Promise Me, Dad

A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

Flatiron Books

Contents

Biden Family Thanksgiving

The days were getting shorter, so the light in the sky had started to fall away when the gate to our temporary home swung open and our motorcade edged beyond the fencing that surrounded the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. We were riding from our official residence at the observatory to Andrews Air Force Base, where my children and grandchildren were already gathering. Jill and I were anxious to be with them for our annual Thanksgiving trip. Family had been an essential escape in the five-and-a-half years I had been vice president; being with them was like flying in the eye of a storm — a reminder of the natural ease and rhythms of our previous life, and of the calm to come when my time in office was done. The job had been an incredible adventure, but there were so many things Jill and I missed from life before the vice presidency. We missed our home in Wilmington. We missed the chance to be alone in a car on a long drive where we could talk with abandon. We missed having command over our own schedule and our own movements. Vacations, holidays, and celebrations with family had become the respites that restored some sense of equilibrium. And the rest of our family seemed to need these breaks as much as Jill and I did.

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. So we had had another wonderful four days at the beach together in August, but by November there was also a perceptible urgency to this need for togetherness that was a bit disquieting. And I was very mindful of it when Jill and I set out for our yearly escape to Nantucket, for another Biden Family Thanksgiving.

We passed through the gates of the observatory, and I felt our government-required armored limousine make its customary gentle pivot onto Massachusetts Avenue, where local traffic had been halted to clear the path for our journey. I glanced at the squat, standing digital clock at the top of the driveway, as I had maybe a thousand times since we had moved into the official residence. Red numbers glowed, ticking away in metronomic perfection: 5:11:42, 5:11:43, 5:11:44, 5:11:45. This was the nation's Precise Time, which was generated less than a hundred yards away, by the U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock. Precise Time — synchronized to the millisecond — had been deemed an operational imperative by the Department of Defense, which had troops and bases in locations around the globe. 5:11:50, 5:11:51, 5:11:52.

Our limousine was already accelerating out of the turn, with an abrupt force that pushed me back into the soft leather seats. The clock was behind us in a flash, out of sight, but still marking the time as it melted away — 5:11:58, 5:11:59, 5:12:00. The motorcade arced toward the southeast, down one side of the circle around the observatory, and we could see the lights of the official residence as they flashed through leafless trees. I was happy to say good-bye to the house for a few days. Our departure meant that many of the naval enlisted aides who looked after us were free to spend the entire holiday with their own families.

The procession gained speed once we hit the parkway and our motorcycle escorts nudged aside other travelers. The motorcade traced the southern edge of Washington, within sight of the monuments and public buildings: Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument — with the White House in the distance beyond it — the Jefferson Memorial, the United States Capitol. I had served in elective office in this city continuously since 1973, thirty-six years as a senator and six as vice president, but I had not grown indifferent to the beauty and import of these towering landmarks, which were now haloed in a glow of soft light. I still viewed those sturdy marble structures as representatives of our ideals, our hopes, and our dreams.

My working life in Washington had given me a sense of pride and accomplishment from the day I arrived, and that feeling had not dimmed after almost forty-two years. The truth was, on November 25, 2014, I was as excited and energized by my work as I had been at any time in my career, though my current office was, it must be admitted, a truly odd job. There is a strange and singular elasticity to the responsibilities of a vice president. As a strictly constitutional matter, the holder of the office has very little power. He or she is charged with breaking a tie vote in the Senate — which I had not been called to do in nearly six years — and waiting around to take over if the president is somehow disabled. A previous occupant was famously quoted as saying that the office is "not worth a bucket of warm spit." (That's the expurgated version. He did not say "spit.") The actual power of the office is reflective; it depends almost entirely on the trust and confidence of the president.

Barack Obama had handed me big things to run from the beginning of our first term, and once he assigned me to oversee the Recovery Act of 2009, or budget negotiations with Senator Mitch McConnell, or diplomatic relations with Iraq, he did not look over my shoulder. I believe I did my job well enough to earn and keep his trust. He sought my advice as much as ever at the end of 2014, and seemed to value it, which meant there were days when I felt that I had it in my power to help bend the course of history ever so slightly for the better.

And somewhere in the motorcade that evening, as we sped through the streets of Washington, was a car carrying the vice presidential military aide, who was in possession of the "nuclear football," which had to be within my reach at all times. I was one of only a handful of people who had control of the codes that could launch a nuclear strike on almost any target on the planet. So a reminder of the grave responsibilities of the office and the trust reposed in me was there, at all times, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

But in spite of all that, in spite of...