The First Son’s memoir
Loss, addiction and what he really thinks of his dad, President Joe Biden
THE weirdest of many weird passages in Beautiful Things, the confessional memoir of Joe Biden’s tormented son Hunter, begins in October 2016, when he books into a wellness ranch in Sonoma for addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine.
Arriving at Dulles airport in Washington at 7am the sometime lawyer and lobbyist misses flight after flight smoking rocks in his car, then drives 651 miles overnight to Nashville where he buys crack on the streets.
After three zonked days he makes it to Los Angeles, but misses a connecting flight because he leaves the terminal to smoke crack, and ends up on a six-day bender. At one point he’s talked out of a fight by a giant called Little Down who is “related to the Boo-yaa tribe” of Samoan gangster rappers.
Hunter then rents a car for the 500-mile journey to Sonoma, almost kills himself running it off the freeway, hires a Jeep, and drives the wrong way for two hours. “At some point the crack lost its oomph, but I kept lighting up anyway, out of force of habit,” he writes, matter-of-factly.
For some miles he follows a giant owl in his headlights. After checking in to not one but two spas and tapering off the crack, Hunter calls Hallie, the widow of his adored brother Beau — who died of a brain tumour I7 months earlier — to fetch him. By the time they got back to Delaware “we were a couple”.
Kathleen, his long-suffering wife and mother of his three daughters, discovers their text exchanges. “Everything blew up after that,” Hunter sighs.
You can see why Donald Trump, with his instinct for an opponent’s tender parts, targeted Hunter when fighting Joe Biden for the presidency.
If the Bidens echo the Kennedys in some ways — Catholic, close, marked by tragedy and driven by a sense of political entitlement — then Hunter is Ted: the one whose lapses reveal the base desires beneath the mask of American nobility.
But Hunter spiked Trump’s guns with a tell-all New Yorker article about his addictions, shortly after his dad announced his candidacy. The Make America Great Again crowd were left with vague allegations about Hunter’s lucrative seat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and a phantom laptop supposed to contain horrors.
This book puts it all out there again, in greater detail, to pre-empt those gunning for his father in office. It is very frank, but also prone to tip into bathos (“politics is not the family business — service is”).
It is a barely believable story of redemption, in which a fragile man whose life is punctuated by loss is saved by the right woman (spoiler alert: it’s not Hallie). It also tells you an awful lot about crack.
On December 18, 1982 Hunter, aged two, and Beau, three, were severely injured in a car accident that killed their mother and baby sister. Aunts, uncles, and grandparents pitched in alongside their grieving, loving father. Five years later, teacher Jill Jacobs became their “mom” and gave them a step sister, Ashley.
The Bidens seem tactile — there is lots of hugging and kissing — but their verbal exchanges rarely go beyond declarations of love, or exhortations to be the best you can be.
The bereavement is never discussed. The family gathers again to switch off Beau’s life support on May 29, 2015. Hunter does not show his father his eulogy for Beau before the funeral: later, he will not tell his father, the presidential candidate, about his New Yorker interview.
Hunter takes his first drink at eight and has his first hangover at 14. Beau waits until he’s 21 and legal and quits booze at 30. Hunter marries Kathleen, whom he meets through Jesuit volunteering groups while studying in Chicago, after she falls pregnant. Both brothers study law and go on to lead different lives; Beau becoming attorney general of Delaware and serving as a major in the 261st Signal Brigade in Iraq and Hunter working for a bank.
Joe Biden hovers over the book as a strict, but affectionate working man who strips asbestos from the pipes of the family home himself and whose office just happens to be the Senate. The family unconditionally support each other’s chosen paths, but again, they don’t talk. Joe apparently doesn’t ask Hunter about his lobbying clients; Hunter doesn’t tell.
When dad becomes vice-president, Hunter has to quit lobbying so becomes an adviser to investors. His appointment to the Burisma board in 2014 catapults him into “grey” areas of business and subsequently into the frontline of the Trump/putin disinformation wars.
Crack strips Hunter of shame. It’s normal, he explains, to offer a stranger $100 to buy crack for you. It’s normal to have guns pointed at you. It’s normal to smoke bits of parmesan in the hope they are spilled crumbs of crack. While excoriating his past, Hunter seems proud of his ability to find crack in any city he might find himself and of his capacity for intoxication while at the Chateau Marmont, compared with previous resident, Doors vocalist Jim Morrison.
Hunter paints his now ex-wife as angry and the relationship with his sister-in-law as an aberration. His current, clean state is entirely down to his second wife, Melissa Cohen, a South African activist. Their improbable courtship is the second weirdest part of the book. Given her number by a stranger, a wasted Hunter texts her after midnight. She bats him off but meets him for a 5.15pm dinner the next day. He’s 49. She’s 32. The first thing he says is that her blue eyes are exactly like Beau’s; the second, that he loves her. He admits he’s a crack addict. She says: “Well, not anymore.”
He gets clean. Weeks later, they have a quickie wedding. Typically, Hunter doesn’t tell his dad until the morning of the ceremony.
But he and Melissa do furnish Joe with a baby grandson to hoik aloft, Lion King-style, after his victory speech as president-elect. His name? Beau.
‘At some point the crack lost its oomph, but I kept lighting up anyway, out of force of habit’