The Last Word

The HOPE of Joe Biden

This year’s poisonous political machinations as federal and state governments apply erratic approaches to managing the COVID-19 public health crisis have burdened and saddened us. We have been offered so many reasons to become jaded, furious, and fearful. Before this presidential election I recommend that you step back and take some comfort by turning to former Vice President Joe Biden’s heartfelt and uplifting bestseller Promise Me Dad, a 2017 memoir and ode to public service, family, and in particular his son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden. Beau died in 2015 after a long battle against aggressive Stage IV glioblastoma as President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden worked hard to accomplish the administration’s long-term policy objectives before the 2016 election.

When picking a president from the two major candidates, it pays to read about their character. How did a seasoned statesman like Joe Biden, already well-versed in personal tragedy, handle matters of state and leadership under the glare of a national spotlight while watching a much-beloved, politically promising son fade before his eyes?

We are bombarded with images and speeches and tweets from the current president, who sucks the oxygen out of the media landscape with his unstable rants and attentioncraving cruelty. It is time to turn away from toxic charisma and towards steadiness, kindness, and hard-earned wisdom. We need a more stable, united country in which we have a clearer path towards caring about and relying on one another.

Vice President Biden’s memoir looks at and beyond personal pain while presenting the values he has learned as a lifetime public servant, one who has aimed to become President since he was a young man. As a newly elected senator, he suffered a crushing blow when his first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash. His two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were in the hospital from their injuries and he was sworn in as Senator at their bedside.

As a single dad, he decided to spend his time shuttling back and forth between Delaware and Washington, DC, a two-hour commute each way, to spend as much time with them as he could. Throughout this book, his emphasis on family love is profound. He speaks of how he came to know Jill Biden, how she became the boys’ mother, and how Neilia and Naomi were never forgotten even when Ashley, his daughter with Jill, arrived. In his discussions of traditional family Thanksgiving vacations to Nantucket and other family events, it is evident how closely bound the Bidens are, no matter how extended, and how much they love and support one another. Joe and Jill Biden have instilled the value that every family member should always be there for one another.

Biden talks candidly about how he came to accept the Vice Presidency against his initial inclinations, since he thought the role would have little impact or responsibility in comparison to his position as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His

advisors, and in particular his family, talked him into it. So did President Barack Obama, who valued his experience and wisdom from performing years of public service. Wisely, Obama asked him to take major roles and responsibility in multiple areas, and acceded to Biden’s requests to be in on all major decisions and play a role in diverse realms of domestic and foreign policy.

Despite having different styles and personalities, their resulting close friendship and complementary partnership shows how a strong, united administration can operate. This aspect of the book shines a light on the way Biden wishes to repeat this pattern of working closely with the eminently qualified Senator Kamala Harris, the first Black and Indian female candidate for the Vice Presidency.

Promise Me, Dad is not a very long book, and it is simply written. That being said, it becomes very intense in its discussion of familial love, public service, and leadership. I found it best to read chapters and then stop and absorb Biden’s insights. Biden cuts back and forth between the time he and his family spent helping his magnetic, up-andcoming son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, battle an aggressive glioblastoma, and the multiple important policy issues he had to address

simultaneously in his professional life while helping President Obama steer the ship of state and working across the aisle with opposition members of Congress.

This memoir shows Biden’s serious attitude towards building effective foreign relations with Russia, the Americas, and Europe, for example, along with leaders in the rest of the world. He also discusses issues as neighborhood policing and his support of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights. Then he flips back to focusing on his son Beau and his closeknit family’s grueling ordeal watching the stoic, resilient Beau undergoing surgeries and experimental drug therapies with the help of medical teams in Houston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

In his book, Biden gives credit to all the people he loves in his family, his good friends, the Secret Service he has grown to know so well and President Obama for his endless support. He also talks about his sons: Hunter’s endless support for Beau, and Beau’s lost potential for becoming a national leader, mentioning that presidential historian Jon Meacham, among many others, thought Beau had the charisma and character to become president himself. Joe idolized his son, putting him on a pedestal.

When Beau died, Biden kept as busy as possible to allay his anguish, and relied on his large network of good friends in politics and elsewhere, along with his family. If anything, his book shows that his pain allows him to empathize with so many people who stoically go through difficult circumstances every day, whether they be a long-term illness, an eviction, a job loss or mortgage foreclosure, or the other difficult struggles of human existence. The empathy he expresses for the public he serves is deep and sincere.

Despite his great pain, Biden also responded to his son’s request: “Promise me, Dad, that you’ll be okay.” He writes of his son’s death as a way to renew his dedication to the very idea of public service after his many years in it. It helped him focus on his own need to live up to Beau’s passion for helping those who desperately needed assistance. In the process, he discusses his own role in reassuring a distressed and fractured nation. Biden emphasizes his role as a longtime champion for the middle class, which he saw waning as tax cuts for multimillionaires and billionaires increased exponentially since Reagan had taken office.

As he notes afterwards, “I have come to believe that the first duty of a public servant is to help bring people together, especially in crisis, especially