Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

by Joe Biden

The gravity of the issues he or she faces on a weekly basis is overwhelming; nothing gets to a president’s desk that isn’t momentous and pressing.

Barack Obama was sworn into office in the middle of the worst global financial crisis in four generations.

Major banks were failing. The economy was careening off a cliff. Americans were losing their homes, their health care, and their life savings. They were losing hope.

President Obama also inherited hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no clear strategy for victory in either.

Even Barack Obama, talented and capable as he is, could not possibly have done it all.

Barack Obama did not appear to belong to anyone except Michelle and his daughters—not campaign donors, or labor leaders, or civil rights groups, or even friends.

unlike most people I know, his own sense of his worth seemed entirely independent of what other people thought of him.

I had learned over the years, a president was never going to have more than about 70 percent of the information needed. So once you have checked the experts, statistics, data, and intelligence, you have to be willing to rely on your gut.

The cares of the presidency sit heavy on any person in that office, and there were times when Barack got down.

Barack was the first person outside my family to know about Beau’s illness.

He thought of her as really smart, really prepared, and backed by the formidable campaign machine the Clintons had spent the past forty years engineering.

I didn’t think it possible for a new Republican administration to roll back Barack’s landmark health care program, or the Violence Against Women Act, or the gains made by the LGBT community.

The mere fact that Beau was hanging tough, determined to do whatever he had to do to make it, gave the entire family hope.

we all believed, like he did, that if he could just hang on long enough, science might outrun his disease.

He had no real control over what the disease or the treatment was doing to his body;

The Child Predator Task Force that Beau created and oversaw had arrested and convicted more than two hundred child abusers and rescued 129 children from abusive situations

Beau refused to burden anybody outside of his brother, Hunter, with his actual dread, not even his mother or me.

The sage political analysts would say she was probably on the way to a historic victory—the first woman to win the White House.

Putin was ice-cold calm throughout, but argumentative from start to finish.

“Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes,” I told him, smiling. “I don’t think you have a soul.” He looked at me for a second and smiled back. “We understand each other,” he said. And we did.

Our administration was seeking to promote and extend the liberal international order that had been in place for forty years: a Europe free, whole, and at peace, with each and every independent country having agreed-upon and secure borders.

The Ukrainian people had been on a thrilling and sometimes harrowing roller coaster for the previous year, and I felt like I had been on it with them.

Yanukovych had lost the confidence of the Ukrainian people,

The disgraced president fled Ukraine the next day—owing to the courage and determination of the demonstrators—and control of the government ended up temporarily in the hands of a young patriot named Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

There was an important principle at stake: big countries ought not to beat up smaller ones, especially after they had given their word not to.

Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons program years earlier—in return for a guarantee from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia to respect its borders and its sovereignty.

He was always on guard against the age-old mistake of allowing smaller brush fires to be unwittingly fed until they had become terrifying conflagrations beyond anyone’s control.

“True bravery is when there is very little chance of winning, but you keep fighting.”

There is no one in the world you are closer to than your brother and sister. You have to be able to count on each other.

What he was saying was: Remember who you are. Remember what matters. Stay true to your ideals. Be courageous.

He let me know he was thinking of me in the way it was most comfortable for him. He seemed to be going out of his way to say nice things about me in public, especially in my absence.

Howard was an incredible secret weapon for Beau, and something all families should have: a devoted patient advocate.

“What makes me optimistic is that President Putin’s vision has very little to offer the people of Europe—or, for that matter, the people of Russia—other than myths and illusions, the false promise of returning to a past that, when examined, was not too good a past to begin with. A sleight of hand that presents the bullying of civil societies, dissidents, and gays as substitutes for strong leadership and functioning institutions. The propaganda that conflates aggression with strength.”

There are times when each of us must bear the burden of loss alone, and in his or her own way. The people who really understand that are the people carrying those burdens, too.

Shock creates an initial numbness that wears away. The pain comes then, and it sharpens. The hurt is a physical presence, and it never leaves you.

The fight for marriage equality was a long, slow battle that required incredible moral and physical courage on the part of really brave gay men and women.

“To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.”

We Irish, I like to tell people, are the only people in the world who are actually nostalgic about the future. I have never stopped being a dreamer. I refuse to stop believing in possibilities.