31
according to both men. Biden commanded an expan-
sive portfolio: implementing the Recovery Act and a
gun-control push, handling sticky foreign situations
from Iraq to Ukraine and doing much of the Senate
glad-handing that Obama loathed. Biden also argued
for a restrained foreign policy, frequently clashing
with the more hawkish Secretary of State Clinton
and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Biden advised
against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and
against sending more troops to Afghanistan.
Within the Administration he was a serious player,
but he was also known for his antics. Upbeat and gre-
garious, he couldn’t walk down a hallway without pi-
geonholing someone for a 10-minute conversation,
a former West Wing staffer recalls. He carved out a
public persona as a sort of lovable goof, encapsulated
by a parody in the Onion of a shirtless “Biden” sup-
posedly washing his vintage Pontiac Trans Am in the
White House driveway. His staff once blacked out the
windows of a venue where he was speaking because
his tendency to bound outside to shake hands pre-
sented a security risk and scheduling hassle.
Obama aides mostly laughed off Biden’s idiosyn-
cracies; they’d known what they were getting when
they picked him. There was one notable exception.
In May 2012, Biden let slip that he’d come around
to supporting gay marriage, forcing Obama to an-
nounce ahead of schedule that his own position had
also “evolved.” Obama’s advisers, some of whom had
tested the idea of replacing Biden with Clinton on
the 2012 ticket, were incensed. Today Biden invokes
their partnership incessantly, but Obama remains of-
ficially neutral in the primary.
Some of Biden’s critics charged that he was so
eager to be part of the action that he would agree
to bad deals in the name of bipartisanship. In De-
cember 2012, then Senate majority leader Harry
Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell reached
an impasse on an extension of the George W. Bush–
era tax cuts. Reid was so annoyed with McConnell’s
offer that he threw it in a fireplace. McConnell
“called Biden because I didn’t want any part of
that deal,” Reid recalls. “I was not a big fan of it,
but it got done.” Reid later demanded the White
House remove Biden from future negotiations.
The morning aFTer the speech in Fort Dodge,
Biden arrives at the North Iowa Events Center in
Mason City, where he’s introduced by Represen-
tative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, a 35-year-old
who in 2018 won a district Trump had carried by
20 points. Youth and diversity are great, Lamb says.
But “a little adult supervision wouldn’t be the worst
thing for us in the House!” Taking the microphone,
Biden extols Lamb’s credentials. “He reminds me so
much—excuse me for saying this—of my son Beau,”
Biden says. “They both ended up majors, they both
ended up deployed, and they both ended up serving
their country from their heart as well as their head.”
Beau was the attorney general of Delaware, laying
the groundwork to run for governor, when in 2013
he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same fast-
moving brain cancer that killed Senators John McCain
and Edward Kennedy. “It’s a death sentence. We knew
right away,” Biden recalls in our interview. “But you al-
ways hope for a miracle.” Beau succumbed to the dis-
ease in May 2015. Before he died, he made his father
swear that he would be all right, as Biden describes
in his best-selling 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad—a
deeply moving chronicle of loss that’s interwoven with
descriptions of Biden’s high-stakes negotiations with
foreign leaders. At first, Biden wasn’t sure he could
keep that promise. The boys had gotten him through
his grief after the car accident, he says. Coming
home every night “wasn’t about being a good dad—I
needed them.” Now his support system was gone.
Biden had been making serious preparations
to run for the 2016 presidential nomination, de-
spite the conventional wisdom that Clinton had it
locked up. His strategist Mike Donilon drew up a
22-page memo arguing that he was well positioned
to win with a message of finishing the work Obama
started and lifting up the middle class. Even Biden’s
gaffes, he argued, would strike voters as authen-
tic and refreshing compared with “carefully pack-
aged candidates” the public had tired of. But Biden
1991
After Anita Hill accuses
Clarence Thomas of
sexual harassment, Biden
presides over an all-white-
male panel in the Senate
1994
Biden helps write
the controversial crime
bill signed by
President Clinton
2008
Obama taps the senior
Senator to join the
Democratic ticket, and
the Senator is elected
Vice President
2015
Biden and his
family at a visitation
for his son Beau
1953: COURTESY BIDEN CAMPAIGN; 1973: AP; 1987, 1991, 2008: GETTY IMAGES (3); 1994, 2015: AP (2)
