Joe Biden convened a “family meeting” to bring together relatives and some longtime advisers just weeks after his self-inflicted wounds following his debate performance.
During the session, Biden’s advisers pointed to the negative backlash from the debates, arguing that they would lower the polls and drain the presidential campaign’s fundraising, but Biden’s children believed that abandoning the race would leave Biden’s gaffes in the public’s memory and tarnish his reputation if he didn’t continue to fight.
The story begins almost 40 years ago, in 1987, during Biden’s first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then-Senator from Delaware, Biden followed his family’s advice and chose to drop out of the presidential race in favor of a bigger cause.
That long-ago moment is best depicted in two political books, one an autobiography, but Biden chose a different path than the one he now claims to be on. After a lackluster debate performance two weeks ago, Biden has stressed he will continue to campaign.
In 1987, some of Mr. Biden’s aides and family argued for maintaining the status quo. Others argued he couldn’t win. But one senior aide saw another reason: The more Mr. Biden focused on the campaign, the more it distracted him from the important work of the Senate.
The Senate hearings for Robert Bork, the ultra-conservative nominee for the Supreme Court, had just begun. Biden was chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. The debate gaffe had happened a few weeks earlier at the Iowa State Fair, when Biden plagiarized many passages from the campaign documents of the British Labour Party leader without citing them. The gaffe sparked rumors of plagiarism and padding his law school resume.
As he later wrote, that night in their bedroom, Biden asked his wife, Jill, a key question: “Can we save the presidential campaign or stop Bork? Which is more important?”
He announced his withdrawal from the campaign the next day in his senator’s office next door to the committee rooms, then quickly got to work, working for weeks to block Bork’s nomination.
Biden found his footing in the door to drop out of the presidential race in 1987, when his own honesty put him at the center of the Bork hearings. The incident and the deliberations behind it shed light on why Biden wants to stay in the 2024 reelection race and what factors are most influencing his thinking.
For anyone wondering what it might take for Biden to withdraw from this year’s election, the best reading is his 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” “What It Takes,” the late Richard Ben Cramer’s detailed account of the six candidates who ran for president in 1988, and his second autobiography, “Promise Me, Dad,” which chronicled the death of his son Beau in 2015.
This latest book, published in 2017, depicts the politically dramatic moment in 2016 when Biden decided to abandon his bid for the presidential nomination, even though the campaign had not yet begun. As in 1987, Biden realized he had another, more important task: caring for the grieving family of Beau Biden, who had died of brain cancer.
In both 1987 and 2015, Biden’s chances of winning looked slim — pundits and other Democrats had all but given up on him — but he never conceded defeat on his way out.
Instead, Biden will likely explain that the risks of divided attention are too high for him to pursue the presidency.
In 1987, that meant potentially tilting the Supreme Court to the far right for a generation; in 2015, it still meant abandoning grieving families to campaign.
According to his 2017 memoir, Biden told longtime adviser Michael Donilon that he gave up on the 2016 presidential race because “it was what was right for my family. It was what was right for me.”
Those decisions will provide the best insight into Biden’s decision-making as he weighs his options after the debate.
The 81-year-old president is now defiantly arguing he is not too old for the job and, despite the objections of dozens of Democrats in Congress, insists he intends to defeat Donald Trump just as he did four years ago.
As these books make clear, no one has been able to convince Biden himself that he would lose at the ballot box. Tell Biden he was going to lose and had to back down, and history suggests he would put up a fight.
Looking back at the past, we can see that a different argument could have been successful.
Tell him that the world needs his full strength as president for the next six months, and that the next six months will likely play out like 1987 or 2015. Tell him that his remaining six months in office will be focused almost exclusively on strengthening the Ukrainian coalition and negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza. Tell him about the possibility of a Nobel Prize.
Please tell him to send an aide (probably VP Harris) to run for the “Biden 2” he so desperately wants. If we had a full-time president, a full-time candidate would be in charge of the case against Trump.
But these points are met with an “I told you so” counterargument: Republicans won in 1988, George H. W. Bush won the election in a landslide, and Trump stunned the world in 2016.
The current drama has already lasted longer than the 1987 political collapse: Just 11 days passed between Maureen Dowd’s first New York Times article on the Iowa debate speech and the exit speech next door in a Senate hearing room.
Biden, then 44, launched his campaign in June 1987 and ran it for several months before the Dowd affair went public and investigations of other candidates began to leak publicly.
