What Jill Biden Doesn't Tell Us
When Special Counsel Robert Hur interviewed Joe Biden in October 2023 about retaining classified documents in his Delaware home, Hur famously declined to indict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” After reading Jill Biden’s memoir View from the East Wing, Hur might well have come to the same conclusion about the former First Lady.
There’s a great book to be written about the Biden story that needs to acknowledge all the rich strands you won’t find here. The curdle of presidential ambitions achieved too late, Jill’s determined yearning for professional credibility, the Bidens’ clenched teeth smiles at the winning star power of the younger Obamas, the passive-aggressive dance with the restive aspirations of VP Kamala Harris, the deeper implications of the tragedies of two sons, which tore into all their hopes for the future, the shredding of the Biden legacy by his own party as much as by a vengeful successor. Let’s cast Laura Dern as Jill, a tungsten Pollyanna who looks back on the White House as a “snow globe, this magical place filled with people trying to keep traditions alive.”
There is a strange space cadet quality about this book, perhaps a result of the PTSD inflicted on Mrs. Biden’s psyche by the Trump wrecking ball that has reduced the East Wing she treasured to a pile of rubble. In the opening pages, she tells us of the shock of learning four months after they left the Oval Office that Joe had stage-4 prostate cancer that had metastasized into his bones. But she never expresses any wifely rage at how the most powerful and medically invigilated octogenarian in the free world wasn’t given a simple PSA blood test, regardless of whether it is standard for men over age 70.
News headlines have focused on the only story she can’t avoid. The career-ending meteor of the June 2024 debate against Trump, when she noticed in the elevator just before her husband went went before the cameras that he was a curious clay color, and “strangely monochromatic” under his make-up. There’s been much pre-pub disgust at her “You did such a great job!” public reassurance to her spouse. But I get that. (Laurence Olivier once said his go-to line for disastrous performances by friends was “WORTH DOING!”) More mystifying is, if she was so appalled by Biden’s dazed, gaping-mouth performance (like nothing she had ever seen before ) that she thought he was having a stroke on stage, why was she supine when advisors later argued against his taking a cognitive test? “Why not give people that test score so they felt assured of his competency?’ she asks now. “I said as much to Joe, but I was at odds with his advisors.” Really? I suspect Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton‘s response would have been “We’re fucking doin’ it, guys.” Is Jill’s apparent passivity a backfill to combat the Lady Macbeth charge?
She reiterates wonderingly that her husband was in top form when he had his annual physical in February 2024, as if how you presented in your underpants four months before has any bearing on coming off like a stunned ox in front of an audience of 51 million voters. (Former chief of staff Ron Klain tells us in his own memoir that when he helped Biden prep for the debate, the president had the idea that if he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot, to which Klain responded, “Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed.”)
Wasted and Basted
My own theory of the debate debacle demands a whole area of exploration that Jill steadfastly avoids: the hidden dramas with her stepson Hunter, the human trainwreck running through the Biden family’s lives. Jill had raised him from the age of seven, with his brother Beau, after the 1972 car accident that killed Biden’s first wife and baby daughter. Hunter’s problems began early. He was busted for cocaine at the age of 18. But it was the 2015 death of Beau, the noble Iraq War veteran, Bronze Star winner, and Delaware Attorney General, that sent Hunter over the edge. His 2021 addiction memoir Beautiful Things tells how he was so out of his mind on crack in these lost years, he mistakenly smoked a small hunk of Parmesan cheese picked out from a rug. Few people in the family used the word “addict” when talking about Hunter. Everyone spoke about Hunter “not being well” or “needing help.”
In June 2024, Hunter was tried on federal gun charges. Jill writes that she only understood the depth of his painful degradation when the prosecution played a clip of him in court reading from his own shocking audiobook. She recounts how she jumped on and off planes to fulfill her first lady duties in Europe, while also getting back to sit in the front row of Hunter’s trial almost every day, once ducking out into a stairwell, where she “leaned against the gritty concrete wall and took deep breaths. On the other side of the door was a cacophony of reporters, lawyers, and onlookers.”
Hunter wrote in his memoir that his father, though broken by the 2015 death of the revered Beau (in which the subtext must inevitably have been the agony of comparison), always stood by his side. Biden often blamed the pressures of his political career for his troubled son’s difficulties and provided a refuge for Hunter’s young family during his spirals into chaos. During Hunter’s trial, Joe was tormented by the need to look legally neutral. I am told that guilt and anxiety about the ordeal of his prodigal son, finally sober and with a new marriage and baby, were the only things the president could think about, as he stumbled through D-Day commemorations in France, a G7 meeting in Italy, and a Hollywood fundraiser. Just two weeks before the high-wire debate with Trump, Hunter was convicted on three felony counts and faced up to 25 years behind bars. The president immediately flew to Wilmington to sustain Hunter with a father’s forgiving embrace. The thought of losing his only surviving son would have addled the brain of the most lucid parent, much less an 81-year-old candidate sparring with a MAGA minotaur on national television. The death of Beau and the conviction of Hunter were the slow-moving, degenerative agents of Joe Biden’s decline. There were howls of outrage from Republicans, but also dismay from Democrats who believe he forsook the moral high ground when he pardoned Hunter, and, preemptively, every member of his family, on the way out of the Oval Office. Given what we now see in Trump’s revenge tour, President Biden should be forgiven for being prescient, IMHO.
And we should forgive Jill Biden, too, perhaps for hanging onto her unsatisfying emotional distance in View from the East Wing. In an interview for her own memoir, Michelle Obama spoke about how she sobbed uncontrollably for a full thirty minutes on the Air Force jet that carried her and her husband away from the Oval Office for the last time, “because that’s how much we were holding it together for eight years.”Jill Biden, on the other hand, recalls how, on the freezing January day of Trump’s inauguration, she wrote a departing message with her fingertip in the steam collected on a frosted window in the White House residence. A pity she doesn’t tell us what she wrote, or what she really felt about her four years in the White House “snow globe.”
Forgiving of the Biden's? We had a clear choice: Kamala or Trump? Hillary or Trump? In both instances the American people chose a con man rather than a competent woman. Not once, but twice!
To be honest, I was all prepared for you to slice and dice her. I really appreciate the compassion you showed in discussing the Bidens. I would think that anyone who has dealt with aging and cognitive diminishment in their family would find at least a little of that compassion for the Bidens. They could not possibly have been the only two people responsible for the situation in the ‘24 election, and I think the anger directed at them is very unattractive on the part of the Democrats that I know.