Peril

by Bob Woodward

“For the next two days, while everybody who’d been at my parents’ house thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag.”

As Meacham defined it, soul was a set of values, a force that pulled Americans toward grace.

Coons was not surprised to hear Biden was in. Biden spoke about Charlottesville, about the country’s alarming divisions. His basic pitch was being honed.

Blunt Rochester was the first woman and first Black person to hold the at-large Delaware seat.

“You talked about how you’re going to get endorsed by this person and that person. “You needed to give her the respect of looking her in the eyes and saying, ‘Congresswoman, I would be honored to have your support.’ ”

“It’s uncomfortable for you because you don’t want her to say no. And it’s uncomfortable for us because we don’t want to be taken for granted. But I’m telling you, you need to invest time in actually respecting her and asking for her support.”

“You know, that’s what Beau would have said if he were here.”

Coons asked if she thought Biden was respectful in how he asked for their support. “Hell, no,” she said. “It’s like he was telling me that I should support him because my dad supported him. And I’m not my dad.”

I would want a woman as my running mate, Biden told her. That was a surprise to Blunt Rochester and was not something he had yet said publicly.

Blunt Rochester soon endorsed Biden and went to multiple states and churches to campaign for him, from Harlem to the heartland. She campaigned harder for Biden than Coons did. Biden asked her to be one of the co-chairs for his campaign and later to be on his vice presidential selection committee.

“I’ve always felt that he would listen,” she said.

Biden’s past habits hovered. His penchant for hugging and kissing women he met, including candidates and elected officials, was being newly scrutinized as the Me Too movement exposed sexual harassment and assault.

“An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden,” read the headline of a story written by Lucy Flores, the Nevada Democrat, for New York magazine. Biden was floored.

In her book, Jill said her husband comes from a family of huggers. But after the Flores episode, and public complaints from six other women who said Biden’s touching and kissing made them feel uncomfortable, Jill was firm with Joe: You need to change, fast.

“Charlottesville, Virginia, is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history,” Thomas Jefferson. It is “also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

Notable was what was not included. No biography. No discussion of policy. Just Charlottesville, the “soul of the nation,” and Trump as a moral aberration.

Progressives outwardly detested him as a relic of Democratic mistakes on Iraq and the 1994 tough-on-crime bill, which disproportionately affected people of color. Most remembered was his much criticized handling of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

The next day, his campaign reported it raised $6.3 million in the 24 hours following his announcement, more than any other Democratic candidate raised on their first day.

“His fast lane,” Conway told Trump, “was to remind everybody that he and he alone was Barack Obama’s number two.” Had his back. Remind people that he had the perfect Washington résumé. Instead, Biden made no mention of Obama or his experience.

Biden should have said, “Trump is what happens when you don’t have enough Washington experience. Trump is what happens when you don’t know your way around Capitol Hill like I do. For those of you who miss the Obama years, I’m your guy.”

If anyone understood the power of a brand, it was Trump.

“Look,” Biden joked, “if he looks young and vibrant compared to me, I should probably go home.”

Donilon would not budge, and Biden never asked for a change. “Soul of the nation” was it.

Cedric Richmond’s political mentor, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, heard the critics. Biden again? Why not new blood? Shouldn’t Black Democrats rally behind one of their own?

Lately, he had been studying up on fascist histories, with a focus on Italy. He saw Trump as America’s Benito Mussolini in waiting.

That week, Biden had said there was “some civility” years ago in Washington. He cited his experience of working with segregationist senators.

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said at a fundraiser, referring to the late Mississippi senator and segregationist. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

Biden also recalled the late Georgia senator and segregationist Herman Talmadge, “one of th...

“You go down the list of all these guys. Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. N...

“I ran for the United States Senate because I disagreed with the views of the segregationists,” he said. They asked him whether he would apologize. “Apologize for what?” Biden asked, raising his eyebrow. “There’s not a racist bone in my body.”

A week later in Miami, Mayor Buttigieg spotted Biden, his head down, touch the rosary beads on his wrist before stepping onstage at the first Democratic presidential primary debate. Biden turned and told Buttigieg that they were Beau’s.

“I’m going to now direct this at Vice President Biden. I do not believe you are a racist. And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. “But it was hurtful,” she said, “to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. “And, you know,” she said, her voice filling with emotion, “there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Sanders, a former track star, was always running, going back to long-shot, unsuccessful statewide campaigns in the 1970s and then his out-of-nowhere victory in Burlington, Vermont’s mayoral race in 1981.

They could position Sanders as a progressive on the correct side of history, and Biden as the past.

Shakir later told others that Sanders “always believed it, always felt it.

The participants were mostly older Black women, the voters Clyburn said would be crucial. When the videos were screened, the women began to cry. They said that’s the America we’re living in. That’s what we’re scared of. That’s what we’re worried about. That’s our life. That’s why we want Biden to win.

“You know,” Pelosi added, “these young people now, they have a smaller attention span. So, we all have to be briefer in how we speak.”

By the end of the year, before any votes were cast, Senator Harris and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke had dropped out despite their enthusiastic beginnings.

During a December 5, 2019, Oval Office interview for Woodward’s book, Rage, Trump asked Woodward to predict who would be his Democratic opponent. Woodward passed on answering. “I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a terrible group of candidates,” Trump said. “It’s an embarrassment. I’m embarrassed by the Democratic candidates. I may have to run against one, and who knows? It’s an election. And I’m looking pretty good right now.”

That January, news of a virulent virus emerged from China. On January 23, China locked down Wuhan, one of its most populated cities, and restricted its population of 11 million people to their homes to control the outbreak.

Klain had led efforts to track individuals from Ebola-stricken countries and worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Get out in front of it, Klain suggested to Biden. Blow the whistle loudly.

It is not over until it is over, and you risk over-responding or under-responding.

“Trump Is Worst Possible Leader to Deal with Coronavirus Outbreak.”

“always uphold science, not fiction or fearmongering.”

The next day, Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, warned him, in a top secret Presidential Daily Briefing, that the mysterious pneumonia-like virus outbreak would be seismic.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” O’Brien said. “What do we do about it?” Trump asked, turning to Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, who had been a Wall Street Journal reporter in China.

Cut off travel from China to the United States. A major health crisis was coming, Pottinger said, that could resemble the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.

At the heart of the trial was Trump’s angst about Biden. Trump publicly dismissed Biden, but he and his senior advisers knew Biden, unlike Hillary Clinton, had a strong base among blue-collar voters. Since Trump had narrowly beaten Clinton, any erosion of Trump’s support with those voters could be crippling to his reelection chances.

In the call, a transcript of which Trump later ordered released, Trump asked Zelensky to talk with Attorney General William Barr and the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about an investigation of the Bidens, particularly Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that faced legal trouble.

In early February, Trump was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate of impeachment charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress, falling 10 votes short of the 67-vote, two-thirds majority required by the Constitution to remove the president from office.