Biden on grief, and what might have been
He saw a limitless horizon for his son Beau in politics
NEW YORK – His son Beau’s death after a brutal battle with cancer persuaded Joe Biden not to run for the White House in 2016, a race he now believes he probably would have won.
Before all that, though, there was a happier reason the then-vice president considered staying out of the race: to clear the way for what seemed to be Beau’s limitless possibilities in politics perhaps even the presidency itself. For what might have been. The threads of fighting cancer weighing ambition and managing foreign policy crises are woven together in Biden’s new book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose published this week by Flatiron Books The account of a tumultuous time is crisp and spare, but the entries quoted from Biden’s episodic diary betray his mounting anguish.
“It happened,” Biden wrote at the end, 7:51 PM on May 30, 2015. “My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.”
A son who had escaped death dec-
ades earlier, surviving a car crash that killed his mother and sister, had been lost at age 46.
Now, feelings of “abject grief” sweep over him less often, Biden tells USA TODAY as he launches his book’s publicity tour, replaced by a sense that “I can make (it through) this, and we can make Beau proud.” At 74, he stands tall and straight, natty in a navy jacket, with the easy smile and affable manner that prompted fans on social media to nickname him “Uncle Joe.”
But his eyes swell with tears as he recounts his son’s final days, and he pauses to regain his composure. “We kept thinking the science would outrun the cancer, and we didn’t make it.”
In the book, Biden reveals he thought “hard” after he and President Obama were re-elected in 2012 about whether that election should be his last, whether it was time to shift the family’s focus to Beau’s political future. The younger Biden had been elected to a second term as Delaware attorney general two years earlier. He would declare his intention to run for governor in 2016, a race analysts predicted would be his to lose.
“I looked down the road and there would be a time in which, if I would continue to run after the vice presidency, it would crowd Beau out,” Biden said in the interview, leaning forward in his chair, recalling his private debate. “I really started to think that I’ve had all this time; I love what I do. But is it just too small a pond for two potentially national figures with the same name?”
It was Obama who dubbed Beau “Joe Biden 2.0.”
“He had all the best of me, but with the bugs and flaws engineered out,” Biden wrote. In some ways, Beau resembled Obama more than he did his dad. He was savvier about new technologies and a more disciplined speaker. “Beau didn’t make many mistakes,” Biden says, laughing at his own reputation as, in his words, a “gaffe machine.”
Beau refused to talk about his longterm aspirations, Biden says, but those around him did. As the commander of allied forces in Iraq, Gen. Roy Odierno had gotten to know Beau during his tour of duty there with the Delaware National Guard. In a eulogy, Odierno, by then the Army Chief of Staff, said he had fully expected to one day be saluting Beau as commander in chief.
His father had had the same thought. “I did,” he says. “I did.”
After he had been diagnosed in 2013 with glioblastoma — the most aggressive form of brain cancer, and a nearcertain death sentence — Beau urged his father not to be deterred from running for president in 2016. But Biden says his grief was too fresh. “I didn’t have the emotional energy to do it.”
When it comes to the 2020 contest, he says it’s not yet time to make a decision about running. “I really want to spend the next month and a half doing nothing but talking about my son, No. 1, and No. 2, I’m working really hard to elect a Democratic House” in the midterm elections next year, he says.
“After that’s over, you know, we’ll see where I am. Look, if my health is good and things are moving, I would probably consider it.”