The FRONTLINE Interviews
Mark Leibovich
National Correspondent, The New York Times Magazine
Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. As a political correspondent for The New York Times, Leibovich covered the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns as well as the Obama presidency.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on June 10, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Biden’s Youth and Family
Let’s talk about this character they call Little Joey and when he was coming up with his stutter and running under car axles and climbing slag heaps and stuff. …Give me a sense of Little Joey coming up in the world.
Well, Little Joey coming up in the world is a story he tells all the time. …It’s sometimes a little bit hard to separate truth from stump speech, which is something that he’s had a bit of a history struggling with.But basically, his story is that he grew up very working class.He’s always quoting his parents, saying, “Joey this, Joey that.”He says some of the most mundane things in the world while quoting his mom and pop and grandpop.So you get the sense of kind of a working-class version of Norman Rockwell coming up around the coal mines of Pennsylvania, even though Biden himself will sort of step back and say, “I wasn’t actually in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.”Eventually his father lost his job, got another job at an auto dealership in Claymont, Delaware.
And look, in Joe Biden’s telling, and I think it certainly is true, he had a very, very kind of average, idyllic, maybe over-polished upbringing in the best working-class traditions of no-nonsense, tight-knit Irish Catholic families that’s very familiar in the Northeast.
It’s like money is not an issue with them, but it’s not there, unlike our other candidate, who money is everything to in every way, even today, I suppose.It’s interesting.What do the Bidens replace money with?I guess it’s family, the Biden way and Biden honor and all that stuff.
Yeah, I think the Biden way, the Biden honor.I mean, Joe Biden—I mean, basically his rags-to-riches story—and he would be the first to say he never achieved riches; he always boasts about being, when he was in the Senate, being the poorest member of the U.S. Senate—he almost immediately went into politics.I mean, that’s how he sustained himself over several decades.So his first job in politics was as a United States senator from Delaware before he was even 30; that’s when he was elected.
So I mean, that’s where—I mean, that’s where he made his fortune, I guess.It’s more of a mythological fortune than certainly the son of a millionaire’s fortune that Donald Trump has and sort of grew up with.But again, Joe Biden talks a lot about, again, being from a working-class background, but also never in a sense that he is some kind of Horatio Alger story himself.He’s un-shy about saying, “Look, I got into politics; I did this early.”He’s not one of these people who fashions himself a businessman who is coming in as an outsider to Washington.
I think one of the best things about him and the worst things about him is that he’s so familiar.He is part of the Washington furniture at a time when America’s grown very cynical about familiar parts of the Washington apparatus, but also at a time, especially in light of who the president is now, where a lot of disruption has happened in a very short period of time that has made people pretty weary and perhaps welcoming of what Joe Biden embodies.
Biden’s Stutter
The stuttering?What do you figure?How has it changed him, made him whoever he is?
Well, I mean, Joe, his—probably the most, one of the most familiar personal struggles he talks about—and he talks about it a lot—is that he overcame a stutter.He was, especially in grade school, he was teased a lot.He was bullied a lot because he didn’t speak right.It took a lot of hard work and a lot of discipline to overcome this.And it’s also something that’s familiar, if not stuttering, per se.I mean, there are a lot of—there are really tough things that kids have to overcome.
So that was sort of—the stutter, compared to his own family’s working-class struggles, was really the struggle that defines himself, defines his own role in the community, in the school, and also, obviously, is a very transferable tale of grit that people, Americans across the country, can associate with their own experiences.And I think it’s part of the very, very effective empathy that Joe Biden has been known to wield in political settings.Whether you want to be cynical about it or not, it’s something that he’s been able to do—connect either through his own personal struggles or to give voters a sense that he can listen to them and understands where they’re coming from.
Presumably he didn’t go to fancy therapists.He wasn’t taken to neurological experts.He beat it himself.
Yeah, I mean, he talked about having a tutor.He talked about being coached in how to just repeat over and over again and really drill himself how words work or how one speaks.But no, this was not a product of the 21st century where you go to a million different specialists and are given drugs and so forth to help you overcome this.I mean, this—I mean, he describes it, at least—and again, none of us were there—but he describes it as a real—a real exercise in discipline that he really had to work hard and also a bit of emotionally struggle with before he could overcome it.
