By Seymour Hersh
SeymourHersh.substack.com
July 4, 2024
So what will happen now as the White House has gone into denial mode about the president's weak performance in last week's debate with Trump? The debate produced no rational discourse on the major issues of our time, and it's unlikely we will hear anything of substance through the remainder of the campaign if Biden chooses to stay in the race.
On that question, I turned the other day to Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992), perhaps the best book on a presidential campaign in our time. Cramer spent six years researching and writing the book. He reported on six Democratic and Republican contenders, including Biden, who withdrew after allegations of plagiarism and lying. (Cramer, who died of lung cancer in 2013, was a friend of mine.)
Cramer was given broad access to Biden and his family, including his wife Jill. Biden was elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972 by a few thousand votes at the age of twenty-nine, after a come-from-behind race against incumbent J. Caleb Boggs, a two-term moderate Republican who had served in the US Army in Normandy, Germany, and Central Europe. Cramer recounts a turning point in a final debate with Boggs-one now filled with irony, considering what happened the other night: "Some wise-ass," Cramer writes, "asked a trick question about a treaty.... Joe happened to know what it was."But Boggs was confused. He stumbled around. Poor old guy looked terrible! So it came to Biden-and he knew-he could've slammed the guy... but, no. That was the key. Joe knew exactly how he had to be. If the beloved sixty-three-year-old did not know what the... treaty was... well, there was only one thing for a twenty-nine-year-old to say:
"Aw, I don't know that one either..."
"That was the moment," Cramer writes, "Joe knew he had him. It was destiny."
Things got much more serious during the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. In the fall of 1987, after months of campaigning, Biden was confronted with a series of lies he had made in earlier campaigns about his academic record and class standing while in law school at Syracuse University. Then came equally serious-and proven-allegations of plagiarism as his campaign speeches came under close scrutiny by the national press. There were things, Cramer writes, that Biden had said during a television interview "about his IQ, and his scholarships, how he graduated with three degrees, at the top of his class."
"There must have been a hundred press calls," Cramer writes. The reporters "didn't want explanations.... What they wanted was a comment-to show they'd called; a no-comment was just as good. He'd explain one thing, they'd bring up another." Biden was by then married to Jill, and, Cramer wrote, she couldn't stand it. She said, "There's no way to answer."
Finally, there was a meeting at his home and one of Biden's senior Senate aides told him: "The only way you're going to shut the press up is... get out" of the race for the presidency.
"Jill wanted out," Cramer writes. "The calls to the house... so nasty. There was no explaining. These people didn't want to hear the answers. They just kept... well, it was awful."
Jill was Biden's second wife. His first wife, Neilia, died in a traffic accident along with their daughter six weeks after his election to the Senate. Their two sons were seriously injured but survived and Biden spent as much time as possible, including most weekends, with them as they recovered: he was sworn into the Senate by his elder son's hospital bed. Cramer devotes a chapter, titled "Jill," to the story of the couple's relationship. They were set up on a blind date after Biden saw her modeling in a Parks Department ad at the airport, and they hit it off immediately. She brought a depressed widowed father back to life.
Once remarried, Biden told Cramer, "he'd take care of the politics and Jill... the way she was with the boys-with everybody. She could talk with anyone. Not that she believed everyone.... She had backbone. She was private.... She could sniff out bullshit.... especially when it was his bullshit.... She'd tell him straight. Very soft of manner was Jill, but smart; she knew who she liked. They'd have their home, their family... then he would reach outward again. It wasn't just the schedule-he could travel, he could speak. It was more like the center was in place... so he could lift his eyes. 'What Jill did,'" Biden told Cramer, "'she was the one who let me dream again.'"
When Cramer interviewed him, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and his withdrawal from the presidential campaign was made in the old judiciary hearing room. The place was packed with reporters. There were twenty-eight TV cameras present. "Feeding frenzy," a sympathetic Cramer writes.