Biden’s Decision

Dover Air Force Base

July 17, 2024

PETER BAKER, The New York Times:

It’s been this roller coaster of days. The president of the United States, who’s under enormous pressure to drop his bid for a second term, ends up being sick and has to isolate. He has COVID. He disembarks from the plane, takes a couple steps and then he just stops, inexplicably for no reason, it seems like. And he looks over to the right, where there’s nobody there. And he just looks halting, unsteady, uncertain, and you saw the lowest point, in some ways, of his presidency.

MALE REPORTER:

Any response to Chuck Schumer?

PETER BAKER:

He disappears into the presidential limousine, and that’s the last time anybody sees Joe Biden for six days.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, The Washington Post:

He was self-isolating for health reasons, but politically he was incredibly isolated, because there were mounting calls for him to drop out of the race. People were wondering, is this the end of Joe Biden’s political career? People were looking at that imagery. They were looking at the days ahead, the weekend that was coming up, as a pivotal moment in determining whether or not Biden would be able to remain as the leader of the Democratic ticket.

NARRATOR:

Sick and on the political ropes, President Joe Biden faced a critical decision.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

He was getting the message from lawmakers on Capitol Hill who were saying, "If you don’t make a decision this weekend, we are going to come out en masse and say that we have lost confidence in you."

NARRATOR:

It would be one of the toughest of his life.

PETER BAKER:

There was no more room for error. He had to decide whether or not he was going to step down as a candidate. Was there one more comeback there for him to mount?

NARRATOR:

For Joe Biden, it was a pivotal moment in a lifetime marked by ambition, tragedy and determination.

FRANKLIN FOER. Author, The Last Politician:

You can’t understand Joe Biden without understanding the insecurities at the core of his being. Those insecurities that are born out of the stutter, born out of the bullying, they're the diesel fuel that keeps pushing him forward.

MALE NEWSREADER:

An automobile accident killed the wife and baby daughter of Biden of Delaware.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS, Sister:

He went from being on top of the world to being a young widower, a father of two children and a man with a broken heart.

JOE BIDEN:

Hello, everybody.

JILL BIDEN:

When he was accused of plagiarism,, we felt that his character was being attacked, and it sort of took us back.

JOE BIDEN:

When you get knocked down, you get back up!

EVAN OSNOS, Author, Joe Biden:

You cannot understand Joe Biden without understanding everything that came before, which is an entire lifetime spent proving to people that he can do the things that they believe he cannot.

NARRATOR:

The roots of Joe Biden’s enduring willpower trace back to a bygone era.

HISTORICAL FILM NARRATOR:

This is the Delaware story. It is an outstanding example of what free people in a free country can accomplish.

FRANKLIN FOER:

When he talks about the world that he wants to see for the country, when he talks about the dignity of work, when he talks about middle-class communities, he’s really going back to something that had existed in his youth.

HISTORICAL FILM NARRATOR:

The fathers and mothers in our hometown are just plain, nice-living folks, the kind you read about in storybooks—you know, Main Street folks who say, “Hello, nice morning.” We built it with civic pride and remain proud of its dignity and friendly, tolerable characters.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS, GQ magazine:

The family moved to Wilmington when Biden was about 10. And the neighborhood was this Irish Catholic, pretty much working class.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

My brother Joe is the eldest of all of us. We were normal kids—we raised hell, we got into trouble. But once we walked outside our home, we were Bidens, and we had to stick together. And loyalty was tantamount—we took care of each other.

EVAN OSNOS:

They have a very strong sense of a clannish identity. “We Bidens” is an idea. You’ll hear Val, his sister, use that term, and Joe Biden uses that term.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

Mom and Dad told us that the most important thing in life was family. My father was not a man of many words. My mother was the one who was the talker in the family. But when he spoke to us, we all perked up. My dad didn’t have to say twice to us what he was thinking or what he wanted us to do. Mom stayed at home. Dad sold cars.

EVAN OSNOS:

Joe Biden’s self-presentation is that he is a man who comes out of the working class, full stop. But actually, the real story is richer. It’s more complicated and interesting, which is of course that his father had money at one point. His father grew up with money.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

My dad grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps.

EVAN OSNOS:

His father had little emblems of wealth left behind, like a polo mallet in the coat closet. And he had photographs of himself next to a private plane and things like that. And then they lost it all. And as a result, there was this sense of almost like a phantom limb.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

He’d been knocked down hard as a young man, lost something he knew he could never get back.

FRANKLIN FOER:

When you listen to Joe Biden, the thing that matters to him most is the sense of dignity, because he saw in his own father’s life and in his own family the scars that are left when you experience that kind of precipitous drop in security, the precipitous drop in status that his family experienced.

TRACEY QUILLEN CARNEY, Family friend:

That value of each person’s dignity, you can see that as a pretty straight line from Mr. Biden to Joe, because he didn’t think his own dignity had always been honored the way it should be.

MATT VISER, The Washington Post:

There’s a story that Joe Biden writes about this father and how they go to a Christmas party and the owner of the dealership at some point in that Christmas party tosses out a bucket full of silver dollars onto the floor. His father was struck by all of these people scrounging around on the floor for these silver dollars. And so his father, in protest, quits immediately.

EVAN OSNOS:

It was supposed to be a kind of fun activity, but Joe Biden’s father found it humiliating. Joe Biden has always had a chip on his shoulder, and that’s something that he inherited from his father. His father was always alert to the risk of being humiliated for not having as much status or influence or power or education or money as anybody else.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

“The world doesn’t owe you a living, Joey,” he used to say. He had no time for self-pity.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

Failure would happen in everyone’s life, but giving up was unforgivable. My dad would say, “It’s not how often you get knocked down, it’s how quickly you get back up.”

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

"Get up!" That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! Kids make fun of you because you stutter, Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden? Get up!

NARRATOR:

Little Joey had a stutter.

YOUNG MALE STUTTERER 1:

Hope to peach—teach PE.

YOUNG MALE STUTTERER 2:

Well, my―father is very strict.

JOHN HENDRICKSON, Author, Life on Delay

When you’re young, it instantly makes you a target for bullies. You’re immediately not like any of the other kids.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

People feel free to make fun of stutterers. It was difficult for my brother.

MICHAEL KRUSE, Politico:

He has talked frequently about the shame he felt, and the anger he felt when his peers made fun of him for his stutter, and even his teachers, the nuns who taught him.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS:

He had an assignment he had to memorize, and he had to stand up and deliver it in the classroom.

NARRATOR:

The words were in front of him: "Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman."

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

When Joe read it, it went "Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentle man." "Say that again?" "Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentle man." This went on three times.

JOHN HENDRICKSON:

He said, "gentle man" instead of "gentleman."

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

The nun looked at him and said, “Master B-B-B-Biden, do you need your classmates to tell you how to say that?"

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS:

It was so embarrassing and so enraging that Biden walked out of the room. He walked out of the school. He walked all the way home.

NARRATOR:

Joey’s mom Jean marched him back to the school to confront his teacher.

TRACEY QUILLEN CARNEY:

Mrs. Biden was a very warm, gracious person, but then she had this steely backbone if challenged—like if somebody did something to one of her kids, for example, I think the steel came out.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

The sister starts telling how disrespectful Joe is, my mother said, "Stop." She said, "Just tell me. Did you make fun of my son?" "Well, I—" "Sister, did you make fun of my son?" "Well—" And my mother said, "Well, I’ll answer it for you. You sure in hell did. And if you ever, ever, ever do that again, I’m going to come back and I’m going to knock your bonnet right off your head. Do we understand each other?"

EVAN OSNOS:

That was a very strong, pugilistic strain in the family. There was a very strong sense that was imparted to the kids that you will never allow yourself to be diminished by somebody else.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

He was not going to let a bully define him. He just knew he stuttered, and he was going to do something about it.

NARRATOR:

His decision was emblematic for how he’d face the many challenges to come.

JOHN HENDRICKSON:

Biden would stand in front of his bedroom mirror holding a flashlight to his face and he would recite Yeats and Emerson. He was determined to eventually be a person who could give speeches.

FRANKLIN FOER, The Atlantic:

Those insecurities that are born out of the bullying, born out of the stutter, born out of his father’s fall from social mobility, those are the things that keep propelling him. They’re the diesel fuel that keeps pushing him forward.

EVAN OSNOS:

At a pretty young age, Joe Biden awakened to the power of his own will; the will to recite these poems in front of the mirror, to beat the stutter, which seemed like this assignment from God, this sense that he had been given this body that was frail. And he got through it with this act of devotion, in a sense, this devotion to himself. And I think it seeded in him this belief that he could, through an act of will, he could get himself to places that other people didn’t think he could.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS, Sister:

In eighth grade in Catholic schools, February was vocation month. The priests or the nuns would come into our classroom and talk about the vocation of becoming a nun and the vocation of becoming a priest. Joe was very taken by it, and I remember his coming home to Mom and Dad and his saying, “You know, I might want to be—I think I might want to become a priest.”

