Biden Biographer: “I Don’t Think He’s at Peace With This Decision”

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you Bianna. And Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

EVAN OSNOS, AUTHOR, “JOE BIDEN”: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: So what did you think of President Biden’s speech earlier this week explaining why he was dropping out of the race?

OSNOS: Well, just on a purely historical level, it was a landmark moment. We haven’t had one of these, as, you know, in more than half a century, a president who gets up and says, I’m actually not gonna run for reelection. So on its – just on that basis, it was a remarkable thing to watch. On a human level, it was also fascinating to see this person, this man wrestling in clear ways with what it is that he’s done. I don’t think, Walter, that he is at peace with this decision. He may never be entirely at peace with this, with this choice. But I think he is also clear that the political requirements, the political judgment left him no option but to make this change. And in that way, we’re watching something play out on the public stage that is in its own way kind of intimate. And I was quite struck by that.

ISAACSON: You talk about the political judgment forced him into this, but you saw that speech. It was clear he’s a lion in winter, very much in winter, and he didn’t talk about the real issue here. He didn’t, could he have said something like, and, you know, in the past few months, past year recently, I’ve slowed down a bit. We’re all getting older. It’s time for a younger generation to come along?

OSNOS: Yeah, that was a, it was a, in its way, a kind of conspicuous omission. He just couldn’t bring himself to talk about the reality of his physical limitations. I think this is an indication of a blind spot, and it’s been a piece of him over the course of the last two years. But it goes back a long way. You know, I remember asking him for the first time, probably a decade ago, about how he would eventually know when it was time to retire back then, of course, he was just 71. And he said, he answered the question by saying, I once encouraged my father to retire. And I think now it was a mistake. He said, I think he could have kept working. It was an interesting – that was where his mind went to that question. He’s always been alert to the sense that he can somehow defy the expectations. But I think when he gave this speech, he wasn’t yet ready. He, you could see it on his face, even though in his voice it was soft, it was diminished, it was raspy. He couldn’t quite address it head on. And so he framed it in the language of protecting democracy, passing the baton to a new generation. The only moment of recognition to this question of age was when he said, it’s time for new voices, fresher voices, and yes, younger voices.

ISAACSON: Do you think that there’s been a coverup in ways from his aides and even people like yourself in Washington who see him every now and then? I mean, why didn’t we know more about this?

OSNOS: You know, I, I sometimes think that it’s less about a coverup than it was about an accumulation of events and anxieties in the sense that you had this period in which he was clearly getting criticized from the right about the possibility that he was declining. And so the White House went into a defensive crouch about those kinds of criticisms. They said, well these are bad faith. And they didn’t take them seriously. It was kind of easy to dismiss them when they were coming from the fringes of the internet. The reality was that they were beginning to limit the kinds of ways in which he would expose himself to criticism, you know, taking, for instance, the shorter staircase down Air Force one, avoiding events that might make him look weak. But it wasn’t as if there were people in the White House who thought, well, we have to keep this guy covered up as far as we know now. And I think this is a credible question that were, is worthy of more journalism. But it would’ve been odd for them to push for a debate as early as they did to pursue that kind of encounter if they thought he wasn’t capable of it. On the contrary, they thought putting him on that stage opposite Joe – opposite Donald Trump was gonna run down to Biden’s benefit. And of course, they were wrong. And I think a whole lot of people were shocked by what they saw on that debate stage.

ISAACSON: You know, I was reading your book that came out right, right when he was taking office as a president. And you mentioned his speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, and he says, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.” That’s a pretty strong thing. Does that help explain why he took so much time to figure out that he had to give up the reins of power?

