Consider This from NPR - The 46th President: How Tragedy And Resilience Prepared Joe Biden To Meet A Moment

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

When Joe Biden takes the oath of office at noon ET on Wednesday, he will become the oldest president to ever hold the office. His journey to the White House spans nearly half a century in public life. New Yorker writer Evan Osnos has written a book about that journey called Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, And What Matters Now. He explains how Biden's deep "acquaintance with suffering" prepared him to meet the country at a moment of grief and loss. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In 1972, Joe Biden got a job he would have for the next 36 years. In Delaware, Joseph Biden, 29-year-old challenger of Senator Caleb Boggs. Biden was a young lawyer in Wilmington challenging Republican Caleb Boggs, a former governor running for his third term as senator. Biden's political resume was, let's say, thin. Joseph Biden, 29 years old. He's had two years as Newcastle County Councilman, and he has been a vigorous young challenger. A hat tip there to Forbes reporter Andrew Sollinger. He posted these clips to Twitter. Now, Biden was so unknown at the time. James Biden, a Democratic challenger.

NBC News got his name wrong. Biden, by the way, is the youngest candidate running for the Senate. In fact, he is not old enough to enter the Senate. He is 29 years old today. That part was true. But Biden's 30th birthday on November 20th made him old enough to serve by the time he took office. Caleb Boggs, as of right now, as we said,

is trailing James Biden in the state of Delaware. That with 11% in is about a 10%. Biden's Senate victory back then was on November 7th, 48 years to the day later. CNN projects Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected the 46th president. The 2020 election was called in his favor.

And now, after that long, long road, Joe Biden will be the 46th president. The Bible tells us, to everything there is a season, a time to build, a time to reap and a time to sow, and a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America. Consider this. Joe Biden has been in public life for nearly half a century. His journey to the White House may be the longest in American history. Evan Osnos of The New Yorker says that journey prepared Joe Biden to meet a moment. You know, one of his friends once said to me, if you ask me who the luckiest person I know is, it's Joe Biden.

And if you ask me who the unluckiest person I know is, it's Joe Biden. And if you ask me who the unluckiest person I know is, it's Joe Biden. And the combination of those two qualities has given him an acquaintance with suffering that is relevant right now. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, January 19th. This message comes from NPR sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers licensed professional counselors who specialize in issues such as isolation, depression, stress, anxiety, and more. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment when you need professional help. Get help at your own time and your own pace.

Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10% off your first month. The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule. Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast.

It's Consider This from NPR. Growing up in a nondescript, split-level home in the Wilmington suburbs, Joe Biden learned what he would later call the first principle of life. Get up. The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down. At a talk to promote a book he released in 2008, Joe Biden said he learned that lesson from his dad, Joseph Biden Sr. He was the first one up in the morning, every morning in our home, clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, putting on the coffee, getting ready to go to the car dealership to a job that he never really liked. My brother Jim said most mornings you could hear dad singing in the kitchen. My dad had real grace.

He never, ever gave up. Now Biden grew up in a generation social scientists have dubbed the lucky few. Because there were literally fewer kids in that generation. Evan Osnos says this was a generation coming out of the Great Depression and World War II. Families were smaller. And that meant there was more money for scholarships. There were more jobs available. It was just simply luckier if you were growing up then, especially as he was as a white male. And that period was a time in which you could rise faster in the workplace. And that concept of

the lucky few became a powerful fact about being a part of that cohort. It felt like anything was possible for him. But in Biden's telling, possibility did not mean a lack of challenges. And he spoke of some of his own in that 2008 speech. The world dropped on your head. My dad would say, get up. Kids make fun of you because you can't pronounce your last name. You said, Biden, get up. Flunked a class in law school, get up. Your wife and daughter, I'm sorry, Joe. There was nothing we could do to save them. Get up. Biden was referring to one of two massive personal tragedies he dealt with while serving in public office. The more recent was his son Beau Biden's death from brain cancer six years ago. The first was in 1972, barely a month after Biden's first Senate victory.

Hello, Mr. President, how are you? Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you, but I wanted you to know that all of us here at the White House were thinking about you and praying for you. A week before Christmas, Biden's wife, Nelia, and infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident in Delaware. President Richard Nixon called to offer his condolences. I understand you were on the hill at the time, and your wife was just driving by herself. At the time of the accident, Biden had been in Washington, D.C., working out of a temporary office, hiring staff, and getting ready for his first term in the Senate. I'm sure that she'll be watching you from now on. Good luck to you. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Okay, here you go. I appreciate it.

