and charisma, and as far as he was concerned, those were the most powerful ingredients in politics.And you had to figure out another person's psychology if you were going to win them over to your cause.

The Death of Biden’s Wife and Daughter

Let's talk about the other thing that you sort of suggested, which makes some of this personal, which is the tragedy.And you've talked about it a little bit.Just how lost was he in that moment?It's interesting that you said he'd sort of been blessed up until that point.He won this election, and he has this beautiful wife and kids.And then this moment happens.
… The moment when he learned about the accident, he was in his office in Washington.They're just getting set up at that point.He's with his sister and some members of his staff, and the call comes in from Delaware.And his sister is on the phone, and just by the look on her face, he could tell that something truly awful had happened, and what he said was, "She's dead, isn't she?," meaning his wife.
And on some level, there was a piece of him that knew that the cosmic ledger was off.He had had so much good fortune, so many things had gone his way, that there was almost an impossibility about it.You know, this is what he sometimes thinks of as the Irishness of life, the sense that tragedy is always there just beyond the horizon, and it will find you.
And I think there was a piece of him, when this happened, he was totally undone by it.Everything that had been going well was suddenly in doubt.His family had been almost destroyed.He wasn't sure if he could even really find it within himself to take this job in the Senate.He thought pretty seriously about not doing it.At one point, he thought of suicide.He was angry; he was really angry.He and his brother used to go out at night and go look for people to get in fights with.I mean, there was almost a physical sense of agony and rage about it.
And he ultimately ended up having these conversations with these older senators and members of Congress; in fact, one person who had lost members of his family in a terrible accident, and that person said to him, “You have to do this because if you don't do this, if you allow yourself to cave in, you will not be able to be the father for these children that they need right now,” his two surviving children, Hunter and Beau.
And so in some ways, it created an arrangement in which the requirements of being a father and what it would take to get him through this allowed him to figure out a way to direct all of that anger and that rage and that sense of impotence in the face of terrible power, the power of this tragedy in your life, he could direct it into his political life and into his life as a widower.And that became his identity.
Yeah, it's interesting.When you go back and read him writing about it and he talked about all the things you talked about and that we talked about before, which is God played a trick on me, and he's angry at God.And he has this sort of pat explanation for how he deals with this.But what he really writes about is the Senate and sort of finding a home there.Whether that happened or not, that's how he tells the story.
I think it's really important to him, because a lot of people who've been in Washington a long time will tell you, the Senate is the best job here because, in the end, you're not the president; you don't have to have the weight of the world on your shoulders.God knows you're not a member of the House, which members of the Senate regard as a fairly degraded profession.But being a senator, you're a member of this club of 100 people.You've got a team at your beck and call.
But you're also part of this tradition, and part of being a senator is that you have the status of not being a member of the House of Representatives, and you have in the back of your mind the hunch that, you know, maybe some day you might go to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and become the president.
So the Senate was—it really swaddled him at this moment when he had lost everything.And it gave him a sense of purpose, a sense of status, and it made him a member of a group of people who had an interest in putting him back together.The Democrats in that body, but also some of the Republicans, they kind of coalesced around him.He became a cause célèbre for a while because of this terrible thing.And it was weird, because he didn't really want quite that form of attention.He actually found it uncomfortable to be the man to whom tragedy was permanently attached.He wanted to be known as a great young legal mind or a foreign policy expert.He didn't want to be somebody who was known for having suffered and survived.He found that almost galling actually.But he had to get used to it.

Biden the Institutionalist

There's this particular draw to the Senate.I was just thinking about his background in the church and also the people who are in the Senate at that point are mostly white men.It’s sort of like the priestly class.Is there something about it, because he's going to become known as an institutionalist.Is there something about the Senate that draws him to it?
Oh, totally.It's funny, you know.It's been a while since I've sort of talked about his relationship to ritual.It was very important when I was thinking about him in 2020 because it was one of the ways that he talked to people about coping with the deaths from COVID.
But here's a guy who had grown up within the church, which is defined by this sense of ritual and of ancient traditions, of things that are worth preserving because they provide order in a disordered world, and he gets to the Senate at a moment of tremendous chaos in his own life, having suffered this terrible loss.And all of a sudden, the rituals of the Senate and the kind of clarifying effect of being a part of this institution almost feels to him like an extension of these values and patterns that had made so much sense to him and his family as a young person.So the Senate became a sort of stand-in for the church for him.And I think that that was—it slotted into his life very much.
And you have to remember, the Congress at that point was dominated by Irish-Catholics.There were people like Pat Moynihan and [former Speaker of the House of Representatives] Tip O'Neill and these giant figures who, all of them had this knowledge of how the church and the Congress were, in some ways, two arms of the same spirit, both of these big institutions that required devotion and ritual.And so he actually did find his home there in a way that people from the outside might find hard to imagine.
The other thing that is a contradiction about him is because he's this institutionalist, he's a member of the Senate, but then there's this other Joe Biden, as he presents himself, of riding on the train, keeping in touch with the common person, not part of Georgetown.Can you help me understand the train ride and the connection to people and how that shapes him?
Initially Joe Biden got into this habit, which was that he would live at home in Delaware and take the train into Washington to be in the Senate.And as a result of that, it created a bit of a distance between him and permanent Washington—the social class, the people in Georgetown who threw the high-status parties, the ones who were really sort of in control of the culture of Washington.
Part of this was, Joe Biden had not gone to Harvard [University],unlike John F. Kennedy.He had not gotten the Ivy League degree.In fact, by his own description, he had barely gone to class in law school at Syracuse [University].So he was somebody who had sort of muscled his way into the institutions of power in Washington, but he had not been born into that tradition the way that some of the others, the Kennedys and people who he admired, had.
And so he was always a little bit on the outside of that.And that was how it began.And then part of the reason why he had to go home to Delaware in the evenings was because he was a single father at that point; he was raising two boys.And that also created an identity in his mind.In some ways, it was a new chapter in the identity of the young boy who had beaten the stutter.Here was the young man, the young senator who was in the Senate but was not part of the in-crowd in Washington.He had that chip on his shoulder, and it now took on a new meaning because he was a guy who was—he was not invited to the greatest parties, or at least he wasn't the one who could spend the night sipping drinks with somebody in Washington because he really did have to get back on the train and get back to Delaware.
And over time, like any of these things, an identity becomes partly organic and then partly reinforced because it becomes who you see yourself as.And he—I think he took some prickly pride in being the guy who could have power in the Senate even if he was not part of the in-crowd in Washington.
Look, later, the in-crowd— there's always been a hierarchy in Washington.It's very clear if you're here.If it was in the [former President Bill] Clinton years, then the Clintons were the big dogs.In the Obama period, it was the Obamas.It really was never the Bidens, even though they had been here for a long time.And he was acutely aware of that.
And the other part of it, the talking to people on the train and the glad-handing and the Joe Biden who bends your ear off, I mean, does he get something from those interactions?
This is the other thing is that, like, just on a chemical level, he is wired in a way where he is constantly in need of human contact.He really gets energy from it; he draws energy from it in a way that's very unusual, not universally true in politics.Oddly enough, you sometimes meet people in politics who are depleted by those interactions; by the end of the day, they want to be alone.
One of Joe Biden's aides once told me: At the end of the day, after he's given a speech, after he's gone to the rally, after he's shaken every hand on the rope line, he goes back to his room, and he gets on the phone; he calls everybody.And when everybody else has gone to sleep, he turns on the TV, and he has to watch a couple of movies to wind down before he can go to sleep.
And honestly, I think it's like, there are extroverts, and then there are Joe Biden extroverts.And he is somebody who is just—he's really, he's really dependent on that kind of interaction with people to a degree that I think other people find exhausting.
Is it like he just needs to win people over, he needs them to like him?
That's a version of it.That's a side of it.It's slightly different, though.
I think that part of it is that, having started his life as somebody who felt socially disadvantaged because he couldn't speak clearly, he is alert to people in the room who feel uncomfortable.I was talking to another presidential candidate in the 2020 race who said to me that “We were all standing backstage before the debate, and some of the other candidates are nervous.You could see it before the debate.These are people who have gotten places in their lives, but they're about to step out onto this stage, and they're pretty nervous about it.Some of them are kind of muttering to themselves.Some of them want to be alone.And Joe Biden goes over, and he's chatting up the backstage staff, the people who run the curtain and the people who run the sound system.Part of that is he's been on the debate stage before, and part of that is he can't help himself.He sees people there who are available to talk to, and he's going to go talk to them.”
Actually, I have to tell you, it was [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg who told me that story.And I remember—Buttigieg is a pretty capable politician, but here, he found himself, he's like, “I don't know where this guy found that energy within him to want to go chat up the AV staff at a moment when he's about to be in front of the entire country and be judged on every movement.” They're just wired very differently.

