In Her Memoir, Jill Biden Continues to Avoid Reality

The best rationale for First Lady memoirs is that the domestic details they offer can serve as a lever, lifting the reader from the mundane to reach some larger ideal that is, if not political, at least profound. Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” was, in many ways, a disquisition on how she went from disliking politics—“In my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact”—to finding real meaning in her role. There’s no requirement for such a book to really grapple with, say, immigration or inflation, and Biden’s does not; most Cabinet members appear only in passing, if at all. The challenge for her as a memoirist is that one of the most controversial aspects of her husband’s Administration—his health and his capacities—is an intimate and personal one in which voters nevertheless had a legitimate interest, and on which she had a unique vantage point. The public was expected to trust her when she said that, seen up close, he was well, and so it doesn’t help that “View from the East Wing” is full of blind spots. She doesn’t persuade; she just insists and elides.

When she mentions the special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation of Joe Biden’s retention of classified materials from his years as Vice-President, for example, she presents his report as a simple vindication. There is no mention of Hur’s assessment that prosecutors might just have had trouble persuading a jury to convict “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” or the uproar that Hur’s assessment provoked. Much later in the book, she concedes that there had been occasional “uncomfortable moments,” such as when her husband referred to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the President of Egypt, as the President of Mexico, during a press conference held shortly after Hur’s report came out. She doesn’t comment on her husband’s furious tone: he attacked Hur’s character and, as a transcript later demonstrated, misrepresented their exchanges. She couldn’t have forgotten those facts, either, but she puts them aside, at the expense of her own credibility.

And Biden keeps putting up hurdles for even the most sympathetic of readers. Four months after her husband left the White House, his office announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones, a tragic circumstance that would have derailed a second term even if he had stayed in the race and won. The book, in fact, opens with an account that raises as many questions as it answers about how the cancer’s progression had been missed by the team of White House doctors assigned to monitor and care for her husband. The standard recommendations are against routine P.S.A. screening for a man his age. But Biden says that she got in touch with one of his doctors to alert the medical team to a potential warning sign: that the President had got up to use the bathroom seven times in one night. “Truly, I did not know what to say to people who were baffled” by the handling of his case, she writes. She ascribes her own lack of follow-up to having an “old-fashioned” marriage.

The Biden family’s internal dynamics also come across, in the memoir, as a puzzle from which several pieces are missing. Their painful losses are well known: Biden’s first wife and a baby daughter were killed in a car accident; his two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured but survived the crash. (He married Jill a few years later, and their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.) Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, leaving the family, Jill writes, “out of control, spinning with grief.” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in “Original Sin,” argue that the family’s concealment of the nature and the gravity of Beau’s illness prefigured its handling of Joe’s condition. During the period when Beau was being treated, he served as Delaware’s attorney general and then announced that he would run for governor. Jill acknowledges the secrecy, but says that it was for the sake of her stepson’s wife and children. She doesn’t bring up his gubernatorial aspirations. In an interview about her memoir, Biden says that she found it hard, when recording the audiobook, to even say out loud that her other stepson, Hunter, who has struggled with crack and alcohol, was an addict. In her view, his trial, on gun charges, was deeply unfair, but her account of his various legal issues is highly selective. (A fuller recent account can be found in “Devils’ Advocates,” by Kenneth P. Vogel, of the Times.) The President had pledged not to pardon Hunter, but he was obliged to break that pledge, she told NBC, because Trump would have targeted him (although it was during the Biden Administration that Hunter had been indicted). “I did support it of course—I’m his mother,” she said. The pardon covered any and all federal offenses, dating back to 2014; the President preëmptively pardoned several other family members as well.