OSNOS: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You know, I’ve been thinking of that line a lot recently. That, for him, is a kind of central mantra of his life. It had become this, you know, it could sound like it’s just a political motto, but for him, it had all of this very deep personal resonance. ‘Cause of course, he had been through these tragedies in his personal life and his political life, and his solution to them in a way that almost like a philosophical solution was to say that surrender is a moral sin. You simply cannot give in. And that when you are pressed, when you are put on the defensive, that’s a signal that you’re supposed to drive harder. And so, in some ways, when this moment arrived, particularly even after the debate, when he was so knocked back further than he probably had been since any moment that he entered politics in half a century, his instinct was to dig in. It was to say, no, the very suggestion of surrender is wrong. And I think that in some ways delayed and slowed his capacity to recognize the political fact that his path was closing. And that explains, I think, part of the reason why it took so long.

ISAACSON: The speech showed him really as a lion in winter. It’s in the la – you know, older, raspy voice. When do you think that decline started to happen? Was it in the last few months? Was it in the past year?

OSNOS: The reporting on this is beginning to clarify some of the things that have happened. I think it’s clear that you began to get a greater drumbeat of concern from people who would encounter the president over the last few months, meaning, let’s call it five, six months. I don’t know. And I think this is a subject that history will want to dig into. But I, you know, I think there were ways in which he was up and down. I’ll just give you an interesting kind of coincidental fact. I saw him last on January 17th of this year, and it just turns out that was the day when he also saw his neurologist for the last time, according to the White House. And so on that day, the person that we saw was kind of more or less consistent with the one we saw on the State of the Union Day. I – meaning he was clearly physically slower, his voice was weaker, clotted as I described it in the New Yorker, but his answers to the questions were essentially the same kinds of answers I would’ve gotten from him a few years earlier. So I think there is a way in which this variability in his performance became more pronounced over the course of the last few months, I’m guessing. And I think that’s part of how you get to where we are today.

ISAACSON: He said that the idea, the ideal of America lies in our hands, your hands, he was saying. What does he mean by that? Or is that just some trope that his speechwriters gave him?

OSNOS: Well, in some ways, I feel as if this moment, this period in which he is accepting, accommodating the reality that his electoral future is closing, you know, that that has relieved some of the pressure around this question of what will it take to save democracy because it’s no longer consumed by the very real incredible issue of is his age preventing Democrats from stopping Donald Trump from coming back to the office. It’s now really a question of whether voters will choose to put Donald Trump back in office or whether they will choose another path. It struck me as he was giving that speech that it was almost like a moment of delivery. He’s delivering, in a sense, the baton to his successor, to Kamala Harris, but he’s also saying to the voters, delivering the very reality that it is now on our shoulders. It is no longer a question of whether Joe Biden is gonna step aside, whether he is blocking the path of new talent. That matter is closed. It really now is a question of, as he sometimes says, what kind of country do we want to be? Do we want to be Donald Trump’s country, or do we want to be another thing? And I think that feels, feels right to me as a matter of decision making.

ISAACSON: Why didn’t he spend more time extolling Vice President Harris?

OSNOS: It’s a good question. I think he, as he put it, was as he described her, is she’s strong, she’s capable. What I heard in him, Walter, was the fact that I think he’s still consumed a bit by the sheer drama of his own, of his own decision to step back. It is just so consuming as a fact. I’m not sure that he’s quite prepared yet to be a muscular voice on the national stage on her behalf. I’m not sure if that’s about misgivings about her capacity. I’m not sure it is. I don’t think he would’ve stepped aside and endorsed her if he thought that it was a path to failure for Democrats. But I spoke to somebody who was on that very first call that he made with senior staff in the White House just a few minutes before it went public. And I said, what was his mood like? What was he, what did he do? What did he say? And this person told me, you know, he really just read his letter word for word. He was not in a position to give a pep rally to buck us up. It was very somber. And I think he is a man really grappling with that, most of all.

ISAACSON: Did he help get delegates to support vice President Harris? Did he rally him? And did he even think on the other hand, of maybe not making an endorsement and letting the process be more open?

OSNOS: I think the truth is that the delegates have surged around Kamala Harris mostly because of the efforts on her part and on people around her who have wanted her to succeed. It has not been largely a Joe Biden project. But there has been this, and I think he has been as surprised as any of us, this surge of enthusiasm, almost as if this process has been uncorked and all of this years of pent up demoralization and frustration on the part of democratic voters, particularly young voters, has come to the surface. So no, he has not been the prime mover behind this. This has really been a reflection of something, a piece of dark matter in politics that hadn’t yet been described. This idea that there were people who wanna be enthusiastic about a democratic candidate and hadn’t had the opportunity over the last two years, and now you’re seeing that in pretty dramatic fashion.

