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

by Joe Biden

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for. —Immanuel Kant

We had all been together just a few months earlier for our annual summer trip to one of the national parks. But five days of hiking, whitewater rafting, and long, loud dinners in the Tetons had apparently not been enough for the grown-ups. Jill and I were in our cabin packing for departure the last day when there was a knock on the door. It was our son Hunter. He knew Jill and I were going alone to the beach for a four-day retreat. But he wondered if maybe, because he and his wife had some free time, they might tag along. We said, Of course! Within a few minutes our other son, Beau, knocked. His in-laws had agreed to watch the children. Maybe we wouldn’t mind it if he and his wife joined us at the beach on Long Island. We said, Of course! I suspect there are parents who might feel put upon when asked to give up their alone time. I regarded these requests as the fruits of a life well lived: our grown children actually wanted to be with us.

I have come to believe that the first duty of a public servant is to help bring people together, especially in crisis, especially across difficult divides, to show respect for everybody at the table, and to help find a safe way forward. After forty-five years in office, that basic conviction still gave me purpose.

I have found over the years that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss. Not because I am possessed of any special power, but because my story precedes me: I was a newly elected thirty-year-old United States senator, excited to be down in Washington interviewing staff, when I got the call that my wife and eighteen-month-old daughter had died in a car accident while out shopping the week before Christmas. Beau and Hunt had been in the car, too. They pulled through without permanent damage, but not before spending weeks in the hospital. The pain had seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I did survive the punishing ordeal. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family. When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience. They know I have a sense of the depth of their pain.

By my estimation, at any given moment, one in ten people in our country is suffering some serious degree of torment because of a recent loss, and I’m not just citing statistics again. I see them at the rope lines at any political event I do, standing there, with something behind their eyes that is almost pleading. Please, please, help me. It’s always more practical to simply pass them by, to avoid any extraneous personal entanglements, to not get thrown off the schedule. We all spend so much time on the move, racing to keep up with the imperatives of modern life and personal ambition. So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need. What does it really cost to take a moment to look someone in the eye, to give him a hug, to let her know, I get it. You’re not alone?

Almost everybody who comes into contact with a president is hungry for something—sometimes nothing more than an acknowledgment, or simply to be put at ease, but most of all to be heard. There was no escaping that for Barack, and it could be draining. “Why do they need so much attention?” he complained to me one day after a congressional delegation left the office. “They constantly have to be reinforced.” He knew the answer without my telling him, but he was frustrated by the amount of time and energy it took. And he was happy to have me there to carry some of that load.

Not that I didn’t get frustrated with the president on occasion. He never gave me a reason to doubt his strategic judgment in eight years of close-up observation. And there was rarely any daylight between us in matters of policy. But sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault. “Just trust your instincts, Mr. President,” I would say to him. On major decisions that had to be made fast, 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.

Never tell a man what his interests are. Be straight and open with him about your own interests. And try to put yourself in his shoes. Try to understand his hopes and his limitations, and never insist that he do something you know he cannot. It’s really just about making the effort to make a personal connection.

I found out only later that the medical professionals at Anderson had started to talk among themselves about Beau—how he never showed fear and never sagged. He wanted the doctors to throw everything at him they possibly could. He kept reassuring them that he could handle it. “We think we are brave if we go when we have a 50-50 chance of winning,” the anesthesiologist who saw Beau at every one of his visits to Houston for twenty months said of my son. “True bravery is when there is very little chance of winning, but you keep fighting.”

I had always tried to impart to my children the lesson that my mother taught me, my sister, and my brothers: 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.

I got off the phone with Abadi thinking this operation just might work, but aware that the outcome was largely out of my hands at this point. This just might work was a phrase that seemed to define my entire life at the moment. Keeping the faith about Tikrit, like keeping the faith about Beau, was an act of will—a kind of house-to-house fight against doubt.

As Air Force Two took off, I felt compelled to open up my diary and write: March 29—Leaving MD Anderson with hope. Beau is an amazing man. As is Hunter. He is staying with [Beau] until the next procedure. I’ll be coming back. I paused. What else was there to say? I was afraid if I really opened up, I would give into a lurking despair, and I could not allow that to happen. I could not allow Beau or anyone else to see that, ever. I set aside the diary until the flight was nearly over, then picked it up again to add one line. Just landed. 6:07. I feel so goddam lonely.

Beau had a way of instilling courage and calming me. He was the last person in the room with me before the presidential primary debates in 2007, the vice presidential debate in 2008, and the vice presidential debate in 2012, when it was up to me to put wind back in the Democrats’ sails after Barack’s demoralizing performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney. Beau would always grab my arm just before I walked onstage and pull me back toward him until I was looking into his eyes. “Dad. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Remember, Dad. Home base, Dad. Home base.” What he was saying was: Remember who you are. Remember what matters. Stay true to your ideals. Be courageous. Then he would kiss me and shove me forward.

