USA TODAY International Edition
Joe Biden, time to make a graceful exit
He can still avoid ending his last chapter in shame
Joe Biden and I go back a long way — over four decades. In that time, he has taught me two crucial life lessons. Now, I hope he can teach a third one.
As a 15-year-old in 1972, I read about the tragic deaths of his first wife, Neilia, and their 1-year-old daughter. Only a few years before they were killed in a car wreck, my mother had bought us matching stationery sets. Already a veteran letter writer, I took pen to paper and wrote Biden a note of condolence.
I’ve held onto his response for 47 years. His letter came in a heavy, cream-colored envelope and he addressed it to “Mr. Petrow,” probably the first time anyone had called me that:
“I offer a belated thank-you for your kind words of condolence. I deeply appreciate your sentiments. I owed so very much to Neilia . ... Now our life has been completely torn apart by an event I shall never completely comprehend.”
Back then, I knew nothing about illness, much less death — but Joe Biden’s family tragedy taught me about the random hands of the fates that can appear in no time from nowhere. The vice president himself put it simply in 2015: “Reality has a way of intruding” into life. That was Biden Lesson No. 1.
Since then, I’ve looked to Joe Biden as a role model. “Uncle Joe” has made any number of gaffes and misstatements and been too touchy-feely with women. But I believed his heart was in the right place even when his mouth — or hands — indicated otherwise.
In 2015, I followed Joe and Jill Biden’s public embrace of their son Beau, who died of brain cancer. Again, I wrote Biden. Like Beau, I, too, had had cancer at an early age. Unlike Beau, I survived. Joe Biden’s open expression of his heart and public anguish reminded me of the depth of this man’s feelings and his ability to connect, especially to those who had endured personal loss.
I did not hear back from the vice president, but that was OK. I believed that Biden might be able to translate this new loss into major advances for cancer treatment, especially when he spearheaded President Barack Obama’s cancer moonshot program. In a 2017 speech, Biden brought the personal to the political. “Like many of you,” he said, “I decided to become acquainted with this after someone close to me in my family was diagnosed. You tend to try to learn everything you possibly can once that occurs.” And there it was, Biden Lesson No. 2: Resilience in the face of adversity.
I hadn’t realized at the time how much such a lesson would mean. My mother had died 10 days earlier, and my father would pass 90 days later. A halfyear later my little sister would be diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. If anyone now needed a moonshot it was our family. Joe Biden gave me hope.
In recent months, I’ve watched Biden with anticipation, only to find my enthusiasm curbed.
He has rightfully been criticized for his role in the 1991 Anita Hill hearings, but he recently said, “I don’t think I treated her badly.” When it comes to inappropriately touching women, Biden still makes jokes. Then, in the first presidential debates, Biden — my teenage hero and midlife role model — lost his footing in front of 18 million viewers when Sen. Kamala Harris accused him of cozying up to segregationists under the guise of civility.
Suffice it to say, Biden showed us that when it comes to gender and race, he’s out of step. I wish he had given me a third life lesson: Don’t confuse a real, genuine apology with weakness.
After the debate, Biden asked a crowd whether he was “wrong ... to somehow give the impression to folks that I was praising those people who I opposed?” “Yes, I was,” he answered. His quasi apology was a day late and a dollar short — actually, nine days late.
Biden has taught me so much in my lifetime — about loss, about love, about virtue. I now wish the former vice president would extend a final lesson and show us how to make a graceful exit before his accomplishments are erased. Joe Biden means too much to me and to so many other Americans for his next — and final — political chapter to be one of a tone-deafness, revealing a man whose time is over.