I last interviewed him, mostly about foreign affairs, in 2014, when he was in the White House and Donald Trump was hosting Season 14 of “The Apprentice.” Biden is seventy-seven years old, and he looks thinner than he did six years ago, but not markedly so. Joe Biden has been a “public man,” as he puts it-holding office, giving interviews, dispensing anecdotes-for five decades. “There’d always be a caregiver on the stool, and she’d be hearing her confession.” “I’d walk in and she’d be in that chair downstairs, facing the fireplace, watching television,” he said. (In the two years after he left the Vice-Presidency, the Bidens earned more than fifteen million dollars, from speeches, teaching, and book deals.) Biden renovated an old garage and his mother moved in. Sell my house and build me an apartment.’ ” For years, Biden, who relied on his government salary, was among the least prosperous members of the United States Senate. In grammar school, he recalls, a nun mocked him for stuttering, and his mother, a devout Catholic, told her, “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head.”)Īfter Jean became a widow, Biden said, she offered him a proposition: “She said, ‘Joey, if you build me a house, I’ll move in here.’ I said, ‘Honey, I don’t have the money to build you a house.’ She said, ‘I know you don’t.’ She said, ‘But I talked to your brothers and sister. (Biden’s mother, the former Jean Finnegan, plays a formidable role in his recounting of family history. “I thought my mom would stay.” She had other ideas.
“God love him, he lasted for about six months,” he said. When his father, Joe, Sr., fell ill, in 2002, Biden renovated the basement of the main house and moved his parents in. Before I could ask a question, he explained the origins of the cottage. The campaign apparatus had scattered into the homes of some twenty-three hundred employees.
Since the Covid shutdown began, in March, Biden had circulated mostly between his back porch, where he convened fund-raisers on Zoom, a gym upstairs, and the basement rec room, where he sat for TV interviews in front of a bookcase and a folded flag.
Later that afternoon, the Bidens were due on Capitol Hill, to pay their respects to the recently deceased John Lewis, of Georgia, a civil-rights icon who endured a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, before rising to the House of Representatives and becoming known as the “conscience of Congress.” It would be a rare excursion. “The docs keep it really tight,” he explained. Biden settled into an armchair across the room from me and splayed his hands, a socially distanced salute. The cottage, styled in Celtic themes (green shutters, a thistle pattern on the throw pillows), doubles as a command post for the Secret Service, and large men with holstered guns stalked in and out. To avoid contagion, Biden’s advisers had put me in a carriage house, a hundred yards from the house where the family lives. These days, the Biden place feels as solemn and secluded as an abbey. The man who stands between Americans and four more years of Trump lives with his wife, Jill, on four sloping acres that overlook a small lake. Markets would crash and cities would burn.” The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching a hundred and fifty thousand, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation’s history in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, whom Donald Trump called “sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators.” On Twitter that day, Trump warned that the demonstrators would “destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask.
The former Vice-President of the United States and the Democratic nominee for President reached the second floor of a cottage at the foot of his property in Greenville, Delaware, a wooded, well-to-do suburb of Wilmington. “Welcome to my mom’s house,” Joe Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view.