Biden’s 1987 Presidential Run

Moving to when he's going to run in '87, how is he known as a senator in those years?
By the way, I ignored one point, Mike, which I'll just say very briefly, but I think it's an important one you raised, which is about him wanting to win over everybody he encounters.There is a level of—Joe Biden has an innate sense of wanting to persuade, of wanting to win over people.He picked up a habit as a young politician when he would look out over a room of people that he was talking to, and he would look for the people that were not nodding, the ones who looked skeptical.And he would drill away, looking at them, trying in his own way to try to get them to agree with him.And sometimes that meant that he would talk too long because he would talk and talk until people either relinquish their objections or he sensed that he had done all he could.
But his son Beau used to stand in the back of the room and watch him go, and he would kind of signal to his father, OK, it's time; we're done here.And I think that was part of what forged that connection between the two of them.They had this kind of unspoken political communication.
And to your question, Mike, what was his reputation in the Senate, is that what you were—
That may be part of his reputation in the Senate.
Yeah, well, it becomes very important, I think, particularly around Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas case.You know, Joe Biden was known in the Senate as somebody who could speak to all of these different subcultures.He was able to talk to members of the Senate who had been part of the old segregationist Democratic Party, and yet he was also able to be close to people like [former Sen.] Ted Kennedy, who came from the New England liberal tradition, the integrationists, the kind of modern Democrats.
And the Clarence Thomas [Supreme Court] hearings was a moment when it all collided.You know, in some ways—you'll have ways of covering this, and I'm happy to expound on it, but if you want to really cut to the chase, I think Joe Biden was so determined to try to satisfy everybody in that moment that he ended up satisfying nobody.He ended up really sort of doing damage to his own reputation because people said, “Why didn't you take a firmer stand?Why didn't you stand up for principle in that case?”
And part of the explanation is, part of the answer is, he was so determined to try to demonstrate a kind of excess fair-mindedness to Clarence Thomas, a fair-mindedness that Clarence Thomas ultimately, Biden believed, did not deserve, that he ended up dishonoring the process that he was trying to preserve.
… So let's go back to '87 because I want to ask you a question which is why.Why as a senator is he driven to run for president at that point?
In some ways, running for president in 1987 was almost a matter of momentum.This is a person who had gotten himself to the Senate, had built up some status and seniority there.Honestly, he was getting bored.He had been there for a while.It seemed like the next natural rung on the ladder.
And I think it's easy to forget now.At the time, Joe Biden had a reputation as a gifted speaker.Honestly, he'd gone from somebody who had been almost unable to communicate because of his stutter to somebody who was being celebrated for his ability, for his wit, for his ability to speak off the cuff, and he would go to places, and he could have this effect on the room, and he was almost addicted to it.I mean, the ability to win over a group of people who didn't really know much about you an hour earlier was a very powerful force in his life.
But so he enters this race with, in some ways, the reputation as a great political athlete.But it wasn't at all clear what the principles were that were driving him.What were the policy ambitions he had?What was he trying to accomplish?He talked about things like the middle class, and he channeled some of Robert F.Kennedy's old rhetoric about a fairer, more inclusive economy.But in some ways, it felt at the time like that was less important to him than the sheer political competition and to see if he could prevail.
… And how do you explain the plagiarism scandal?
… My real theory on Joe Biden is that Joe Biden didn't ultimately figure out what he was really running for in life until much later in his career.It's an unusual story, but he now talks about "the central cause of my presidency, the defense of democracy." And he never had a central cause.For years and years, he would do a bit when it came to dealing with the Supreme Court; he would do a bit on foreign affairs; he would work on the Violence Against Women Act.But it's only now, in the ninth decade of his life, that he has a thing that he describes as the central cause.
And I don't think you can understand why it is that he's running for a second term in the White House without understanding what the significance of that is.All of a sudden, he has this purpose, and it is a very powerful ingredient in his calculations.
It's also funny if you think about him as an institutionalist, because there's a lot of other senators he's running against.There's other people.And there is not in that race, an anti-institutionalist, somebody who wants to burn everything down.So like, it's like, what does he stand for?
Yeah, well, he had trouble.I mean, there are these images of him on this debate stage sitting next to all of these other more or less indistinguishable candidates, all white men, more or less, with very few exceptions.And the way he tries to distinguish himself is by presenting himself as an inspiring story of somebody who came from nothing.As he says, “Why am I the first member of the Biden family to go to college?”
The problem was, that was not actually an original story.It was one that he had taken from Neil Kinnock, the British politician.And he had been on the stump; he had been quoting Kinnock.But on that day, sitting in front of reporters, he didn't quote Kinnock; he just absorbed Kinnock's story as his own and started telling it, and that was the beginning of the unraveling.
I can understand that explanation: He forgets to cite it.But I think what's harder to understand is why is he quoting Kinnock in the first place over and over again and not telling his own story.
… For me at least, Kinnock's story in some loose way rhymed a bit with Biden's own story.Here, you have a family.He was, after all, the first—I have no idea, actually, if he was the first person in his family to go to college.I don't know; I sort of doubt that.But I think, like—
There was a way in which the Kinnock story, which was a very dramatic and specific example of coming from a real downtrodden family and making your way out of the mines and becoming this powerful politician, Biden found that very appealing.There was a little piece of it that rhymed with his own background because, after all, his father had instilled in him, and his mother, this very strong sense that, it's up to us to prevail over the people who will look down upon you.
And so Biden had this slightly edgy sense of aspiration about him.And in some ways I think it made him vulnerable to the temptations that Kinnock's story provided, which was.here was the most soaring, conceivable example of the kind of arc of a personal story that he was trying to channel.I don't think it's just a matter of forgetting to quote him.I don't think forgetting is quite what happened.What really happened was, it was almost like Joe Biden as a political performer was inhabiting the role only a little too well.He absorbed this story into his own, and of course it was not his own story.
It kicked off an entire study of how much of Joe Biden was real and how much of it was taken and absorbed and patched together from the Kennedys and from this and from that, and it fed into a narrative at the time that maybe Joe Biden is much more interested in the status of office than he is in the content of his policies and what he really represents.
The anger that you see, … that response that you see from Joe Biden, what is that, and what do you see in that?
… He has this acute sensitivity to anybody looking down on him.And there was a moment, this now famous moment, when somebody started questioning his credentials and saying, “You didn't seem like you were a very good law student,” and instead of saying, “You're right.I really wasn't a very good law student,” he brushes back, or he sort of rears back and gets aggressive about saying, “I think I'm smarter than you are.I think I have a higher IQ than you.”
I think that's the insecurity talking, and it's always there, lurking just below the surface because it was such a big piece of him as a young person, this—that's the same Joe Biden who still remembers the names of the kids who bullied him as a child for his stutter.It was only many, many years later when he could write about the experience of going to law school and of almost failing out that he was able to do it with any kind of peace.But in that young, hungry, ambitious Joe Biden, that was not something that he was willing to take lightly.In fact, it felt to him like an assault.