Biden has shown his anger in public, blasting a New Hampshire voter who asked him about his qualifications to be president: “I think my IQ is probably a lot higher than yours,” he yelled at the man.
He privately lamented the newspaper columnists and late-night talk-show hosts who ridiculed him, and in his 2007 memoir he devoted several pages to his reporting at The New York Times, particularly its scathing senior political reporter, R.W. “Johnny” Apple.
Biden, a graduate of the University of Delaware, has always favored the nickname “Middle Class Joe” among a senator dominated by Harvard graduates like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and Yale graduates like John Chafee (R-IL), and he clearly harbored a resentment for the state college graduates against the elites.
And the Times came to embody that worldview: He craved the newspaper’s love, but he also raged when he faced criticism from the paper.
“If I withdraw from the election, I would be admitting that Johnny Apples was right,” he wrote in Promises to Keep.
He convened the meeting at his Wilmington home, which he named “The Station,” and his entourage included his wife, two sons, his sister and her husband, two brothers, his parents, and some of his longest serving advisers.
Beau and Hunter, then 18 and 17 years old, respectively, were encouraged to speak out and share their opinions like full-fledged political consultants.
“I’ve never given up… I’ve never given up on anything in my life,” Biden said, according to Cramer’s book, “What It Takes.”
“Exactly,” Bo said.
Hunter feared resigning would be an admission of guilt. “All that matters is honor,” he said, according to his father’s 2007 book.
At the time, Biden’s advisers insisted his campaign could still forge ahead, but others worried the air had let out on his political balloon, and Biden’s top press secretaries warned of more negative media coverage to come, including about Biden’s brothers, James and Frank.
But then Biden’s lead lawyer on the Judiciary Committee, Marc Gittenstein, explained that Biden would likely appear to be an absentee chairman when it comes to Bork’s hearings, given the amount of time he will be spending campaigning.
“If we win in Bork, it’s our fault. If we lose now, it’s our fault,” said Gittenstein, who currently serves as Biden’s ambassador to the European Union.
In Biden’s book, his mother, Katherine, cast the final vote: “I think it’s time to step back,” she said.
But in Kramer’s story, another voice was just as influential.
“Get out,” Ted Kaufman said.
Kaufman, 85, has been by Biden’s side since he first became a senator in 1973 and served as his chief of staff in 1987. Though he has not officially worked for Biden over the past three decades, he remains one of Biden’s closest confidants outside of family members.
Fast forward to October 2015, and there was another “family” meeting, attended by Kaufman, Hunter Biden, Jill Biden, Biden’s sister Valerie Owens, Donilon, and four other longtime aides, including then-Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Steve Ricchetti, now a White House counsel, as well as Democratic super-lawyer Robert Bauer and his wife, media expert Anita Dunn, new members who have grown close to Biden over the past nine years.
The political situation was very different from 1987.
Biden’s popularity soared as the nation watched the vice president publicly mourn Beau’s death, but the presidential campaign began without him. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton garnered huge support from the Democratic establishment, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) mounted a powerful insurrectionist army.
But Mr. Biden and his team found a way. Friends like Bill Bradley, the Princeton basketball star and three-term senator who was a thoughtful leader, offered encouragement. George Clooney, a Biden supporter who called for Mr. Biden’s removal, told Mr. Ricchetti he would “work with you no matter what,” Mr. Biden writes in “Promise Me, Dad.”
Even Dowd, now a columnist for The Times, wrote favorably about his chances of winning. The elites who had been his thorn in previous campaigns liked him.
The final family meeting was held on October 20th, when plans for the announcement and campaign were made. Although late attempts to get into the presidential race have failed in recent years and Trump would fall far behind Clinton and Sanders, everyone seemed to be on board.
Now Mr. Donilon realized he had another, more important mission. Mr. Donilon, who had been a top adviser to the vice president and is now a senior White House adviser, had been one of the main drivers of Mr. Biden’s decision to join the campaign. But that night he saw the look of panic on Mr. Biden’s face, his jaw clenched.
“What’s wrong, Mike?” Biden asked.
“I don’t think you should do that,” Donilon told Biden, according to Biden’s book.
Biden needed to focus on the most important job at hand: healing families.
It was a message that got through to a man who had been chasing the presidency for decades, convincing him that there was another, more important issue to address.
Biden announced the next day that he would not run, just as he did in 1987, the day after Kaufman and Gittenstein told him they were dropping out.
“All the while, I had to do my job,” Biden wrote in the final pages of his 2017 book. “I had to do my job.”