EVAN OSNOS, The New Yorker:

The church imposed a sense of ritual, a sense of hierarchy, a sense of being part of something larger than yourself. All of these were really this essential piece of what it meant to be a Biden.

MARC FISHER, The Washington Post:

Biden sees in the insecurities of his youth—kids making fun of him, his father messing up in business—he has a craving for security, and he finds it in these institutions that are permanent—the church and it’s thousands of years of ritual, that if you master you can build a career for yourself, a reputation and a security for yourself, your family, your community, and that to him was enormously appealing.

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The Irish Times:

For a lot of boys growing up in that culture, this is what you look up to, this is what you aspire to. To have the priest in the family, it’s a real honor for the family. When you become a priest you get all the prestige, and you get the social status and you get the spiritual status.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

And so Joe said, “Maybe, I’m thinking about the priesthood.” At that time the young boys went from eighth grade, they went into the seminary at ninth grade. And my mom said, "Well, it’s wonderful, if you want to be a priest. But there’s no way in hell you’re going at ninth grade. You go to high school, you go to college, and when you get out, and if you want to be a priest, you have my blessing. But you’re not going in ninth grade. You’re too little to make that decision."

NARRATOR:

It was in high school that Joe discovered another calling.

EVAN OSNOS:

When he was in high school, John F. Kennedy became the president.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:

Sen. John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever voted into the White House. Mr. Kennedy is also the first Catholic chief executive in the history of the country.

EVAN OSNOS:

And all of a sudden, an Irish Catholic, the first Irish Catholic to reach the White House, became this enormous symbol for Biden.

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

EUGENE ROBINSON, The Washington Post:

The election of JFK was such a moment. Most, if not all, Democrats of his generation really were invested in the Kennedy story.

JOHN F. KENNEDY:

The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

JFK had talked about that torch being passed to a new generation, and Biden wants to be the guy picking up the torch. He certainly pursues status, and he certainly wants to be a person of consequence.

EVAN OSNOS:

In fact, he went to the library and started looking up Kennedy’s background to figure out how did this person become president? What does it take to get there?

NARRATOR:

Now, the son of a car salesman, the bullied kid with a stutter, decided to aim impossibly high—pursue John F. Kennedy’s path into politics.

Kennedy was a young senator; Biden set his sights on the Senate.

Jack had a picture-perfect wife, and Joe would find a picture-perfect wife—Neilia.

MATT VISER:

When he first meets his wife, he tells her he wants to be a young senator and then he wants to be president. He had that ambition very early on, which does tie in with John F. Kennedy. It’s not until he’s 78 that he actually becomes president. But this striving for something big and be president of the United States is something that Biden has from the youngest of ages. He spent more time than almost anyone in American history thinking about and running for president.

MALE REPORTER:

Sen. Robert Frances Kennedy died today, June 6, 1968.

MALE REPORTER:

If this were an actual campaign train, Sen. Kennedy would be on the platform of the last car. Today, that’s where his casket rests.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

That terrible caravan of death of John F. Kennedy and then of course, so close together, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, has a very profound effect on Biden.

MALE REPORTER:

Now the car bearing Sen. Kennedy is passing by the—

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

Biden talks very movingly about standing there to watch the train carrying Robert Kennedy’s body.

JFK had talked about that torch being passed to a new generation. Well, now the torch has been dropped. It has to be picked up. Joe Biden wants to be the guy who will be the new Irish Catholic politician, picking up the torch.

VINCE D’ANNA, Campaign aide, 1972:

He called me into his office and he said to me, “I want you to help me. I want to run for office.” And I said, “Well, what do you want to run for?” And he said, “The United States Senate.” I said, “You’re crazy.” He said, “Will you help me?” I said, “Sure. I’ll help you.”

NARRATOR:

It was considered a fool’s errand, unseating a popular incumbent to win a U.S. Senate seat at age 29.

TED KAUFMAN, Campaign aide, 1972:

Joe Biden asked me about getting involved in his campaign. I started off by telling him that there’s no way he can win. Cale Boggs was the candidate for the Senate. He’d been a two-term congressman, two-term governor, two-term senator. He’s beloved around the state.

VINCE D’ANNA:

Boggs was seen to be invincible. He had won like 29 straight years of elections, in different elections. But he really believed in himself. He really believed that he could beat Boggs.

EVAN OSNOS:

He was really positioning himself to be an alternative to an older generation that had come before, much the way that JFK had done that.

JOE BIDEN:

The fact that I’m young and the fact that I still have some of my hair and my family was involved, and I have a very, I think, very appealing family.

EVAN OSNOS:

In many ways he modeled his own candidacy after the Kennedys. He and Neilia would go out with the kids. They were all part of the operation. And it was an amazing tableau.

NARRATOR:

Joe and Neilia had built a family—Beau, Hunter and Naomi.

MATT VISER, The Washington Post:

Politics is so much of a family enterprise for the Bidens, in a way that it was too for the Kennedy family. But his family doesn’t have the political connections or the financial connections that the Kennedy family had.

NARRATOR:

Just about the only people who thought he could win were Joe Biden and his family.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

I was the campaign manager. We, the Bidens, we had no money. We had no power or influence. We didn’t know anybody who was a big name who could help us. But we had Joe.

JOE BIDEN:

Thank you. Hi, how are you? Joe Biden’s my name.

EVAN OSNOS:

There are extroverts and then there are Joe Biden extroverts.

JOE BIDEN:

Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much.

EUGENE ROBINSON:

He is a person who lives to interact with people. He’s a born politician. You get him in front of a rope line, you get him in a place where he gets to shake hands, he comes alive.

PEGGY NOONAN, The Wall Street Journal:

Some people are in politics because they’re in love with policy, but they’re not necessarily in love with humans. The phrase “the common touch” is kind of an old one, but it was very around when Joe Biden started out. And he had it. Joe Biden loves the game of it. He loves the dance of it. He loves meeting people. He loves hugging strangers.

TED KAUFMAN:

He always made an incredible impression on people. I can remember we did a poll, and something like half the people in the state thought they had met him personally. Which was absolutely, totally completely impossible. And that’s how he won.

MALE NEWSREADER:

In Delaware, two-term Republican Caleb Boggs whipped by 29-year-old Joseph Biden.

TED KAUFMAN:

He literally won by personal contact with people all across the state.

VINCE D’ANNA:

I mean, the world literally changed overnight. No one expected it, including a lot of the people in the campaign. It was just a sense of the impossible had been accomplished.

JOE BIDEN:

All of you have done something that the political pundits said there was no way in the world it could be done.

EVAN OSNOS:

He had gotten where he was through sheer will and charisma. And as far as he was concerned, those were the most powerful ingredients in politics. What that taught him was that if you can envelop people in a sense of who you are and just make them feel something, that that is a more effective political tool than having every policy detail at your disposal.

TED KAUFMAN:

This is the honest-to-God truth, I can remember as if it was as clear as today, standing in that crowd, I was thinking, I will never, ever again believe that anything’s impossible. And I’ve looked at races for the last 50 years, almost 50 years, and I’ve never—no one’s ever come to me with a race that was as impossible to win as this race.

NARRATOR:

To Joe Biden it was yet more proof he could decide to do the impossible.

EVAN OSNOS:

The need to perform, to prove the doubters wrong, that’s deep down within him. That has been a part of him forever, and it is very much a part of how he thinks about proving the doubters wrong even now, at the age of 81.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The youngest new face in the U.S. Senate next year will be that of Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware. So young, in fact, that at the time of his election on Nov. 7, Biden was not yet old enough to serve.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

I could hardly wait to be thirty, the constitutionally required age for entering the Senate.

We threw a big party two and a half weeks after the election. There was a cake, and Neilia and I cut it together, standing over it like we did our wedding cake, except that Beau and Hunt were there.

EVAN OSNOS:

For the first 29 years of his life, after having solved the problem of the stutter, Joe Biden had almost a kind of blessed existence. He discovered that, “OK, life’s pretty good to me.”

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

I was a United States senator-elect at age 30. Neilia and I had done this amazing thing together, and there was so much more we would do. The doors were just beginning to swing open on the rest of our lives.

CURTIS WILKIE, The News Journal, 1971-74:

I spent a good bit of time with Joe. I was assigned to do a long, long piece on him, something like “Young Mr. Biden goes to Washington.” I rode on the train with him to Washington one day and he was very excited. He was almost like a little kid. In fact, he was saying, “Hey, they’re all going to think I’m a page here.” Just bubbling with excitement, kind of on top of the world. And I had lunch with Neilia. She was very pretty and quite intelligent, good company, charming, easy to talk to. I just thought to myself, “You know, this couple really has everything.”