Biden’s 2008 Run for President

… We talked about what it was like for him to be criticized in '87 and what it's like with Anita Hill.[The 2008 campaign for president] is almost a disaster from the beginning with the gaffe about Obama, … and it sort of collapses.How hard is all of that for Joe Biden to believe it's finally his moment and come in against all of that and discover it isn't?
I think when he dropped out of the 2008 race, it really did seem like that might be the end.I mean, at that point he had run for president twice; it hadn't worked.Actually, his wife, Jill Biden, had already started to encourage him to do something completely different, like go to architecture school.She thought, you know, “You've always wanted to be an architect.I'll pay for it if you want to go and be trained as an architect.”
So there was a real period in his life when it seemed like this may not work, actually.And then the most unlikely thing happened, which is Barack Obama, the person who he had offended early on in this race, decided actually he needed Joe Biden in his candidacy.And Biden's life has been full of these kinds of almost miraculous turns, these things that you could not have predicted, and that was one of them.
Was it hard for him to say yes to this younger upstart?
When he first was presented with the idea, there was a piece of wounded pride that made him say, “I'm not going to go work for somebody who's younger than I am, who hasn't earned it the way that I have in all these years in politics.” And he talked to his mother, and he talked to his wife.
His mother said to him, “Look, you have spent your career presenting yourself as a champion of civil rights, and here you have the opportunity to help somebody become the first Black president of the United States, and you're not going to do it?” And that was persuasive.
And I think there's another piece of it.One of Biden's aides told me once that after he was given this offer of being the vice president, that he told Jill, "Look, I'm not sure I could really work for somebody.I've been my own boss since 1973.How am I going to do this?" And she said, "Grow up."
So there's a way in which he had to sublimate his own sense of pride and identity and stature within this larger enterprise of helping Barack Obama become president and make history.And in many ways, Mike, I think the big surprise is that he was able to do that, actually.
This is the thing.This is the hardest thing to capture, and I think part of the task of the film in some ways is, for all of these moments where Biden can seem somehow immune to the awareness of how other people see him, he then has these moments of breaking through and actually connecting with people in exactly what they need in that moment.And what people needed in 2008 was—let's be blunt—Barack Obama needed a way to speak to older, white voters, particularly in the Midwest, in places like Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden felt very at home.And Biden was able to do that.And as a result, he helped Barack Obama make history.
And I think that's part of this complex portrait of who he is.The same thing.I mean, in 2020, I don't think anybody thought that at a moment of rapid diversification in this country, at a moment of generational change, that in fact it was going to be the oldest member of the field, an old, white man who was going to be the Democrats' choice.But in a strange way, he was the person who could go up against [former President] Donald Trump and unify the party and run a national campaign.And that is partly—that is a big piece of the story of Joe Biden, is timing.

The Obama-Biden Relationship

… The other part that does sound like it was difficult, though, is we have Biden behind closed doors, but also in the press, the reputation of Uncle Joe.And maybe the relationship with Obama improves, but at the beginning, the raised eyebrow and the feeling among the younger staff of disrespect.
… So when Biden came into the Obama team, he represented, in some ways, a voice that was out of favor.He was somebody who was talking about Reagan Democrats, meaning working class, often men in manufacturing jobs, people who had been a part of the Democratic coalition for a long time but were seen as part of the past, not the future.
He was often the person in the room who was saying, “Well, what about conservative Democrats?What about religious Democrats?” Honestly, what he was saying was, what about people who look and sound like me?And to some of the younger members of the Obama team, the kind of more the more cutting-edge, progressive Democrats in that coalition, they often looked at Joe Biden and they thought, honestly, you're talking about a politics that has gone away.We don't need to think about the white working class; that's not the future.
And Joe Biden ultimately took a lot of pride in having been alert to something that turned out to be a real failure within the Democratic Party, which was not being more responsive to parts of the country that felt like they were being left behind by Democrats, people like members of the unions.Joe Biden was out there talking to them, trying to stay connected to them.
And I remember having a conversation with Biden in 2014, long before [Sen.] Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump had reawakened attention on the needs and the complaints of the white working class, and Biden was talking about it then.And honestly, when he talked about it, I thought he was talking about something that didn't matter anymore, and I didn't appreciate that he was actually talking about something that was going to be a part of the future of politics, not just part of the past.
Did he get something from Obama?Did Obama help him in some way?
Yeah.In many ways, Obama provided a form of redemption for Joe Biden.After having lost the presidential race, now he gets to be part of an operation that was not just making history, but it was cool.This was a group of political figures led by Obama and [former First Lady] Michelle Obama, who felt like they were laying the path to a new form of politics, a more inclusive, path-breaking politics.And Biden got to be a part of that.
It was a source of great pride.I think he took pride in the fact that he felt like maybe Obama wouldn't be Obama without some of Biden's tactical expertise on dealing with Congress.Obama didn't make much of a secret of the fact that he never wanted to set foot in Congress again if he could avoid it.Biden, on the other hand, loved it.He kept his gym membership at the Senate gym because he liked to go back there and schmooze with people.And so Biden did the parts of the White House job that Obama didn't really want to have to do.