I think people know the outlines of that story, and what they may not know is actually the depths that he fell afterwards. I mean, he was, by his own description, suicidal. He was cruelly reminded that nobody is truly the author of their own fate, of their own experience. Evan Osnos says that lack of control collided with Biden's father's get-up-and-do-it principle, which he had lived by so successfully. I think it was those two kinds of experience, the ability to will himself to success, and then the humbling of the reality of all that he could not control that became the foundation of his worldview.

So if that's act one, I want to talk about what happens next, sort of how he develops his politics. And I'm looking to around 19, maybe 73, 74, when he begins to embrace the movement of parents in the Democratic Party who are against school integration through busing. Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. This came up via his running mate, right? Kamala Harris bringing it up on the primary debate stage. Because your city council made that decision. So that's where the federal government must step in. That's why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. But can you put that moment in context? Why did he embrace that movement?

He had actually run for office as somebody on the side of civil rights. He played a bit part in some desegregation protests in Delaware. And he got to the Senate and he represented a state divided between the North and the South. It was a place where Jim Crow laws still applied. And he was constantly tacking back and forth between support and opposition to elements of civil rights. And there was this fateful moment in 1974 when he went to see a group of parents who were opposed to the busing of students. And they shouted at him. And it changed him. He became their champion in the Senate. 32-year-old liberal Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware led the fight for the recent Senate

anti-busing amendment. In fact, in the fall of 1975, Biden explained to NPR that he opposed federal support of busing because he argued it wasn't actually an effective means of desegregation. There is academic ferment against it. Not majority, is academic ferment against it. Not majority, but academic ferment against it. There are young Blacks and young white leaders against it. There is social unrest which highlights it. We are now also in a moment where you may have a constituency of white voters who are calling to be appeased on issues of race. Is Joe Biden the guy that is ready to do that? at? Well, he is a person who reflects this complicated, and let's call it what it is,

ugly diversity of ideas about race in America. And there was a time in his life when he took the side of people who opposed integration. And I mean, the reason why I'm stumbling, is that I think that the person that he sees himself as now, the way that he imagines himself entering the history books, is the person who believed that he could help Barack Obama succeed and then eventually believed he could open the door to Kamala Harris and the diversity that she represents. And the truth was that he is a person who was an opponent of busing in the 70s, and he was also somebody who decades later was so repulsed by what he saw in Charlottesville... Very fine people on both sides. ...that that was one of the moments that drove him into the race. But 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. And in some ways the trajectory of his life with its tacking and turning on questions of race, is a reflection of the Democratic Party itself over the last half century. The thing that struck me is he's running for president periodically throughout this period as well. And you write that he has described himself as arrogant. So how does that different from that kind of first act of his career, right? Where the confidence matures somehow or curdles into arrogance. In his years in the Senate, so much of what he was doing in running the

Judiciary Committee or head of the Foreign Affairs Committee was very often running against the background of his desire to be president. And by the end of 2008, you know, after this long 36 years in the U.S. Senate, he was heading actually for the history books as not a person who was a giant of history. And it was remarkable that he could have ended his career that way, but it was in fact Barack Obama, who opened this new chapter, opened a door for him. For months, I've searched for a leader to finish this journey alongside me. In Springfield, Illinois, then-Senator Barack Obama told a crowd that he had searched for a running mate who understood working class concerns, who saw the challenges facing America in a, quote, changing world,

and a leader who could be president if called upon. And that man is Joe Biden. Biden, of course, had been ready to be president since his first run for the Democratic nomination in 1988. That 2008 loss to Barack Obama was his second attempt. They were totally different people. I mean, they were separated by 19 years and this utterly different sense of style and approach. Barack Obama was quieter, more disciplined. And the truth was that watching Obama up close changed some of Biden's own political habits and practices. And as somebody who worked very closely with both of them said to me, the reason it worked was that each one thought he was the mentor of the other.

As he enters this next phase of his career, what does he bring to this moment? I think he brings to it a lot of scar tissue, some of the successes he's had, and also a lot of the failures along the way and the tragic events. That combination of qualities. One of his friends, his former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, once said to me, if you ask me who the luckiest person I know is, it's Joe Biden. And if you ask me who the unluckiest person I know is, it's Joe Biden. And the combination of those two qualities has given him an acquaintance with suffering that is relevant right now. This is a country that is grieving right now. This is a country that is grieving right now, literally in some cases,

families who have lost people to the COVID epidemic and other people who are grieving for our politics, grieving for the culture that we are living in right now in this period of such pain. And that for him is something that he knows how to contend with. It's been a part of his life for a long time. That's Evan Osnos. His book about the president-elect is called Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.