Chapter 23
By many metrics, things were far better halfway through Joe’s term than they’d been when he entered office.
There had been buzz around various candidates as possible primary contenders against Joe if he decided to leave after one term, but we were told that based on the polling, Joe was the Democrats’ best bet.
The stakes were extremely high. The Supreme Court had struck down Roe v.
Wade in June; lawmakers on the right were signaling that it was just the beginning of a rollback of women’s access to health care.
I’d heard horrible stories from women denied care for life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies, fetal anomalies guaranteed to result in stillbirth, and miscarriages in progress.
Women were being left to bleed until they were about to die from sepsis before it was legally safe for a doctor to step in.
They might be told to sit in hospital parking lots, waiting for a fetal heartbeat to fully stop, before they could be admitted.
Still, Joe wanted to be sure that running again would be the right thing, especially for the family. I floated a hypothetical: “I’ve wondered if the Republicans would continue to go after our family if you decided not to run?”
Joe didn’t think that was a good reason to run or not run, whether the other side would continue to attack us.
Our grandson Hunter took out his phone, scrolled for a minute, and then held out the phone. On it was a post from an extremist site with a photo of Joe kissing him. It appeared to be a kiss on the lips. The article suggested that this was evidence of child abuse.
“If we can survive terrible lies like this,” Hunter said, “we can survive anything. You should run, Pop. They can’t say anything worse.”
My family believed that Joe was the right person for the job.
To me, Joe was definitely aging, but he was not exhibiting signs of dementia or senility.
In November 2020, he had twisted his ankle tripping over one of the dogs at our home in Rehoboth Beach.
He was diagnosed with hairline fractures in his foot.
He was given a walking boot, but he opted not to wear it.
As a result, the foot did not heal properly.
Now you’re not only aging, but you’re aging with a damaged foot.
I kept saying, “Why can’t we break it again and set it straight?
” But apparently it was more a problem with the soft tissue.
While the fractures healed, the nerves had been affected, which meant he was in excruciating pain most days and there was nothing to do about it but rest—something he refused to do.
In spite of the pain, he would stand for hours and hours.
He has always had a high pain threshold, but that was a lot even for him.
I’d look over sometimes during a holiday party or a long receiving line and see on his face that he was suffering.
Still, Joe was the same man I’d always known.
He’d always been an athlete, and he was determined to keep it up.
It was hard for him to admit that he couldn’t be as physically active as he’d always been, and he refused to give up longtime athletic pursuits like biking.
He was a believer in baseball player Satchel Paige’s line “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.
” Joe also loved the quote “You’re only as old as you think you are!
” As a onetime college football player, he wanted to keep jogging onto the stage into his eighties.
The kids and I begged him to stop. But the more we told him not to, the more he did it, just to prove that he could.
Physically, he was no longer 100 percent.
For that matter, I wasn’t either. I used to wear five-inch heels without a second thought.
By my seventies, I still wore heels, though they tended to be a bit shorter.
Joe was just older. Even if he threw on a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, he was part of a generation that preferred hours-long speeches to short videos.
Still, there was such a disconnect between who Joe was to me and how the world saw him.
A recent visitor watched Joe head out the door, hop into his dark green 1967 Corvette Stingray, rev the engine, and screech down the driveway.
“That,” the visitor said, “is sure not the guy they portray on television.”
Even if he had slowed down in the years before his reelection bid, I believed in my heart that he was still good enough and wise enough and capable enough to govern.
He never wavered from his values, the same ones I grew up with.
I believe that if his health had ever deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to serve, he would have had the humility to admit that—and if he were to step down before the end of a second term, he would have handed the reins to Kamala.
For the good of the country, I knew that I, for one, would rather Joe have a second term than not.
There was a lot of good work to be done.
Given what terrible things Joe’s opponent guaranteed he would do, the choice seemed clear.
I felt that Joe was a far, far better option than his opponent—who, by the way, was only three years younger than Joe.
In spite of his age, Joe was still doing the job, and doing it well.
In February 2023, he and I were out for dinner at the Red Hen in DC when he told me he’d be secretly leaving the White House in the middle of the night.
When we were out together in public, people were often trying to read our lips.
They almost always got it wrong, but it was still uncomfortable to be watched that closely, and to know that whatever people thought they picked up would be in the papers the next day.
So when Joe shared a major bit of news partway through our meal, he covered his mouth with his napkin and spoke softly.
“Tonight, after we get home,” he said, “I’m going on a mission to Ukraine.”
I nodded. While I knew the region was dangerous, I had complete faith that Joe would be okay because I had full confidence in the Secret Service and our military.
At four that morning, he made his way to the airport in a baseball cap, getting on a plane for Poland.
After landing, he took the train to Ukraine to meet with President Zelensky.
I knew there was a team down in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) bunkers monitoring Joe’s trip, so I went to see how he was doing and brought them pizza.
When Joe returned, I went with him to visit the special ops team, to thank them for all they had done to keep him safe.
President Zelensky called the surprise visit “historic, timely, brave.” He said that it was “an extremely important sign of support for all Ukrainians,” as well as “the most important visit in the entire history of Ukraine–US relations.”
Joe had taken a risky, physically demanding, clandestine trip, and it had been a great success—further evidence that in spite of his age he was still very much up to the job.