4 The New York Review
The Designated Mourner
Fintan O’Toole
Mourning becomes Joe Biden. “I
have found over the years,” he writes
in his recent best-selling memoir
Promise Me, Dad, “that, although it
brought back my own vivid memories
of sad times, my presence almost al-
ways brought some solace to people
who have suffered sudden and unex-
pected loss.... When I talk to people
in mourning, they know I speak from
experience.” The most moving thing in
that book is not even Biden’s restrained
and heartbreaking account of the slow
death of his beloved son Beau. It is the
two brief appearances of Wei Tang Liu,
whose son, Wenjian Liu, was one of two
police officers murdered in New York
City on the Saturday before Christmas
- Biden visited the family home in
Brooklyn to pay his respects.
The father, an immigrant from
China, had little English, but Biden
picked up on his need for physical in-
timacy, for the consolation of touch:
“Occasionally he would lean into me so
that his shoulder touched my arm.... I
did not pull away, but leaned in so that
he could feel me there.” When Biden
finally made to leave, Liu walked out-
side with him and embraced him in
front of the line of policemen standing
watch. “He held on to me tightly, for a
long time, as if he could not bear to let
me go.” Five months later, when Beau
was dead, Biden was leaving the pub-
lic wake at St. Anthony’s church in his
hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
He saw, in the long line of mourners,
Wei Tang Liu. Neither man spoke to
the other: “He just walked up and gave
me a hug. It meant so much to me to
be in the embrace of somebody who
understood. He held on to me, silently,
and wouldn’t let go.”
Joe Biden is the most gothic figure
in American politics. He is haunted by
death, not just by the private tragedies
his family has endured, but by a larger
and more public sense of loss. Richard
Ben Cramer, in his classic account of
the 1988 presidential primaries, What
It Takes, wrote how even then it was a
journalistic cliché to define Biden by
the terrible car crash that killed his first
wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi
(and injured Beau and his brother,
Hunter), in 1972, shortly after Biden
was elected to the Senate at the age of
twenty-nine. Cramer refers to the “type
that fell out of the machine every time
they used Biden’s name: ‘... whose life
was touched by personal tragedy.. .’
Joe Biden (D-Del., T.B.P.T.).”
Even now, as Hunter Biden’s name
is threaded through Donald Trump’s
impeachment hearings, there is a ghost
behind it: Hunter is Neilia’s maiden
name. Trump’s preoccupation with
Hunter’s presence on the board of the
Ukrainian energy company Burisma
hinges on a reality that is certainly wor-
thy of scrutiny: Joe Biden was, as he re-
counts in some detail in Promise Me,
Dad, deeply involved in the Obama ad-
ministration’s relations with Ukraine,
and it seems implausible that Hunter’s
position with Burisma was merely co-
incidental. But the frenzied inflation
of this story, like so much that involves
the Bidens, is freighted with both dread
and grief. The dread is Trump’s (ar-
guably misplaced) fear of Biden as a
competitor for the presidency in 2020,
an anxiety that became a manic fixa-
tion that has led to his impeachment.
The grief drives Biden’s fierce need to
protect his living son, not just for him-
self, but for Hunter’s dead mother and
brother.Yet even if those horrible losses had
not befallen his family, Biden would
have a very public relationship to the
dead. He is haunted by the murdered
Kennedys. In his campaign speeches
he has evoked the image of himself and
his sister, Valerie, weeping openly as
Robert Kennedy’s funeral train passed
by. For the first decades of his po-
litical career, his pitch was essentially
that these dead men could rise again
through him. The speech that first
made people talk of Biden as a poten-
tial presidential candidate was at the
New Jersey Democratic Convention in
Atlantic City in 1983, when he brought
the house down with his evocation of
the slain: “Just because our political
heroes were murdered does not mean
that the dream does not still live, bur-
ied deep in our broken hearts.” Biden
recalled in his 2007 memoir Promises
to Keep, “I remember the feeling in the
room when I delivered that line; its ef-
fect on the crowd washed back at me as
a physical sensation. I could see peoplein the audience crying.” He also real-
ized that in channeling the dead, he al-
lowed each listener to “fill in my words
with his or her own meanings.... After
all, each person has a little something
different buried in a broken heart.”