EVAN OSNOS, The New Yorker:

He was in his office in Washington, and they're just getting set up at that point. He’s with his sister and some members of his staff.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS, GQ magazine:

Neilia was at home with the kids, taking care of the kids in Wilmington. And the phone rings and Val gets it. Biden is sort of paying attention, then he really starts paying attention when he sees her face.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

And I got a call from Jimmy Biden, and he said, “Come home. Now! There’s been an accident." And Neilia was in the car, the station wagon, with the three children, Beau, Hunt and Naomi, and she had gotten a Christmas tree and she was on her way home.

She was hit broadside by a tractor-trailer. And she and Naomi, who sat behind her in the car seat, they died instantly. And Beau and Hunter were seriously injured. And my brother looked at me and said, “She’s dead isn’t she?” And I said, “I don’t know, Joey.” I did know. Jimmy told me.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

I could not speak, only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

In six short weeks he went from being on top of the world to being a young widower, a father of two children and a single dad. And a man with a broken heart.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

The minute I got to the hospital I knew the worst had happened. The boys were both alive, but Beau had a lot of broken bones, and Hunt had head injuries.

CURTIS WILKIE:

I don’t think Joe was ever young again after that. It just shattered all these thoughts of this nice young couple and the life they were going to have. And I don’t think I ever went on to finishing that story I was working on. It just changed everything.

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The NY Review of Books:

In a terrible way he becomes more like the Kennedys than anybody would ever wish. This fate that seems to drag on the success story of the Kennedys, in the worst possible way it inserts itself into Biden’s life.

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

The pain cut through like a shard of broken glass. I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn’t just an option, but a rational option.

FRANKLIN FOER:

Joe Biden has a crisis of faith in the most profound sorts of ways. He cannot believe in a benevolent God after having his wife and daughter taken from him. There’s a crisis of faith about his own destiny and his own place in the world. He’s on the cusp of being the youngest senator, and he feels as if this is not the thing for him to do.

EVAN OSNOS:

He was angry. He was really angry. There was almost a physical sense of agony and rage about it. He and his brother used to go out at night and go look for people to get in fights with.

Biden, 1985 interview

JOE BIDEN:

I just felt rage, absolute rage. Anger. It just didn’t make sense, and I could not understand that.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS:

He’s not even sure what to do. He’s not sure he can even be a senator anymore. “Who am I? What do I do here?” And he just considers giving up.

NARRATOR:

In his darkest moment, he returned to the Biden motto: “Get up.”

Biden, 1985 interview

JOE BIDEN:

The legacy that Neilia left me was the ability to draw strength from what she was and not weakness from her no longer being.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

Sudden death, out of the blue, seems to say the universe has no meaning. Life has no meaning. And so you can look to the things that are available to him to try to insert meaning back in, and one is politics.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Since the accident he’s been living at a hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, taking care of his sons. Today the Senate sent an official to the hospital to swear him in.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Biden had requested that he take his senatorial oath in the hospital so that his children could be with him.

JOE BIDEN:

Can you make a speech, too? Sure, you can make a speech.

HUNTER BIDEN:

I want to make—

JOE BIDEN:

Well, go ahead and make one, then.

SENATE OFFICIAL:

Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help you God?

JOE BIDEN:

I do.

SENATE OFFICIAL:

Congratulations, Senator.

JOE BIDEN:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

MARC FISHER, The Washington Post:

After the crash he needed something to comfort him. He needed something to envelop himself in. He needed a place to be a part of that would sustain him and give him a sense of purpose and give him a sense of achievement. And the Senate gave Biden a sense of belonging. Biden’s instinct is to envelop himself in institutions.

NARRATOR:

The Senate would define Biden and shape his life.

EVAN OSNOS:

Here’s a guy who had grown up within the church, which is defined by this sense of ritual and ancient tradition. Things that are worth preserving because they provide order in a disordered world. And he gets to the Senate at a moment of tremendous chaos in his own life, having suffered this terrible loss, and all of a sudden the rituals of the Senate and the kind of clarifying effect of being a part of this institution almost feels to him like an extension of these values and patterns that had made so much sense to him and his family as a young person. So the Senate became a sort of stand-in for the church for him.

FRANKLIN FOER:

Joe Biden has this ritual where every day he’s getting on the train, taking it to Washington Union Station, and at night he’s going back home to be with his boys. It’s so poignant because there was so much guilt that was associated with his relationship with these two boys because he was constantly having to leave them, and even when he was returning late at night it was often after they were already asleep.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS, Sister:

There was such a bond with Joe and the boys. Joe made them better, and they made Joe better. But at nighttime when you close the door he was still alone, and a widower and a single dad.

TRACEY QUILLEN CARNEY, Senate aide, 1984-2002:

These three guys had been through hell together, and when Jill came, they hit the jackpot in terms of, they had Mommy, lost Mommy, they got Mom. And they hit the jackpot with Jill and they knew it.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

She was a gift. She made my brother whole. She was a gift to the entire family. He fell in love with her very quickly, and she fell in love with my brother. And mostly she fell in love with the boys. I saw my brother come alive again. I saw him smile. I saw him get up in the morning and the world’s the oyster. I mean, I’m taking on the world.

JILL BIDEN:

When I was dating Joe, Jimmy and Frankie took me out to dinner. They wanted to let me know that the family plan was that Joe would someday be president. And so they were letting me in on this and kind of warning me that if I was going to marry him, that this was part of the plan. And I listened, and it was kind of surreal, but I sort of brushed it off, because it just didn’t seem possible at that moment.

ROBERT COSTA, CBS News:

Biden has always wanted to be a player in presidential politics. He’s always been someone who’s thought about running, wanted to run. A longtime Biden confidant once told me that fish swim, birds fly and Joe Biden runs for president.

NARRATOR:

1987 would be his first shot at the presidency.

It was a family affair—the boys had grown up, and he and Jill had a daughter, Ashley.

PETER BAKER, The New York Times:

He wants to prove himself. If you spend your childhood mocked and ridiculed for a stutter, if you feel like your family has taken a downward turn because your father’s career and finances have collapsed, you want to prove yourself. So yeah, he’ll run for president in 1987 as a young man.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Biden is gambling that his politics of passion will impress the voters more than the issue politics practiced by most of his Democratic rivals.

MALE REPORTER:

Biden is running in the ideological center, often criticized for a lack of substance in his speeches.

PEGGY NOONAN, The Wall Street Journal:

That’s always been one of his challenges. He casts about for what he wants to say. He casts about for the issues he wants to put forward and what he wants to say he believes in. And it feels cast about.

MARC FISHER:

He’s searching for messages and rhetoric that connects. And so he finds speeches that are emotionally powerful, he hears them, and he incorporates them into his own sense of self.

NEIL KINNOCK, British politician:

Why am I, the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

"Promises to Keep" by Joe Biden

MALE VOICE [reading]:

The ad was riveting; I couldn’t take my eyes off Neil Kinnock.

NEIL KINNOCK:

Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football. Weak?

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The Irish Times:

He takes bits of speeches from British Labor leader Neil Kinnock, and he kind of uses them pretty much verbatim.

JOE BIDEN:

"Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?"

PEGGY NOONAN:

Joe Biden borrowed it and applied it to his own life and made a moving sort of aria, a moving sort of part of a speech about his own life, which in fact had been taken from Neil Kinnock.

JOE BIDEN:

Is it because they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania and come up after 12 hours and play football for 4 hours?

EVAN OSNOS, Author, Joe Biden:

Joe Biden as a political performer was inhabiting the role, only a little too well. He absorbed this story into his own, and of course it was not his own story.

JOE BIDEN:

I hope you’ll consider me. Thank you very much.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden today faces a controversy—

MALE NEWSREADER:

Biden seemed to be claiming Kinnock’s vision, and life, as his own.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Biden said that he often quoted Kinnock, with attribution.

JOE BIDEN:

What I should have said, I should have said, “To paraphrase Neil Kinnock.”

EVAN OSNOS:

It kicked off an entire study of how much of Joe Biden was real and how much of it was taken and absorbed and patched together.

MALE NEWSREADER:

For a second time in two weeks Sen. Joseph Biden—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He looks like a Joe Biden wind-up doll with somebody else’s words coming out.

JILL BIDEN:

When he was accused of plagiarism, we felt that his character was being attacked. And it sort of took us back.

MALE NEWSREADER:

One from John Kennedy’s inaugural, others from Robert Kennedy. Their words from the lips of Joe Biden.

JOE BIDEN:

We cannot measure the health of our children—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY:

—the health of our children—

JOE BIDEN:

—the quality of their education—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY:

—the quality of their education—

JOE BIDEN:

—the joy of their play—

ROBERT F. KENNEDY:

—or the joy of their play.