Beau Biden’s Death

… We talked about the Kennedys.Was there a sense of that in Beau?
Yeah, I didn't know Beau.I don't have a good feel for him.But I think Beau represented—in Joe Biden's mind, Beau was the natural extension of a story, a story that was a lot like the Kennedy family: the idea that you could raise the next generation of political leadership and instill in them your talents and your values, and maybe you could engineer away your own faults.And he saw that in Beau.
He really used to say about Beau, that "Beau Biden had all of my good qualities and none of my bad qualities." And I think the assumption, very much so, Joe Biden's assumption was, he would get out of politics in 2017.It was clear it was not his moment, and that would be the end.It was Beau Biden was going to be the future of the Biden political dynasty.And then, of course, that became impossible.
How close was his relationship, especially with those two boys after the car accident?We realize more about it now, or at least I do.
I think it was very, very intense.Beau and Hunter had been injured in that car accident and had been hospitalized, and then it was the three of them.It was the father and the two boys, and they were a unit that were kind of rebuilding one another, getting them back to life.And these were two boys who were growing up without a mother until Jill Biden came into the family, and so it was an unusually intense emotional and personal connection.
And then on top of it, Beau Biden, who was, after all, Joe Biden's namesake, he was almost the literal extension of Joe Biden's aspirations in politics, then he turned out to be a pretty gifted politician of his own, and he started succeeding in Delaware, became the attorney general.And the assumption within the family and within the circle of advisers around the Biden family was, Beau Biden is the future.He is the one who is going to carry the torch.And they began to see this idea of becoming the Kennedys 2.0.
And I think that was really strong in Joe Biden's sense of himself and how he had built something that didn't exist before: the makings of a political dynasty.
… And now this tragedy and this diagnosis, I guess initially sort of disbelief in it.But the reality becomes clear within the year.
I have a memory of being in Biden's office in the West Wing in 2014, and this was a period when they got a little bit of good news in his medical trajectory.We were having an interview and Biden left the room to go take a phone call.It was something—he said, “I can't miss this call,” and he left.And he came back, and he had tears in his eyes because they had gotten what they thought was a very positive development in Beau Biden's treatment.It turned out to be ultimately an illusion.
But in that period, Joe Biden was deeply absorbed in what was happening to his son, and I think what we now know is that, at the time, Biden told his aide, Steve Ricchetti, he said, “Schedule me as much as you possibly can.Fill my days,” and he said, “because that's the only way I'm going to get through this.I know this from personal experience, that if I am allowed to ruminate, to go within myself, I won't get through this.The only way I survive is by staying busy, keep working.”
And the effect of his death on Biden?
Oh, man, I mean.Well, it just gutted him.
You know, there's this one photograph of Joe Biden at his son's funeral, where Biden is kind of looking up, and he's closed his eyes, and he's kind of clenching his eyes closed, and he's got Beau's children around him, these children who have just lost their father.And there is a moment of a man just absorbing the full cosmic agony of what has happened to this family.
Around the White House, he was not the man he had been.He was distracted.He was grieving.He was fragile.It was hard for him to get through a conversation without thinking about Beau, talking about Beau.And in some ways, people enveloped him.They tried to support him, having gone through this.But there was also this recognition that this is not a person who's in a position to run for president.
And so at that point, Joe Biden has these two really powerful instincts competing within him.One is the belief, the old belief: “I've earned this; this is my time.I've been the vice president.I know the policy.I can do this job,” and then the other piece of him that is saying: “I'm caving in.I'm in grief.I'm in a terrible, terrible agony.”
They had a meeting finally in October of 2015, several months after Beau had died.They were still, the people around him, talking about the fact that they thought he could win.All of their data, their surveys that they were conducting suggested that he was in a better position than [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton as far as they were concerned.
And it was in that meeting, finally, that his adviser, Mike Donilon, who had been one of the most fervent advocates for Joe Biden running for president, finally said, just looking at him, he said, “You know, you don't have to do this.” And it was really that moment that flipped a switch in Joe Biden, where he finally gave himself permission to give up that dream, this thing that had been with him for half a century of becoming president of the United States.And he just—he realized this isn't going to happen.And the next morning, he got up and went and told Obama.
When you see that announcement in the Rose Garden, where he says he's not going to run, it’s like where does he—because after the last tragedy he had gone into the Senate, and he, as he tells the story, he found his way working through.Here's this political ambition for his whole life and the tragedy and—is there a question about what his meaning is and what his life is about at that moment as he walks out?
Yeah, it's really amazing.I mean, for the first time in his adult life, he was completely adrift.He was leaving the government.He hadn't been out of government in 44 years, and all of a sudden, the thing that had been supposed to sustain him, which was, he was going to become the father of this next great political talent, Beau Biden, that had been taken from him.And he said openly, “I have no idea what I'm going to do now.” …
But the truth was, it wasn't clear what would happen next.The last thing in the world, honestly, I think people thought was that this man would eventually be president.
Obama doesn't encourage him to run; in fact, seems to actively discourage him, whether Obama was doing it because of his friend Joe or because he wanted his legacy to be the first female president. I mean, for Joe Biden to get that pressure or whatever it was from Obama?
… Biden and his family got the very clear impression that Barack Obama was not encouraging him to run for president, and that wounded Biden a bit.I think it felt to him like Obama was picking a favorite and that he had chosen Hillary Clinton as his heir apparent.And Obama denied having done that.It didn't feel to him like that's what he had done, but that's how Biden interpreted it.
And right up to the present day, Biden will often tell the story about how he felt that Obama had in effect picked Hillary Clinton over him.And I think it tapped in to this deep and enduring sense of “Other people don't quite think I'm up to this,” and it activated that gene.And in some ways, Biden is always on the lookout for that moment when somebody says, “I don't think you can climb to the top of that heap.” And it becomes—it becomes a trigger for him.
I have to say, I mean, we're all building towards a natural—you're doing it very elegantly, Mike, because we're building towards the inevitable and natural point, which is when everybody says to him in the 2024 campaign, “You really shouldn't do this.” Almost for 81 years, people have been telling him, “You shouldn't do this.” And in some cases he has gone forward, and it has worked out, and in some cases he has gone forward, and it has ended very badly.And that's the story of Joe Biden's life.

