Joe Biden is in one of those seasons in which people are noting, again, that he often tells stories about his life that aren’t true. This is bubbling around largely because the week’s polls indicate his own party’s voters think he is too old to be president, and its donors and officials are frustrated he shows no sign of stepping aside to allow some fresh, brisk candidate to take his place.
He has often claimed or suggested that his son Beau, who died of brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 2015, died in Iraq, where he had served six years before. The president has claimed he graduated in the top half of his law school class when he didn’t, and has over the years made unsubstantiated claims as to his extremely high measurable intelligence. He’s said that as vice president he awarded his uncle a purple heart, and that he was arrested in a civil-rights protest. There are many such stories, including the enduring one of Corn Pop, the bad dude from a bad gang who threatened a young Mr. Biden with a switch blade until Mr. Biden, bearing metal chains, forced him to back down.
What these stories have in common is that they are cinematic. They’re pictures—the glistening scholar, the rumble. This is in line with the fact that Biden, born in 1942, lived his early life during the rise of movies as an art form and as the primary way America explained itself to itself. I understand and am of this cohort and have a kind of felt memory of the old American West from spending a Long Island childhood watching John Ford movies on channel 9. On the other hand, I don’t think I am Liberty Valance.
Mr. Biden has always taken it too far, and here is a small theory on why he tells lies. It is not only that, in terms of his nature and personality, he likes to make up stories and to be at the center of them. It is that he entered national politics in 1972, before the age of mass-media saturation. That’s when he ran for U.S. Senate. In those days, trying to build his brand—it was then called the image—he’d go to the local Kiwanis Club in Wilmington, Del., and speak to the guys at lunch, and he could tell them anything to make himself memorable and keep things lively. We know from all the reporting and biographies over the years that he’d talk about what a sports star he was and how he got triple honors at school.
Audiences would enjoy it. Stories of other people’s lives are interesting. And even though he was bragging, occasionally perhaps subtly, I’m sure he wove in some modest jokes at his own expense, at which the audience would have chuckled even while thinking: Son, you’re not big enough to be self-deprecating.
Mr. Biden became a pol before everything was on tape, so you could make up pretty much anything and not get caught. This was true of others in his political generation. Hillary Clinton got in trouble in 2008 for claiming she’d come under fire in a diplomatic visit to Bosnia. She didn’t; there was videotape. But she started out before videotape was accessible and ubiquitous.
What is peculiar is that they don’t change when times change, and they get caught. This is testimony to the power of habit, but also connects to the old world of politics as a school of entertainment. Fifty and 100 years ago politicians were supposed to entertain you. One way to do it was through rousing and sentimental stories.
Here we mention Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” a history of the first two years of the Biden administration, published this week. Mr. Foer touches on the tall tales: “A good Biden story often gets better with time.” The president has a “heroic self-conception.”
“Grieving was his expertise. If there was one thing that everyone agreed Biden did more adroitly than any other public official, it was comforting survivors.” I disagree. From what I’ve observed Mr. Biden has a disconcerting habit of turning all conversation to his grief, not yours, and this is not quite empathy but the work of a needy and glommy ego.
“The Last Politician” isn’t a fully satisfying work. Its virtue is that it gives readers some sense of the inside of the Biden White House in its first two years, and of those who peopled it, which is an underreported story and seems here reported responsibly. Sometimes it’s fun, if confusing. The newly inaugurated Vice President Kamala Harris tells the White House she doesn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race, but she needs her office to be majority-female and to have a black woman as her chief of staff. Mr. Foer presents the following as if one might understand it: “She asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia.” She sounds like Connor Roy from “Succession.”
The section on Afghanistan is valuable as a tick-tock but provides no deep access to the thoughts of the many players in that crisis. And the book can be frustratingly double-minded on the meaning of things. Mr. Foer asserts as a reporter that there were reasons to believe schoolchildren were damaged educationally and emotionally by pandemic school closings. He reveals what was happening in the White House as that issue came to a boil: First Lady Jill Biden’s primary interest was to make sure the new education secretary wasn’t a school-choice supporter. While mayors are trying to get the unions to return to school, she celebrates the heads of the two leading teachers unions. “As she sat with the heads of the union, Jill Biden didn’t even nod in the direction of the tensions. Instead of pressing the union chiefs, she paid tribute to them, reserving her highest praise for [Randi] Weingarten.” Later the president calls Ms. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at her New York home to buck her up when she came under fire over shut schools: “I am not abandoning you on schools. I want you to know that.’”
Mr. Foer: “For the sake of avoiding conflict . . . the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail.” That “was the price of peace.” This seems well-reported and yet weirdly without judgment. This is what you do to keep a major constituent and donor group in your tent? You sacrifice a generation of kids?
I don’t see what will change Mr. Biden’s mind about running. You get the strong impression, in the book and outside it, that he likes the job and sees himself as a great man, indispensable, or at least the right man for the moment.
Many in his party wish he would move on. They can’t make him, don’t have the power; it’s a fractured party broken in pieces, just like the Republicans. The old bosses—Tom Pendergast, Richard J. Daley—are long gone, with their smoke-filled rooms. There are seasons when I miss them. This is one of them.