MATT VISER, The Washington Post:

This moment attacks Biden on the very issue that he’s most sensitive about, which is being accepted and feeling like he belongs and like he has achieved great things in his life and like that should be respected.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

Anything that kind of gets through the thick skin really hits a raw nerve for him.

NH PRIMARY VOTER:

Senator, I have one real quick question: What law school did you attend, and where did you place in that class, and the other question is—

MALE VOICE:

Who cares?

NH PRIMARY VOTER:

—could you quickly—

JOE BIDEN:

I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship—

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

He comes alive in some way when he’s pissed. He seems more like a real person. He’s suddenly this kind of little kid who feels he has to really stand up for himself against the bullies.

JOE BIDEN:

The only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class, and I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like, Frank.

EVAN OSNOS:

That’s the insecurity talking, and it’s always there, lurking just below the surface. He has this acute sensitivity to anybody looking down on him.

MALE REPORTER:

Syracuse University Law School records show he sought a partial, not full, scholarship, for financial, not academic, reasons. That he finished, not in the top half but 76th out of 85 students.

FRANKLIN FOER, Author, The Last Politician:

I look at his ambition and Joe Biden is just, he wants to grab you by the lapels to tell you, “Goddamnit, I am smart! Goddamnit, I am a great man in history!” And clearly there is this drive that’s born out of this scarring experience of his father taking this downward tumble, that because of his stammer he was bullied as a kid. That creates this desire to assert himself, to assert his dignity, to assert his place in the world.

JILL BIDEN:

I felt it was so unfair what happened to him. The one thing that Joe prided himself on was his honesty and his integrity, and now it was being attacked. And he had to pull out of the race.

JOE BIDEN:

Hello, everybody. Delightful to see you all here. You know my wife, Jill.

NARRATOR:

It was an agonizing decision: standing down—at least for the moment.

JILL BIDEN:

I can remember so clearly getting out of the race. I didn’t think, “Oh, we’ll do it again." I thought—I’m telling you, it was really scarring, I guess would be a good word.

JOE BIDEN:

The exaggerated shadow of those mistakes has begun to obscure the essence of my candidacy and the essence of Joe Biden.

MICHAEL LAROSA, Fmr. Press Secretary, Jill Biden:

Jill Biden just looked at the cameras, and you could just hear all the cameras clicking. And she just had this blank stare on her face. I think she developed sort of a long-term mistrust of the press as a result of that race. It definitely steeled her and made her a much more guarded political spouse going forward.

JOE BIDEN:

Thanks, folks. My wife and I thank you very much. And Tommy, thanks again.

MICHAEL LAROSA:

There are still scars from that campaign today that they carry with them.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden dropped out of the hunt—

MALE NEWSREADER:

Joe Biden blames mostly himself for blowing it—

MALE NEWSREADER:

The Delaware senator said he was a victim of his own mistakes.

FRANKLIN FOER:

Joe Biden was pretty chastened and embarrassed by the 1988 aborted run for the presidency. He doesn’t want to ever be accused of being an artificial, plastic politician again. He doesn’t want anybody to ever question his smartness ever again.

NARRATOR:

He would rebuild himself in the Senate, becoming a leading figure on the Foreign Relations Committee, deepening his bipartisan credentials and chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Senate hearings began on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Clarence Thomas. He’s conservative, an outspoken critic of affirmative action, former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

MALE REPORTER:

We see Judge Thomas now with the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

NARRATOR:

Just a few years after his failed run for president, Joe Biden was again in the spotlight, overseeing a high-profile Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

MALE NEWSREADER:

There’s Chairman Joseph Biden, and I think he’s just about ready to get the proceedings underway.

JOE BIDEN:

The hearing will come to order. Good morning, Judge. Welcome to the blinding lights.

MARC FISHER, The Washington Post:

For Biden, the Clarence Thomas hearings were a chance to shine. It was the national stage, national television, and he was the face of the Senate. And so, as an institutionalist, Biden sees this as a moment for him, and the Senate, to show how America can work best.

JOE BIDEN:

Heck you are six, seven years younger than—I’m 48. How old are you, Judge? 42, 43?

JUDGE CLARENCE THOMAS:

Well, I’ve aged over the last 10 weeks, but [laughter] 43.

JOE BIDEN:

Forty-three years old. Because of your youth, Judge—

NARRATOR:

But before long, Biden had a crisis on his hands. This affidavit contained allegations that Thomas sexually harassed a former employee, Anita Hill.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Good evening. We begin tonight with the potential for political explosion on Capitol Hill.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Clarence Thomas ran into trouble today—

MALE NEWSREADER:

Questions are growing over charges of sexual harassment against Thomas.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The FBI did indeed interview Anita Hill, a former subordinate of Thomas’—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Trouble today for Clarence Thomas. Enough trouble that some senators are calling for a postponement of this week’s confirmation vote.

MALE NEWSREADER:

But committee chairman Biden conceded tonight that new information—

NARRATOR:

With the pressure mounting, Biden decided to allow Anita Hill to air her allegations.

JOE BIDEN:

The hearing will come to order. Welcome, Professor Hill.

Professor, do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

ANITA HILL:

I do.

JOE BIDEN:

Thank you.

EUGENE ROBINSON:

It struck me as, something’s wrong with this picture. This is—you see the panel of white men, and you wonder if Anita Hill is getting a fair shake.

JANE MAYER, Co-author, Strange Justice:

It seems to have been a nightmare for Joe Biden. As a man he felt uncomfortable about it, as a white man he felt uncomfortable about it. The whole subject matter just made him incredibly uncomfortable.

JOE BIDEN:

Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged?

ANITA HILL:

I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography involving women with large breasts and engaged in variety of sex with different people or animals. That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated.

ANGELA WRIGHT, Clarence Thomas accuser:

Biden had no idea what to do with this particular situation. He could have done something to provide her with some support, some comfort, but that didn’t happen.

NARRATOR:

Angela Wright also worked with Clarence Thomas.

ANGELA WRIGHT:

There were actually three other women other than myself who were willing to testify, who had actually said they called Sen. Biden’s office and offered their own testimony.

NARRATOR:

Wright offered her own stark allegations, which Thomas denied.

ANGELA WRIGHT:

He asked me in one situation what size my breasts were. He told me he wanted to date me. This is a man who, in my opinion, has often spoken inappropriately to women.

JOE BIDEN:

Let me now yield to my friend from Pennsylvania, Sen. Specter.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (R-PA):

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

ANGELA WRIGHT:

Sen. Biden allowed members of that committee to grill Professor Hill in a way that was inappropriate and humiliating.

ARLEN SPECTER:

I find the references to the alleged sexual harassment not only unbelievable, but preposterous. How reliable is your testimony in October of 1991 on events that occurred 8, 10 years ago?

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, The Washington Post:

There was a question of whether or not Joe Biden could have done more to protect Anita Hill, to defend her, to speak up for her.

ARLEN SPECTER:

—and in the context of a sexual harassment charge—

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

Joe Biden didn't use his platform as a leader of that committee to stand up for Anita Hill, to say that he believed her.

FRANKLIN FOER, Author, The Last Politician:

Joe Biden is a member of this fraternity, a member of this old boys' society that is the U.S. Senate. He is somebody who looks at his fellow senators, who looks at the likes of Arlen Specter—of course he’s going to be deferential to them. He’s not going to want to have an adversarial relationship with them.

ARLEN SPECTER:

You testified that the most embarrassing question involved—this is not too bad—women’s large breasts. That’s a word we use all the time. That was the most embarrassing aspect of what Judge Thomas—

EVAN OSNOS, Author, Joe Biden:

That moment was the limitations of his capacity for empathy. Joe Biden drew the perimeter of his world, of his life, as members of the United States Senate, but that perimeter did not extend at that point to the women who were accusing Clarence Thomas of doing terrible things.

JOE BIDEN:

It is the intention of the chair to have Judge Thomas back. In fairness to him he should have an opportunity tonight—

NARRATOR:

Biden gave Clarence Thomas the last word—a chance he’d use to deny the allegations.

CLARENCE THOMAS:

This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a Black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

The term “high-tech lynching” really put a number of the Democratic senators on their heels. They saw the racial overtones of that statement. They saw how Clarence Thomas was going on offense. A lot of the senators just did not want to have to deal with this.

NARRATOR:

With that, Biden moved to wrap up the hearings. Angela Wright and the other women accusing Thomas would not testify.

EVAN OSNOS:

Joe Biden was so determined to try to satisfy everybody in that moment that he ended up satisfying nobody.

ANGELA WRIGHT:

He’s kind of in the middle of the road. I’m a Southern woman, and I’ve always heard that the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill and yellow stripes. And that you have to take a position and you have to decide what you stand for.