Biden’s Early Political Career
… Now as a grown-up, fresh out of law school with a beautiful wife and a plan, I guess, to create a great middle-class American dream, maybe better than that.Can you describe what you know about what the circumstances were in Wilmington, [Delaware] at that time, just in terms of the fires and the cops and the struggle?
Yeah, it did seem like a fairly typical kind of small urban environment in the Northeast.There were some civil rights struggles.There was obviously some—there were some—there were a lot of struggles around the ’60s, but not like you would find in Philadelphia or Newark or other cities around there.But again, I mean, there was a time when the middle class could make—make some advances for themselves, move into a bigger house.
He’s also not a campus radical in any way.Vietnam is happening, and he’s wearing alpaca sweaters and listening to Frank Sinatra records or something.It doesn’t seem like he’s—
He does not strike you as a guy who went to Woodstock, right?He was a fairly conservative Democrat at the time.He identified very closely as a Catholic Democrat.He was very well versed in sort of the—the sort of urban Democratic boss politics that was characteristic of around Philadelphia and parts of Delaware.Yeah, he knows how to slap backs.I think you sense that when a lot of people were sort of dropping acid and hopping in the car and driving out to Haight-Ashbury or wherever, Joe Biden was learning how to slap backs and how to make friends and how to make it in politics.
And that’s how he—that’s how he got in.But no, he was a fairly conservative character at a time when the Democratic Party was—much of the establishment was far more conservative than it is now.And that is sort of, I think, a more formative intellectual experience for him than anything that people who were actually on the front lines of the civil rights struggle or the counterculture might have been.
The way I remember, he’s part of the youth movement that’s coming in.He’s a little before all the Gary Harts who benefit from Watergate.But he is the bright, young, and maybe the youngest senator ever, because he’s not even 30 when he actually wins the election.
Yeah, I mean, he was—first of all, he came out of nowhere.I mean, no one—I mean, not a lot of people were studying Delaware politics at that moment in U.S. history.He immediately became notable for two reasons.One, he was so young; he was 29 years old.He actually had to wait to be sworn in to the U.S. Senate because the legal age was 30 at the time.And also, he had this terrible tragedy that greeted him, I mean, within days of him being elected to the Senate, a car crash in which his … wife and daughter were killed, sons were injured.And it was a horrific and unspeakable experience which changed his life immediately, obviously, and nearly got him to quit the Senate before he even started.
Can you imagine what his reputation was?This guy, you don’t really know what his politics are. …And so who was young Joe Biden when he lands on the Hill, fresh-faced boy, cheeks of tan, out of Delaware?
Yeah, my sense of Joe Biden at that time was that he was both starstruck and just really awestruck about some of the giants, no matter what party, who were sort of roaming the halls of the Senate, whether it was Ted Kennedy or Strom Thurmond or Mike Mansfield or whoever.At the same time, he was a man in a hurry.And again, I mean, he obviously had this terrible thing happen to him as soon as he entered the Senate, but once he sort of got some footing under him, he was not someone who was waiting his turn.In fact, he was fighting as hard for attention and notoriety and the ability to stay as a U.S. senator as anyone was.He was seen as a bit of a show horse at first.He ran for president at an early age 16 years later.And look, I mean, Joe Biden, he’s definitely a blend of humility, devastation, but also real ambition that, like you find with a lot of U.S. senators, came into focus pretty quickly if you were watching the Senate at that time.
What’s he good at then?What was he good at?
He gives a great speech.He has always given a great speech.He’s a good talker.He’s also—he talks for—I mean, he would say the first—he would say—maybe he wouldn’t be the first to say, but, look, he talks endlessly.He goes on way too long.But he has a real gift of gab, of oratory.And also, he’s good in a conversation.I mean, like a lot of politicians, he repeats stories; he repeats jokes.He has the same asides that he uses over and over again.He’s used to being a public figure.
But he sort of came to it very early on.And look, at a very early age, Joe Biden could excite a room, especially a sort of smaller labor hall kind of room or a campaign banquet hall kind of setting, which is a kind of easier room to rile up than sort of the more staid environment of the Senate.But no, the gift of gab has always been Joe Biden’s superpower.