ISAACSON: What do you think his legacy will be in policy terms in particular?

OSNOS: I think that there is an indelible concrete legacy that you cannot dispute. The fact that he has done things like pass legislation that will have generations of benefit when it comes to climate change or prescription drug costs. Or in a sense articulating the argument against authoritarianism at home and abroad. Those are real things, and they won’t ultimately depend on what happens over the course of the next 105 days. But the fact is his ultimate legacy, the way that history will describe him, Bill Clinton sometimes says, you only get one sentence for your presidency in history. That will depend on if he succeeds in having a Democrat prevent Donald Trump from coming back to office. He has defined for himself the project of protecting democracy, and we don’t yet know if he waited so long that that became impossible. We’ll have to see whether Kamala Harris and who she chooses as a running mate are capable of picking up that baton in this extraordinarily short period of time, and succeeding on the project that he started.

ISAACSON: You write about how Biden had “a sobering case for moral decency, for reasonableness.” These are words you’ve used before, “And that he might offer us some solace, a language of healing.” I thought a few years ago when Biden became president that maybe the poison and the partisanship would leach a bit out of the system. He’s somebody who’s worked across the aisle, he was just a, you know, a unthreatening, unintimidating person. Why isn’t that more of his legacy that he was able – why wasn’t he able to calm down some of these, the divisiveness in our society?

OSNOS: You know, in some ways he’s a hard man to hate you would think. He’s a person who is a sort of a moderate by nature, by temperament. As he said himself, after about a year in office, he said, I’ll be honest with you, I was surprised, I was wrong. He said that I thought that Republicans, once Donald Trump had left the stage, would come to their senses as he said. That in some ways the fever would break. That didn’t happen. In fact, he became a kind of unlikely target of this very intense scorn. And I think there’s an interesting way in which he never reciprocated. You never saw him become a sort of sneering, bitter taunting politician. That’s not his tone. You know, he would get severe sometimes he would talk about the grave threat to democracy that he thought in Donald Trump. And he certainly has a profound personal dislike for Trump, but you didn’t see him take on some of the body language of a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a kind of the language of Matt Gaetz, God knows. But I think that in the end, the forces that drive our politics into this desiccated toxic form that he is contending with are larger than any one person. They’re larger than him, and it was never a reality, it was never a possibility that he could somehow individually repair that. I think that his, in a way, his fluency in the language of suffering and healing was helpful in a particular case, which was the pandemic. This was a country that was literally grieving. I mean, just grieving the sheer number of lives lost and the fact that he knew that in a way that a lot of presidents in the modern age don’t have that much familiarity with personal suffering is and was useful, but it was by no means the end of the story.

ISAACSON: Will he or should he speak at the Democratic convention and out on the campaign trail?

OSNOS: I think he will to some degree. I think you’ll see him out on the campaign trail, particularly in places where he can be politically helpful. Let’s remember, one of the key questions here is going to be whether Kamala Harris can maintain those crucial states in the upper Midwest. Whether she can hold onto the so-called Blue Wall of Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin. He is at home in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and you may well see him out there trying to do some of that work. But it is an inescapable fact that we are seeing a man now in the final chapter of his political career. And I think that, that one of the theories has been that he could serve in effect, at the convention as a kind of eminence gre, a non-executive chairman. There may be a moment of coalescence, of gratitude to him for stepping aside. But there’s no question now, Walter, we are into a different phase. And politics is an unsentimental business. People move on extremely fast, and he is already now shifting into the rear view mirror. And I’ll tell you one person who knows that is Joe Biden. It’s part of the reason why I think he’s held on so avidly for so long.

ISAACSON: Evan Osnos, thank you so much for joining us.

OSNOS: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.