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Atlanta, September 2019
My media consultants and a full film crew are at my house to get footage for my forthcoming Senate announcement video. The video, by the way, turned out great. Here's a link to it if you've never seen it or if you've been longing to see it again. Lieberman announcement video
Over the previous week, my old friend and groomsman, Hunter Biden, had become the center of multiple political news cycles. Trump had taken to asking at his rallies "Where's Hunter?" Chants of "Lock him up! Lock him up!" would sizzle through Trump's crowds. I told my consultants that Hunter was probably my best friend, day in and day out, for a year or two in New Haven after he transferred to Yale Law School from Georgetown. The Hunter I knew was as good and sweet-hearted a guy as you could find, a guy who would literally give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. I was pissed off that Trump was bullying him. I said to my media consultants that maybe I should speak up on his behalf. First of all, it would be sincere. Second, it would show I was tough. And third, it would be a way to attract good will from the Democratic base and Biden supporters in particular.
My media folks knew that part of what I wanted to accomplish in the campaign was to set myself apart as different, as a non-conventional candidate. I told them that I had a tendency to zag when everyone else zigs. They liked this part of me, and they liked this part of the campaign's potential. However, when I floated the "defend Hunter" idea, they looked at me with nervous smiles as though maybe I was kidding…? Or worse, maybe those zags were about to run the campaign amok.
In truth, I knew as I floated it that the idea was a political clunker. For me, the son of a famous former senator, to align myself right out of the gate with another of my ilk, the Notorious RHB (Robert Hunter Biden...I just made that Notorious RHB thing up 🙂), would have been plain stupid. I would have voluntarily linked myself to the poster child for nepotism and cronyism in politics. By any conventional standard, their advice was correct, and I took it. My good friend from years past had become too toxic to defend.
New Haven, Summer 1994
I believe I learned through some contact between our dad's offices that Hunter was moving to New Haven. I had just graduated from Yale Law School, and I was living with my girlfriend and future wife, April, on Court Street in New Haven. By sheer coincidence, Hunter, his wife Kathleen, and their baby girl Naomi moved in almost directly across the street from us. That part of Court Street is a narrow, one way, one lane, one block, landscaped slice of road separating two rows of historic townhouses in the Little Italy neighborhood of New Haven known as Wooster Square.
Hunter and I probably spoke on the phone once or twice before they moved in, and on the day they arrived I met him and Kathleen for the first time. I had dinner at Sally's Apizza that night and brought over some leftovers for them as they were moving in. While I was there, at probably 9:30 or 10 p.m., a couple of middle-aged white guys in painting outfits walked in. They were wearing white undershirts, baseball hats and jeans. They carried a ladder and their paint supplies in a businesslike manner. I was impressed that Hunter had managed to get two guys over to their apartment at that hour to start work. I knew his dad was a good, pro-union Democrat, and these two guys looked like union guys -- probably members of the Painters and Trades Union, probably old friends of the family. But then Hunter kissed them both and pointed me out, and I realized the two painters walking in at 10 p.m. were his dad and his Uncle Jimmy. We said hello, and they got right back to what they were there to do, very businesslike. If you've seen the movie The Sting, you remember the scene where the two guys go into the Western Union office pretending to be painters; that's what Joe and Jimmy Biden looked like that night. Very businesslike -- not a senator and businessman but two house painters working overtime.
What can I say about the next two years. We lived across the street from each other. I probably spent some part of three or four nights a week over at Hunter and Kathleen's apartment drinking wine, listening to music, and shooting the shit. They were an easy couple to hang out with, and Hunter was a fun friend. I don't know that we ever went out anywhere together; we just hung out. The only real vice I can attribute to Hunter at that time is that he smoked cigarettes, I want to say Marlboros. Every so often, he would go just outside their front door for a smoke. If I had to connect these times with a few particular images, it would be red wine, Johnny Cash, sometimes a little whiskey, and Hunter taking a few long steps out the front door for his nicotine fix. He was a guy who wore jeans and mid-height cowboy boots most of the time. I want to say a black leather jacket was in the mix as well. He always carried around a little stationery store kind of lined journal in which he'd scribble thoughts or poems, sketches as well. It's good to see that he's circled back to this kind of artistic pursuit.
I never saw him do any drugs, although I think he had a couple friends he'd met at a coffee shop with whom he might smoke marijuana from time to time. I wasn't an expert, but I saw no hint of a future addict. What was clear to me was that he had more of an artistic soul than a corporate one. It was also clear there were expectations on him to do something that could be conventionally measured as "big." We would talk about this kind of stuff. With him as with me, these expectations were overwhelmingly self-driven and circumstance-driven. If you grow up with a parent you have idolized who has reached the powerful top echelon of a very public and very competitive and somewhat glamorous business - and also a business concerned with making the world a better place - it's hard not to put pressure on yourself to succeed in certain ways that other kids of highly successful parents might not necessarily feel. This probably relates to the very public aspect of the success, which springs from the public and then depends on the public for its survival.