And I think later in life he became known as someone who listens really well.I know Chris Dodd, who is one of his longtime colleagues—senator from Connecticut; they’re very good friends—said that people talk about Joe Biden as a gifted orator, but Dodd said that he considers Biden to be a very gifted listener.He is someone who is an “eloquent listener”—those were Dodd’s words—someone who actually has a certain art about how he looks and can sort of present himself when people are talking to him about sensitive things.And I thought that was an interesting way of describing it.
Biden’s 1987 Presidential Bid
Absolutely—’87, he decides to run.As you say, he’s been there 15, 16 years.What happens to him?We don’t know what his policies were, but he gets blown up real fast, doesn’t he?
Yeah, he blew himself up real fast.I mean, Joe Biden is someone who—again, he was an up-and-comer.He was probably—I mean, this was pretty early in 1987; there were about six or seven candidates.And he was seen as probably a top-tier candidate; I mean, he was seen as liberal, but he was seen as a gifted campaigner, speaker at a time when there was an open presidency.Ronald Reagan was retiring; Vice President George Bush was probably going to be, and was eventually, the Republican nominee.The Democrats had a cast of what was known as the Seven Dwarves at the time, and Biden seemed to have as good a shot as any.
Then in the, I think it was the late spring of 1987, Joe Biden got busted for basically plagiarizing and lifting a story or lifting a speech that Neil Kinnock, a British Labor leader, used to deliver about his ancestors growing up in the mines.And really, I mean, it was one of those first, kind of word-for-word, just caught red-handed plagiarism things that was the beginning of the end for him.And he wound up dropping out well before the voting started in Iowa and New Hampshire.And so yeah, that was that.That was the first of three times he ran for president, but that ended in disaster.And it took him years to recover.
It’s that moment in American politics right after Hart gets blown up.Hart was also a little earlier, but he was in that pack.
Yeah, Gary Hart actually was the front-runner.I should correct myself.Gary Hart seemed to be the guy, but then all of a sudden Gary Hart drops out over this Monkey Business scandal.That would have been around maybe May of 1987.And the field was obviously wide open, and Joe Biden was, again, right there.
The humiliation, which I’m sure somebody who’s been a kid who stutters, is fearful about humiliation.Oh, my God, the humiliation and getting caught in such a blatant way, in a time when maybe 10 years earlier he wouldn’t have been laid out the way he was laid out.But boy, was he laid out in the gotcha politics and journalism that was starting to happen.
Yeah.No, exactly, it’s true.I mean, journalism changed just a few months earlier when Gary Hart was kind of like the victim of a journalistic sting operation by the <i>Miami Herald</i>, in which he was thought to be—he never admitted it—but thought to be sleeping with Donna Rice.This was also—I mean, if this had happened 10 years earlier before C-SPAN started, there was a lot less footage—there would have been a lot less footage around.
But also, if you sort of look at the psychological dynamic here, Joe Biden comes off as someone who has a lot of self-confidence, someone who talks a lot, who clearly has self-assurance enough to say all the things that he says, but obviously there’s an imposter syndrome dynamic at work here, because if you feel like you have to make up stuff about yourself and invent stories that are not your own and then do it in such a self-destructive way in which you can be caught, that speaks to a level of character, and certainly insecurity, too, that is common among a lot of politicians.And Joe Biden, again, I think, would say that that—I mean, he’s not much of a navel-gazer, but he probably would say that that’s an example of a young politician trying to fly too close to the sun. …
I mean, this was an interesting bit of timing for Joe Biden, because he was also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a time when an extremely polarizing judge, Judge Robert Bork, had been nominated to the Supreme Court, and Biden as chair of the Judiciary Committee was presiding over the hearings.And this was within months of him just flaming out on the campaign trail.And again, he was seen as having a very, very aggressive, very, very kind of combative hearing in which Judge Bork eventually was not confirmed and was voted out by the U.S. Senate.
