Biden relates life story in transcript
Freewheeling side of president now rarely seen back on display
WASHINGTON — They were there to talk about classified documents, but somehow President Joe Biden’s mind had turned to Mongolia.
Something about being handed a bow and arrow during a visit and embarrassing his host. “Pure luck, I hit the ... target,” Biden recalled. Not so much the Mongolian leader. “(He) couldn’t pull it back. I was like, ‘Oh, God.’ ”
He has a large storehouse of stories, this president, and he shared them freely during interviews with prosecutors last fall. Biden described giving an oration in law school on a case he had not read and lying his way into an exclusive club in Delaware. He recounted his time with President Barack Obama and trying to “save his ass” from manipulative generals. He boasted of building a solar facility in Angola.
What any of that had to do with Biden’s handling of secret papers was not always clear, but transcripts of his five hours with special counsel Robert Hur released last week opened a window into a president not often seen by the public lately.
He was funny and folksy, chatty and charming, quick and quirky. In a sometimes meandering stream of consciousness, he took prosecutors on a colorful tour of his life with the occasional disquisitions on the history of the Gutenberg printing press and Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential election defeat.
Of most importance to investigators, Biden was maddeningly imprecise about the government documents that ended up in his homes and offices where they did not belong. “I don’t remember how a beat-up box got in the garage,” he said.
All told, Biden offered variations of “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall” more than 50 times.
And there were other things he could not recall — what a fax machine is called, the name of a former Cabinet colleague, the agency that preserves official papers. Discussing negotiations with a challenging nation, he named Afghanistan, then corrected himself to say that he meant Iraq, only to have one of his lawyers tell him he was actually referring to Iran.
But he was clear and cogent through most of the questioning, which stretched over two days in October even as he was responding to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. At times, it seemed less an interrogation than a late-night talk show that prosecutors were loath to interrupt, a showcase of presidential patter that swung from self-serving to self-revealing, from a wrenching depiction of his son’s deathbed to a cringey mention of the first lady’s body.
“I just hope you didn’t find any risque pictures of my wife in a bathing suit,” he told interrogators who had searched his private homes as part of their investigation. “Which you probably did. She’s beautiful.”
A few minutes later, he offered advice to the younger people in the room, which was pretty much all of them. “I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy,” he counseled, “because you get asked to do everybody’s eulogy.”
This was the loquacious Joe Biden that many in Washington remember from his years before the White House, before he learned to check himself a little more in public and stopped giving so many interviews and news conferences where he might go off script. Biden has always had a mind that wandered and a tongue that was loose, often to the chagrin of his advisers.
His off-duty passions fairly leap off the 258 pages of transcript — particularly real estate and automotive vehicles.
“I’m a frustrated architect,” Biden said, constantly thinking about how to build or redesign homes. His family even gave him a drafting board. “In order to try to convince me not to run for the Senate for the 19th time,” he related, “my wife said, ‘Look, you don’t run, I’ll pay for architectural school for you.’ ”
Then there was his cherished Corvette, which Biden always speaks of as if it were a favorite child. “It drove me crazy. I wanted to drive it,” he said, referring to limits imposed by the Secret Service, which frowns on presidents and vice presidents taking the wheel.
For five hours in the Map Room of the White House, in fact, Biden was all about the accelerator and not so much about the brake.
He talked of passing the Violence Against Women Act (“really meant a lot to me”), writing his first memoir (“it was on the bestseller’s list”) and promoting legalization of same-sex marriage (“I’m the guy that got that changed,” which might surprise former Justice Anthony Kennedy). He mentioned the day he met his first wife, offered thoughts on agriculture on the Delmarva Peninsula and talked ruefully of once being “the poorest man in
Congress.”
Among those who made cameo appearances in his circuitous discourse were Strom Thurmond, Cory Booker and Benjamin Netanyahu. Shown a photo of himself with an arm around Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an estranged friend, he said, “They’re the old days.” From the cold type of a transcript, it was not clear — was he wistful or bitter?
He told well-worn stories of deciding to run for president in 2020 — how a dying Beau Biden, his eldest son, insisted that he not withdraw from public life out of grief, how he bristled when President Donald Trump equated white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, with the protesters against them and how his grandchildren called a family meeting to urge him to get into the race.
Some of the more interesting stories, though, were of his early adulthood, now more than a half-century ago. He “didn’t take law school very seriously,” he admitted, but once gave a 10-minute talk in class without reading the material and “the whole class stood up, started clapping.” He wanted to move to Idaho after law school but went to a job interview at a law firm in Delaware where he was told, “I assume you’re expecting to be hired on your looks.”
And then there was the man with the mutilated private parts. It was one of Biden’s first cases as a lawyer, involving an oil refinery worker who was injured by a fire in a containment vessel.
“He lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old,” the president explained matterof-factly.
A senior partner ordered him to write a motion to dismiss the man’s lawsuit. “And ... it prevailed,” Biden recounted. “And I looked over at that kid and his wife home with two little kids, and I thought: ‘... I’m in the wrong business. I’m not made for this.’ ”
So he eventually went into politics instead, embarking on a career that would one day take him to the White House.