NARRATOR:

Biden ended up voting against Thomas, but the Anita Hill hearing would be a stain on his reputation.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

You have a 98% male U.S. Senate which many say almost slipped Anita Hill’s allegations under the rug.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Sen. Biden allowed them to ask her very difficult questions indeed.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The Senate’s botched handling of the Thomas nomination is just one more black mark—

TIM RUSSERT, Meet the Press:

January of ‘07. Are you running for president?

JOE BIDEN:

Yes. I am running for president.

TIM RUSSERT:

Are you filing for—

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The Irish Times:

Biden running again just seems like some sort of crazily persistent delusion. You’ve tried this before. It hadn’t worked. Why the hell are you still going? It’s not going to work this time. Is anybody in 2005–2006 thinking, "What the country really needs is Joe Biden," apart from Joe Biden?

JOE BIDEN:

I’m going to be Joe Biden, and I’m going to try to be the best Biden I can be. If I can, I’ve got a shot. If I can’t, I lose.

NARRATOR:

But his campaign quickly started to unravel on national television.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

It sure isn’t easy running for president these days. This was not a good day for Joe Biden, was it?

FEMALE REPORTER:

No, it really wasn’t.

MALE NEWSREADER:

He just got into the race today, and no sooner than he did, he talked his way into a national controversy.

MALE REPORTER:

He spent much of the day discussing these comments he made to a newspaper reporter about Sen. Barack Obama.

JOE BIDEN:

I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Some people listening to those descriptions of Obama—“articulate, clean”—heard racial overtones, or at the very least, condescension.

JELANI COBB, Author, The Substance of Hope:

I think when people heard the "clean and articulate" line there was a wave of eye-rolling, certainly among African Americans. It was the kind of well-intentioned but benighted commentary that you expect from people who inhabit environments where there aren’t very many Black people, and the United States Senate has historically been a prime example of that.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Tonight, his campaign is doing damage control.

FRANKLIN FOER:

There goes Joe Biden, running his mouth one more time. How humiliating to be hoist on this dumb aside that he makes about Barack Obama.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Joe Biden’s apologizing for a remark he made about Sen. Barack Obama—

FRANKLIN FOER:

And of course that’s going to be the thing that does him in. It’s totally, completely humiliating.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The latest news is that Joe Biden is dropping out of the race, Joe Biden is dropping out—

PETER BAKER, The New York Times:

Nobody is paying attention to Joe Biden. It is humiliating. From the brash, young upstart candidate of 1987, now he’s the picture of the establishment that nobody wants anymore.

EVAN OSNOS:

It really did seem like that might be the end. He had run for president twice, it hadn’t worked. And then the most unlikely thing happened, which is Barack Obama, the person who he had offended early on in this race, decided actually, he needed Joe Biden in his candidacy.

VALERIE JARRETT, Obama senior adviser:

President Obama believes that diversity is a strength and that the country was absorbing a lot picking their first Black president. And so having someone who had years of experience in the Senate, someone who had vast experience in foreign affairs, I think he thought they made a good team.

FRANKLIN FOER:

He accepts the vice presidency because Barack Obama genuinely seems to need Joe Biden, and there’s a way in which it flatters Joe Biden’s ego to feel like he’s needed. And Joe Biden always wants to feel essential, indispensable.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Barack Obama is projected to be the next President.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois—

NARRATOR:

Two decades after he’d first run, Joe Biden was closer to the presidency than ever.

EVAN OSNOS:

Biden’s life has been full of these almost miraculous turns. Biden gets to be part of an operation that was not just making history, but it was cool. This was a group led by Obama and Michele Obama who felt like they were laying the path to a new form of politics, a more inclusive, path-breaking politics, and Biden got to be a part of that. In many ways Obama provided a form of redemption for Joe Biden.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

There was a lot of skepticism about Joe Biden among Black voters. They were remembering the Anita Hill hearings. He had this image as a good old boy, someone from an earlier era, someone who grew up during segregation. The fact that the first Black president had appointed him to be his vice president really did a lot for Joe Biden, for his standing in the Black community.

NARRATOR:

His political career may have rebounded, but being vice president wasn’t the job he’d been chasing all those years.

MARC FISHER:

I mean, it is a second-class job by definition. It doesn’t hold a lot of authority, and you’re there just in case. To be in the White House as second fiddle was frustrating.

CHUCK HAGEL, Obama Secretary of Defense

He had been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, chairman of Foreign Relations Committee, senior in about everything he’s done. That’s very big, that’s powerful, and to give that up for a number two spot that you really can’t do anything significant without getting the president, your boss’ OK and approval, sure, there had to be an adjustment there.

PEGGY NOONAN, The Wall Street Journal:

I look at Biden sometimes and sometimes I think I see when the camera, he believes, has turned away from him and is no longer still on him, you get a sense of the sadness. His face folds into some considerable anguish.

NARRATOR:

To make matters worse the president made jokes at Biden’s expense.

White House Correspondents’ Dinner

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

All this change hasn’t been easy, so I’ve cut the tension by bringing a new friend to the White House. He’s warm, he’s cuddly, loyal, enthusiastic. You just have to keep him on a tight leash. Every once in a while he goes charging off in the wrong direction and gets himself in trouble. But enough about Joe Biden. [laughter]

FRANKLIN FOER, Author, The Last Politician:

There was this tendency that Barack Obama had to make Joe Biden the punchline of his jokes. Which then gave permission to everybody else in the room to roll their eyes at Joe Biden. And so it was this death spiral for Joe Biden where he just kept tumbling down the status order.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE, The Associated Press:

Biden was already mid-60s, close to 70, when he was vice president. There were some young staffers who would look at him as the old kind of crazy Uncle Joe.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS, GQ magazine:

And it pains him because it goes back to who he was as a child when he was made fun of. It was frustrating to him to be thought of as just Uncle Joe.

PETER BAKER:

And he brings the issue to Obama. He sits down with him at lunch and he says, “Listen, you can’t be talking about me that way because it will diminish me and I will be less valuable to you.” And Obama took that to heart.

CHUCK HAGEL:

Joe stayed focused on who he was, what he was doing and the relationship he had with the president. That’s probably what got him through all that.

MARK LEIBOVICH, The New York Times Magazine:

The relationship grew. I think it grew over time, it grew through adversity. Joe Biden had a very consequential vice presidency. He was given special projects that were extremely important in the moment.

EVAN OSNOS, Author, Joe Biden:

Biden did the parts of the White House job that Obama didn’t really want to have to do. Obama never wanted to set foot in Congress again if he could avoid it. Biden, on the other hand, loved it. YHe kept his gym membership at the Senate gym because he liked to go back there and schmooze with people.

VALERIE JARRETT:

In the Senate, Vice President Biden, to this day, enjoys relationships on both sides of the aisle. He knew that he could call them and they would take his call and that he could go and thrash issues out with them.

MATT BAI, The Washington Post:

The real question isn't what thing did you do if you’re vice president. The real question is, how much influence on the president and the national policy coming out of the executive branch did the vice president have? And I think Biden had as much influence as any modern vice president maybe with the exception of Dick Cheney. I think he was a very influential vice president, and an extremely loyal vice president.

1990 political ad

JOE BIDEN: (TV AD)

There’s been an uncommon bond between my boys and I that is different than anything that I’ve ever experienced in my life. I truly enjoy—

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS:

Beau Biden is the apple of Biden’s eye. He was not just someone who he thought was brilliant and successful and so proud of him. It went beyond pride. It was almost like, “He’s the perfect version of me.”

JOE BIDEN: (TV AD)

The distinguishing feature about Beau is how steady he is. He’s carried in one sense a heavier burden than my other children, but my God, he’s not only carried it, he’s shouldered it.

EVAN OSNOS:

Beau Biden was the literal extension of Joe Biden’s aspirations in politics. The assumption within the family was this idea of becoming the Kennedys 2.0, and Beau Biden is the future. He is the one who is going to carry the torch.

1987 presidential campaign

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He’s already finding the campaign trail eating up all of his family time, so his family travels with him. That’s his son Beau who was along tonight.

JOE BIDEN:

This is my son Beau Biden.

BEAU BIDEN:

Hi, how are you? Nice meeting you.

JOE BIDEN:

Big Mike, meet my big guy. This is Beau.

BEAU BIDEN:

Hi.

EVAN OSNOS:

Joe Biden really used to say about Beau that, “Beau Biden had all of my good qualities and none of my bad qualities.”

JOE BIDEN:

Well, hi, Bishop, nice to meet you.

MALE SPEAKER:

Good to see you.

JOE BIDEN:

It's my honor. Meet my son Beau Biden.

ROBERT COSTA, CBS News:

Beau Biden was someone he wanted to see become president of the United States. He was ready to do everything possible to help Beau rise in American life.

ROB BUCCINI, Beau's best friend:

Beau had a very informative childhood. Being around his father since he was in grade school, you're around people that are interesting. You are very up to speed at a young age, what’s happening in the world, what’s happening domestically, what’s happening internationally.

