The former First Lady keeps putting up hurdles for even the most sympathetic of readers.
“To me, a house is not a home without a pet,” Jill Biden writes in “View from the East Wing,” her new memoir about her tenure as First Lady. “I think there are pet people and non-pet people; you either love animals or you don’t.” Arguable, perhaps, but those familiar with the Bidens’ ups and downs may have had a guess about where she was heading with that, narratively speaking. The Bidens brought three German shepherds to the White House: Champ, an elderly dog who died just months after moving in, and his young successors, Major and Commander, who were, to put it succinctly, biters. Secret Service records released as the result of a Freedom of Information request reveal at least twenty-four occasions on which Commander, alone, bit agents—a tally that doesn’t include attacks on other staff members. One agent ended up in the hospital. Eventually, Major was sent to live with a friend and Commander with relatives. They have also been banished from “View from the East Wing”; the only mention of any Biden dogs is an oblique reference to Joe “tripping over” an unnamed one at the beach house the family owns in Delaware, in pre-Presidential days. Instead, Jill’s raising of the pet-people flag is followed by an ode to Willow, a cat, who brought “joy to children” who visited the White House grounds.
The best rationale for First Lady memoirs is that the domestic details they offer can serve as a lever, lifting the reader from the mundane to reach some larger ideal that is, if not political, at least profound. Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” was, in many ways, a disquisition on how she went from disliking politics—“In my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact”—to finding real meaning in her role. There’s no requirement for such a book to really grapple with, say, immigration or inflation, and Biden’s does not; most Cabinet members appear only in passing, if at all. The challenge for her as a memoirist is that one of the most controversial aspects of her husband’s Administration—his health and his capacities—is an intimate and personal one in which voters nevertheless had a legitimate interest, and on which she had a unique vantage point. The public was expected to trust her when she said that, seen up close, he was well, and so it doesn’t help that “View from the East Wing” is full of blind spots. She doesn’t persuade; she just insists and elides.
When she mentions the special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation of Joe Biden’s retention of classified materials from his years as Vice-President, for example, she presents his report as a simple vindication. There is no mention of Hur’s assessment that prosecutors might just have had trouble persuading a jury to convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” or the uproar that Hur’s assessment provoked. Much later in the book, she concedes that there had been occasional “uncomfortable moments,” such as when her husband referred to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the President of Egypt, as the President of Mexico, during a press conference held shortly after Hur’s report came out. She doesn’t comment on her husband’s furious tone: he attacked Hur’s character and, as a transcript later demonstrated, misrepresented their exchanges. She couldn’t have forgotten those facts, either, but she puts them aside, at the expense of her own credibility.
And Biden keeps putting up hurdles for even the most sympathetic of readers. Four months after her husband left the White House, his office announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones, a tragic circumstance that would have derailed a second term even if he had stayed in the race and won. The book, in fact, opens with an account that raises as many questions as it answers about how the cancer’s progression had been missed by the team of White House doctors assigned to monitor and care for her husband. The standard recommendations are against routine P.S.A. screening for a man his age. But Biden says that she got in touch with one of his doctors to alert the medical team to a potential warning sign: that the President had got up to use the bathroom seven times in one night. “Truly, I did not know what to say to people who were baffled” by the handling of his case, she writes. She ascribes her own lack of follow-up to having an “old-fashioned” marriage.
