6 The New York Review
participant in, the great dramas of the
1960s.
So how could Biden imagine himself
as the reincarnation of the Kennedys?
Those two words: Irish Catholic. His
claim to that legacy is not experiential
or particularly ideological. It is ethnic
and religious. The Kennedys defined
an Irish-American Catholic political
identity—white (even in their case con-
spicuously privileged), yet by virtue of
the grimness of Irish history and the
outsider status of Catholics, supposedly
not guilty of the grave crimes of racial
oppression. Its promise was to act as
the bridge across the great divide of US
society, being mainstream enough to
connect to the white majority but with
a sufficient memory of past torment to
connect also to the black minority. Its
underlying appeal was to the very thing
that Biden would come to embody—“a
sense of the depth of their pain” rooted
in “vivid memories of sad times.” This
is what Biden chose when he defined
himself as he has throughout his pub-
lic career: “I see myself as an Irish
Catholic.”^2
And this was indeed a choice. Biden
is not an Irish name—he recalled in
Promises to Keep his Irish- American
aunt, Gertie Blewitt, telling him:
“Your father’s not a bad man. He’s
just English.” Nor is his middle name,
Robinette. The Robinettes, his pater-
nal grandmother’s kin, traced their
ancestry in America to a tract of land
near Media, Pennsylvania, originally
granted by William Penn. So Biden
could have presented himself, had he
chosen, as an all-American boy. In-
stead he identified with his mother’s
ethnic ancestry, making himself, as he
puts it in Promise Me, Dad, a “descen-
dant of the Blewitts of County Mayo...
and the Finnegans of County Louth, on
a volatile little inlet of the Irish Sea.”
Part of the attraction was undoubtedly
the devout Catholicism that has been
Biden’s great consolation. But another
part was the great escape from Ameri-
can history and its burdens of guilt.
Biden recalled the same aunt telling
him about the notorious British irregu-
lars sent to put down the Irish national-
ist revolt in 1920:
I’d go upstairs and lie on the bed
and she’d come and scratch my
back and say, “Now you remem-
ber Joey about the Black and Tans
don’t you?” She had never seen
the Black and Tans, she had no
notion of them, but she could re-
cite chapter and verse about them.
Obviously there were immigrants
coming in who were able to talk
about it and who had relatives back
there. She was born in 1887. After
she’d finish telling the stories I’d sit
there or lie in bed and think at the
slightest noise, “They’re coming
up the stairs.”^3This is a fine description of vicarious
oppression. Biden grew up in relatively
prosperous middle-class American
comfort and went to Archmere, a privi-
leged fee-paying Catholic high school
in Wilmington. Even as a national poli-
tician, he seems to have been largely
shielded from anti-Catholic venom.
But one of the advantages of being an
Irish-American Catholic is that you
can attach yourself to a history of op-
pression in Ireland and release yourself
from white guilt in America. Your fore-
fathers are sinned against, not sinning.
As Biden put it in 1974, defending his
opposition to busing in Wilmington, “I
feel responsible for what the situation is
today, for the sins of my own generation.
And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible
for what happened three hundred years
ago.” By “what happened” it is clear
that he meant slavery. How could the
Irish be responsible for that?
Above all, though, being Irish Catho-
lic created the possibility of reincarnat-
ing the Kennedys. Biden’s desire was
there from his coming of age. He told
Neilia that he would be a senator by the
time he was thirty and then president of
the United States. He achieved the first
through sheer chutzpah, taking on the
incumbent Republican, Cale Boggs,
who had won seven straight elections
and had held state and federal office
for twenty-six years. Biden got the
nomination because no serious Demo-
crat even wanted to run against Boggs.
But the Kennedy magic worked. And
it is clear that Biden thought it might
work all the way. Cramer reported on
Biden’s fantasy project in the 1980s to
buy a seventeen-acre plot and have his
extended family all together in differ-
ent houses:Joe and Jill and the kids would
take the big one, and then a guest
house... it was a compound, it
was...Hyannisport! He could see
the goddam thing in Life maga-
zine, he could just about lay out the
photos right now... The Bidens.
First Family.And like the Kennedys, this First Fam-
ily was to be dynastic. As Biden wrote
in Promise Me, Dad, “I was pretty sure
Beau could run for president some day
and, with his brother’s help, he could
win.” The reader is invited to imagine,
through the evocation of the brotherly
bond, that Hunter might then succeed
Beau. The Irish Catholic dynasty of
which the US was robbed by the mur-
ders of the Kennedys in the 1960s
would return in the 1980s and last, per-
haps, for decades.
But in gothic stories, dreams of the
dead shade into nightmare. On the po-
litical level, the second part of the
Biden plan—becoming president—has
made him a revenant. Cramer, writing
about Biden’s discussion of a run for
the 1988 primaries, describes Jill Biden
wondering, “What if Joe did break
out and made a run for the finish, and
came in... just short. Then they’d run
again... and again. That was her night-
mare: that he’d run, come close, and
then it would never stop.” Her night-
mare became real. Biden filled out pa-
pers for the New Hampshire primary
of 1984, ran for the 1988 nomination,
ran again for 2008, and is running yet
again for 2020.A major problem here is that Irish
Catholicism, youth, and good looks
were never enough to make Biden the
heir to RFK. To return to that speech
in Atlantic City in 1983, in which
Biden invoked the murdered heroes,
its appeal to unity is vastly blander
than Kennedy’s insurgent effort toforge a real unity of purpose between
the black and white working classes.
Biden, like RFK, positioned himself
as a figure who could transcend class,
race, gender, and party, but this time
in the name not of radical change but
of a mere rhetorical figment. He urged
Democrats to campaign “not as blacks
or as whites; not as workers or profes-
sionals; not as rich or poor; not as men
or women, not even as Democrats or
Republicans. But as people of God in
the service of the American dream.”
