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“He made it very clear that he was a big boy and
wasn’t going to let that color him,” says Clyburn,
who urged Biden to pick a Black woman and told
him that many people, including Clyburn’s own
late wife, had rooted for a Biden- Harris ticket from
the start. Once Biden decided Harris was the best
pick, the rest of the inner circle got behind the de-
cision. Jill Biden was the one who called the vet-
ting committee to inform them of the choice. “At
the end of the day, it was his decision, and one
that he made essentially alone,” Bedingfield says.
Harris was in her apartment in Washington’s West
End neighborhood when her team learned that Biden
wanted to reach her. She started getting ready to take
the call. Then, an update: Biden wanted to talk over
Zoom. A brief panic ensued as she scrambled to get
herself video-ready. It “wasn’t actually one of my
Zoom days,” she says. “That required a whole prepara-
tion process to be Zoom-ready for the Vice President.”
Biden cut to the chase. “Immediately he said, ‘So,
you want to do this?’ ” Harris recalls, paraphrasing
their conversation. “That’s who Joe is. There’s no
pomp and circumstance with him. He’s a straight
shooter.” Her husband Doug Emhoff and Jill Biden
soon joined them on the call; within an hour, her
apartment filled with campaign staffers carrying
briefing binders. The next day, she was in Wilming-
ton, where Jill greeted them with a plate of home-
made cookies. To join the Biden campaign was to
join the Biden family, and Harris and Emhoff spent
about a week visiting with the Bidens and getting to
know their kids, while Biden talked over the phone
with Harris’ mother-in-law and her adult step-
children, Cole and Ella. Harris’ relationship with Em-
hoff ’s kids, who call her Momala, reminded Biden ofhis own wife’s relationship with his sons Beau and
Hunter: a “blended family,” he calls it, where there’s
“no distinction in their house.”
Picking a former rival—one whose dynamism
might exceed his own—was a move that Trump
never would have made. It “revealed a lot about Joe
Biden,” says former Representative Steve Israel. “And
she had the pronounced effect of mobilizing Demo-
crats across the country.”Joseph Robinette biden JR. has wanted to be
President ever since he was a little boy with a mouth
full of pebbles, reciting poetry to try to cure himself
of his stutter. When his future mother-in-law asked
what he planned to make of himself, Biden said “Pres-
ident,” adding, “of the United States.” Before she died
in a car accident in 1972, his first wife Neilia told
friends her husband would run the country one day;
many years later, when Biden was in the twilight of
his vice presidency, his son Beau, racked with termi-
nal cancer and beginning to lose his speech, begged
him not to abandon public life. He’s run for the Oval
Office three times, worked with eight Presidents and
served as Vice President for eight years in a career
that stretched from the Senate to the Situation Room
to countless swing-state diners and union halls. His
operatic life story has veered from grief to triumph,
rising star to tragic figure, statesman to survivor.
Biden’s American Dream began in the rosy after-
math of World War II, when America was flush with
pride from its triumph over fascism. It was a Rock-
well upbringing—football games, soda-pop shops—
but it wasn’t always easy. At times money was tight;
when Joe was 10, the family had to move in with his
TEXAS: SERGIO FLORES—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES; PHILADELPHIA: DREW ANGERER—GETTY IMAGES grandparents before his father found a job selling
A masked
Biden speaks
to supporters in
Philadelphia on
Election Day