So Biden, I mean, I would say it’s wrong to say he took a victory lap over that, but that was seen as certainly a bright spot of his tenure as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which were not all bright spots, as we saw in subsequent years.But in a way, it served as sort of a rehabilitative way for Joe Biden to, rather than going—hiding under the covers, to sort of stay out, stay in the fight, and have a very, very visible platform from which he could be part of an argument.
The Clarence Thomas Hearings
And from that platform, he finds himself mediating between the allegations of Anita Hill and the responses of “lynching” by Judge Thomas.There couldn’t be a hotter seat in Washington during that time.
Yeah, that was—so fast-forward four years to 1991.Clarence Thomas, nominated by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush to the Supreme Court, was sort of on a—kind of on a glide path to being confirmed.Then all of a sudden, Anita Hill, former staffer of his, is accusing him of sexual harassment, which became a huge cause célèbre, and Joe Biden again caught in the middle of this.
Now, he was still chair of the Judiciary Committee.There were these really searing images that were very powerful at the time, and certainly are—have been through history—of this all-white panel, Joe Biden right in the middle of it, grilling Anita Hill, sometimes in quite hostile fashion, in a way that really kind of seared into memory an example of how difficult it can be for a woman, especially a woman who is accusing a powerful man of sexual harassment, to try to storm the gates of this all-white chamber of the U.S. Senate.
And Joe Biden, again partly symbolically but also partly from how he ran the hearing, was seen as a real sort of ringleader to that.And that’s one that he’s been apologizing for, at least sort of expressing some regret for, for many, many years.
It’s a quality of Biden’s that I’m sure you’ve heard and maybe know, which is this kind of ameliorator: I don’t want to choose a side. …I’ve watched a lot of footage of him sitting there, saying to the judge: “Judge, how old are you?You’re just a young—,” and to Anita Hill saying, “I’d like to be your lawyer if I could, if the circumstances were different.”What’s up with Joe Biden?
Joe Biden likes to be liked.He likes even his staunchest enemy to like him.He cannot turn himself off from some kind of sort of folksy, schmoozy kind of banter that is common among old-time, back-slappy politicians, right?So that is very much who Joe Biden is.
Now, you have someone—now, sort of related to this, I remember asking Biden himself this once, around Lindsey Graham, who is a senator today, who has been extremely harsh on Joe Biden and has attacked him and has been very close to President Trump, and Biden says, “Yeah, I’d probably talk to Lindsey because I have a hard time holding grudges, which is proof that I’m not really Irish.”It’s a line he used over and over again: “Yeah, I can’t hold grudges.It’s proof I’m not Irish.”And that I think is also who Joe Biden is.I think he would much rather have a kind of jocular interaction with someone than settling a score.
And of course, around Anita Hill, the women’s movement, which had brought her forward and felt very strongly—I’m being generic here—NOW and others, a lot of women invested a lot in that.And when Biden won’t call the extra witnesses and he just wants it over and he wants to get out of the room and get Thomas confirmed, it’s like a piece of baggage he has to carry for a long time in Washington.Memories about something like that from interest groups aren’t easy to assuage as the years go on.
Right.And again, it’s become even more difficult.I mean, usually there’s a sense that time can heal all wounds, and Biden is also—he’s moderated his views.He’s passed a lot of legislation that he would boast about as being favorable to women’s equality.But at the same time, the needle has moved so far on sort of gender equity over the years, and the images—look, again, images are so powerful, and they don’t go anywhere.Like when you talk about Anita Hill, you look at those pictures.You see pictures of Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and then you look at the panel, and there’s Joe Biden right in the middle of it.And it’s something that he has tried to apologize for; he’s tried to reach out to Anita Hill herself for.But again, I think perhaps unfairly—or fairly, whatever—he’s going to be seen as a central figure at a moment when a woman was trying desperately to be heard and was ultimately not and sort of sent away into history while Clarence Thomas has enjoyed a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
Obama’s Relationship with Biden
Let’s talk a little bit about Obama and Biden. …I gather, at least the way he sells it, and maybe Obama goes along with it, that … they were pretty close to other.True?