Hunter Biden

… During this period also, one of the questions that is going to come back is, why with Hunter doing the deal with Burisma and his side business and Biden's involved in the portfolio, why doesn't he tell him, “Knock it off,” and it seems like some of his advisers are pretty worried about it. Why doesn't he?
I think it's a couple things.
In some ways, the Biden family had taken on a new version of that old Irish-Catholic clan we talked about, where one son became the priest, one son became the politician, one son earned a fortune.And that's how you made a family work.And in some ways, the Biden family was doing a version of that where you had Beau Biden beginning to build a political future; Hunter Biden was the businessman.He was the one who was going out there and, in some cases, literally funding his brother's life, helping to pay for private school.And ultimately, Hunter Biden started to pay for some of his brother's medical treatment, or maybe all of his brother's medical treatment.So there was an actual financial need within this family.
And I think also—this is the part where it's speculative.I'm a little hesitant to explore it too much because I don't really know.
It was clear that Hunter Biden was not going to have a political career, and Joe Biden was not going to get involved in the business life that Hunter Biden had.He'd never been somebody who was particularly comfortable around business.One of the only things he did say to his son that we know for sure is, “I hope you know what you're doing.” And that turned out to be a disastrous decision on Hunter Biden's part because it invited a whole cascade of problems from there.
I mean, Hunter's already had some problems being discharged from the Navy, and he's already had some alcohol issues, and it seems like it really descends in that period at the end of the Obama presidency.
… When Beau died, it was really like a bomb went off in that family, because all of a sudden, Hunter Biden's addiction issues, which had been off and on for years, they exploded.And a year to the day after Beau's death, it was on that anniversary that Hunter turns very hard again towards alcohol and drugs and begins this rapid spiral downward, and it was a spiral that involved substance addiction and also these bad business decisions.But they were compounding one another, and it was one bad decision after another.
And I think from Joe Biden's perspective, there was a feeling of helplessness, of what can I do?There was a moment when he confronted Hunter Biden at their house in Delaware, followed him out into the driveway and pleaded with him, pleaded with him: “Let me help you with this problem.” But Hunter at that point was beyond reach.
… In some ways, there was always a limit to how much Joe Biden could really understand what Hunter was going through, because after all, Joe had dealt with his own risk of addiction by turning away from alcohol decades ago.And so there was a piece of him that couldn't quite grasp how it was that Hunter was in the grip of this thing that lurked within their genetic code, but ultimately he was struggling to get free from.

Biden’s 2020 Run for President

… Let's go to the next question about why, which is 2019, and there's lots of things that you can point to, what he points to with Trump and the things we've been talking about and Beau and the lifelong ambition.How do you understand why he decides to run now, especially after Beau's death?
Joe Biden obviously talks a lot about the role that the scene in Charlottesville played in his mind.And I think there's a few ways to read that.There's no question that that scene of these neo-Nazis marching with torches had a big impact on him.And I think it's not only the fact that he saw Trump as this dangerous element of the racist tradition that lurks within American politics, but I think it's also, on some level, Biden looked at Trump and saw the antithesis of so much that Biden had tried to be in politics; somebody who had tried on a personal level, sometimes to a fault, to be reverential of the institutions, who admired and revered what politics could be, the idea of compromise.These were things that he considered hallowed ground.And here's this guy coming along who is desecrating a lot of the values that Biden thought were dignifying politics.
And I think he also looked at him, and the political piece of Joe Biden's brain said, “I can beat this guy, and I can beat this guy because I have a national reputation.I've been in the vice presidency, and a lot of the other Democrats who are running, they might have promising futures, but they don't have the kind of experience and standing around the country that I have.They don't have the relationships.”
We've talked about the idea that Joe Biden believes that politics is personal.It's not just about your policy ideas.[Sen.] Elizabeth Warren might have had the most elaborate, worked-out policy agenda, but did she have a relationship with important politicians in South Carolina, like [Rep.] James Clyburn, who would tilt the balance in a fundamental way?Joe Biden did.
When you go back and look at that convention speech and he talks about lightness, light and darkness and the soul of the nation and these terms, which do seem so different from the Joe Biden that we have been talking about, what do you see in like that and in the framing?It almost sounds religious, right, light and darkness?
I should have addressed this when we were talking about what happened to Joe Biden as a result of Beau's death.I mean, one of the most revealing comments that somebody ever made to me was, after Beau died, people began to see Joe Biden a little differently.He was almost physically different, that there was a way in which he was more settled.There was—as somebody very close to him said to me, it got rid of the last trace of arrogance of the old high school quarterback, and he was a more, a bit more contemplative than he'd ever been, really.For years in politics, he'd been moving fast, a little bit by the seat of his pants, and now all of a sudden there was no more reason to be racing along, and instead he was a little bit of a more meditative figure, which is a word nobody ever would have used for Joe Biden in his earlier years.
And it was almost ironic that it was this moment in which you had a nation that was reeling from COVID, in which people were quite literally grieving for members of their family and grieving for the direction of the country under Trump that Biden found that all of this language and philosophical preparation that he'd spent all these years investing in, about how to survive and how to grieve, all of a sudden it became politically relevant.It was not just this element of his life that had always been this strange sideline from politics.That was politics.Politics was as much about grief and recovery as it was about any policy idea.
To what you were just saying, this idea that he carries around the rosary of Beau, and he's got it on his hand.Is that part of that change in him?
… Grief was this permanent partner in Joe Biden's life, and he could make space for it when he needed it, and it would also recede at times.And after Beau's death, there was a way in which there was a conjunction between what was happening in his own life and what was happening in public life, that all of a sudden, these two things were joined.
And if you looked across that stage of other Democratic candidates in the primary, the truth was nobody there had a reputation for having survived a terrible personal tragedy and come out the other end of it.That was really—that was Joe Biden's reputation in this country.
And it also became this answer eventually to Trump, because Trump was coming out there, and he was like an almost a cartoon of machismo and of strength and of somebody who would never confess to feelings of vulnerability or loss, and here was Joe Biden, who was wearing his heart and his grief out loud.I think it sort of made a case that Joe Biden couldn't even make explicitly for himself.
… At this moment, which people talk about a lot now, of Biden standing there with the next generation behind him and “I'm a transition,” how do you see that?How do you think Joe Biden saw that at the time or now?
I think what was going on was, Biden is not naive about politics.He knows what he was saying.He was suggesting just enough to the public that “There are all these people around me, and I'm going to do what I can to bring them into politics and give them a start.”
What he didn't say was, “I'm only going to serve one term.” In fact, he was given the option of signing a pledge more or less saying, “I'm only going to serve one term,” and he didn't do that.If he really meant “I'm going to serve one term,” he could have easily said so.He could have signed a pledge.
There's a piece of Biden, I think, that recognized that that would probably be political malpractice.If you go into office saying, “I'm going to do one term,” you're a lame duck, as far as Biden's concerned, from day one.All anybody would want to talk about is, who's coming next.And in his mind, he probably wouldn't have been able to make deals with Congress because they would have said, “This guy's days are numbered anyway.”
So in his mind, he kind of tried to have it both ways.He allowed enough of the sense that he was perhaps only going to do one term without ever saying so explicitly, but then he also made sure that he wasn't cutting himself off too soon.
I think there was another thing going on, which is that he was also saying in that moment: I'm going to create a younger, more diverse community of politics around me.And on that, he delivered.The administration that he composed was in fact much more diverse, both ideologically and in racial and ethnic terms and in gender terms, than administrations before him.And so in his mind, I think he feels like he delivered on enough of that promise.But of course some people said, “Well, we thought you were only going to do one term.”
Personally, honestly, Mike, personally, I never thought when he said that, that he was saying, “I'm only going to serve one term.” And I went around and said to people at the time, “If you think that, if you are thinking that's what he means, you don't really know Joe Biden.And on top of it, listen to what he's saying and what he's not saying, because the details matter.”

