This portrait of the president-elect reveals Biden’s flaws but also the compassion and courage needed to start America’s healing process
Americans have spent this year watching aghast as reality demolished what Evan Osnos calls “the most basic stories we tell ourselves”. Those stories habitually declare the US to be exceptional, uniquely virtuous and therefore entitled to pre-eminence: how then has “the world’s richest, most powerful country” been laid low by the pandemic and shamed by Trump’s irresponsible antics? To help repair the damage, Osnos presents Joe Biden as someone whose career has been a basic story of a different kind – grounded in shared suffering and commiseration with others, not inflated by preordained conceit.
Osnos begins impersonally, with a nameless, middle-aged white male collapsing in a hotel room in 1988; after a while the victim is identified as Biden, toppled by a brain aneurysm. Anonymity makes a pitiable everyman of him, and even though emergency surgery saved his life on that occasion, Osnos goes on to show Biden coping with an extra battery of cruel blows. His young wife and their infant daughter were killed in a car crash in 1972; his adored son Beau was to die from a brain tumour in 2015, aged 46. Biden, we learn, is acquainted with grief, and he also understands how a bereaved person or an afflicted nation can be coaxed towards recovery.
At his best he is shrewd and fearless. ‘I’ve looked into your eyes,’ he said to Putin, ‘and you don’t have a soul’