My sense was that he was interested in politics back in Delaware but also that his brother Beau was somehow the chosen one for that. Hunter was 100% on board in his love and support for Beau. Looking back, I'd have to say that his soul probably wanted to pursue the life of an artist. And his real world ambition would probably have propelled him to run for office at some point if it were an option. Instead, upon graduation he accepted an extremely lucrative job in an elite management training program for Delaware based credit card company MBNA. I have no doubt he was qualified for this job. He was a smart, good-looking, charismatic and likable guy. But I can tell you that his total compensation package was unlike anything I'd ever heard of. It was probably three times what the biggest New York law firms were paying Yale Law graduates then, which itself was a lot. I don't believe he was the only person in this management program, so it's quite possible that others received similar packages. But it was a sweet deal -- sweet enough to make a person question why he'd ever want to write poems or run for office. Hell, it was sweet enough for me to question why I wanted to stick around in Connecticut!
Regardless, he was a great friend. And Kathleen and April became great friends as well. Hunter was one of my groomsmen and Kathleen was April's matron of honor when we got married in the fall of 1996.
From Then Until Now
Between then and now, I think I've only seen Hunter once. On the way to or from Washington in the Spring of 2000, April and I stopped and stayed the night at Hunter and Kathleen's house in Wilmington. When we got there, they had a little gathering going on. Beau was there, and it was the one time I ever met him. He was a really good guy. I will add that he was wearing what seemed to be gold leather pants that night. I only mention this because it's my one personal memory of a guy who has rightfully become a hero to many. And I mention it because it tells you that in addition to that, he was a regular guy with a sense of humor who at age 31 would show up at a party at his brother's house wearing some interesting pants.
Since 2000, I've spoken with Hunter once or maybe twice. Kathleen came over to my parents house in Washington once when I was there. Hunter was supposed to come as well, but something came up, and from Kathleen's affect I inferred that it wasn't unusual for something to come up. I think I learned then that he was training for triathlons or something like that. In hindsight, this would seem like an attempt to harness his addictive instincts into something healthier. In any event, we've had almost no contact for a long time, not because anything but just because.
Before I decided to run for Senate, I tried to connect with Hunter to see if he needed any help with whatever his part of the campaign was going to entail. By then he had made his share of headlines, and it seemed clear that he had been battling addiction. But as far as I knew, he was basically functional, and I figured he would play some significant part in the campaign. I never reached him. It may be that I had the wrong number. More likely, and again in hindsight, he may have been deep into his crack addiction by then, nearly getting shot in the head under a bridge in Los Angeles trying to secure his next high.
Like I said, I'm glad he is painting now, and I hope he is secure in his sobriety. When I've seen him on TV over the last year, he has looked angry to me, even when he hasn't been directly addressing the "Where's Hunter'' line of attack. I can't blame him, but that worries me some; I hold him very dear and wish him peace and all other good things.
Outrage
These few weeks, I'm writing about outrage in our politics. Hunter's addictions seem to have driven him to make ill-advised business and personal decisions over the last 20 years that have affected everyone in his life, including, of course, himself. However, he hasn't broken any law, and his father certainly hasn't broken any law. I'm not saying, and I don't think he's saying, that he shouldn't be subject to any criticism. But the extent of the outrage is, to me, itself outrageous -- and all the more so because of its source, the Trumps. I don't know of a family more besotted with nepotism, cronyism, and financial chicanery, and as we all know, the prosecutors are closing in. It is a testament to Trump's remarkable facility in the outrage media ecosystem that he could succeed as the critic of anyone in this regard.
Corruption is a problem in Washington. But it isn't the corruption of greed; it's the corruption of fear. Fear of political failure. Fear of losing. This is American politics today: fear in each party of the extremes, of the big interest groups, of he or she with the most galvanized Twitter following. Politicians are almost never corrupted by money. Money isn’t what drives them. If it were, they’d be doing something else. What drives them is some varying combination of the desire to do good, the need for approval, and the lust for power. Losing threatens all of these. We need more leaders who, when forced to face the choice, choose fight over flight, choose to stand and not fold, choose the majority of people they serve -- not the minority who pull their strings. Enough leaders like this can become an antidote to the outrage. My old friend Hunter is a side story at best in a politics that's become more and beside the point -- beside the point of service, beside the point of progress, beside the point of unity, all about outrage, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Hunter Biden