Here was Biden the consoler and at
the same time the ambitious politician,
for what he really meant was that the
Kennedys lived on in him. Biden’s biog-
rapher Jules Witcover writes of Biden
in 1987, early in his campaign for the
Democratic primaries, “Casting him-
self as the next young and rising John F.
Kennedy, Irish Catholic Biden told the
cheering Iowa Democratic faithful.. .‘I
think 1988 is going to be about 1960.’”^1
That, of course, was the year of JFK’s
coming. Biden even repeated exactly
JFK’s slogan, “Let’s get America mov-
ing again.” The ghost of the other dead
Kennedy hovered around him too. Of
the campaign managers who were try-
ing to shape a grand story for Biden in
1988, Cramer writes:It wasn’t that they wanted to make
Joe into Robert Kennedy... it just
happened that Robert Kennedy
was important... to the time, to awhole generation. And that was
the message: that a whole genera-
tion was lost, submerged, driven
off from the struggle for a better
world, twenty years ago, in ’68,
bloody ’68, the Year of the Locust,
and the Tet Offensive, the Chicago
Convention, and Richard Nixon,
and the murders of Martin Luther
King and...Bobby KENNEDY!
That was the whole fucking
point!... That a whole generation
had to come back now, that they
had to wake up!There is something eerie in this notion.
Biden becomes not just the reembodi-
ment of the dead Kennedys but a kind
of political necromancer, calling forth
an entire generation that has been
wandering in a civic Hades, lost to the
world of democratic engagement. He
also becomes the man who can imagi-
natively reverse time, who can take us
all back to 1960, back to the beginning
of the story so that it can be told again
without the blood-soaked pages.
The most important question, though,
is what gave Biden the right to make this
vast claim? It was not the authority of
experience—I was there by the side of
our murdered hero. In the two great
mass movements of the 1960s, the cam-
paigns against the Vietnam War and
for civil rights, Joe Biden was conspicu-
ously not there. There were large pro-
tests against the war in Wilmington—he
does not seem to have attended any.
College deferments saved him from any
danger of being drafted for Vietnam.
In 1968 and 1969 Wilmington was
placed under military occupation by the
Delaware National Guard for fully nine
months after riots following King’s as-
sassination. In Promises to Keep, Biden
recalls passing “six-foot-tall uniformed
white soldiers carrying rifles” on his
way to work at a law office every day.
He acknowledges that, in the black
neighborhoods of East Wilmington,
these white soldiers were “prowling”
the streets and that “mothers were ter-
rified that their children would make
one bad mistake and end up dead.” But
he then folds their terror into an anec-
dote about how he got to know black
people for the first time while work-
ing as a lifeguard in a black district six
years earlier. The extraordinary po-
litical event—an American city under
military occupation—becomes an inti-
mate tale of awakening sympathy.
This lack of personal involvement in
the struggle did not stop Biden, when
he was seeking national office, from
inventing a civil rights past for him-
self. Cramer reported on his rhetoric
in the primaries in 1988: “Joe was off
on his life... how he started in the civil
rights movement.. .remember?... The
marches? Remember how that felt?...
And they’re nodding in the crowd, and
he’s got them, sure.” Even when his
handlers warned him to stop saying
this because it was not true, he couldn’t
help himself: “Folks, when I started in
public life, in the civil rights movement,
we marched to change attitudes.” The
plain fact, as Witcover notes, is that “he
avoided street protest or anything else
that smacked of civil disobedience.”
He was a concerned observer of, not a(^1) Jules Witcover, Joe Biden: A Life of
Trial and Redemption (William Mor-
row, 2010).
Joe Biden; drawing by Anders Nilsen