INTRODUCTION 2008. Tallahassee. Joe Biden had been campaigning all day, most of it on his feet. Talking, laughing, joking, hugging, Biden-ing. He had to be exhausted. Finally, at dusk, his weary team slogged back to the airport. Time to rest, recharge.
As they pulled up to the tarmac, Biden noticed a group of kids, Cub Scouts, who were there to visit a fire truck.
Hey, he thought,
Cub Scouts!
Revitalized, Biden ran over and shook their hands, hugged them, tousled hair. Then he had an idea.
“You guys wanna come and see my plane?”
“Yeah!” the kids cried out.
“Is it okay?” Biden asked a staffer, like a teenager asking to borrow the family car. The staffer gave the thumbs-up.
YES! After getting permission from their (amazed) parents, Biden walked the kids to his plane, where his wife, Jill, cheerfully waved them on board. Joe showed them the cockpit, gave them a grand tour, and learned their names along the way, almost as if he were charming a prime minister.
One of the kids spotted a basket of candy. “Is that your snacks?” “That’s our snacks,” Biden said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “You can sneak one if you want.” He doled out some Tootsie Rolls. “Everybody got one?”
His assistant at the time, Herbie Ziskend, remembers the day well. “These little kids were adorable. And he met them all.” This wasn’t a campaign event. This wasn’t scripted or planned. Biden just loves this kind of stuff. The best part? “The kids didn’t know who he was!” Ziskend says, laughing.
It seems that everyone who has worked with Biden, knows Biden, or once bumped into him on the Amtrak has a favorite story to share. Like the Delaware woman who says he raced down a thief to save her purse, the neighbor who watched him zip around in his Corvette, or the teenager who met Biden once, just once, but received some advice that would help him conquer a speech impediment. Colleagues and staffers can vouch for that authenticity
, that warmth, how he’s the same Joe whether the camera is on or off . . . for better or worse.
Just ask the cameraman. “He’s almost
exactly the same,” says Arun Chaudhary, the nation’s first-ever White House videographer, whose team shadowed Biden and President Obama, capturing their every moment, whether they were talking policy or licking ice cream cones. Or, as Obama put it, “Folks don’t just feel like they know Joe ‘the politician.’ They feel like they know the person. What makes him laugh, what he believes, what he cares about, where he came from. Pretty much every time he speaks, he treats us to some wisdom from the nuns who taught him in grade school.”
The goal of this book is to unpack that wisdom—not just the lessons from the sisters at Holy Rosary, but the hard-fought insights he has earned from a lifetime of service. Biden has freely,
gleefully, shared much of this advice in countless speeches, interviews, and gabfests with students, but no one has really collected it all in one place. So throughout the book you’ll find callouts to the “Wisdom of Joe,” little dollops of insight that apply to us all.
Why Joe Biden? The premise is simple: Biden is a good man; Biden is
the man. We can learn from the way he speaks plainly, stays upbeat, and treats others with respect, no matter who they are or how they vote. That basic
decency is why liking Joe Biden is a nonpartisan issue. His pals have ranged from liberal lions (Ted Kennedy) to arch conservatives (Strom Thurmond). “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem,” suggests Republican Lindsey Graham in his slow, southern drawl. “He is as good a man as God ever created.”
“Joe Biden doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” says John McCain. “He’s unique in that he’s had some role in every major national security crisis that his nation has faced in the last thirty-five years. I don’t know anyone like him in the U.S. Senate. . . . I would say he’s been the most impactful vice president that I’ve known—certainly in modern times.”
McCain has a good point—Biden isn’t just a “nice guy”; he also gets things done. When we take stock of Joe’s legacy, we see a record of service that has few modern-day parallels. Who else pushed to end wars in both Vietnam
and Iraq? Who else worked with eight presidents, from Nixon to Obama? (Or as he put it, “Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.”) As chairman of the Robert Bork proceedings, he might have done more to shape the Supreme Court than anyone since FDR. He championed the Violence Against Women Act. Pushed through a crime bill that put 100,000 cops on the street. Fought to end the genocide in Bosnia. And he did all that before he became, in Obama’s totally unbiased judgment, “the best vice president America’s ever had.”
Why this book? Let’s not kid ourselves. An entire generation knows Biden mostly from the aviators, the Amtrak, the “bromance” memes, and the ice cream cones. And, okay, the gaffes. In an odd way, we only embraced Joe Biden
after he left the White House, sort of like how we might not appreciate an ex until after the breakup.
So another mission of the book is to give Joe his due, to look back on his life and savor the best nuggets. As should be clear from the cover, this is not an academic tome or a year-by-year account of Biden’s life, from birth to Air Force Two. (For that, I recommend Jules Witcover’s exceptionally well-researched 2010 biography,
Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, as well as Biden’s own 2007 memoir,
Promises to Keep.) Instead, the goal here is to offer something that can be binged in a single weekend, focusing on the key stories and lessons from Biden’s remarkable life and career.
Why now? Or, to be as blunt as Biden, isn’t this old news? Shouldn’t we be looking forward, not backward?
First off, Joe’s wisdom is timeless. And it can be helpful to look at the past—the good and the bad, the wins and the misfires. Joe Biden isn’t perfect; that’s the price of being a public servant for nearly five decades. (Quick perspective: When Biden prepared to launch his first campaign, the Yankees were led by a player named Mickey Mantle.) So the book doesn’t pretend the flaws don’t exist; instead we’ll look at those missteps and suss out the teachable moments.
Most important, we can learn from the way that Biden, time after time, has bounced back from unthinkable tragedy and heartache. As his longtime right-hand man, former senator Ted Kaufman, once said, “If you ask me, who is the luckiest person I have ever known? I would say Joe Biden. If you ask me, who is the unluckiest I have known? I would say Joe Biden.” As a young man he lost his first wife and baby daughter. As an old man he lost his son. Along the way he nearly died from a brain aneurysm, with a priest giving him last rites. That’s why when Biden says something like, “I feel your pain,” it’s not phony. With Biden it’s real. He does feel the pain, and he has felt the sharp edges of that pain for more than forty years.
Yet this is what makes Joe, well, Joe: Through it all, he carries himself with grace and strength, and somehow, against all odds, he even finds a way to see the
humor. The tears are followed by a smile, a chuckle, some finger-guns. In fact, he is so effective at exuding this breezy cool, this
Ah, Shucks friendliness, that at times we forget that he is a man of substance and grit, a man who has a knack for bucking the odds, for coming back from the brink.
Joe’s comebacks began in the very beginning. When Biden was a boy, then just “Joey,” after any setback, his father would tell him,
Get back up! Get up! Get up! He has followed that advice as a child, as a man, and as a father.
None of us have walked in Biden’s shoes or faced the same tragedies, but all of us will know loss, feel heartache, suffer bruising defeats. As just one example, on November 8, 2016, about 65.8 million Americans were knocked to the floor by a sucker punch.
Joe can help us get back up.
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Wilser. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