Biden’s Presidency

… When you go to that inauguration, which is in the middle of COVID, but it's also just weeks, days after Jan.6, he'd been warning about democracy.The military is there; there's social distancing.
It's unbelievable, yeah.
You know that moment that he comes into, and I guess the question people ask about him is, there's the grandiosity of defending democracy, and then there's Joe Biden, the compromise, “I'm going to return things to normal.” What's the challenge that he faces at that moment about who he is and what his presidency will be?
Well, in some ways I don't think he saw those as so different because—I think Biden's promise to the public was, “I'm going to return things to something more recognizable in politics.” And what that means is, we're going to have elections and the people who win will win, and the people who lose will lose.And it might be a little boring at times.In fact, he almost explicitly promised to take up less space in people's minds.He kind of said, “I don't really think that politics needs to be this all-encompassing inferno that kind of consumes us all.” And that was part of the implicit promise.
But, you know, I don't think that it was grandiose to talk about trying to shore up democracy.In fact, democracy was as actively and explicitly under threat as we had seen at any moment since the Civil War.And had he not talked about it in those terms, if he had just talked about education policy and expanding access to health care, it would have been a little bit of, sort of beside the point.
The inauguration was literally two weeks to the day after a violent mob had stormed the Capitol, and here they were—on Jan.6, already the scaffolding for the inauguration was going up.Part of the insurrection climbed that infrastructure to make its way into the building.So by the time Joe Biden steps to that lectern on the day of the inauguration, you have a country that is both reeling from the shock and the offense of what had happened, and was also, I think, trying to figure out, can we actually ever go back to normal after this?What is really possible?Are we permanently changed by it?
So part of his message was to say, “That is not us.That scene that you saw on the steps of this building, that is not us; we are something else.” And it was a more lofty, aspirational image of America than I think people had come to expect from that young, hungry Joe Biden.

The Withdrawal from Afghanistan

You talked before about empathy and the question of Afghanistan and the withdrawal.Do you think that that was part of what led to those images?Was it coming from Biden, a lack of concern about what will happen to who was being left behind?
I think Afghanistan was a combination of things.For years, he had been trying to achieve a policy objective, which was to pull the United States out of Afghanistan.And he felt that there was a lot of history there.He felt that the generals, the men in uniform, tended to be very dismissive of politicians, and not just any politicians, Democratic politicians.Biden had spent years, of course, on the Foreign Relations Committee.He'd had a lot of dealings with members of the Pentagon, and there was a constant low-grade tension where some of the people in uniform would be pretty disparaging about Democrats who they thought were in some ways kind of weak on defense, and Biden had built up an allergy to that.
And so when he was finally in the White House as the vice president, and they had this huge matter before them, this question of whether to double down on Afghanistan or to pull out, Biden made his case internally over and over again.Most famously, he wrote at one point on Thanksgiving Day, he wrote a handwritten memo which he faxed to President Obama, making the case that the United States should pull out of Afghanistan.And he lost that battle.It was a bureaucratic and political battle, and it's not one that he won.And it didn't go away.In his mind, it stayed with him.
Part of the reason why he felt so attached to this issue was he had a son who was in uniform.Beau Biden had been in the military.Very few people at the highest ranks of politics these days actually do have children in uniform.Biden considered it a point of some personal expertise, that he cared about what the effects were on families of having their children deployed overseas over and over again.
And so when his position didn't prevail, it stayed with him and kind of gnawed at him for years.So finally, when it comes around in 2021, here's this moment that he's been waiting for for years, when he's been saying the United States should pull out of Afghanistan.The Trump administration had set a schedule that would allow him to do so, and he convened a process in which experts would come in, and they would make their case to him.But it became clear over the course of that process that he was unwavering in his belief that the United States had to get out, and he wasn't willing to delay it, even when people said they thought he should.
… He wasn't, as he said at one point, “I'm not going to expose my son to the risks of trying to get Afghanistan to embrace values that it doesn't seem willing to embrace,” and that bothered a lot of people because it put people in Afghanistan at risk.
For Joe Biden, who had been on the Foreign Relations Committee, been vice president, but not been the decision-maker, and who sees things in terms of Beau when the bomb goes off at the gate and American troops are killed, and he is the president, and he is there when the bodies are being greeted, and they're yelling at him, the families, what does that moment mean for Joe Biden?
It's an awful moment.I mean, it really was.In the first part of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, before the bombing, in many ways, he felt like he was right.He understood that he was being criticized in the press, but in some ways it only confirmed for him his theory of the case that the United States was always going to have to leave Afghanistan.And it was never going to be easy.
But the bombing was something different.The bombing was now a moment when the very rationale that had driven him to pull out, the risks to Americans, all of a sudden that was—that had, in the worst possible way, had come to pass.He said at one point right after the bombing, when the news reached him in the White House, he said to the people around him, “The worst possible thing has now happened.”
And he then had this task of going and being with the families, families not all that different from his own, parents of children in uniform.And I think it was really a shock to him.He thought that he had this capacity to talk to grieving parents, that he had refined his techniques over the years.He knew how to do it; he knew how to reach people even when they seemed unreachable, and he tried that with some of the parents and they responded with real anger to him.They held him personally responsible.And I think that was a really difficult thing for him to absorb because it was almost like this moment was beyond even his talent for grief.
Do you think it was a turning point for his administration?
Certainly was.… The images out of Afghanistan were a huge turning point because up until that moment, it almost felt as if this administration was making up for all of the faults of the Trump administration.They were experienced and competent and responsive to politics, and now here was something that seemed so at odds with what people expected.You began to see this really dramatic fall in their favorability and in how people perceived them.This was supposed to be the competent group, and those images made it seem as if, well, maybe that story is not complete.
The other thing that was going on, Mike, which I think is important is that inflation had started to eat away.And so you had these two things happening at the same time.Inflation was going up.People were starting to get frustrated when they went to the grocery store or they gassed up their car, and then you had this really dramatic demonstration on TV of the ways in which this administration was not performing the way that it wanted to.And those two things were a perfect storm, and you began to see his popularity decline, and it never recovered the level that it had before.
What they would want to talk about, in foreign policy, is, at least initially, is Ukraine and his response.It seems like he finds meaning in it in a way of connecting it to what's happening in the U.S.Help me understand how important his response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine is for understanding Biden's presidency.
… After the agonies of Afghanistan, all of a sudden you have this very different moment, this moment of redemption in some ways for the administration.Many of the European leaders and the experts on Russia and on Ukraine had predicted that Putin was bluffing.They thought he's not going to go in, and it would be irrational; it would be self-destructive.But the Biden administration and the intelligence community was convinced that Putin was actually going to invade, and they made a choice, which was almost unprecedented, which is that they decided to put out some of this intelligence beforehand, and by doing so, they put Putin on the defensive because all of a sudden, he couldn't say anymore that he was just having a military exercise.The U.S.was saying very explicitly, he is preparing an invasion.
And the reason why that was important was because, after the fact, after Putin invaded, all of a sudden the Biden administration had credibility.They could go to other European leaders and say, “We were right, and you were wrong, and now it's a time for us to marshal a coherent response.”
So all of a sudden, you had this moment when people thought, OK, NATO, which had been described by Emmanuel Macron as effectively brain-dead, was coming together to a degree that I don't think anybody had predicted beforehand, and it was doing it in part because the Biden administration had shown that they were more prescient than any other of the big powers were about what was about to unfold.

