Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris – This memoir settles some scores, but generally with a stiletto, not an axe.
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When Jill Biden watched Joe Biden struggle in the presidential debates and abruptly end his political career, she knew something was going in a dire direction.
“Is this a stroke?” she wondered as she watched television in a waiting room near the CNN studios where President Biden was facing Donald Trump in June 2024. “It felt like we were looking at an AI hologram of a man we knew, but the hologram was glitching. Was he drugged? ”
Two years later, Jill Biden still doesn’t know what happened that night. Perhaps he was overcoached and coddled, she writes in her memoir of her time as first lady, A View from the East Wing, to be published June 2 by Gallery Books. Perhaps he was given Ambien or codeine cough syrup for a persistent cough upon returning from Europe and was experiencing side effects.
Never mind that he started the rally right after the debate ended. It was already too late. “Will Joe Biden survive?” a USA TODAY analysis asked. The reassurances of his spouse and aides who deny that the 81-year-old president is suffering from cognitive decline may not be enough.
“Joe lost himself in that discussion,” she writes, but makes no fuss about her husband’s lack of performance. “He had lost his essence. He didn’t speak from the heart. He had lied to him over a hundred times, but it didn’t matter.”
As they left the set that night, Joe Biden whispered, “You’re really pissed off, aren’t you?”
“Yes, yes,” my wife of 47 years whispered back.
Let me be clear: that was not the message they conveyed that night. Then, reflexively, it was sugarcoated. “You did a really great job,” she told him in front of a crowd of supporters. “You answered all the questions.”
But three weeks later, under pressure from Democratic Party elders, Biden reluctantly bowed to political realities and announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race with 107 days left until Election Day.
This step will not protect him from being held responsible for Trump’s victory and the Democratic Party’s woes.
“Performance is not very good”
Yes, even Jill Biden admits, her husband is older and more tiring than he used to be. “The truth is, he wasn’t performing as well as he did when he was younger,” she wrote. “As long as he gets the job done, does that disqualify him from being president?” She didn’t think so, and neither did his aides and doctors, she says.
In fact, she encouraged him to take a cognitive test to prove the point, but the idea was shot down by his advisers.
“They argued to him that every day at work was a test of his cognitive function, and that it was foolish to think that anyone could be satisfied with the ability to count backwards by three or any other ability required on a test, given his track record otherwise.”
Questions were already circulating about his meticulous schedule, including his limping and general reluctance to hold press conferences or sit down for interviews with reporters.
Jill Biden is leaving the door open that the naysayers might be right.
“Was he too old to work and I didn’t notice?” she writes. “I didn’t think so, but can you be objective enough to be sure?”
Conspiracy theories about his mental state will ensnare her, too.
Some critics accused her of being “some kind of puppet master,” someone who secretly runs things in the White House. But others claimed she was responsible for telling her husband not to run for president in 2024 and urging him to resign amid the uproar.
It was a role she had never seen herself play before, she says.
The first debate about whether he should run for the White House in 2020 took place over a minute over an impromptu lunch after attending former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral in December 2018.
“Before I looked at the menu, I said, ‘Joe, this is it. You have to decide. Are you going to run or not?’
“‘Yes, I want to run,’ he told me matter-of-factly.”
“Okay,” she said.
Almost six years later, when the question arose of whether he would step down, she said her role had been similarly limited. She said she even refused to answer his questions about her views and offered to support whatever decision he made.
That restrained portrayal of her is at odds with her reputation as a first lady who is an ardent protector of her husband and keeper of her family’s records.
She said the defining moment for Biden was when aide Steve Ricchetti told him that a group of senators was said to be preparing a letter telling Biden it was time to step down.
“The Senate was always the institution he respected above all else,” she said, and it was where he served for 36 years. “If he had received that letter, he might have really died. He might have died of a broken heart.”
Kamala Harris calls for urgent support
When he called then-Vice President Kamala Harris to tell her of his decision, she first expressed concern. “Oh my god, Joe. What about you?” of courseThe Bidens had their phones on speaker at their beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Harris then switched into what Jill Biden calls “prosecutor mode” and began pressing her to immediately endorse her as the Democratic nominee to replace Biden.
When he suggested waiting until the next morning, she warned him that any delay would spark a “prank” by Democrats trying to support someone other than themselves.
“I want it sooner,” she said.
“I’ll get back to you when I figure this out,” Joe said.
“Can you do it now?” she answered. “So, in 20 minutes?”
At that point, Jill Biden says, she left the room.
Her memoirs usually settle some scores with a stiletto rather than an axe.
Some longtime Democratic allies had fair weather friends. White House doctors somehow failed to diagnose Joe Biden’s prostate cancer before it spread to his bones.
And Melania Trump.
Jill Biden pointed out, without comment, that in 2021, Melania Trump did not follow the custom of the outgoing first lady inviting the incoming first lady to tea, an opportunity to see the new home. When their positions reversed in 2024, Biden extended the invitation and Melania declined.
Biden followed another tradition by handwriting a formal letter to his successor wishing her well and leaving it on the first lady’s desk. In her final moments at the White House, she also wrote an informal message with her fingertip on a steamy window on a cold morning, she says.
It’s not clear what the message was or whether anyone saw it.
Reconciliation with Nancy Pelosi
“A View from the East Wing” features some of the standard content of a first lady’s memoir. It records the rigor of election campaigns, the scrutiny of clothing, the pomp of state banquets, and the demands of foreign travel. She spoke of her determination to continue her work as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, a job no other first lady has done.
There are other, less traditional notes as well. She detailed eight traumatic days in which she attended her son Hunter’s trial on drug charges related to drug addiction in Wilmington in June 2024, while taking an official visit to France and headlining a campaign event in Pennsylvania.
“You can take a shower at the airport,” Chief of Staff Anthony Bernal advised.
The word “Trump” appears only twice in this 275-page book. The first time was a reference to the “Trump family” who attended President Bush’s funeral, and the second time was a reference to Joachim Sauer, the husband of then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In all other references, Biden’s predecessors and successors, his political nemesis, are simply described as “opponents” and “the new president.”
The book ends with a moment of reconciliation.
A year after leaving the White House, the Bidens attended the funeral in New York for Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, who died at age 35 from a rare, aggressive form of leukemia.
During the service, the priest encouraged members of the congregation to share the sign of peace.
Two seats behind the Bidens was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who held difficult talks with the president as he considered whether to withdraw. It was his decision, she reportedly told him, but she believed he should be expelled. “She said Joe would be heartbroken if he heard what Democrats were saying about her,” Jill Biden wrote.
They had never spoken since that day. Now he returned to where she was sitting and held out his hand.
peace. Let’s be friends.
they hugged. At least for them, the past was the past.