Moscow nuclear negotiations

ROB BUCCINI:

If you thought that Joe Biden could be President Biden, no question Beau Biden could have been President Biden. No question. They had the same skill sets.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS, Aunt:

Beau was his father’s child in that he was a public servant. He was the attorney general, and went to serve in Iraq.

2009, Baghdad, Iraq

JOE BIDEN:

You guys know this guy? This is my son, my number one son.

VALERIE BIDEN OWENS:

And was on his way running for governor.

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The Irish Times:

There’s no question but that he sees Beau as his successor. Undoubtedly the death of Beau’s mother, Biden’s first wife, makes that even more necessary. Beau surviving that car crash, being the kid who emerges literally from the wreckage, feels like there’s a kind of destiny, that that terrible, terrible moment will be somehow balanced out in the future by the swearing in of President Beau.

2012 Democratic National Convention

BEAU BIDEN:

My dad is Joe Biden. A few years ago—

NARRATOR:

But Beau’s destiny would be denied.

BEAU BIDEN:

He’s the father I’ve always known—

NARRATOR:

He was sick, and his father knew it.

BEAU BIDEN:

It is my great honor to place into nomination my father, my hero, Joe Biden! Joe Biden as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate!

NARRATOR:

Beau Biden was dying of brain cancer.

PRIEST AT BEAU'S FUNERAL:

—what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. May the peace of God the creator, redeemer and sustainer, surround each of you as we begin this time of thankfulness for Beau’s life. Asking God to grant peace for the today and hope for tomorrow. Amen.

FATHER LEO O’DONOVAN, Family priest:

I saw most clearly how he felt about Beau’s death at the wake. There was supposed to a wake from 2:00 to 4:00 and 6:00 to 8:00, and I went of course at about 2 o’clock. And the vice-president was there. He stood like granite for six hours at the coffin. And the sense you had was—ah [cries] “This was my boy.” And I think probably, if there is a heaven, God wept in heaven with him.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS:

I happened to be in Obama’s White House and Biden walked in, and I—honestly, it was almost like I didn’t recognize him; this was shortly after Beau died. He just looked like he had aged years and years in such a short amount of time.

FRANKLIN FOER, Author, The Last Politician:

People detected, incredibly noticeably, these dramatic changes within Joe Biden. They noticed physical changes in Joe Biden, that this guy who had been really vigorous was starting to age rapidly in front of them. He was no longer the gregarious guy trying to monopolize the air time. He would recede in meetings.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

It’s just impossible to imagine how you deal with this terrible, terrible moment of grief. Again, it faces Biden with this choice. This is what we keep coming up with Biden, that he’s faced with choices nobody would want to make. And so, again, he either does the thing that I think most of us would do at that stage, which is just say, “I’m done.” Or you somehow find some way of saying, “Well, I still have to make sense of this. I still have to inject some kind of meaning into all of this cruel tragedy that life has inflicted on me." And the only meaning for a 50-year politician is the presidency. Which has always been in his mind, but now it becomes almost not just a kind of political career, it becomes a personal salvation.

NARRATOR:

As he had before in moments of tragedy, he returned to the Biden motto, “get up,” and his abiding political ambition, but it hinged on the support of President Obama.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE, The Associated Press:

They were together for eight years, for two terms. President Obama gave the eulogy at Beau Biden’s funeral. Here you are, working for someone for almost eight years. You have this person’s back for eight years, and now you’re looking to them to support you, and you find out they’re supporting someone else.

BARACK OBAMA [chanting]:

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

NARRATOR:

Obama would instead support Hillary Clinton.

HILLARY CLINTON:

Thank you so much!

CROWD [chanting]:

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

What Obama’s saying is, “Well, in your condition, with all the stuff you’ve suffered, you really shouldn’t be putting yourself through a presidential campaign.” Obama was sort of using Beau’s death as a way to excuse his own betrayal of Biden. That’s a pretty harsh, cruel thing to do.

NARRATOR:

Biden would be forced to do it again: to stand down.

JOE BIDEN:

Good morning, folks. Please, please sit down. Mr. President, thank you for lending me the Rose Garden for a minute.

BARACK OBAMA:

It's a pretty nice place. [laughter]

JOE BIDEN:

Unfortunately, I believe we are out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination. But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

He had been in the Senate for 36 years. He had been vice president for eight. And knowing that he had run twice already for the presidency and didn’t make it, there was this very strong feeling in Washington that he was putting a period on the end of his political career.

FINTAN O’TOOLE:

He really does seem, at that moment, like a tragic figure, in an almost Greek sense. Someone who the gods have chosen to pile these miseries on. Everything kind of moves together to just blow up somebody’s life and somebody’s sense of themselves. And that’s what seems to be happening to Biden at that time. Both his public and to some extent his private lives are over.

JOE BIDEN:

But I’m telling you, we can do so much more. I’m looking forward to continue to work with this man to get it done. Thank you. Thank you all very much.

NARRATOR:

Joe Biden watched as the Trump presidency roiled America.

WESLEY LOWERY, Author, They Can’t Kill Us All:

Joe Biden, like any number of people in the Democratic Party, sees the true crisis of American democracy in the Trump presidency.

CHARLOTTESVILLE NEO-NAZI PROTESTERS:

Jews will not replace us!

MALE NEWSREADER:

Mayhem in Charlottesville.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides—

Russian collusion. Give me a break—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

President Trump now facing outrage after firing Comey—

DONALD TRUMP:

I did you a great favor when I fired this guy.

ANTONY BLINKEN, Campaign adviser, 2020:

I think there were regrets about not running in '16, I think he believed he could have and would have beaten President Trump. Whatever regrets there were, whatever sense of “Oh, I should have done it, maybe things would be different,” I really think the driving force was the profoundly dangerous direction the country was headed in.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Chaos, confusion and anger growing in the wake of President Trump’s immigration ban—

MALE NEWSREADER:

President Trump turning up the political heat with tweets critics are calling “racist and xenophobic.”

EVAN OSNOS:

Biden looked at Trump and saw the antithesis of so much that Biden had tried to be in politics.

MALE NEWSREADER:

What he's trying to do is make America hate again.

MALE NEWSREADER:

At one point today, the president asking, “What good is NATO?”

EVAN OSNOS:

Biden was somebody who had tried to be reverential of the institutions, the idea of compromise. These were things that he considered hallowed ground. And here’s this guy coming along who is desecrating a lot of the values that Biden thought were dignifying values of politics.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

For only the third time in American history, the House of Representatives has voted to impeach a president.

NARRATOR:

Now, Biden would try yet again for the presidency.

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS, GQ magazine:

The ironies can’t be lost on anyone. Here he is now, he’s going to run against a guy who people call the biggest bully there is. Joe Biden, the guy who can’t stand bullies, who spent his life defending others from bullies. It’s almost like a Greek play. Now here you are at the end of your life, and the one last move is to defeat the bully.

JOE BIDEN:

Hello, Philadelphia!

NARRATOR:

He was 76 years old.

JOE BIDEN:

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

MATT VISER, The Washington Post:

In Philadelphia, Joe Biden had his kickoff rally of his campaign. And you’ll see at the end, all of the grandchildren are there, and they come on stage. Ashley comes on stage. Jill comes on stage. But Hunter does not—he’s off on a drug bender at the moment.

Hunter Biden is in perhaps the deepest despair of his life. He’s disappearing for long stretches, and his father doesn’t know where he is.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE, The Associated Press:

As with any family with a family member who is going through some sort of substance abuse, it’s super hard to watch your child descend into these kinds of behaviors. And it’s no different when you’re a politician, like Joe Biden was, versus a regular, average American.

Joe Biden voicemail to Hunter

October 2018

JOE BIDEN (audio recording):

It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. Love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t either, but I’m here no matter what you need. No matter what you need. I love you.

MATT VISER:

Joe Biden wants to be as emotionally supportive as he can with Hunter. From Joe Biden’s perspective, this is his only surviving son. There’s a lot of raw emotions, I think, between the two of them.

NARRATOR:

Biden’s decision to run put Hunter in the spotlight.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, The Washington Post:

At the end of the day the family realized that the fight that they had was a bigger fight. They thought that he was uniquely positioned to defeat Donald trump. His children and his grandchildren gathered together and said, "We know we’re going to take some bullets. We know that we’re going to be negatively impacted by a nasty campaign. But we’re ready for it, and you should jump in this race."

DONALD TRUMP:

By the way, what ever happened to Hunter? Where the hell is he? Where’s Hunter? Hey, fellas, I have an idea for a new T-shirt. I love the cops, but let’s do another T-shirt—"Where’s Hunter?" [applause] Where is he?

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

Generally in politics there’s an unwritten rule that family members are typically off limits, because children don’t ask for this.

TRUMP CROWD [chanting]:

Where is Hunter? Where is Hunter?