Biden’s Legislative Success and Low Poll Numbers

… All of the legislation, it seems like there's a theory, like “We can show government can compromise, can work, and there's going to be a political payoff to that.” But it doesn't seem like there is a political payoff.
Well, it's so interesting because—so part of Biden's promise to the public was, “I'm going to show you that government can actually work again.The government has failed you in many respects in the early years of COVID.” It was only later, once the vaccines became available, that people get this feeling of OK, the government is delivering again.But Biden's whole theory was, “I can take a paralyzed Washington and make it work.That's what my decades of experience will deliver.”
And he gets at it.He goes into Congress, and he and his people begin to start to build these coalitions to pass these bills.And in some ways, the theory of the case was, if we can show that Washington will work and we can put practical things in people's hands, like stimulus checks and infrastructure, we can actually fix the roads that people so often say they want, or we can cap the price of insulin, which is something people have been asking for for a long time, that somehow the public will respond politically.
What you discover is, the public was responsive on some level, but it was much more responsive to the fact that the Supreme Court had taken away access to abortion than it was to the things, the benefits that the Biden administration had delivered by passing bills in Congress.And I think that scrambled the circuits a little bit in the White House because all of a sudden, they had thought that maybe these things would restore some of this decline in their popularity as a result of Afghanistan and inflation, and instead they found themselves trapped in this lower level of popularity that no legislative achievement seemed capable of bringing them out of.

Israel and Gaza

After all of his years in foreign politics, was he ready for Israel/Gaza?Had that past prepared him for the for the foreign policy challenge and the political challenge of that invasion and the response?
In some ways, the crisis in Israel, it tapped in to both the power of his experience and then also the limitations of it.In some ways, he was captive to that experience because he felt very deeply in protecting the state of Israel, in the idea of Israel.It was really core to his sense of what America's responsibilities are in the world.As he sees it, there is no safe harbor for Jews unless there is a state of Israel, and he feels really powerfully about that.
At the same time, his vision of Israel was something that was increasingly out of step with where Americans were, and particularly young Americans, who had come to see it as something else.It was not this scrappy state which had built itself out of the Holocaust.It was, in fact, a powerful and, in the minds of many young Democrats, a bullying state that was not fully acknowledging the responsibility it had for the loss of life in Gaza.And Biden had a harder time understanding that newer vision of Israel, of course, than he did to the one that had sustained him for decades.