The other ominous bit of news was that Putin was about to sign a decree banning the reporting of Russian deaths during “special operations” in peacetime—as it had long been banned in wartime. Putin wanted to bury any evidence of battle deaths in Ukraine, because two-thirds of the Russian population opposed the idea of sacrificing Russian soldiers to grab back pieces of Ukraine. “Some watchers can see only one plausible reason for the change,” noted the Washington Post. “Russia is gearing up for another military push into Ukraine.”

I was still moved by the thought of Barack’s willingness to let go and show the extraordinary depth of his emotion in his eulogy for Beau. We had been through a lot together, but I felt closer to the president that day in St. Anthony’s, and more appreciative of his friendship, than ever before. “Michelle and I and Sasha and Malia, we’ve become part of the Biden clan, we’re honorary members now,” he said. “And the Biden family rule applies: We’re always here for you. We always will be. My word as a Biden.”

One was from Evan Ryan, one of my former staff members. She sent me a note, quoting a poem. “I stood watching as the little ship sailed out to sea,” it read. “The setting sun tinted his white sails with a golden light, and as he disappeared from sight a voice at my side whispered, ‘He is gone.’” The disappearance did not mark an end, but another beginning, in a new and unknown place. “On the farther shore a little band of friends had gathered to watch and wait in happy expectation.” I found myself imagining Neilia, and Beau’s baby sister, Naomi, and my own mother and father standing on that far shore, ready to receive him. “Suddenly they caught sight of the tiny sail and, at the very moment when my companion had whispered, ‘He is gone,’ a glad shout went up in joyous welcome, ‘Here he comes.’”

Teddy’s father, Joe Kennedy Sr., had been a spectacular success in almost every business he touched, and he had seen one of his sons become president of the United States. But he buried three of his four sons and a treasured daughter in his own lifetime. In her letter to me, Vicki Kennedy quoted from a letter Joe Sr. had written to a friend who had lost his own son, a letter she said Teddy used to pull out and read in the worst times of his own life. “When one of your loved ones goes out of your life, you think what he might have done with a few more years,” Joe Sr. had written to his friend. “And you wonder what you are going to do with the rest of yours. Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find yourself part of it, trying to accomplish something—something he did not have time enough to do. And perhaps that is the reason for it all. I hope so.” I hope so, too. I knew what Beau would have done with a few more years. He would have continued his fight against the abuse of power, especially the abuse of children. It was central to who he was, and Hunter, Hallie, Ashley, Jill, and I were determined to carry that effort forward in his honor. We set up the Beau Biden Foundation to continue his work. It gave us purpose. And we all needed purpose.

I also thought of my dad that morning in Kiawah, and one of the greatest life lessons he taught me, when I was a teenager. We were at a traffic light in downtown Wilmington, and my dad and I caught a glimpse of two men on a nearby corner. They embraced, kissed each other, and then headed off separately to face their days—as I supposed thousands of husbands and wives all over the city did every morning. I just turned and looked at my dad for an explanation. “Joey, it’s simple,” my dad told me. “They love each other.”

We also had to speak to folks who were doing well. I took a lot of ridicule for saying rich folks were just as patriotic as anyone else. But I meant it. I had no doubt that most wealthy Americans were willing to forgo one more tax break in order to better educate our children, or to rebuild this nation’s infrastructure, or to provide decent health care to everybody who needs it. They know that the opportunity to get richer isn’t the whole deal. Lifting up their country is part of the deal, too. We had to remind corporate America and Wall Street that just taking care of themselves and their shareholders wasn’t good enough. They had a responsibility to their workers, their communities, and their country, too. Not to shame them, not to harangue them, but to remind them that a long history of shared prosperity and a secure and growing middle class is why America has had the most stable political democracy in the world. If we lose that—and we were losing it—no amount of money will hold back the anger and the pitchforks. This wasn’t just about profits and economics. This was about the social stability of this nation.

We had come through so much as a nation, and we were heading in the right direction. The country had dug out of an incredible hole in the previous six years, thanks to President Obama. Our administration had helped to create thirteen million new jobs and overseen a record sixty-seven straight months of private-sector job creation. The nation’s deficit had been cut in half. And we were finally moving from recovery to resurgence; the country was poised to take off.

And now, we were at a turning point. Now we were in a position where we could move from what we had to do to what we wanted to do.

I knew also, from hard-earned experience, that the second year is in some ways the hardest. The shock is over, as is the strangeness of living through all the first holidays and anniversaries and birthdays, and the undeniable permanence of the loss begins to settle in. If I did win the nomination the next summer, we would all be trying to deal with that new layer of grief in the middle of a general election.