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

President Trump saw Hunter Biden and the troubles that he was in as a way to get under Joe Biden’s skin, to rattle him, to try to throw him off his game. To hurt him, to inflict pain, basically.

JOE BIDEN:

—and I resent—

DONALD TRUMP:

Are you talking about Hunter? Are you talking about Hunter?

JOE BIDEN:

I’m talking about my son Beau Biden—

DONALD TRUMP:

I don’t know Beau, I know Hunter. Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged—

JOE BIDEN:

That’s not true, he wasn’t dishonorably—

DONALD TRUMP:

—for cocaine use, and he didn’t have a job until you became vice president—

JOE BIDEN:

None of that is true.

DONALD TRUMP:

—and once you became vice president, he made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow and various other places. He made a fortune.

JOE BIDEN:

That is simply not true. My son, like a lot of people we know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He's fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him.

FRANKLIN FOER:

The thing that I think is probably most painful for Joe Biden is the knowledge that his son would not be subjected to all of this public scrutiny were it not for his own political career and his own political ambition. And if you’re Joe Biden, you definitely feel some sort of responsibility, and guilt, and culpability for what your son’s being subjected to.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The deadly coronavirus, officially hitting the U.S.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

At least 12 confirmed cases right here in the United States.

NARRATOR:

In the midst of the campaign: COVID.

MALE NEWSREADER:

A tragic turn in the coronavirus outbreak: the first death from the disease here in the United States.

EVAN OSNOS, Author, Joe Biden:

You had a nation that was reeling from COVID, in which people were quite literally grieving for members of their family.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Empty streets lead to packed emergency rooms across New York City.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Paralysis in this typically vibrant city in just a matter of weeks.

EVAN OSNOS:

And grieving for the direction of the country under Trump.

MALE REPORTER:

What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?

DONALD TRUMP:

I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. Go ahead. I think that’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.

EVAN OSNOS:

It was this moment that Biden found that all of this language and philosophical preparation that he’d spent all these years investing in about how to survive and how to grieve, all of a sudden it became politically relevant. Politics was as much about grief and recovery as it was about any policy idea.

JULIE CHÁVEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Deputy campaign manager, 2020:

He’s someone who can empathize. He’s someone who understands the impact that tragedy and trauma can have on an individual or on a family. As we were going through a period in our country where, collectively, so many people were experiencing loss.

JOE BIDEN:

What is on the ballot here is the character of this country. Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity. And I’m going to make sure you get that. You haven’t been getting it the last four years.

JEN O’MALLEY DILLON, Campaign manager, 2020:

Joe Biden was so laser focused on what we had to do for the American people and how we had to communicate with them during that time of crisis. He chose to be the stable leader and voice of the American people.

EVAN OSNOS:

Biden’s promise to the public was, "I’m going to return things to something more recognizable than politics." It might be a little boring at times; in fact, he almost explicitly promised to take up less space in people’s minds. He kind of said, “I don’t really think that politics needs to be this all-encompassing inferno that kind of consumes us all.”

NARRATOR:

And finally, after a lifetime of striving, it worked.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

The Fox News Decision Desk can now project that former Vice President Joe Biden will win Pennsylvania and Nevada.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

He is President-elect Joseph Robinette Biden—

MALE NEWSREADER:

—become the 46th president of the United States.

JOE BIDEN:

I, Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, do solemnly swear—

FINTAN O’TOOLE, The Irish Times:

There is this very deep sense that "This is why I’m here. This is what all this horrible pain is about. This is what all this difficulty is about. This is what all the slights I’ve had to endure, all the ways in which I’ve been underestimated and mistreated through life. And all of these absurdities that have been piled on me, through death and illness. And OK, this is it. I’m here now. And there’s something that matters, not just to me, but to America and the world."

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Our nation’s Capitol under a state of emergency, under a citywide lockdown.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The chaos here has shaken the U.S. Capitol and the country.

PETER BAKER, The New York Times:

Because of Jan. 6, there’s barbed wire and military vehicles in the streets and soldiers surrounding the Capitol. It looks like an encampment.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Tens of thousands of police, federal agents and National Guard troops on the streets.

PETER BAKER:

For Biden it’s not the moment of personal triumph that he, I think, might have imagined, because the country is in such dire straits at this point. He is inheriting one of the most uncertain periods in our modern history. You have a raging epidemic that has yet to be conquered. You have an economy that has just collapsed overnight. You have schools that are closed and businesses that are closed. It felt like the whole thing was just really on edge.

MICHAEL LAROSA, Fmr. Press Secretary, Jill Biden

There were no crowds on the streets, cheering, like you’d seen in so many images and videos of previous inaugurations. It was just an eerie feeling.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

After Joe Biden is finally sworn in as president, he’s finally gotten this thing that he’s wanted his whole life, he couldn’t really celebrate. There were no parties. There were no inaugural balls because of COVID. It was super weird.

RON KLAIN, Chief of Staff, 2021-23:

He came down from the residence on the West Colonnade towards the Oval Office, and I remember looking at him and saying this is just—this is an incredible thing to see after all this time, that he is coming into the Oval Office as president of the United States. So I felt a lot of excitement and a lot of anxiety about the fact that we were going to now start to do a lot of work.

JEN PSAKI, WH Press Secretary, 2021-22:

We knew we were walking into a pandemic, an economy that was reeling, so there was a crisis management aspect, certainly, of the first year. He felt that when you come in as president, especially at the moment he did, he needed to be a healer.

EVAN OSNOS:

Part of Biden’s promise to the public was, “I’m going to show you that government can actually work again. That’s what my decades of experience will deliver." We can show that Washington will work, and we can put practical things in people’s hands, like stimulus checks.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The first batch of stimulus payments will start going out to Americans in need this weekend—

MALE NEWSREADER:

—the president declaring, “Help is here.”

ROBERT COSTA:

He gets trillions of dollars in new spending passed by Congress.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

These are the priorities the Biden administration have said they want to get done.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—$1.9 trillion COVID stimulus relief package to help Americans struggling throughout this pandemic.

ROBERT COSTA, CBS News:

He’s able to push people to get something done on the American Rescue Plan, then on infrastructure.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The president is poised to sign into law the largest federal investment in infrastructure in generations.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

It will have transformative impacts on the middle class. It will be huge for Biden’s legacy.

ROBERT COSTA:

Works for months to try to get Build Back Better revived.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Democrats will continue to fight for Build Back Better.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—the ultimate test of the president’s legislative power as the bill is in the hands of the Senate.

ROBERT COSTA:

He’s trying to get so much done. And he does get a lot done. So on the domestic front, Biden has an FDR-like first year.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This is the most successful legislative presidency.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—can surely be credited to the fact that Joe Biden had more legislative experience than any president in history.

NARRATOR:

But during that first year, one decision would tarnish his presidency.

JOE BIDEN:

I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.

CHRIS WHIPPLE, Author, The Fight of His Life:

Biden was hellbent on withdrawing. He did not come into this with an open mind, necessarily, to any other options. He was hellbent on getting out.

FEMALE REPORTER:

In this withdrawal from Afghanistan, do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling—

JOE BIDEN:

None whatsoever. Zero. The Taliban is not the Sou—the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Black smoke seen rising from the U.S. Embassy, the chaos directly contradicting any talk of an orderly evacuation process.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Twenty years of American and NATO-led gains collapsing in stunning fashion.

VICTORIA NULAND, Undersecretary of State 2021-24:

As the Taliban are approaching Kabul, it becomes clear that the Afghan forces that we have trained are vacating their posts and are not going to stand and fight.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—outside the last remaining U.S. base. At Kabul Airport, chaos continues.

MATT VISER, The Washington Post:

The images that come out of that withdrawal is one of hastiness. It really becomes a moment for Biden that undermines a lot of the things that he ran on, which was calm, steady and competent.

JOE BIDEN:

The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. I stand squarely behind my decision.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

The president was very confident that his decision was the right one. He took no blame for any of that, the aftermath that we saw.

MALE NEWSREADER:

At Kabul International Airport, time is running out.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

U.S. troops are scrambling to fly Americans and allies out of the country.

MALE REPORTER:

An explosion, a large explosion outside of the Abbey Gate at the Kabul Airport.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Chaos and carnage as back-to-back bomb blasts tore through packed crowds at the airport.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

It is the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Thirteen U.S. service members killed in this attack.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

And this will have to be a big moment for his presidency. This day. Remember this day.

EVAN OSNOS:

The very rationale that had driven him to pull out—the risks to Americans—all of a sudden that had, in the worst possible way, had come to pass.

CHRIS WHIPPLE:

Joe Biden went to Dover Air Base for the dignified transfer of the bodies, and he met with the families. And as we all know, nobody’s better than Joe Biden at consoling the bereaved. He always talks about Beau. And in this case, he was confronted by several family members who were livid, inconsolable, shouting at him.