The utter vacuity of the last sentence
points not to a transcendence of divi-
sions but to mere evasion of all ques-
tions of power, privilege, and systematic
oppression.
There is something almost too ghoul-
ishly spectral—more Halloween than
haunting—in the way Biden’s most
promising presidential bid, his first, was
derailed by Robert Kennedy. Biden got
into trouble when it was revealed that
he had effectively plagiarized a speech
by the then leader of the Labour Party
in Britain, Neil Kinnock. But he might
have weathered the storm, since he
had actually credited Kinnock several
times previously in using the same ma-
terial. What destroyed him was the un-
earthing of an earlier speech in which
he echoed, word-for-word but without
attribution, a long passage in which
RFK had attacked the idea of the “bot-
tom line”: “That bottom line can tell
us everything about our lives... except
that which makes life worthwhile.”
Adam Walinsky, who wrote the origi-
nal speech, accused Biden of a “coun-
terfeit of emotion.” Instead of being
a reincarnation, Biden appeared as a
grave robber.
Yet the one Kennedy trait no one can
accuse Biden of faking is tragedy. And
within this tragedy, there is the other
side of the Irish Catholic dream. The
shadowy twin of the striving for suc-
cess is an almost Greek sense of the
capriciousness of fate. The Kennedys’
dazzling success comes with a terrible
toll of death. Biden, cruelly, endured
the pain without ever quite matching
the glamour of the ascent. He wears
his dead son’s rosary beads around his
wrist and says that litany of prayers
in his dark moments. It culminates in
a great cry of despair directed to the
mother of the crucified Christ: “To
thee do we cry, poor banished children
of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of
tears.” Biden has had to live much of
the time in the valley of tears, and in
this long sojourn his Irishness is about
something more than vicarious oppres-
sion. It is a way of framing sorrow.
In Promise Me, Dad, Biden quotes
one of the grand figures of Irish-
American politics, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan: “To fail to understand
that life is going to knock you down is
to fail to understand the Irishness of
life.” So while an African-American
choral group was chosen to play “joy-
ful music” at Beau’s memorial service,
Biden notes that there were also “bag-
pipers to add the mournful, plaintive
wail of Irishness.” In his address at the
service, Barack Obama quoted a line
from a song by the Irish poet Patrick
Kavanagh, in which mourning is as
inevitable as the passing of seasons:
“And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at
the dawning of the day.”
It scarcely matters here whether
there’s much truth in the notion that
the Irish have a particularly familiarrelationship with grief. What does mat-
ter is that the “mournful, plaintive wail
of Irishness” is the soundtrack for both
the Kennedy and the Biden stories, in
which triumph is always shadowed by
calamity. There is in this structure of
feeling no easy opposition of hubris
and nemesis. There is just, as Obama
said to Biden when Beau was dying,
the awareness that “life is so difficult to
discern”—difficult because it does not
offer itself in the easy forms of the won-
derful and the terrible but confuses the
two by conjoining them as twins. The
political manifestation of this aware-
ness is not the upbeat rhetoric of the
American Dream; it is a politics of
empathy in which the leader shares the
pain of the citizen. While Biden seems
hollow when he deploys the former, he
has been a forceful practitioner of the
latter. “We had to speak for those who
felt left behind,” he writes in Promise
Me, Dad. “They had to know we got
their despair.” Biden has always been
better at getting despair than at giving
concrete, programmatic form to hope.With Biden, fellow feeling is literal—
he feels you. He is astonishingly, over-
whelmingly hands-on. He extended the
backslapping of the old Irish pol into
whole new areas of the body—hugging,
embracing, rubbing. In his foreword to
Steven Levingston’s engaging account
of the Biden–Obama relationship,
Barack and Joe, Michael Eric Dyson
writes of the vice president’s “reinforc-
ing his sublimely subordinate position
by occasionally massaging the boss’s
shoulders.” But Cramer noted Biden
doing the same thing to an anony-
mous woman at a campaign stop in
1987: “Gently, but decidedly, he put his
hands on her. In Council Bluffs, Iowa!
He got both hands onto her shoulders,
while he talked to the crowd over her
head, like it was her and him, through
thick and thin.” So not really a gesture
of submission or of domination, per-
haps, but a desperate hunger to con-
nect, to touch and be touched, to both
console and be consoled. “The act of
consoling,” Biden writes, “had always
made me feel a little better, and I was
hungry to feel better.”
There is something religious in this
laying-on of hands. It is an act of com-
munion. But it is also profoundly prob-
lematic—and not just for the obvious
reason that, in the Me Too era, touch-
ing is too apt to raise questions of gen-
der, power, and consent that clearly did
not occur to Biden in Council Bluffs
or anywhere else. It too easily depoliti-
cizes pain. To see how this can play out
in practice, consider a phone call Biden
made to Anita Hill in October 1991.
Clarence Thomas had been nominated
to the Supreme Court by George H.W.
Bush. Biden, as chair of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, was in charge of
the process. Hill had written, in confi-
dence, an account of Thomas’s sexual
harassment of her. Biden was calling
her to invite her formally to testify at
a hastily arranged public hearing. Hill
was worried about whether she would
be protected from verbal assault and
whether witnesses who came forward
to express similar concerns about
Thomas would also be heard. Here is
Hill’s account:“The only mistake I made, in my
view, is to not realize how much
pressure you were under. I should(^2) Niall O’Dowd, “Joe Biden’s Irish
Roots,” Irish Central, March 15, 2009.
(^3) O’Dowd, “Joe Biden’s Irish Roots.”