One of the themes of Biden’s memoir is that he was a fantastic President. To hear him tell it, as his term was coming to an end, things were going great all around. The global economy was “humming,” inflation in the U.S. was falling, we’d “completely rebuilt NATO” and “reclaimed the American advantage over China,” carbon emissions were poised to plunge, and the A.I. companies had meekly fallen in line with his call for them to be more responsible actors. And there were real successes. It would be a far better book if he acknowledged some failure other than not retaining the loyalty of Democratic leaders.
For example, as part of his claim to have beaten COVID, he writes that it took him just four months, until May, 2021, to go “from fewer than half of America’s schools being open to 99 percent.” If that number is news to many parents, it is because Biden seems to be defining “open” as a school where a child showed up at some point, rather than consistently or full time, and ignoring reclosures in the wake of the Omicron variant. (An earlier book, Franklin Foer’s “The Last Politician,” explored the role Joe Biden’s relationship with teachers’ unions played in the struggle to reopen schools, for better or worse.)
There is similar sleight of hand in his discussion of immigration. Biden boasts of a dramatic fall in “encounters with undocumented migrants” at the border between January, 2021, and January, 2025. At the same time, the Biden years did see a historic wave of immigration, and the memoir offers little insight into how it was managed. For example, he does not mention his Administration’s concurrent extension or renewal of Temporary Protected Status to more than a million people, and of humanitarian parole to hundreds of thousands more, many of whom were fleeing terrible circumstances. Those migrants were documented, but, because T.P.S. grants and parole are executive-branch actions, Biden also left them vulnerable to having their status stripped away by the next Administration—which it promptly began doing, as Trump turned migrants into targets.
“Yes, people could point to moments when I mixed up names or lost my train of thought or had a weak voice or walked slowly,” Biden writes. “But they could never point to something presidential that I failed to do.” A few pages later, he points to one. It is the spring of 2024, several months after Hamas brutally murdered civilians in Israel, including at a music festival, taking many of the survivors hostage, and Biden has repeatedly spoken to Benjamin Netanyahu to express his “concerns” about the Israeli military response, and what “rising casualties were doing to Israel’s image.” To his dismay, he writes, “Bibi had no qualms about making promises he had no power—or intention—to keep.” Be that as it may, it also appears that the promises Netanyahu made—to act with restraint, to protect civilians—were ones that Biden no longer had the strength or resolve to enforce. The combination of an ever-mendacious Netanyahu and an increasingly diminished Biden was a disastrous one. In many situations, a good team of staff members can act on behalf of a President, but there are moments when a President is required to impose his or her will, as only a President can. That moment came for Biden after October 7th, and he missed it.
Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, published her own memoir earlier this year. To read them side by side is to be reminded that there is more than one way of being avoidant. Jill padded her book with details about the White House’s floral arrangements; Joe does so with a six-page list of laws he signed, including the CHIPS and Science Act and the Working Dog Health and Welfare Act. The Biden Administration did accomplish a great deal—the legislation passed, the trillions of dollars spent—but it could be notably lacking in transparency, and the President’s memoir doesn’t much help. He speaks more kindly of his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, than Jill does, for example, but without giving a real sense of her influence or why he thought that she would be ready to step in for him, either when he chose her as his running mate or when he endorsed her, twenty-seven minutes after he withdrew from the race.
