So Long, Joe.

Presidents' Legacies Evolve

Hunter, Beau, Ashley, Jill and Joe Biden in his first run for the presidency in 1987

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Franklin D. Roosevelt was sixty-three when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage three months after his fourth inauguration. His wife, Eleanor, was shocked to learn that FDR’s mistress was in the room.

Harry S. Truman defied the political odds and won reelection in 1948. His postwar leadership is now extolled. Truman’s approval rating at the end of his term was 32 percent.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a thousand days into his presidency, leaving a wife and two small children. Kennedy’s martyrdom has shaped memories of him, his brother Robert, and his son, who died in a plane he was piloting.

Lyndon B. Johnson did not run for reelection in 1968. He went home to Texas, by all accounts a broken man because of Vietnam, recognizing that the war he waged couldn’t be won. He died at sixty-four. His profound impact on civil rights is now fully acknowledged.

Jimmy Carter was defeated in 1980 and returned to Plains, Georgia, facing bankruptcy. His approval rating was 34 percent. He is now past one hundred years old, and after so many more years of service he is considered the greatest ex-president ever.

Bill Clinton won two terms as president and left with an approval rating of 66 percent. He will always be associated with fellatio in the environs of the Oval Office. He was the second president ever to be impeached. His wife fell short of the history she seemed destined to make.

Barack Obama served two terms, and he and his wife, Michelle, left the White House demonstrably fed up with the practice of politics; their oratory is brilliant. So far, in my view, their lives since January 2017 have been more glamorous than meaningful.

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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, and was sworn in less than a month after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Biden will leave the White House on January 20 with approval ratings in the low thirties and with the sting of bipartisan criticism of his pardon of Hunter, his surviving son. Beau, his other son, died of brain cancer in 2015.

The presidency is a great and powerful position — the most important that Americans can bestow on one of their fellow citizens. But as the examples above show, Democrats in modern times have left the White House in frustration or with a stain of one kind of another.

My sense is that only Joe Biden and his family really know how he feels these days. I have shaken his hand once and exchanged pleasantries at an event for a PublicAffairs book in 2019. We are the same advanced age, which along with race, gender, and sexual orientation is an identifier — for better or worse — in measuring where we fit in the national landscape.

I have watched Biden’s presidency with chagrin, not for his policies (which on the whole I have agreed with) but for the way he was regarded by the country — even by the voters who gave him the largest popular vote total in history.

The Biden shrug was dominant. I especially recall the day he was on his way to the Capitol to advocate for an important bill when Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democratic senator, said she would vote against him, dooming the legislation. I wrote that presidents need to be inspiring like Barack Obama or intimidating like Donald Trump. For all four years, Joe Biden was neither.

At the outset, he made a fundamental mistake in calling himself a “transitional” president, becoming essentially a lame duck from day one. Even before the 2022 midterms, commentators (including savants who had made their names and careers as political advisers to Clinton and Obama) were dismissive – first sub rosa and then publicly -- about Biden’s prospects for reelection.

When the Democrats scored surprising victories in the 2022 midterms, Biden might have announced that he would not launch another campaign and would have been hailed. Instead, he adamantly insisted that he would run again. Why?

My guess is that the more people told him to get out, the more this proud man wanted to stay in. I then thought that with Trump running, he felt he could not drop out lest he would endure the assumption that he was afraid of his predecessor.

In his very rare interviews, Biden insisted he was up to serving another term and that his challenge was to persuade American voters that he could.

And then came the nationally televised debate on June 27, which only minutes after it began was the effective end of his candidacy.

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One fact I have observed in recent years is proof of the aphorism that matters tend to evolve slowly and then, often, resolve suddenly. The debate outcome was an example, settling the argument that Biden could not handle another four years.

In national politics, momentum was building to prosecute Trump for his crimes, enshrined in ninety-two felony indictments. And then, by a six-to-three vote, the Supreme Court gave him broad immunity for his actions while in office, answering a question about presidential power than had been around for almost 250 years.

In the Biden years, as wars have raged in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East, the battles were grinding. Afghanistan took an abrupt turn when American troops left after two decades and the Taliban immediately regained power. Israel’s assassination of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, followed by the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, ending a fifty-year dynasty in a matter of days, reflected the volatility in a region where wars have raged virtually nonstop for decades.

With Trump returning to office, Ukraine must now accept that victory over Russia will be impossible. So there was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posing with Trump in Paris, prior to the reopening of Notre-Dame. Remember Trump’s attempted extortion of Zelensky, which led to the first impeachment trial?

Which gets back to Biden. Reversing statements that he was a transitional president and that he would not pardon Hunter were plainly mistakes — in both cases because of human nature rather than flaws of character, I contend

Will history restore a measure of respect for Biden’s presidency? My guess is yes, because of what it accomplished. But that will take time and will certainly not happen suddenly.

Seasonal Greetings. Back in January