The reviews of the Colbert interview the next day put talk of Biden for President into overdrive. “It was an extremely rare sighting given our culture and our politics today,” Mike Barnicle said at the top of Morning Joe. “It was an actual human being.”

I was still in New York that day to help Governor Cuomo mark the anniversary of September 11. Andrew had already endorsed his home state’s former senator Hillary Clinton for president, but he was still pushing me to think hard about running. Don’t make a decision you’ll regret. And he was effusive in his praise for me. “Today is about human beings and character,” he told a meeting of first responders. “This is a man who is authentic. This is a man who is genuine.… When he’s with you, he looks you in the eye and tells you he’s with you.… He’s all heart. He’s here to do the right thing. He’s a friend in good days and bad days.”

But the Politico story exceeded even my worst expectations of what the opposition was going to be like. The idea that I would use my son’s death to political advantage was sickening. I didn’t think anybody would believe the charge, but I could feel my anger rise. And I understood the danger of that, especially in my present emotional state. If this thing about Beau came up somewhere in my hearing, I was afraid I would not be able to control my rage. And I would say or do something I would regret.

One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: “To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.”

I had been knocked down hard enough by then to understand the Irishness of life, and this past year had reminded me of it all over again.

When I was just barely a teenager, my mother asked me what I wanted to do, or be, when I grew up, and I only knew one thing for sure. I wanted to make a difference, to be part of some significant historical change. I guess it was because I was thinking about civil rights.

And even though he was no longer able to travel to Washington to take part in regular Senate business, John was working like hell to complete a new book, which he envisioned as his valedictory message to the country he had loved and defended so fiercely. I was particularly struck by one line from the book. “I have lived with a will,” John writes. “I have served a purpose greater than my own pleasure or advantage.…”

He had developed a very real passion for making sure the least vulnerable in our society, children especially, were better protected. That passion, that purpose, drove him.

Those are words for all of us to live by, and another reminder to me of what Beau meant when he said, “You’ve got to promise me, Dad, no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right.” I had understood instantly, in the moment, what my son was trying to tell me even without him spelling it out. Be engaged, Dad, he was saying. Stay in the game. Keep fighting for what you believe in. Don’t give up. At the time, and even as I completed the manuscript for this book in the spring of 2017, it always seemed to me that I had captured Beau’s meaning largely because of our personal intimacy, our own shared wavelength. When people are close, especially a parent and a child, there are so many things conveyed and understood without words. But over the last year, as I have been going around the country talking to people about Beau’s life and his legacy, and reflecting on the meaning of his time with us, and his message for those of us who live on, I have realized something else. My son hadn’t so much told me how to keep going after he was gone, or what he expected of me. He had showed me. Beau was leading me forward not by word or thought, but something far more lasting and far more bracing: the power of his example. Even before he got sick, and certainly all through his battle with brain cancer, Beau had showed me, and his family, and his friends, the value of living with purpose in the face of the tallest odds. It remains an honor for us all to try to live by the example he set, b...

I know where my brother learned that—he learned that from my dad. He learned that public life was not about serving yourself, rather it was about the privilege to serve those who can’t serve themselves.

Someone once said, “Don’t wait to make your son a great man. Make him a great boy.”

And somehow, Beau sensed that—how understandably and deeply hurt his family and his father was. And so, rather than use his childhood trauma as justification for a life of self-pity or self-centeredness, that very young boy made a very grown-up decision: He would live a life of meaning. He would live a life for others. He would ask God for broader shoulders.

From his dad, he learned how to get back up when life knocked him down. He learned that he was no higher than anybody else, and no lower than anybody else—something Joe got from his mom, by the way. And he learned how to make everybody else feel like we matter, because his dad taught him that everybody matters.

I saw him when I visited Iraq; he conducted himself the same way. His deployment was hard on Hallie and the kids, like it was for so many families over the last fourteen years. It was hard on Joe, hard on Jill. That’s partly why Jill threw herself into her work with military families with so much intensity. That’s how you know when Joe thunders “may God protect our troops” in every speech he does, he means it so deeply.

He was a man who led a life where the means were as important as the ends. And the example he set made you want to be a better dad, or a better son, or a better brother or sister, better at your job, the better soldier. He made you want to be a better person. Isn’t that finally the measure of a man—the way he lives, how he treats others, no matter what life may throw at him?

I got to know Joe’s mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, before she passed away. She was on stage with us when we were first elected. And I know she told Joe once that out of everything bad that happens to you, something good will come if you look hard enough. And I suppose she was channeling that same Irish poet with whom I began today, Patrick Kavanagh, when he wrote, “And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.” Beau Biden brought to his work a mighty heart. He brought to his family a mighty heart. What a good man. What an original. May God bless his memory, and the lives of all he touched.