PETER BAKER:

They’re like, “This isn’t about your son, this is about my son. This is about our kids. This is about what happened to them.” For him, this moment where his empathy is usually a strength, it doesn’t really work in the way it had for him in the past.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

Mark, you met with Biden over the weekend. How did that go?

MARK SCHMITZ, Father of U.S. Soldier Jared Schmitz:

Uh, it didn’t go well. He talked a bit more about his own son than we did my son, and that didn’t sit well with me.

We had family members at Dover when we were there to receive our children’s bodies. That was the worst day of all of our lives, and to sit there and have him talk to us about Beau was the biggest insult.

JEN PSAKI:

His response was, “I thought I was helping them.” That’s really where it genuinely came from. And for someone who’s lost as much as he has, to have the reaction that it wasn’t helping them, I think, is especially heart-wrenching.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

And as those families and friends grieved, the president of the United States stood there checking his watch. It was a scene that those families will never be able to forget, and they haven’t.

MARK SCHMITZ [Congressional testimony]:

I stood there on the tarmac watching you check your watch over and over again. All I wanted to do was shout out, “It’s two f------ thirty, ass----!” Mr. Biden has run his entire political campaign for 50 years as the family man. Well, I’ve got news for you, sir—the curtain has been lifting, and that campaign slogan will never work again.

FRANKLIN FOER:

It was the one moment in the course of the entire withdrawal from Afghanistan where he was second-guessing himself. He second-guessed himself about his interactions with these grieving parents. And I think it haunted him.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

There’s a brand new poll out. Joe Biden is so far under water right now. A majority of Americans disapprove of his job performance.

JONATHAN KARL, ABC News:

He is supposed to be the firm leader who’s going to take away the chaos. What was more chaotic than that American withdrawal out of Afghanistan? It changed public perception of Biden in a way that he was never able to recover from.

NARRATOR:

Afghanistan was just the beginning. For Joe Biden, it would be crisis after crisis.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Nearly 60% of voters think Biden’s policies are making the economy worse.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Housing, shelter, food, medical costs, all rising.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The big question now: when will prices start dropping?

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—and that has some Americans losing patience with the Biden administration.

RON KLAIN, Chief of Staff, 2021-23:

It felt like there was something new every day. It’s part of working at the White House at all times, but it seemed particularly acute then, and we just had to keep working on it.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Inflation in the United States has jumped 7%. That number is sky-high.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

We haven’t seen inflation run that hot in this country since 1982.

PETER BAKER, The New York Times:

Suddenly, the candidate who promised normalcy and calm becomes a president of a period of volatility and uncertainty.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Millions of Americans are simply being priced out of homeownership.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

With the interest rates going up, they are stuck.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Now to a key campaign issue—the border crisis.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

This is not another headache the White House wants to deal with.

PETER BAKER:

If you add Afghanistan to what’s happened at the border and inflation, it feels like things are kind of out of our control. Then you have Russia invading Ukraine, and then the Gaza War.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The Russian assault has begun.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine is now carving a path of destruction.

FRANKLIN FOER:

The world, for reasons that have nothing to do with Joe Biden, is on fire.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The Middle East in flames. Israel has formally declared war—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel’s borders overnight.

FRANKLIN FOER:

If so much of his presidency has been about dousing those fires. And all of that firefighting may be extremely heroic, but you’re not going to get credit for firefighting, at the end.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Meanwhile he’s facing the lowest poll numbers of his presidency—

FRANKLIN FOER:

People will just remember the fact that the world felt out of control in that moment.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Americans have lost their confidence in President Biden and their optimism for the country.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

The way he saw it, he’s doing things and trying to help people and legitimately helping people. The president had signed several pieces of legislation, but the goodwill that he wants them to feel toward him is just not there.

MALE NEWSREADER:

A shocking 71% say we’re on the wrong track, and that includes a near majority of Democrats who are saying that.

DARLENE SUPERVILLE:

The administration kept saying that when voters start to pay attention, the polls will turn around. Things will look better. But they’ve been saying that for a while, and it’s just not showing up in the polling.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

A new poll found more Americans trust former President Donald Trump than Biden to fix the economy—

MALE NEWSREADER:

He probably is the most impactful president of my lifetime in passing legislation, he’s just got to get out and sell it.

JOE BIDEN:

On my watch, instead of having “Infrastructure Week,” America’s having “Infrastructure Decade.”

MARC FISHER, The Washington Post:

Biden does go out and try to win people over, but he does it with less and less capacity to make a persuasive speech.

JOE BIDEN:

Over a billion, 300 million, trillion, $300 million.

America’s a nation that can be defined in a single word—was I—excuse me—

MARC FISHER:

His voice gets softer. His voice gets more raspy and remote.

JOE BIDEN:

—making sure that the third world, the, uh—excuse me, the third world, the, uh, the southern hemisphere—

MARC FISHER:

His physical presence seems to diminish with every passing month, and so his ability to go out and sell his message really seems to decline over the course of his years in office.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

A top concern: his age. More Americans than not say Biden is too old for a second term.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR:

Every member of the Biden Cabinet should be asked when are they going to start thinking about the 25th Amendment.

JEN PSAKI:

He has what I would call a very healthy chip on his shoulder in the sense that he always feels underestimated—not always, but often. You’re commander in chief, you’re probably the most powerful person in the world, people are still underestimating you. He has one of the most accomplished legislative records of anyone who has ever served in the job. Still underestimated.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Two-thirds of Americans in exit polls say that they don’t think you should run for reelection. What is your message to them, and how does that factor into your final decision about whether or not to run for reelection?

JOE BIDEN:

It doesn’t.

FEMALE REPORTER:

What’s your message to them, to those two-thirds of—

JOE BIDEN:

Watch me.

EUGENE ROBINSON:

He has decided that he can beat Trump. He has the experience of having done it once, and he’s convinced he’s going to do it again.

MALE CNN DEBATE ANNOUNCER:

This is the CNN Presidential Debate.

NARRATOR:

Having decided to run again at age 81, Joe Biden would now have to prove he was up to the challenge.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

The stakes were very high, because he was losing, and he needed to turn the race around. And it was supposed to be his opportunity to showcase his forcefulness and his ability to take the fight to Donald Trump.

MALE CNN DEBATE MODERATOR:

Now please welcome the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden.

MICHAEL LAROSA:

As soon as he walked out, I thought, "This won’t be good." He looked very pale. He wasn’t smiling the way I thought he would.

JOE BIDEN:

Making sure that we’re able to make every single, solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with the COVID—excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with—look, if—we finally beat Medicare.

MALE NEWSREADER:

President Joe Biden’s poor performance, halting and stumbling at times—

MALE NEWSREADER:

Biden’s debate performance was so bad that he managed to make Donald Trump actually look good.

MICHAEL LAROSA:

Americans saw something that concerned them, that shocked them. But they also saw something that confirmed suspicions that they already had. He’s an older candidate, no one’s going to deny that.

MALE NEWSREADER:

It was an unmitigated disaster for President Biden, from the second he walked out.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Based on that, in 18 weeks, Donald Trump will be the president-elect.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

People thought that his mental decline was very much more advanced than people had been able to see because of the way that he had been kept behind closed doors, kept on a teleprompter, kept on script. And so Americans saw a politician who was not only having a bad night, but was in the decline of his political career.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Panic inside the Democratic Party right now.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—several op-eds calling for Joe Biden to bow out of the race.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

There’s been some real damage done that cannot be undone.

CROWD [chanting]:

Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!

JOE BIDEN:

Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth!

EVAN OSNOS:

For as long as Biden has been around he’s been contending with this question in one form or another: does this man have the capacity to do it? And it’s a version of the same question he was asked as a child when he was stuttering. Is this guy smart enough?

PETER BAKER:

Joe Biden’s life story, certainly as he narrates it, is one of adversity and resilience. He gets knocked down, he gets back up. Whether it’s being a child with a stutter who is mocked in school. Whether it be the great tragedy of his young life when his wife and daughter are killed in a car accident. Whether it be his political career when he flames out on two previous presidential campaigns. Every single time, as he sees his life, he gets back up.

CROWD [chanting]:

Joe! Joe! Joe!

JOE BIDEN:

I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up! [applause]

NARRATOR:

But now, the ultimate decision, to go against the Biden motto: stand down for good, and not get back up.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA:

There’s a lot of fights that you can have in politics. But you can never win the fight against time. He was not going to be getting younger. His skills were not going to magically return. He made this decision, and he ultimately came to understand that he was going to be a one-term president.

JOE BIDEN:

My fellow Americans, it's been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years. Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.

PETER BAKER:

He knew that this was the end of a half-century in public life, and that the very last decision he would make in that sense would be to surrender.

JOE BIDEN:

I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. I made my choice. Now the choice is up to you, the American people.