I mean, there did seem to be some real fondness that grew over time.And I also think Joe Biden had a very consequential vice presidency.I mean, he was given special projects that were extremely important in the moment.The first thing was that he was administering this $700 million stimulus bill that passed right out of the Great Recession in early 2009, that Obama basically just outsourced to Joe Biden and said, “Here, figure out how we’re going to administer this.”And that is a massive bureaucratic undertaking.
He also sort of put him in charge of interacting with the Hill, because Joe Biden obviously has much stronger relations and much better people skills in some way than Barack Obama himself did, even though he also came from the Senate.
So—but I do have a sense that the relationship grew.I think it grew over time.It grew through adversity. …But the best example is that Vice President Biden said in an interview that he was OK with gay marriage.And at the time, that was an incredibly radical notion and far more so than what Barack Obama was willing to say and what the administration was willing to say.And Biden, I mean, didn’t quite walk it back, but they definitely had some friction over several weeks there that they thought was going to be politically very difficult for them.It turns out, through the hindsight of history, that Joe Biden would receive a lot of credit for being prescient at a moment where support for same-sex marriage was gaining a lot faster than anyone realized at the time.
But yeah, I mean, Joe Biden, even during the ’08 campaign, would run his mouth.He would say things that would be problematic.And I think over time, Obama, and I think even—I remember Obama saying this once, he said, “Sometimes you just sort of shrug your shoulders, and what can you do?”And he came to accept him as a friend, and I think it was forged through two very tough elections and two very difficult terms in office.
He’s mocked by the younger staff a great deal.
Always has been, yeah.
We don’t have any information that Obama himself joked about him, but “Joe bombs,” as I think you wrote, were a familiar—
… One that has been treated kindly retroactively is the gay marriage gaffe, because I guess it was a gaffe in the moment; it certainly doesn’t look like one now.
But yeah, he would say things; he would do things.He was sort of like the goofy uncle in the administration.And I think Biden sort of played the part really well.He’s sort of good at laughing at himself.But at the same time, he takes himself very seriously.He likes to be treated as a principal.He likes to be treated as someone who could very easily be in the Oval Office rather than the Old Executive Office Building.He is someone who, even though he ran twice rather disastrously for president, thinks that he could just as easily be there also.
So I mean, there is that mix in Joe Biden of some combination of hubris and humility that has always mingled very closely around his persona, both in the White House and also in the Senate.
Biden’s Role on Race in the Obama Administration
The territory that he sort of, I guess, has carved out for him is around race. …And through all of them, from the beer summit to Trayvon Martin, all of them, Joe was the guy.He’s the griever in chief when a kid gets killed.He goes into the Black community, I guess based on what happened in Wilmington and a lifetime of helping Black causes—I’m not sure what.
I think it’s just a lifetime of being a really good and really experienced retail politician.I mean, Obama seemed to use Joe Biden as an ambassador into environments: whether working-class, union hall environments; whether the Senate caucus room; whether even African American environments; or even sort of tense racial reconciliation conversations, like around the white police officer from Cambridge, Mass., who falsely arrested Henry Louis Gates in his own home.I mean, there were a lot of situations where Obama, again, just sort of said, “Look, you deal with this.”
And again, grief and empathy was another thing.I mean, yes, there’s sort of a joke that vice presidents are sent into mourning areas or disaster areas as representatives at funerals and things like that.But again, there is any number of examples of Joe Biden going into very difficult, very painful environments and actually being sort of the lead guy in grieving circumstances, which I think is something that Obama, I think, got pretty good at over the time of his presidency, because partly and sadly he dealt with a lot of mass shootings and things like that.But I think it’s in many ways something that Joe Biden taught him how to do.
Biden Doesn’t Run in 2016
His son Beau is dying during ’15 while he’s thinking about, should he run for the presidency of the United States?He raises it with Barack Obama at one of the lunches.… And Obama’s response is what?
Obama was apparently not an advocate for Joe Biden running for president in 2016.He—I mean, at least quietly at first was very all in for Hillary Clinton.I think he was very mindful of not doing this too publicly, again, at first out of respect to his loyal Vice President Joe Biden.But Hillary Clinton, at least in the eyes of the Obama apparatus and the leadership of the party, was the anointed one.She was going to be the first woman president after Barack Obama was the first African American president, and she just seemed more positioned to sort of take on that mantle.