The Biden family’s internal dynamics also come across, in the memoir, as a puzzle from which several pieces are missing. Their painful losses are well known: Biden’s first wife and a baby daughter were killed in a car accident; his two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured but survived the crash. (He married Jill a few years later, and their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.) Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, leaving the family, Jill writes, “out of control, spinning with grief.” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in “Original Sin,” argue that the family’s concealment of the nature and the gravity of Beau’s illness prefigured its handling of Joe’s condition. During the period when Beau was being treated, he served as Delaware’s attorney general and then announced that he would run for governor. Jill acknowledges the secrecy, but says that it was for the sake of her stepson’s wife and children. She doesn’t bring up his gubernatorial aspirations. In an interview about her memoir, Biden says that she found it hard, when recording the audiobook, to even say out loud that her other stepson, Hunter, who has struggled with crack and alcohol, was an addict. In her view, his trial, on gun charges, was deeply unfair, but her account of his various legal issues is highly selective. (A fuller recent account can be found in “Devils’ Advocates,” by Kenneth P. Vogel, of the Times.) The President had pledged not to pardon Hunter, but he was obliged to break that pledge, she told NBC, because Trump would have targeted him (although it was during the Biden Administration that Hunter had been indicted). “I did support it of course—I’m his mother,” she said. The pardon covered any and all federal offenses, dating back to 2014; the President preëmptively pardoned several other family members as well.
The extended family is not marginal in the book, nor, it seems, in the Biden White House. As is often the case with Presidential households, its many members are omnipresent: at the residence and at Camp David, accompanying Jill on official trips, celebrating milestones in the Rose Garden or on the South Lawn. For those not steeped in Biden lore, it gets hard to keep track of the grandchildren: Naomi, Natalie, Finnegan, Maisy, Little Hunter, and Little Beau. Hunter has four daughters and a son (Navy, the youngest girl, does not appear in the book), and it is the second-eldest, Finnegan, who gets to accompany her grandmother to the coronation of King Charles. “As a history major at U. Penn, she was poised to appreciate it all,” Biden writes. They are sitting in Westminster Abbey when Finnegan taps her grandmother on her arm. “ ‘How can they call Pop old?’ Finny said with regards to Joe. ‘Look at most of the leaders.’ She gestured toward the leaders of Ireland, Italy, Finland, Sweden.” The men in question were heads of state, with largely ceremonial roles, but each of those countries had a head of government who was much younger. Ireland’s then forty-five-year-old leader, Leo Varadkar, had visited the White House less than two months earlier. If Biden explained this to her granddaughter, she doesn’t say so. Instead, she writes, “I gave her a little hug and straightened her fascinator.”
Perhaps because so many important things are missing from the book, there is a lot of filler, even though the book isn’t long (two hundred and sixty-six pages, generously spaced). We are provided with a long list of the amenities at Camp David and the texts of various press releases. The menus for state dinners are recounted in detail. In the floral realm, “I prefer low vases with fun mixes of flowers to tight bouquets,” she writes. Good to know.
There is a lot of Joe in the book, and yet not much of him doing the work of governing—deliberating, balancing the concerns of foreign and domestic allies, making the big calls. The question of who did, and who decided, what in the Biden Administration is not a conundrum that the former First Lady seems ready to help resolve. Joe Biden’s most vivid presence as President comes toward the end of the book, when he refuses, for weeks after the debate, to withdraw from the race, pushing back against erstwhile supporters; they include Nancy Pelosi, who tells him that he’d be “heartbroken” if he heard what people in the Party were saying about him. Jill subscribes to the view that the reason he had to drop out was that Democrats succumbed to “fear.” He tells her, “Jilly, I had no choice.” After barely mentioning Kamala Harris’s performance in her four years as Vice-President, Biden is fairly clear about her annoyance when she hears Harris, on speakerphone, nudging Joe to endorse her at the same time that he tells the world he is leaving the race. (“I walked out of the room.”) He waited almost half an hour after the announcement to do so.
One of Jill Biden’s wearying authorial choices is to never use Trump’s name unless she absolutely must—for example, in a quote. Instead, he’s “the prior president”—until, later in the book, he becomes “the president-elect.” (Melania Trump, whom Biden calls “polite and controlled,” is referred to only by her first name.) Many civilians do the same, feeling that they hear “Trump” quite enough as it is. But the First Lady’s memoir is the wrong place for such self-soothing rhetoric. Not naming Trump comes to feel like another way of not recognizing the stakes in Biden’s stubborn, prolonged reëlection campaign, or reckoning with its cost. The East Wing of the book’s title has literally been demolished. There is no snow globe on Pennsylvania Avenue now, and maybe there never was. ♦