Biden’s Age and Mental Acuity

… When you look back at Biden's presidency, how is it different being president, and has it led to him being constrained as president?
Remember for years he's called himself a gaffe machine.He knows it.It's a fact.And on some level, he takes some pride in the fact that he gets in trouble for saying what he thinks; he likes that about himself.He'd much rather get in trouble for saying what he actually believes than for saying something that he doesn't believe.But there's a trace of regret whenever this happens.You can sometimes see that little moment in his eye when he realizes he said something that's going to get him into trouble.
But look, I don't think he expects that he's going to start being more and more disciplined.I don't know if it's an age issue or not.Look, he's been saying things that have been getting himself in trouble even back when he was a wunderkind in Congress, so it's not a matter of age; it's much more a matter of how his head works.
But then they clean up after him.You know, the staff cleans up after him, which seems a little bit humiliating when he says something like Putin, this guy can't remain in power, which could be a strong political statement, but they're cleaning up after him, and the questions about why doesn't he have more press conferences?Why doesn't he do the <i>60 Minutes</i> interview before the Super Bowl.
Well, he did do a <i>60 Minutes</i> interview.He just didn't do the pre-Super Bowl interview.
But is he not out there as much—I mean, maybe it's changed in the last few days—but throughout his presidency as he might have been otherwise?
I think there is nervousness among his aides that they feel as if, well, if we put him out there and he does something that blows back on him, they think, well, we're going to be the ones held responsible, because you can't hold the president responsible, so they're going to be the ones who have to figure out how to manage the political fallout.
White Houses have a way of, in a way, kind of building in these habits where they would say, “Well, we don't have to do this interview, so let's avoid it.” …
And so what they're trying to do is figure out ways of saying, "OK, how do we put him out there in the best way where he can make a case for himself and not just be on the defensive all the time?"
The State of the Union was a big deal because it came at this moment when everybody was more or less—Democrats were all wondering, "Can this person really still do this?Does he have the energy?Does he have the focus?"And the State of the Union was generally regarded as a big success.He showed that he could still do this.The politics of narrative is really important.In some ways, the most damaging thing you can do in politics is something that fulfills a suspicion people already have about you.It takes on a superpower effect.
And so one of the things the campaign had to do was they had to figure out how to interrupt that narrative, break that.And it's not going to go away.Age is going to be an issue he is going to be talking about until Election Day.But you had to demonstrate that there was the possibility that, at the right moments, he could deliver.
In that moment, since this is the biography, do you see the kid practicing in front of the mirror, realizing this is a high-stakes moment, going out to the State of the Union?
… He went up to Camp David, and, as they often do, presidents will practice their State of the Union with a fake lectern and a fake audience and get ready for the event.But for Joe Biden, it was especially important.When he does a speech, ever since he was a young man, he's always put in these little breath marks on his copy of the script, which help him avoid stuttering.But it is also a ritual.And he's a man of ritual.He believes that, in a way, you have to prepare for something like that in the way you've always done it if you're going to try to deliver.
I think the lesson of the State of the Union was, if Joe Biden has the time and the space to prepare for something properly, he can do it.And if he tries to rush it and he does too many things in his schedule and he doesn't say no and he says yes all the time, then he makes a lot of mistakes, and it comes back to haunt him politically.
I noticed this, by the way, Mike, if you look at the transcript that he did in the Robert Hur case, there's these moments over the course of the interview where [special counsel] Robert Hur and the other lawyers are saying, “Do you want to take a break?We've been going for an hour.We just did another hour.Do you want to take another break?” And he keeps saying, “No, let's keep going.Let's power through.” And in a way, it's a mistake because it puts him at a disadvantage.And that's one of the things that he's going to have to master if he's going to defeat the doubts about his age and ability.
And since you mentioned Hur, that moment when he comes out after, the night that it's released, and he's got Beau's rosary, and he seems angry. Who do you see in that Joe Biden, who comes out right after he's been accused of being an elderly man with a poor memory?
… For me, it's no mystery.… He was really offended by the suggestion that he had forgotten when his son died, because that's what the report suggested.It suggested that one of the most important events in his entire life had slipped his mind, that he was somehow incapable of remembering that.And it was so galling to him, genuinely galling and offensive, that he demanded, in effect, to go out and refute it.
And in the end, it ended up being more of a problem for him than it was a solution.That night probably didn't help him very much, but it was a sign of how visceral this was for him.The idea that he could forget the most searing day of his adult life in the last years was something that he found impossible.
There is this parallel, too, throughout his whole life, starting with the stuttering and how smart is he in '87 plagiarism.And here he is, president of the United States, and the question is his “mental acuity,” I think is the phrase that comes up over and over again.How is that for Joe Biden, the human being?
… For as long as Biden has been around, he's been contending with this question in one form or another: Does this man have the capacity to do it?Is he smart enough?Is he brave enough?Is he bold enough?But I think very specifically, there's an irony that now, in the final chapter of his career, that he's being beset by these questions of, does he have the mental capacity, the acuity, the fitness to do the job?And it's a version of the same question he was asked as a child when he was stuttering: Is this guy smart enough for this?
And I think in some ways it's deep down within him.It is inextricable, the need to perform, to prove the doubters wrong, that that has been a part of him forever, and it is very much a part of how he thinks about proving the doubters wrong even now, at the age of 81.
So that brings us to the question of why he's running again. You spend a lot of time looking into that and thinking about that.
Yeah, I can give you a 13,500-word answer, which is what I needed in the New Yorker.The answer is, I think, a couple of things:
You know, I think he's running in the last campaign of his life because he believes that he can win.He believes that he has proven himself not only as a candidate against Donald Trump, but also, once in office, that he's shown that he can pass bills that ultimately will help people's lives, and that he can figure out the complex politics of United States right now, a time when everybody thought he was going to lose in the midterm elections in 2022, and in fact, Democrats outperformed.
I think there's also a really personal piece of this, which is that we often say Donald Trump tried to steal the election in 2020, but you have to remember, he tried to steal the election from Joe Biden, and Joe Biden is somebody who believes that politics is a personal matter.It is about character.It is about how people regard you and how you regard others.And on some level, I think there is a deep and enduring sense of offense that Donald Trump broke the rules on the most basic level, the rules of the game that Joe Biden has made his life's work.And Biden doesn't want the last word to be "Donald Trump somehow managed to fight his way back to the nomination and perhaps even fight his way back to the White House." I don't think Joe Biden was going to go quietly into the night against that prospect.
The other things that we've talked about, making sense of tragedy, the proving people wrong when they say that he's not up to it—those are all part of it, too?
Yeah, they're definitely part of it.You cannot understand why Joe Biden is running in the last election of his life for president at a moment when many people believe he shouldn't, without understanding everything that came before, which is an entire lifetime spent proving to people that he can do the things that they believe he cannot; that he was smarter, sharper, gutsier than they think he is.That's his image of himself.
And I think that he has spent decades haunted by that memory of being a young person who people thought, well, maybe he's really not that gifted; maybe he just doesn't have what it takes to speak, much less to be anything.
And I think that the last act of his political career was almost preordained, because the idea that he was going to slink away when Donald Trump ran for president again—the very first answer that Joe Biden gave me when I asked him this question in the Oval Office was, when I said, in effect, "Why are you doing this?", he said, “I've beaten this man, and I'll beat him again.” And I thought to myself, you know, that's a version of an answer he might have given to the bully in the schoolyard when he was seven years old.And I think that's still who Joe Biden is.
If you think about it now, like it's one thing to climb on top of the slag heap and risk your own life, but the way he is framing this election in terms of the United States and democracy and in terms of the world and democracy and the stakes are so high, I mean, how much does Joe Biden think that is on the line?And I guess from the outside, how much is he risking in this bet that he can beat him again?
There is nothing naive, honestly, about Joe Biden.You can say a lot of things about him, but he knows gravely, deeply what the risks are.He knows what the stakes are.He talks about this election in ways that a lot of political strategists think is too lofty.When he talks about politics and freedom on the line, there's a lot of people who think, well, you should be talking about the price of groceries.And he doesn't talk about it that way; he talks about it in this very dramatic, almost existential way, about what the United States is and what democracy represents.
But he's always led a life of risk-taking.It's a reality.It's a pattern.It's unmistakable.And some of those risks have turned out well for him, and some of those risks have turned out badly.But he's not doing it casually or flippantly.He really believes that when you look across the landscape of politics today, that we can imagine all kinds of up-and-coming Democrats who might have a shot, might have a chance, but how many of them have actually won a national race for office?
And Joe Biden will tell you, “I've done it once, and I'll do it again.” It's just not clear that he's right about that.We don't know yet.
That's the question.I know you've talked to people, as have we, who say, “Call it a win; your legacy; don't risk it.You'll go down as the hero who defeated Trump the first time, that you could pass all this legislation.” But there's something about Joe Biden that that logic doesn't—
No.In fact, that logic in some ways, I think, it makes him dig in.There is an easy, obvious path that Joe Biden could have taken.He could have left office after one term as the man who rescued America from COVID, who vanquished Donald Trump and drove him out of the office, even after he tried a violent coup to keep himself there. And Biden is fully aware of that.And I think on some level, he looks at it and says, “Not as long as people are asking whether I'm up to the task, am I going to be able to do that.” As long as people are asking that question, he is going to show up and try to answer it and try to win.

Latest Interviews

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Thank you! Your subscription request has been received.

Stay Connected

Explore

FRONTLINE Journalism Fund

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

PBS logo
Corporation for Public Broadcasting logo
Abrams Foundation logo
PARK Foundation logo
MacArthur Foundation logo
Heising-Simons Foundation logo