So yeah, I think, for as much empathy and as closely aligned as Obama and Biden were, especially over the time of Beau being sick and eventually dying, that was a period in which Barack Obama was putting the brakes on his vice president, saying, “Look, you’ve had a good run; we’ve had a good run.Let’s”—and I think one of the things that Obama would say is that: “Look, you’re too raw.You’re just grieving too hard.”And I think that that was true at the time.I think Biden would probably agree.
But he also would say in retrospect that—I mean, Biden would also say in retrospect that he probably should have run four years ago.I mean, his age would be a lot less of an issue.Hard to know if he could have beaten Hillary Clinton for the nomination, but certainly Barack Obama at that moment was not a force for Joe Biden jumping in and running immediately after that experience.
He gets the Medal of Freedom … in a kind of surprise event.They don’t tell him that it’s going to happen.He walks in the room.Everybody cries.It’s an amazing valedictory, I guess, for Joe Biden for 30-plus years of service to the country.
Yeah, I mean, one thing you see through that period, around 2015 and ’16, which was seen as sort of like—I mean, after he decided not to run for president, and also after the death of his son—it was a real—I mean, there was a lot of goodwill for Joe Biden.There was a lot of goodwill among even Republicans in the Senate who he served with. …He was given all kinds of awards and testimonials and speeches and everything.And I think most people assumed, including him, that he was going to ride off in the sunset, maybe make some money for the first time, and not return to politics anytime soon.
Biden’s 2020 Presidential Bid
Why does he?
He would say that the answer is Donald Trump.He would say that he would not be doing this if it was Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush running for reelection.He would say that—I mean, look, he’s like a politician.He will dress this up in saying, well, this is a battle for the soul of the nation; this is a battle to unite the country.Both those things are true, I think; it’s unclear exactly what he means.But ultimately he is running because he thinks he can win, and he also thinks that the Democrats need to win.I mean, I think that’s the public-spiritedness of it.I mean, obviously when you want to be president—and Joe Biden has wanted to be president seemingly since kindergarten—if you think you can win, you should run.
But at the same time, it’s not optimal.He’s 77 years old.I mean, he would say himself he wishes he were 57 years old.And—but at the same time, I mean, Donald Trump, in Joe Biden’s telling, provides an existential crisis that the Democrats need to confront with someone who can do the job and, more importantly, someone who can win.
I think you wrote he’s transitional, not transformational.What does that mean?
I think that’s right.Well, I think what it means is that if you look back at the 2020 presidential race, Democrats, as it turns out, were not looking for a revolution, OK?I mean, the press got all excited about Bernie Sanders, about Elizabeth Warren, people who were espousing a much more progressive, much more radical point of view at a time when a lot of the people in the media thought that the Democratic Party had moved kind of left, taken a leftward lurch that was going to make it unrecognizable compared to even the Obama years.
Joe Biden sort of stayed the course.I mean, he didn’t really try at any point—to try to refashion himself into Bernie Sanders with hair plugs, right?I mean, he really—he sort to stayed true to like the sort of old Joe thing.And it looked like it wasn’t going to work for a while.I mean, look, the—he caught some breaks.I mean, I think—I mean, Iowa was a disaster; he got clobbered in Iowa.But all anyone remembers about it is that it was a fiasco around the caucuses.We still don’t know who won, to this day.He also got clobbered in New Hampshire.There was a lot of muddle in the Democratic Party.There was a lot of other stuff going on.Donald Trump was making news also.Then all of a sudden you had this showdown in South Carolina where he was well-positioned to win.
So yeah, he was lucky, too.And he was lucky in a way that he hadn’t been lucky in past opportunities running for president.But no, I mean, but he also took—he ran a fairly moderate race, I mean, I think maybe more so than he actually is, and what his presidency would be if he wins.
But this is the thing I love about the Biden story.Nobody really knows what he stands for or what his policies are, and in a way don’t really care.
Yeah, in a way, I mean, Joe Biden has outsourced the mission statement of his presidential campaign to Donald Trump, essentially saying, “I am not him, and I can beat him.”
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